RedHanded - Episode 374 - Gisèle Pelicot: The Altar of Vice

Episode Date: November 7, 2024

Of the 83 men who had raped Gisèle Pelicot, she recognised only two faces. One was a neighbour – and the other was her beloved husband of over 50 years. Dominique Pelicot had been using a chatroom to invite total strangers over to assault his wife, without her knowledge, for almost a decade. And she had had no idea.We peel back every layer of this unfathomable case: the shockwaves it sent through France and the Pelicot family; the rapists’ jaw-dropping attitudes to their crimes; Gisèle’s astonishing bravery in speaking up in her 2024 trial; and even evidence linking Dominique Pelicot to two cold cases – one a brutal murder. It’s time to meet the Monster of Avignon.Exclusive bonus content:Wondery - Ad-free & ShortHandPatreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesFollow us on social media:YouTubeTikTokInstagramXVisit our website:WebsiteSources available on redhandedpodcast.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. They say Hollywood is where dreams are made. A seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Hannah.

I'm Saruti. And welcome to Regalide. We're in France for you this week because if you have been anywhere near a news outlet, you will have heard about this, and we just couldn't help ourselves. Yeah, it's one of those cases where, like, my friends who don't even listen to the podcast are like, are you going to cover this case? And I'm like, give us a fucking chance. Because it's mad.

And we're going to tell you just how mad because we're very lucky to have a French speaker on our staff here at Red Handed HQ. And he's been, I can't think of the verb to read. Yeah, something like that. He's been reading fucking loads. Reading away. Reading away in le français.

So we hope that this is the most comprehensive English language piece of content out there on this. So you're welcome. Darnay-a. I think is what they say. Right. D'accord. Let's get on with it.

Oui, d'accord. In November 2020, 68-year-old Giselle Pellicot found herself having a rather unusual conversation with local police. They wanted to know some quite strange and specific things, like did she take a lot of naps? How did she feel when she woke up? How often did Giselle and her husband have sex? And the most concerning, were Giselle and her husband into swinging and or group sex? For that last question, a confused Giselle had said a very firm no.

She was a one-man kind of woman and couldn't bear any man's hand on her other than her husband's. What on earth were the police talking about? After a pause, one of the officers slid Giselle a photograph. The image showed a man and a woman in bed together. The man was on top. At first, Giselle had no idea what this photograph had to do with her, but slowly she realised it was her bed. It was her bedroom. And it was her. The photograph showed Giselle lying unconscious. The man who was in bed with her was a total stranger.

And he was raping her. Before Giselle had a chance to process what she was even looking at, the officers showed her more and more photographs. There were hundreds of images of her lying lifeless in her marital bed, being assaulted by dozens of strange men. Out of a total of 83 faces, there were only two men she recognised immediately. A friendly neighbour, whom she chatted to whenever they passed each other in town. And her husband of over 50 years.

It's very, what's his name, David Parker Ray, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. It's honestly one of the strangest cases that I have encountered in our long eight years doing this show i was lying in bed the other day googling it and sam's always like i don't want to know but then also tell me and i was always telling them this it just seemed like i was making it up it seemed like i was trying to just shock him and i was like no it's all true so strap in guys it's gonna be a fucking hell of an episode as giselle looked at these hundreds of images of herself her whole world fell apart everything she'd built over the past five decades with a man she loved the family they had raised it was all a farce that day the police had searched the computer of Giselle's husband, Dominique Bellico, after he was caught upskirting three women at a local supermarket.

Giselle had only gone to the police station to iron out what she was sure was a harmless mistake. It's quite difficult to, like, accidentally upskirt three times. Giselle's husband was a respectable, honourable man who'd supported her through her declining health in the past few years. She trusted him implicitly. But Dominique's computer revealed evidence of at least a decade of unimaginable deceit and depravity, which has led him to be known as the Monster of Avignon. For almost ten years, Dominique had been drugging his wife Giselle into a stupor and then raping her in her sleep.

