The French husband who drugged his wife to be raped by more than 70 other men took the stand to confess on Tuesday, admitting: “I am a rapist, just like everyone else in this room.”
Dominique Pelicot, 71, admitted filming men who raped his 50-year-old wife Gisele, 72, for almost a decade while she was drugged unconscious – and begged for his family’s forgiveness.
“I admit the charges in their entirety,” Pelicot said, according to BFM TV, whose reporter was at the courthouse.
“I am a rapist, just like everyone else in this room,” he said, admitting that he also raped his wife, along with the men he recruited to abuse her while she was unconscious.
“I ask my wife, my children and my grandchildren to accept my apology. I regret what I did. I ask for your forgiveness, even if it is not forgivable,” he continued.
He is accused of rape, gang rape and various invasions of privacy by recording and distributing sexual images.
Pelicot addressed the fifty other men between the ages of 26 and 73 who are also on trial for the rape of his wife.
“They knew everything. They can’t say anything else,” he said.
The wheelchair-bound patient blamed his distorted behavior on a difficult childhood and became the victim of rape himself. He complained, “You’re not born a pervert, you become a pervert.”
His ex-wife responded to his confession, telling the court: “For fifty years I lived with a man who I never thought was capable of these acts of rape.”
Pelicot, who was initially arrested in 2020 when he was caught filming up a woman’s skirt, offered sex to his wife on a website and filmed the abuse.
Investigators later found 300 photos and videos of the abuse, including images of his own daughter naked, prosecutors said.
Pelicot faces a prison sentence of twenty years.
With Postal Wires.
