French woman says uncovering of mass rape trauma ‘saved her life’

A French woman whose husband has admitted to enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was drugged told his trial on Thursday that police had saved her by uncovering the crimes.

“The police saved my life by investigating Mister P’s computer,” Gisele P told the court in the southern city of Avignon, referring to her husband — one of 51 of her alleged abusers on trial — by only his last name.

Gisele P, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting the moment in November 2020 when investigators first showed her the images of a decade of sexual abuse orchestrated and filmed by her husband, Dominique P.

“My world is falling apart. For me, everything is falling apart. Everything I have built up over 50 years,” Gisele P said, pausing at times only to sip from a glass of water.

She had told police her husband was a “super guy” when she was first invited to speak with them, she recounted as her daughter and two sons watched the testimony.

At that meeting, Gisele P was shown “barbaric” pictures where “I’m lying motionless on the bed, being raped”, she remembered as her husband listened with his head bowed.

“They treat me like a rag doll,” she told a panel of five judges, adding that she had only plucked up the courage to watch the video footage in May 2024.

Lawyers for some of the defendants had questioned on Wednesday whether the couple had had a libertine relationship, or whether it was credible that Gisele P had noticed nothing for the entire decade of the abuse.

“Don’t talk to me about sex scenes. These are rape scenes,” she said on Thursday, emphasising that she had never practised swinging or any other form of libertine sex.

‘Never complicit’

She reiterated that she was “never complicit” and had never “pretended to be asleep” when asked by lead judge Roger Arata.

Gisele P has insisted that the trial take place in public so the full facts of the case can emerge. “I’m speaking for every woman who’s been drugged without knowing it, in the name of every woman who may never know … so that no woman has to suffer” the same thing in future, she said.

Gisele P is in the process of divorcing her husband, who admitted on Tuesday to drugging her with sleeping pills and then recruiting dozens of strangers to rape her. He was exposed by chance when he was caught filming up women’s skirts in a local supermarket.

The husband “will again explain the reasons why he did this. He will explain himself and justify himself, if there can be a justification for this because it’s unpardonable”, his lawyer Beatrice Zavarro told AFPTV.

The 71-year-old father of three documented his actions with meticulous precision on a hard drive with a folder labelled “abuse”, lead investigator Jeremie Bosse Platiere told the court on Wednesday. That enabled French police to track down more than 50 men suspected of raping Gisele P while she was drugged.

A third of them were identified using facial recognition software, Bosse Platiere said. He said he had hand-picked investigators “who had the stomach” to face the videos and images of abuse. Police drew up a list of 72 individuals suspected of abusing Gisele P.

The investigators counted around 200 instances of rape, most of them by Dominique P, and over 90 by strangers enlisted through an adult website.

‘I feel disgusted’

Gisele P said she had recognised only one of her alleged rapists, a man who had come to discuss cycling with her husband at their home. “I saw him now and then in the bakery, I would say hello, I never thought he’d come and raped me,” she said.

“I feel disgusted,” she added, telling the accused to “for once in your lives at least, take responsibility for your actions.”

The men received “strict instructions, there was clear and transparent information” about what was happening, the husband’s lawyer Zavarro said. “If these men came [to the couple’s home], they were coming in the knowledge of what they were doing. That is what Mr P will say.”

The assaults took place between July 2011 and October 2020, mainly in the couple’s home in Mazan, a village of 6,000 people in the southern region of Provence.

Most of the suspects face up to 20 years in jail for aggravated rape if convicted.

Eighteen of the 51 accused are in custody, including Dominique P. Thirty-two other defendants are attending the trial as free men.

The last suspect, still at large, will be tried in absentia, with hearings expected to last four months until December 20.