PARS – The videos recorded by Dominique Pelicot of his wife, Gisle, when, unconscious due to the drugs he gave her, she was raped by dozens of men whom her husband invited to his house, are going to be screened in the Criminal Court of Avin in the presence of the public and the press.
The president of the court, Roger Arata, reversed the decision he had taken on the 20th to exclude the public and the press from the room at the time when these videos were shown and authorized their presence, as Gisle Pelicot wanted, who He had wanted that with transparency in the process of everything that was done to him, “shame would change sides.”
Arata, according to the local press, announced his turn at the end of a debate this Friday morning at the hearing on that issue and specified that given the nature of the images, which will begin to be broadcast this afternoon, each Once it is done, an announcement will be made so that those who want can leave the room.
During that debate, Antoine Camus, Gisle Pelicot’s lawyer, who has become a private prosecutor, justified the relevance of the public and the press being present to prevent the defense from presenting to each other what the images show.
For Camus, the videos serve to “destroy” the thesis held by some of the accused “of an accidental rape, of a rape due to lack of attention, due to recklessness.” “What they show,” he stressed, “is opportunistic rape.”
The lawyer for the private prosecution pointed out that if the public and the press are not present, there is a risk that “to save face”, the lawyers of those who sit in the dock when they are allowed to return to the courtroom will make a biased interpretation of the images to say that things there are not clear.
Precisely Nadia El Bouroumi, who is a lawyer for one of those accused of having raped Gisle Pelicot, justified her position against the dissemination of the videos to the public and the press in the name of “a fair process”, of the exercise of the right of the defense and the presumption of innocence.
El Bouroumi complained that “we are in a situation of media dictatorship” and claimed the right to ask questions without being accused of attacking the private prosecution.
“Ms. Pelicot,” he stated, “is a victim, that cannot be disputed. But were the accused capable of understanding it?”
Many of those who sit in the dock acknowledge having had sexual relations with the victim – with the images it would be impossible to deny it – but they maintain that they believed that they had her implicit consent, through her husband and that they were not aware that he used chemical submission to bypass his will.
Dominique Pelicot has been on trial since September 2 along with 50 other defendants before the Criminal Court of Vaucluse (southeast France) for having drugged his wife with anxiotics for almost ten years in order to rape her in an unconscious state and also sexually abused her. dozens of men she contacted on online platforms.