And then he had posted images of her on an online forum to invite random men to their house to assault Giselle as well. These 83 men would come into the Pellicot bedroom and rape Giselle while she lay there, practically comatose. And her husband, well, Dominique would sit in the same room and film the entire thing. This had been going on for a decade, and Giselle had had no idea. When this story became public, it tore a hole through France and hit headlines across the world, especially thanks to Giselle Pellicot's incredibly brave decision to waive her right to anonymity. The scale of deception was more than anybody could understand. But this case also shone a big fat light onto France's attitudes

to sexual freedom. That was a conversation already at a fever pitch in the nation, and the story of Giselle Pellicot has just thrown a whole lot more fuel on that fire. Her calm, dignified testimony about the tatters of her 50-year marriage, one she believed to have been rock-solid, captivated the world, and it still is. Because even after Dominique's chatroom recruitments were revealed to the world and it still is because even after Dominique's chat room recruitments were revealed to the world the horrors just kept coming 20,000 covertly captured images and videos of undressed sometimes unconscious family members were discovered on his devices memories of his questionable conduct around his children and grandchildren were now seen in a whole new light.

A grubby, grubby light. And DNA evidence now linked him with two cold cases. One of vicious murder. But to understand how this frankly unbelievable case came to be, we need to start at the beginning. Giselle met Dominique Pellico when they were just 19. He was a handsome young man with long hair, and pretty quickly they fell madly in love.

The pair lived just outside Paris, and over the years they had three children, Thomas, Caroline and Julian. Now many reports that you'll read out there, even those from the children themselves, describe pre-arrest Dominic as the perfect doting family man. But that's a little bit too black and white. Always is, isn't it? Because there were plenty of messy times in the pelico household for a start dominic's career was patchy at best he was an estate agent for a while red flag honestly i was talking about

this in the pub the other day why is it that an estate agent is the only occupation which has no uniform but you can tell by the way they're dressed what they are it's very true though i would also throw finance bro in there especially now that the the winter is upon us oh the gilets the gilets the gilets are coming not the gilets jaunes just the gilet they're fucking everywhere so yeah he is an estate agent for a while obviously or not we don't know but he clearly wasn't very good at it because he soon quit and then trained as an electrician before then joining edf as an electricity salesman but that didn't work out either and so dominique started his own company for a bit but then went bankrupt so things weren't always easy in the Pellicott home. In fact, one day,

when they were just children, the kids had come home from school to find a bailiff, a police officer and a team of removal men, slowly emptying their home of every item of furniture they had. Over the years, Giselle did have a steady job as an office manager, but financial difficulties took their toll on the marriage and the family over the years. There was also a fleeting affair and even flashes of violence. The children remember one night seeing their father Dominique pinning Giselle to the wall by her shirt collar. Still, it is fair to say that those times in the Pellicoe house were the exception rather than the rule. The family all considered themselves to be totally normal.

A loving family. Friends saw Dominique and Giselle as the perfect couple. And that was only strengthened by their difficulties over the years. There is no question, Giselle trusted her husband completely. Dominique did the school run, he consoled the kids through hard times as they grew up, and was by all accounts a dedicated and communicative father. In time, the kids grew up and moved out, as they do,

and seven grandchildren joined the Pelico fray. I was walking Mabel the other day, and someone was like, oh, it's great training for kids, you know, getting a dog. And I was like, oh, is it? And they were like, actually, kids are easier because they go to school. He was hip hop's biggest mogul, the man who redefined fame, fortune and the music industry. The first male rapper to be honored on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Sean Diddy Combs.

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you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest season only on Wondery+. You can join Wondery in the W Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Start your free trial today. The family met up and spoke on the phone all of the time and the grandchildren loved to talk about cycling or football with their papo. When Giselle and Dominique retired in 2013, they decided to move south to the town of Mazin in Provence. Now Provence is the absolute escape to the chateau dream. Provence is a beautiful part of France. Obviously it's all quaint summer festivals, market gardens and gently swaying lavender fields. And every summer the Pellicot children and grandchildren would all come to stay for the

school holidays. And they all remember these visits as gloriously happy times. They swam in the pool all day and had aperitifs and long, presumably butter-soaked dinners out on the terrace every evening. There were dance competitions and games of trivial pursuit. Knowing what she knows now, though, Caroline, the bellicots' daughter, calls these happy memories a comedy of tranquility. Very nice, Caroline. Caroline. We're going to talk more about Caroline, but she is quite the wordsmith. Her book, which we will talk about later, really did allow us,

or producer Alex, who speaks French, to translate it and then help us put this story together. So Caroline is really the key reason we're even able to do this today. Because while the move to Mazin seemed like a picture-perfect retirement for the Pelicans, from the outside at least, it also put 400 miles between the couple and their children. And although no one had so much as an inkling, it is out there, in Provence, where Giselle's nightmare began. As far as anyone could see, the only real blip in this seemingly perfect family story

happened back in 2010, before the Pelicos moved south. It was in 2010 that Dominique was arrested in a supermarket for the first time. He'd been caught by security guards filming under women's skirts with a pen camera. He was fined 100 euros, which is absolutely the lightest of light slaps on the wrist. But something else did come of this arrest. Dominique's DNA was taken and put onto the database. And keep that in your brain pocket because we're going to come back to it.

