Dominique Pelicot convicted with 50 others in rape trial that shocked world 19DEZ24

Gisele Pelicot arrives at the Avignon courthouse on Dec. 10. (Christophe Simon/AFP/Getty Images)

I am so impressed with Gisele Pelicot's bravery and commitment to show rape victims they can survive rape and get justice. I hope and pray whatever time she has left that God grant her strength, peace and joy with her family and friends and Him. Given the nature of their crimes, if dominique pelicot and the others were sentenced in the U.S. they would probably be pardoned by (NOT MY) pres elect drumpf / trump once he is sworn in. If he was born in America he too could be elected president. From the Washington Post.....

Dominique Pelicot convicted with 50 others in rape trial that shocked world

Pelicot, 72, was convicted of orchestrating the drugging and mass rape of his wife over almost a decade. Fifty other men were also found guilty, most of rape.

Updated

December 19, 2024 at 9:01 a.m. ESTtoday at 9:01 a.m. EST

By Leo Sands

Leo Sands is a breaking-news reporter and editor in The Washington Post’s London Hub, covering news as it unfolds around the world.

Judges on Thursday convicted a Frenchman of aggravated rape and other charges, after the 72-year-old admitted to repeatedly drugging his wife and recruiting dozens of other men to rape her over almost a decade.

A court in Avignon, southern France, sentenced Dominique Pelicot to 20 years in prison, the maximum allowed under French law, after finding him guilty of all charges. Prosecutors said he regularly found men online to abuse his wife, 72-year-old Gisèle Pelicot, after he had sedated her.

The three-month trial — held in open court at the request of Gisèle Pelicot, who said she wanted the world to know what had happened to her — has drawn horror and attention internationally, triggered a reckoning about sexual violence in France and turned the grandmother into a feminist hero.

“I have never regretted this decision. I now have confidence in our ability to collectively seize a future in which each woman and man can live in harmony with respect and mutual understanding,” she said outside the courtroom after the verdict was delivered.

All 50 of Dominique Pelicot’s co-defendants were also found guilty Thursday: 46 of rape, two of attempted rape and two of sexual assault. The judges handed them sentences ranging from a three-year suspended sentence to 15 years in prison.

A lawyer representing Dominique Pelicot told reporters that her client would make a decision over whether to lodge an appeal by Dec. 29.

Throughout the trial, Dominique Pelicot did not dispute the prosecution’s account. “I am a rapist, like everyone else in this room. They cannot say otherwise,” he said during the trial in September.

Dominique Pelicot appears with his lawyer at the courthouse in Avignon, France, on Monday. (Zziigg/Reuters)

Pelicot told the court he developed a routine of secretly sedating his wife by slipping crushed antianxiety medication into her food and drinks. The dose was enough to keep her unconscious for seven hours. Through an online forum, he recruited strangers to sexually assault her in their home and other places he and his wife were staying.

His activity came under scrutiny in 2020 after three women reported him for allegedly trying to film under their skirts, according to prosecutors. Police arrested him and seized his technological devices, where they found hundreds of photos and videos allegedly showing his wife being sexually assaulted by multiple men, one of Gisèle Pelicot’s lawyers previously told The Washington Post.

About 15 of Pelicot’s co-defendants admitted their guilt, while others contested the charges against them. About 20 additional men who appeared in his videos have yet to be identified.

The defendants who appeared in court ranged in age from 26 to 74. They included truck drivers, army veterans, a fireman and a nurse. Some apologized directly to Gisèle Pelicot in the courtroom. One was accused of raping her up to six times and another of being inspired to commit a copycat crime against his own wife. One defendant was tried in absentia after fleeing the country.

Gisèle Pelicot’s decision to address her experiences publicly has forced a wider conversation about sexual violence in France. Throughout the trial, she asked people to consider why so many people were willing to participate in her abuse — and why no one went to the police to report what was going on.

Yaël Braun-Pivet, the president of France’s National Assembly, thanked Pelicot for her courage, which she said had helped break societal taboos surrounding sexual assault. “The world is no longer the same thanks to you,” Braun-Pivet wrote in a statement on X.

SERMON ON THE WOMAN WITH THE BENT BACK 12SEP10

FROM the lady preacher who calls her blog 'Sarcastic Lutheran', she often post great sermons and life lessons. Click  the header to go to her blog.....you'll have to go there to see what other have e mailed her in response to her request......

Sermon on the Woman With the Bent Back

 

Luke 13:10-17

¹⁰Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. ¹¹And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. ¹²When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” ¹³When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. ¹⁴But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, “There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.” ¹⁵But the Lord answered him and said, “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? ¹⁶And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?” ¹⁷When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing.

