A husband choreographed the multiple rapes of his sleeping wife with such chilling attention to detail that a lawyer on Wednesday described him as a “perverted Steven Spielberg”.
Before videoing strangers carrying out the attacks, Dominique Pelicot would dream up sordidly elaborate scenes and ensure they were re-enacted precisely to heighten his twisted thrills.
“My client was told: ‘Do this, do that, move this leg here, move that arm there’,” said French attorney Jalil Amr, who represents one of the alleged rapists.
“It was as though he was directing a movie.”
“He (Pelicot) behaved like a perverted Steven Spielberg, or you could say the director of a scene from James Bond. We will see that when the videos are replayed in court.”
Mr Amr made the comparison on Wednesday when speaking to me during a break in a trial of such extreme depravity and shocking marital treachery that it is even sending shockwaves through France – a nation with a long history of scandalous debauchery.
He is defending Redouane Azougagh, a jobless, Moroccan-born man aged 40 with at least three children.
He is one of the 50 men being tried together in Avignon for the aggravated rape of Gisele Pelicot, whose husband admits to drugging her evening meals with sleeping pills before inviting strangers he met in an internet chatroom to their home to violate her.
Though Azougagh admits having sex with the unconscious Mrs Pelicot, now 71, on two nights in the spring of 2019, he denies rape – claiming he assumed he was taking part in a kinky game to which she had consented.
According to a file submitted to the court, investigators identified him ‘with 94 per cent certainty’ from videos in Pelicot’s secret stash.
One was labelled Night with Miloud – the sign-on Azougagh used on a website for swingers and voyeurs.
Pelicot had tagged another Well Raped.
A third film in which he featured was given a title too disgusting to publish.
After his arrest Azougagh at first denied being the man in the videos, claiming they had been doctored, but police found evidence on his phone that proved he was lying.
He then changed his story, saying the Pelicots had “presented themselves as a libertine couple” who were looking for a man to take part in a threesome.
Following the husband’s instructions to the letter, he drove to their chalet, in the Provencal village of Mazan, late at night, parked some distance away and entered quietly through the kitchen.
Pelicot then went into movie director mode, ordering him to warm his hands on the radiator before touching his wife so as not to wake her, and telling him exactly how to proceed.
While Azougagh thought it “strange” that Mrs Pelicot was unresponsive, he told investigators, he carried out her husband’s orders because he thought it was “role playing between them”.
He assumed the couple would later play the film back for their entertainment, he said.
Video evidence that will be presented to the court shows that this first attack went on for 71 minutes between 1.09am and 2.21am, on March 13.
The second, a fortnight later, spanned more than two hours, says the prosecution.
Audio transcripts from the films may support Azoughah’s claim that he was “directed” by Pelicot.
“You see, I told you, you can’t do that – you have to wait,” Pelicot snaps at one point.
“Go over there, I’ll see if I can turn her over,” is another of his grisly instructions.
He gruffly rejects Azougagh’s plea for his wife’s head to be covered during the alleged rape.
The Moroccan-Frenchman claims he only learned that Mrs Pelicot had been drugged on his second visit.
However, her husband maintains that – as with all the other alleged rapists – he knew exactly what was happening from the outset.
According to Pelicot, Azougagh later attempted to blackmail him by threatening to reveal the rapes to police and stalked his house menacingly.
But he says he refused to pay him off, only agreeing to give him some of the sleeping pills he used to drug his wife.
Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Police Commissioner Jeremie Boss Platiere began giving harrowing details of some of the other alleged attacks on the unknowing Mrs Pelicot between 2011 and 2020.
As Mrs Pelicot listened with admirable composure in court, he revealed how married nurse Redouan El Farihi was in her bedroom with her husband – who “offered her as a present” – for a full three hours, in June 2019.
That same month, Mrs Pelicot’s hands and legs were bound while another nocturnal visitor – refrigeration technician Thierry Postat, 61 – assaulted her, said the detective.
One of the most emotion-charged moments of the trial is expected on Thursday when Mrs Pelicot takes the witness stand to confront her husband and the accused rapists with the enormity of their alleged crimes.
The Pelicots’ daughter Caroline Darian – who has written a book called I No Longer Call Him Daddy – was also in court on Wednesday.
In her memoir she recalls how she learned that her parents’ home was a “chamber of horrors” when her mother phoned her out of the blue amid the COVID pandemic, in November 2020.
She fled the court in tears on Tuesday after the trial judge revealed that, as well as orchestrating the attacks on her mother, her father had also taken sneak photos of her in her underwear.
Additional reporting: Rory Mulholland