Still though, the whole thing was almost over before it began. Giselle wrote this incident off as a hiccup in an otherwise happy marriage. It's amazing what people will let go isn't it yeah i think you know we're so desperate to hold on to like normalcy and to not want to confront something that might have the ability to completely destroy our lives understandably so and yes giselle lets it go but like so do the authorities they're just like here's a hundred euro fine and I think we've talked about this before particularly when we did like the Sarah Everard case this kind of idea of like lower down on the scale sexual misdemeanors like flashing upskirting people kind of just write it off as like the realm of the pervy old man and it not really being very dangerous.

That's just not true. Yeah. And besides all of that, Giselle knew what Dominique had been through as a child. And she rationalised that it was enough to mess anyone up. So let's talk about what exactly Dominique went through as a child. Well, at the age of nine, he had been lying in a hospital bed when a female nurse sexually assaulted him. On top of that,

his family life had some troubled boundaries. His parents had adopted a daughter with learning difficulties, and little by little it became clear that Dominic's father was regularly assaulting this child. And he actually considered them to be in a sexual relationship. Dominique and his brother had apparently tried on several occasions to have this girl taken away from the family for her own protection.

They pleaded with their father to stop, saying that if this girl got pregnant, that he wouldn't be able to avoid a scandal. And then later, when Dominique was in his teens and had started as an apprentice electrician, he said he witnessed a gang rape on a construction site. He had confided all this to Giselle, and she knew that it caused him a lot of pain. So Giselle thought nothing more of this supermarket escapade. He'd been caught, he was sorry, and that was that. Giselle didn't have the energy to stay mad at Dominique. Especially since, shortly after they moved, she began to feel very strange.

And soon things escalated. Until Giselle felt like she was losing her mind. Giselle, in a not-very-French way, had never really smoked or been a particularly heavy drinker. She loved walking and she kept active, but down in Mazin in her 60s, something changed. She started experiencing lapses in memory. She woke up one morning surprised to have a new haircut and then rushed to her hairdresser who told her that she'd been there just the day before. There's nothing that terrifies me more than losing time. It's absolutely harrowing what happens to Giselle because yeah who's more scared of the idea of losing their minds it's already like a top tier fear

that anyone is going to have and at 60 she's young. And then it's compounded by the fact that when she realizes what it is, it's even fucking worse, arguably, than finding out she had Alzheimer's. Sometimes Giselle couldn't remember saying goodbye to her children or a film that she'd watched just the night before. She had bouts of fatigue

and she started to lose a lot of weight. She had difficulty controlling one of her arms and her hair started to fall out. And there were a lot of strange gynecological problems too. An ultrasound revealed a large inflammation of her cervix. Giselle, as Saru said, suspected, as we all would in that situation, that she might have Alzheimer's or a brain tumour, but nothing ever showed up in scans. Giselle was convinced that there would be some strange mystery illness that could explain it all. What she couldn't explain was testing positive for four STDs. This is bonkers, right? Because yes, the losing time, the kind of weird amnesia the blackouts even the gynecological

problems as she's 60 maybe you're thinking you know hormone levels are changing something's going on it's some sort of condition we just need to diagnose the stds four of them where are they coming from and when this happened dominique accused his ailing wife of having affairs, which of course she denied. And they agreed to just chalk it up to her mystery illness as well. And look, he has the fucking gall to turn around to Giselle and accuse her of having an affair. But she never accuses him. The thing that makes way more logical sense is that she would say, you've given these to me.

