'I am a rapist, like the others in this room,' husband tells trial that shocked France

A 71-year-old French man accused of drugging his wife so that he and dozens of strangers could sexually assault her at her home told a court yesterday that he admitted the charges.

- Angelique Chrisafis

"I am a rapist, like the others in this room," Dominique Pélicot said, quietly and calmly, as he looked across the courtroom at the 50 other men who are also on trial, accused of raping his wife in her own bed while she was drugged and in a state akin to a "deep coma".

Pélicot, a retired estate agent, is accused of drugging Gisèle Pélicot with sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication, then recruit-24 ing dozens of men online allegedly to rape her in the couple's home in a southern French village between 2011 and 2020.

Giving evidence for the first time after several days of ill health, Pélicot said of the other accused men, aged between 26 and 74: "They all knew." He said they were aware they were being invited to rape his wife.

"I am guilty of what I did," he said. "I say to my wife, my children, my grandchildren... I regret what I've done and I ask for forgiveness, even if it's unforgivable." Of his wife, to whom he was married for 50 years but who has now divorced him, he said: "She did not deserve this."

He also apologised to the wife of another man he allegedly raped at her home when she was drugged.

Dressed in a grey cardigan over a blue T-shirt, with white hair and a heavily lined face, Pélicot was brought in from his prison cell and sat confidently in the secure glass box for interrogation, staring straight at the five judges in the Avignon criminal court. At times he sighed with irritation when asked if the men who allegedly raped his wife had known she could not have consented. Sometimes he cried when talking of alleged sexual abuse in his own childhood.

The court heard how Pélicot would tell men clearly in private messages online: "I'm looking for someone to abuse my wife asleep." He wrote to one man online: "You're like me, you like rape mode."