We know very little about the woman who was healed in our text today.  The text is silent on the question of why was she healed and others weren’t. We don’t know why she bore the pain and humiliation of a bent back.  Perhaps  modern physiologists might be able to give a diagnoses, you know, now that we know SO much about human beings.  Perhaps the source of her crippled physique was chiropractic in nature, perhaps a lack of calcium.  Medically there’s only conjecture on our side of the 2,000 years that separate us from her. 

None of us may have ever experienced the spinal reality of such a thing but The infirmity of the woman who was healed in our text for today seems spiritually familiar doesn’t it? Because her collapsed posture is the physical representation of being se encurvatus en se…, the self curved in on the self which, incidentally,  is Luther’s definition of sin. Myopically unconcerned for anything but the self and having no thought for God or the neighbor.    In other words, bent in a manner in which we see nothing but our own feet. We can come by it naturally – embodying the messages we receive from society and our families and our selves – that we are not thin enough, smart enough, rich enough, like our sister enough, or enough enough.  This can just bend us in.  Then add to it our cultural obsession with the self and the notion that we are our own Gods and the result is a deformity of identity.  One particularly insidious example being our inability to forgive ourselves for not being God.  For not being God!  For making mistakes and getting things wrong and not hitting the mark. Hard to say which is worse – trying to be God for myself, or punishing myself for not managing to do something that isn’t actually possible in the first place.. What bends us over so that we see only self are the voices from inside or outside that try to overpower the sound of God naming us as God’s own. 

It’s hard to say what it was like for her that day when everything changed.  We think of this text in Luke as a healing narrative but really it was nothing less than an exorcism.  Well, that and another opportunity for Jesus to pick a fight with the nice religious folks since all of this happened on the Sabbath.  In all fairness the leaders of the synagogue were just doing their job when they said to the crowds that it was the Sabbath day of rest and not a time for healings.  But see, Jesus does not violate the Sabbath by healing her.  He fulfills it.  By healing her he actually does Sabbath TO her.  He physically embodies in her what Sabbath is, namely a time for putting aside our handiwork so that we might witness the handiwork of God.  She is passive, in the midst of the faithful where she is restored to an upright position, no longer turned in on herself and is named as a Child of God’s promises.  That sounds pretty sabbathy to me.

After she is seen, touched, and healed by Christ, she is named by him as a daughter of Abraham and restored to the dignity and wholeness of being a child of the promise.  You know, this is the only place in the Bible where the term daughter of Abraham appears.  Here Jesus places her in the history of God’s promises.  And the promise to which she has claim...the promise to Abraham was not that his children and children’s children would be super rich and important and fabulous…the promise to Abraham was that his descendants would be a blessing to all nations.  The good news for Abraham had little do with himself and had a lot to do with God’s love for the whole world.

So this daughter of Abraham is blessed to be a blessing.  She encounters the Christ and For the first time in 18 years stands upright and praises God not because she got what she wanted but because praise is simply the consequence of wholeness. 

 Here’s where we finally learn what the purpose of her healing was.  The purpose of her healing is not fulfilled when she stands up straight and it’s not fulfilled when she is named and it’s not fulfilled  when she praises God.  The healing is completed when the community witnesses new life in their midst and rejoices.  In other words, her healing from God had less to do with her and more to do with God’s love for the whole world.

Having seen God’s mercy in the upright body of this daughter of Abraham, the community rejoices for having God in their midst.  Right there in the mess of their broken lives and fractured hopes and crippled bodies.  Right there in the midst of the hypocrites and religious legalists. There is where God shows up.

It’s the same for you actually.  Your encounter with God’s grace has a purpose.  Your being freed from the tyranny of self has a purpose.  Your being acted upon by God…being made whole has a purpose:  and it’s not so that you can collect higher self-esteem and a sense of well-being in order to Spiritually feather your nest.  God does all of this for the good of your neighbor.  It’s always been like that with God.  You know why God gave us the 10 commandments? Because God demands obedience?  So that you will be happy?  nope.  Because God loves your neighbor and would prefer you not steal from them or sleep with their husbands. 

         Having been restored by God, having been healed of being bent in on herself, this daughter of Abraham then bore Christ into her community.  So if you too have been freed from bondage,  if you have been shown selfless love,  raised from the dead, restored to wholeness it is for the benefit of the community.  Don’t keep it to yourself.  Because like the bent woman, you really are blessed to be a blessing.

         This week I asked you to email me examples of where God is healing you where you feel free and where you still feel bound.  So, as an experience of doing Sabbath to each other hear now where God is at work.