But that is a testament to how much Giselle Pellicott trusted her husband and she doesn't trust herself because she's forgetting everything all the time exactly exactly in 2017 her no doubt terribly worried children convinced Giselle to see a neurologist and yet again a scan of her brain showed nothing particularly abnormal for a 60 year old woman the doctor assured Giselle that she probably had experienced some kind of standalone amnesic episode or perhaps a stroke one that now she'd had it would probably go away no one ever considered toxicology tests. Giselle's children were understandably seriously concerned.

And in 2018, when her son Julian and his family were visiting, they saw it happen with their own eyes. Just a few minutes after Giselle sat down to dinner, her elbows suddenly gave way. She lurched back in her chair, like she was drunk out of her mind. Julian remembers her body seeming totally drained of any energy, like a ragdoll. She stared blankly forwards. And Dominique seemed worried too, but said it happened from time to time when she had too much activity. In other words, he basically turns around and blames Julian's family for tiring Giselle out. So Dominique suggested that they put Giselle to bed immediately and said it was

probably just some sort of unexpected flare-up of her strange new illness. In reality, it was exactly the desired effect as far as Dominique was concerned. It had just kicked in too early. In 2019, due to what Giselle had started calling total blackouts, she stopped driving or even taking trains in case she missed her stop. Dominique took Giselle to all of her appointments, all of the scans and to see all of the specialists and held her hand all the way through. Then one night, Giselle came to to find Dominique having sex with her he told her that he thought she was awake and she should just go back to sleep and Giselle wrote this off as just another

blackout it's working out so perfectly for Dominique because the campaign he is waging against Giselle of drugging her and we're going to talk more about that in a second specifically what he's using and how he's doing it but it is rendering her completely terrified and also completely isolated. She stops going out, she stops trusting anything anything she stops even believing the things that she sees with her own eyes and the things that are happening to her and at the same time he gets to play this perfect loving husband who accompanies her to all of the doctor's appointments and therefore compounding Giselle's reliance on him even more so he can exploit it and she also to an outsider is totally unbelievable absolutely anything she says she's

just gonna sound nuts and there's also a record of it because i've been running around from specialist to specialist so even though her you know having that episode at the dinner table wasn't exactly his plan it works in his favor yeah because her children see her be completely out of control out of nowhere yeah yeah and so it was all going quite well as far as Dominique was concerned. But then, on the 12th of September 2020, he once again was caught taking pictures up the skirts of three shoppers in a local supermarket. Each one of these women lodged a complaint, and Dominique Pellicott was taken in.

And, look, with this upskirting incident, I don't want Dominique to not get caught but this is where he is losing control right if he had just carried on with his horrible little scam which already was taking huge amounts of risk as we'll go on to discuss he would have got away with it this upskirting this inability to control himself from going out in public and doing this is what leads to his downfall. Because after he's arrested, a psychiatric profile into Dominique revealed deviant voyeurism. Police believed that they now had enough recourse to dig a bit deeper into this man. Because remember, this is the second time he's been arrested for the same thing. So they seized his phone, which led them to his computer, a collection of SIM cards, a video camera, and a hard drive. And as they looked through each of these,

the police uncovered more and more horrors. Far worse than these small-town police officers could ever have imagined. It took them over two months to go through the 20,000 images and videos they had found. But Pellicot had been quite helpful because they were all neatly filed and labelled in a folder simply titled Abuse. Jesus Christ. Two months later, on the 2nd of November, Giselle took Dominique back to the police station. They woke up together, had their breakfast and headed in. Dominique was calm and showed no signs of nerves on the drive to the station. The pair of them were both convinced that it was just a formality. When they got there dominique

disappeared with some officers and after a while they came to fetch giselle when they asked her to describe her husband's personality giselle was confused and she said what she always said dominique was a caring attentive person who was always ready to help they had loads of close friends they had a lot of dinner parties and and they lived a very normal life. After 50 years of marriage, Giselle had, quote, not one obscene word for her husband. The upskirting had been a mistake, one she'd already decided to look past. Giselle had no idea that the next time she saw her husband would be two years later in a courtroom surrounded by 50 of her rapists. Because this, as we told you at the top of the show, is where Giselle was confronted with the horrifying images

of herself being raped by countless strangers in her own bed. That evening, Giselle phoned her children one by one and told them what had happened. I don't even know the words you would use to describe this situation to your children. No. What? I mean, it's probably one of those things you just have to come right out with.

