Avignon (France) (AFP) - 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 life by uncovering the crimes.

“The police saved my life by investigating Mister Pelicot’s computer,” Gisele Pelicot 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.

Speaking for the first time since the extraordinary trial began on Monday, Gisele Pelicot, now 71, revealed her emotion in almost 90 minutes of testimony, recounting her mysterious health problems and a fateful meeting with police.

For years, she said, she had had strange memory lapses and other health problems and thought she might have had Alzheimer’s.

In November 2020, she was invited to speak to investigators, who showed her the images of a decade of sexual abuse orchestrated and filmed by her husband and her world fell apart, she said in court.

“For me, everything is falling apart. Everything I have built up over 50 years,” Gisele Pelicot said.

She had told police that Dominique Pelicot, her husband of 50 years, was a “super guy”, she recounted as her daughter and two sons watched the testimony.

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

“Frankly, these are scenes of horror for me,” she said.

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

She said that none of her abusers alerted the police.

“Even an anonymous phone call could have saved my life,” the woman said as her husband kept his head down.

Lawyers for some of the defendants had questioned on Wednesday whether the couple had had a libertine relationship, or whether it was credible that Pelicot 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.

- ‘Speaking for every woman’ -

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

She has insisted that the trial take place in public so the full facts of the case can emerge.

After she gave her testimony on Thursday, her family said via their lawyer that their full surname could be published.

Gisele Pelicot said she wanted to draw attention to the dangers of sexual crimes through so-called chemical submission, or drugging someone with malicious intent.

“I’m speaking for every woman who’s been drugged without knowing it,” she said.

“I’m taking back control of my life, to denounce chemical submission. Many women don’t have the proof. I have the proof of what I’ve been through,” she said.

She also told the accused to “for once in your lives at least, take responsibility for your actions”.

“I feel disgusted,” she added.

“I’ve lost ten years of my life,” she said, adding that inside she was a “field of ruins.”

Pelicot is in the process of divorcing her husband, who has admitted to the charges against him.

He was exposed by chance when he was caught filming up women’s skirts in a supermarket.

- Folder labelled ‘abuse’ -

The 71-year-old father of three documented his actions with meticulous precision on a hard drive in a folder labelled “abuse”, lead investigator Jeremie Bosse Platiere has said, adding this led police to track down 50 suspects beside the husband.

The investigators counted around 200 instances of rape, most of them by her husband and more than 90 by strangers.

Pelicot 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.

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 Pelicot. Thirty-two other defendants are attending the trial as free men.

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

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