He drugged his wife so that dozens of men would abuse her nearly 100 times

A pensioner is to stand trial for recruiting dozens of strangers online to rape his wife after drugging her unconscious, in a case that has horrified France.

Fifty-one other men are also on trial in the southern city of Avignon alongside the main suspect, a 71-year-old former employee of French power company EDF.

They are accused of raping the woman who, according to her lawyers, was so sedated that she was unaware of the abuse.

The trial will be “a horrible experience” for the victim, who is now in her 70s and does not wish to be identified, said Antoine Camus, one of her lawyers.

“For the first time, long after the events, she will have to relive the violations she suffered for 10 years,” she told AFP, adding that her client “remembers nothing” of the abuse she only discovered in 2020.

The woman could have asked for the trial to be held behind closed doors, but she did not, because “that is what her attackers would have wanted,” Camus said.

“She is fully determined to confront them and her husband, with whom she lived for 50 years but knew nothing about, as she discovered at the age of 68,” the lawyer said.

Police began investigating defendant Dominique P. in September 2020, when He was caught by a security guard secretly recording under the skirts of three women in a shopping center.

Examining his computer, police said they found thousands of photos and videos of his wife, visibly unconscious and often in the fetal position.

The images are believed to show dozens of cases of rape in the couple’s home in Mazan, a town of just 6,000 inhabitants about 33 kilometres from Avignon in Provence.

Investigators also found chat rooms on a site called coco.fr, now closed by police, where he recruited strangers to come to his home and have sex with his wife.

A total of 92 rapes committed by 72 men were recorded, of which 51 were formally identified.

Dominique P. admitted to investigators that he gave his wife powerful tranquilizers, especially Temesta, an anxiety-reducing drug.

The abuse began in 2011, when the couple were living near Paris, and continued after they moved to Mazan two years later.

The suspect gave the men strict instructions not to wake her up when they abused her. overnight. They were not allowed to use aftershave or cigarette smell and had to warm their hands before touching her. They also had to undress in the kitchen so as not to accidentally leave clothes in the bedroom.

The husband participated in the rapes, recorded them and encouraged the others using degrading languageaccording to prosecutors. No money was exchanged.

Among the Accused rapists, aged between 21 and 68 yearsThere were a forklift driver, a firefighter, a company manager and a journalist.

Some were single, others married or divorced, and some were family men. Most participated only once, some as many as six times.

The courts’ defense was that they simply helped a libertine couple live out their sexual fantasies, but Dominique P. told investigators that they all knew his wife had been drugged without her knowledge.

The process will have to establish to what extent they understood the situation when they had sexual relations with the woman whose condition, according to an expert, “was closer to coma than sleep.”

The defendant told prosecutors that only three men left the house quickly after arriving, while all the others proceeded to have sex with his wife.

Dominique P., who said he was raped by a nurse when he was nine, is ready to face “his family and his wife,” his lawyer, Béatrice Zavarro, told AFP.

This trial may not be the last. He is also charged with a murder and a rape in 1991, which he denies, and an attempted rape in 1999, which he admitted after conclusive DNA testing..

“There is no typical profile of a rapist,” Véronique Le Goaziou, a specialist in sexual violence, told AFP.

“A lot of people will say he’s crazy,” she said of Dominque P. “But there’s no certainty. Only a small number of rapists are diagnosed with a real mental illness.”

Psychiatric evaluations conducted during the investigation showed that Dominique P. was “a patriarch” and “a manipulator” with a “perverse” personality who used his wife as “bait.”

The trial is expected to continue until December.