There's no nice way of saying it. No. What? I mean, it's probably one of those things you just have to come right out with. There's no nice way of saying it. No. Thomas the eldest vomited after hanging up the phone. Julian collapsed in a state of shock. And Giselle says that her daughter screamed like a wild beast. And Caroline, her daughter, wrote this in her book. It was what you call a tipping point, the start of a slow descent into hell,

where you have no idea how low you will sink. As the police worked to identify the 83 men they saw in the photographs, they soon uncovered exactly how dominique had been finding these people dominique pelico as it turned out was a very keen user of a hellhole website called coco.fr which i'm afraid we are going to have to tell you about coco pitches itself as a chat site without registration. Fuck me. Users were only required to give their gender and their age and their postcode and a nickname. Coco was very proud of its super low levels of moderation. Absolutely anything went.

And inevitably, Coco.fr quickly became a resource for cyber criminals And then, worse Users began to chat on Coco to coordinate child sexual abuse Gang rapes, homophobic attacks and even murders It became known in France as a den of predators Human rights organisations, gay rights activists and child protection associations campaigned for years to get coco.fr taken down as recent as last year coco was used to coordinate an attack on a gay man one so brutal it became front page news over the past three years the site has been associated with more than 23 000000 police cases and judicial proceedings,

affecting almost 500 victims, and those are just the ones we know about. An investigation was started in France in December 2023, with the help of law enforcement from Bulgaria, Germany, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Hungary. Coco.fr's servers were eventually seized in Germany, and its operator was arrested, and the website was shut down in June this year. I mean, good. Yes! But also, like, is it going to stop anything?

Of course it isn't. No. It's just whack-a-mole, isn't it? It is. I'm just like, I think it feels good that, yeah, okay, this website got shut down, but, like, playing devil's advocate at least you knew where they were then now they're underground they'll just go somewhere else you're gonna have to find it i don't know it's tricky business it's really really tricky because

obviously it's when it comes to trading of child sexual abuse images obviously that service should be taken down but i don't know it doesn't it doesn't solve the problem but we're not here to talk about coco.fr that's just the forum that Dominique Pellicot was using. We are getting ahead of ourselves. We need to go back to 2020 and to Dominique Pellicot himself. He was especially fond of a specific forum on Coco.fr called Assent un Sous, or in English, Without Her Knowing. Why do even horrible things sound nice in French? Yeah.

Even when I said ass. Asshole. Asshole. So this forum, as the name might suggest, was a place for men to openly talk and brag about sexual experiences they'd had without the knowledge of their partners, who'd often be knocked out on drugs. I did not realize before this episode how common this specific type of sexual abuse or rape is. It's called drug facilitated sexual assault.

And that is a specific classification of perpetrator. Now I get it. I think we all immediately think of like the date rape drugs in clubs and bars. Yeah, or like chem sex parties and stuff. Yeah, but like what we actually are talking about is what these men are doing on this forum, which is drugging your own partner in order to be able to do basically with her what she might not allow you to do if she were awake. So starting in 2011, while the couple was still in paris dominique had started off on this forum posting about his own experiences he made no effort at all to mask what he was doing

in fact he often said how much he enjoyed what he called rape mode fucking hell he is a vile vile beast of a man do you know what my friend said the other day it's in light of hugh edwards which i've been thinking about a lot and but it's not something i've ever well not ever but it's not something i deal with she was like when a man that age does something so horrible it kind of goes to this weird place in your brain where you're like is my dad capable of that oh god because it's that like age group of men that you just don't think of in that way i suppose i mean the only thing i think of what i think of hugh edwards is like what else has he done that we don't know about because a man who gets to that age and gets caught did not start five years ago but anyway this is not an episode about Hugh Edwards.

Maybe we'll do one in the future. But for now, let's stick with Dominique. Because he told members of this forum that he was using sleeping pills so that he could do things with Giselle, like I said, that she wouldn't have been into. And he would film these rape mode nights and then post the videos on coco.fr in these videos dominique repeatedly refers to his wife as la salope which essentially means slut or whore in french i also believe it's where we get trollop from oh well thank you that's one of my favorite words and uh with regards to this lessel comment he would later tell a judge that he meant it as a compliment in those videos giselle is near comatose and dominique made it his own pet project to perfect his sick cocktail of sedatives that he was slipping to his own

