PARIS: For years, she had been losing hair and weight. She had started forgetting whole days, and sometimes appeared to be in dreamlike trances. Her children and friends worried she had Alzheimer’s.

But in late 2020, after she was summoned to a police station in southern France, she learned a far more shattering story.

Her husband of 50 years, Dominique Pelicot, had been crushing sleeping pills into her food and drink to put her into a deep sleep, police said, and then raping her. He had ushered dozens of men into her home to film them raping her, too, they said, in abuse that lasted nearly a decade.

Using the man’s photographs, videos and online messages, police spent the next two years identifying and charging those other suspects.

On Sept 2, 51 men, including Pelicot, will go on trial in Avignon, in a case that has shocked France and cast a spotlight on the use of drugs to commit sexual abuse and the broader culture in which such crimes could occur.

The accused men represent a kaleidoscope of working-class and middle-class French society: truck drivers, soldiers, carpenters and trade workers, a prison guard, a nurse, an IT expert working for a bank, a local journalist. They range in age from 26 to 74. Many have children and are in relationships.

Most are charged with raping the woman once. A handful are accused of returning as many as six times to rape her.

The victim, who has divorced her husband and changed her surname since his arrest, is now in her 70s.

Since his arrest, Pelicot, 71, has “always declared himself guilty,” said Béatrice Zavarro, his lawyer. “He is not at all contesting his role.”

Other defendants have denied the rape charges, with some arguing that they had the husband’s permission and thought that was sufficient, while others claimed they believed the victim had agreed to be drugged.

When police showed the victim some of the photographs they say her husband had carefully classified and stored, she expressed deep shock. She and her husband had been together since they were 18. She had described him to police as caring and considerate.

She had no memory of being raped, by him or the other men, only one of whom she recognised, she told police, as a neighbour in town.

The first time she will consciously witness the rapes, her lawyer Antoine Camus says, will be in the courtroom when the video recordings are played as evidence.

The trial comes at a moment of heightened scrutiny of the handling of sexual crimes in the country. Rape is defined in French law as an “act of sexual penetration” committed “by violence, coercion, threat or surprise”. A number of feminist lawmakers want to amend that wording to say explicitly that sex without consent is rape, that consent can be withdrawn at any time, and that consent cannot exist if sexual assault is committed “by abusing a state impairing the judgment of another”.

“There is a kind of naivete on the topic of predators in France, a kind of denial,” said Sandrine Josso, a lawmaker who led a parliamentary commission into what is known in France as “chemical submission” - drugging someone with malicious intent. She started the commission after she says she became the victim of a drugging last year. A senator is being investigated on accusations that he slipped ecstasy into her Champagne.

Josso hopes that the Avignon trial will draw attention to the use of drugs to prey on women, and also shed light on the wide profile of predators. “They could be your neighbours, without falling into paranoia,” she said.

Pelicot seemed like a classic man next door. He was a trained electrician, an entrepreneur and an avid cyclist. His middle child and only daughter, Caroline Darian, her pen name, described him as a warm and present father in a book published in 2022 about the case, And I Stopped Calling You Papa. She tried to turn her family trauma into action, forming a nonprofit association, “Don’t Put Me to Sleep”, to publicise the dangers of drug-facilitated crimes.

Her father, she wrote, was the one who drove her to school, picked her up late from parties, encouraged her and consoled her. Her mother was the stable breadwinner, working as a manager in a Paris-area company for 20 years.

When she retired, they moved to a house with a big garden and pool in Mazan, a small town northeast of Avignon. The couple regularly hosted their three children and grandchildren for summer vacations peppered with late dinners on the terrace, where the family debated, held dance competitions and played Trivial Pursuit.

“I think of us as happy,” his daughter wrote. “I thought my parents were.”

None of them harboured any suspicions. Then, in 2020, three women reported Pelicot to police for trying to use his camera to film up their skirts in a grocery store, and he was arrested.

Police seized his two cellphones, two cameras and his electronic devices, including his laptop, before releasing him on bail.

On the devices, police say they found 300 photographs and a video of an unconscious woman being sexually assaulted by many people. They said they also found Skype messages in which the man boasted of drugging his wife and invited men to join him in having sex with her while she was unconscious.

Over the course of their investigation, police found more than 20,000 videos and photographs, many of them dated and labelled, in an electronic folder titled “abuse”. The timeline they built began in 2011. The list of suspects grew to 83.

Two months after his initial arrest, Pelicot was arrested again and charged with aggravated rape, drugging and a list of sexual abuse charges. He is also accused of violating the privacy of his wife, daughter and two daughters-in-law on suspicion of illegally recording, and at times distributing, intimate photos of them.

If he is found guilty, he faces up to 20 years in prison.

During interviews with police, the details of which were included in an overview of the case by the investigative judge, Pelicot said he began drugging his wife so he could do things to her, and dress her in things, that she normally refused. Then he started inviting others to participate. He said he never asked for or accepted money.

He met most of the men, the investigating judge’s report stated, in a chat room on a notorious, unmoderated French website implicated in more than 23,000 police cases in France from 2021 to 2024. It was finally shut down, and its owner arrested, in June after an 18-month investigation stretching across Europe.

The chat room where most of the men met Pelicot was called “a son insu”, which means “without their knowledge”.

Over the years, Pelicot told tpolice, he developed rules for the visitors to ensure that his wife did not wake: no smoking or cologne; undress in the kitchen; warm hands under hot water or on a radiator, so their cold touch would not jolt her. At the end of each night, according to the investigating judge’s report, he cleaned his wife’s body.

Of the 83 suspects, police identified and charged 50.

Only one of the men is not charged with rape, assault or attempted rape of Pelicot’s wife. Instead, that man is accused of following the same model, and drugging his own wife to rape her. Pelicot is also charged with raping the man’s wife while she was drugged.

Five of the men also face charges for possessing child sexual abuse imagery.

Pelicot is also being investigated in the rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman in 1991 and the attempted rape of a 19-year-old in 1999. He admitted to the attempted rape, according to Florence Rault, the lawyer representing the victims in both cases, but denies any involvement in the 1991 homicide.

The story has prompted some soul-searching among doctors, since Pelicot’s wife had visited gynaecologists and neurologists over a series of mystifying symptoms, but had received no diagnosis, according to her daughter.

“What I found disturbing for us doctors was that no doctor considered this hypothesis,” said Dr Ghada Hatem-Gantzer, a well known obstetrician-gynaecologist and expert in violence against women. She and a pharmacist, Leila Chaouachi, have now developed training for doctors and nurses on the symptoms that victims of drug-facilitated assault can experience.

Contrary to popular belief, most cases occur at home, not at bars, said Chaouachi, who runs annual surveys on such offences in France. Most victims are women, the surveys show, and around half of the victims do not remember the attack, because of blackouts, she said.

In the case going to court in Avignon, some of the accused admitted guilt to police. According to the investigating judge’s report, many claimed that they were tricked into having sex with a drugged woman - lured by a husband for a three-way encounter and told she was pretending to sleep, because she was shy.

Several said they believed that she had consented to being drugged and raped as part of a sex fantasy. Some said they did not believe it was rape, because her husband was there and they believed he could consent for both of them.

“It sends shivers down the spine regarding the state of affairs in French society,” said Camus, who is also representing Darian and many other members of the family. “If that’s the conception of consent in sexual matters in 2024, then we have a lot, a lot, a lot of work to do.”

 - NY Times