Sixty-nine days of hearings to understand how 51 men, with generally uneventful social profiles, were able to turn into rapists. Firefighter, journalist, craftsman, retiree, delivery driver, prison guard… today aged 30 to 74, they are being tried by the criminal court of Vaucluse from September 2 to December 20, because they accepted the proposal of Dominique P. – the anonymity of the accused is intended to guarantee that of his relatives –, 71 years old today, to abuse his drugged wife who was in a comatose state with anxiolytics that he made her ingest without her knowledge.
“Without his knowledge”this is precisely the name of the chat room on the dating site Coco.fr, on which the septuagenarian was recruiting. “You’re like me, you like rape mode”exchange Dominique P. and an interlocutor after a contact on the chat, closed in June for having been implicated in several criminal cases.
It all began on September 12, 2020, with what appeared to be a simple news item: the police intervened in a supermarket in Carpentras (Vaucluse), where a retiree was being held by security guards. In the aisles, using a cell phone attached to a bag, Dominique P. was filming under the skirts of several customers. He mentions “a drive” while his wife was away looking after their grandchildren. Voyeurism-type deviance, a psychiatrist expert concluded. But when they opened the laptop they seized at his home, investigators discovered a file entitled ” Abuse “It contains more than 20,000 photos and videos, which the pensioner has methodically listed with a date, a first name or nickname and a pornographic title.
At the police station, his wife was told that since 2011, her husband – whom she describes as “a great guy” before being confronted with the reality of the facts – delivered her as prey to dozens of men during a medicated sleep that left her with no memory. “He disgusts me, I feel dirty, sullied, betrayed. It’s a tsunami, I’ve been hit by a TGV”she will tell the judge when discussing the discovery of the facts.
Two-faceted personality
It took seven waves of arrests, mainly in Vaucluse, to apprehend the accused. Two died, others could not be identified. The investigating judge estimates that there were 72 men who knowingly accepted the instructions given by Dominique P.: not to wear perfume or smell of tobacco, to park their vehicle in the parking lot of a college not far from the P. couple’s home, to undress in the kitchen, to warm their hands on the radiator, etc. Investigators recorded 92 rapes between July 2011 and October 2020.
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