fucking wife yeah because it's not just a film you can't just be like oh here's one random sleeping pill i'm sure that'll like keep you under control for whatever i'm gonna do it takes him a very long time to work out the exact combination and he experimented quite a lot until he did what he needed it to do he'd had a lot of different combinations through the years mainly sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication. And in the court records, you can see that he doesn't keep them in the house in case Giselle or the children or something finds them. He hides them in his garage, hidden under a tennis sock stuffed into a hiking boot. And in there, he had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pills. Giselle would later remember one occasion where her husband gave her a beer that was glowing mint green and he just shoved it down the sink. It's all just

like part of the fun for him I think. He thinks of himself as this dirty little like alchemist. Yeah and he's probably like to all his weird friends on Coco.fr, he's like, this is how you do it, boys. I'm the master. 100%. Eventually, Dominique settled on a recipe. Lorazepam, which is anti-anxiety and also used to treat insomnia. Temesta, which is a potent anti-anxiety and also seizure medication. And Zolpidem, a powerful sleeping pill prescribed only for severe transient insomnia. Dominique would crush this mixture up and slip it to Giselle in her dinner, in her coffee, or in her glass of wine. He was careful to work out the right amount to minimise suspicion and prevent side effects.

Dominique's National Health Insurance shows that he ordered 450 pills in the space of a year which quite understandably has raised some pretty heavy bushy french eyebrow suspicions on the village doctor yeah it's absolutely mad how he was able to get access to this much medication in such a short space of time? We don't have the answer to that one today. The investigation is still going on, but it might well come up later and we'll do an update. Yeah, the trial is still very much ongoing, so updates will be needed. Yeah, we're going to stick to what we know.

Yeah, I mean, there's 50 men on trial. What we know is that Dominique drugged his wife, he raped her in her sleep, and he posted videos online for all of his scumbag friends countless times over the next few years. And then, once the Pelagos had moved south, presumably now feeling pretty safe, being so far away from their children and their old lives, Dominique started inviting others. Harvard is the oldest and richest university in America. But when a social media-fueled fight over Harvard and its new president broke out last fall, that was no protection.

Claudine Gay is now gone. We've exposed the DEI regime and there's much more to come. This is The Harvard Plan, a special series from the Boston Globe and WNYC's On The Media. To listen, subscribe to On The Media wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jake Warren, and in our first season of Finding, I set out on a very personal quest to find the woman who saved my mum's life. You can listen to Finding Natasha right now, exclusively on Wondery+. In season two, I found myself caught up in a new journey to help someone I've never even met. But a couple of years ago, I came across a social media post by a person named Loti.

It read in part, Three years ago today that I attempted to jump off this bridge, but this wasn't my time to go. A gentleman named Andy saved my life. I still haven't found him. This is a story that I came across purely by chance, but it instantly moved me, and it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider

some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding, and this time, if all goes to plan, and it's taken me to a place where I've had to consider some deeper issues around mental health. This is season two of Finding, and this time, if all goes to plan, we'll be finding Andy. You can listen to Finding Andy and Finding Natasha exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. He would invite forum members to his house, offering sex with his wife. He'd tell the men to park in a school car park nearby until he messaged them the all clear. He'd tell them to undress in the kitchen to avoid any chance of leaving clothes in the bedroom. He would also then have the men wash their hands in warm water in case the temperature change woke Giselle up. Which is just like, they're going to go in and do all sorts of horrible things, but you're concerned

if their hands are too cold, she's going to wake up. I really just think it's part of his fantasy to not only control giselle in this moment but also control these men and make them do all of these weird ritualistic things before he allows them access into the bedroom where they get to do what they want completely he would also tell these men that they couldn't smoke beforehand or even wear perfume or cologne in case again it woke giselle up and the rule was that if Giselle moved an arm, say, even an inch, they were to stop immediately and leave. Dominique never insisted the men wear condoms,

even ones he knew were HIV positive. Jesus. Which explains, obviously, why Giselle had four STDs. And this bit, again, I think it just tells you how much of this is just for his sick perversion, because he never ever asked any of these men for any form of monetary payment. His only request was that he be allowed to film the encounter. So the men would come to the house, they would jump through all of the hoops that Dominique tells them to, and then they would rape Giselle,

who would be passed out and curled up in the fetal position in bed. Then, when the men left, Dominique would clean Giselle's body and wait until she woke up. It makes me feel so sick. Yeah, me too. And once again, this is why your dog should sleep in your bed. The police eventually identified about 200 instances of rape, 92 of them committed by men that were not Dominique Bellico.

Only three men left after seeing Giselle lying unconscious in her bed, and even with them there was no evidence that they called the police. Authorities identified 83 men and they tracked down 50 of them. All 50 admitted to what they had done, but most of them argued that Giselle was consenting. Dominique and his lawyers have maintained throughout this whole process that he was very clear with the men that he invited over as to what was going on. Many of the 50 though disagree claiming that they thought that Giselle was in on the whole thing despite the whole fucking point of the forum being without her knowledge and sorry he is also telling you things like don't smoke don't wear cologne you've got to wash your hands in warm

water you've got to leave your clothes here does that not set off a little bit of an alarm bell for you that giselle isn't quote-unquote consenting and in on this some of these men say that they were promised a casual threesome and then told that Giselle was going to be pretending to be asleep because she was shy or even that she'd sedated herself or just she liked it bollocks before we meet these rapists and dig deeper into their various wildly misplaced understandings of consent I'm afraid it gets even worse. On the 3rd of November 2022, the day after Giselle's visit to the police station, her children took the train down to Avignon.

Now we're drawing mostly from her daughter Caroline's account here, because under her pen name, Caroline Dinan, she wrote an astonishing book about the family's experience of this entire time. It's called Égé c'est ce de ta peau de papa, which means, and I stopped calling you papa. It's part first-person account of unimaginable trauma and part essay on chemical submission as a form of rape. And it's amazing. Everyone should definitely go buy it read it the only problem is it is completely in french and we haven't been able to find a translation but if you do it is honestly worth a read because

it paints a very vivid picture of the impact that this entire situation that is so unique so unimaginable and the fallout that it had on the family in the days immediately after they found out so yeah go check it out like we said it's the only reason we could do this episode today caroline was told the full story of her mother's experience she asked the police if her father showed any remorse and they told her that he had not. He just thanked the police for quote taking a load off his mind. Poor you. How awful. Then the officers told Caroline that as well as the thousands of pictures of her own mother there were two of another young woman

lying on the bed in her underwear with the covers off. In the photo, it was clearly night time, but the bedside light was on. And just like her mother had the day before, Caroline slowly realised that the woman in the photograph was her. She immediately knew that she'd been drugged. She knew she didn't sleep in that position and the light was too bright.

It would have woken her up. Dominique has never been charged with drugging or sexually abusing Caroline, but she suspects that he did. In 2019, Caroline was admitted to a hospital for a string of three emergency operations for a gynecological problem, which none of the three surgeons that operated on her could explain.

When Caroline left the police station, she was immediately examined and sent straight to a psychiatric emergency room to help her deal with the news. And Dominique had been sharing these pictures of Caroline with his gross online friends. With captions like daughter of the whore or my daughter naked. They were circulated around the forum and commented on. There were also photos of his daughter-in-law taken in the bathroom with a camera hidden in a toiletry bag with more horrible captions like

My slutty daughter-in-law. He even, and sorry about this, but I promise you we're kind of almost done, he even started to get creative. In one picture, Dominic superimposed his own genitals onto a picture of his daughter-in-law in a swimsuit. There are just thousands and thousands and thousands of photos like this. It's just sick, the depths of depravity with this man. He is completely insatiable. He is completely like ravenous for of depravity with this man he is completely unsatiable he is completely like ravenous for sexual depravity he's constantly it feels like pushing the taboo further and further

and further and seeing what more fucked up things he can do without any sense really of a fear or a risk assessment of how dangerous what he's doing is to his own freedom because he's just inviting men on this online forum to come to his house he's just lucky that none of them called the police presumably because as we'll find out a lot of them have a lot to cover up for themselves but it is mind-boggling how he got away with it for this long and how many people want it yeah oh my god i know i know like i really just want to believe that obviously the group of men that he's putting it out to right they're self-selected into a forum that's already called without her knowledge so he's got a high hit rate there but it is terrifying and also like

incest porn is basically mainstream now yeah absolutely and I think this is one of the most terrifying things of the easy accessibility of extremely hardcore pornography and the younger and younger that children are viewing it. Because what is the risk is this idea that we see with people who go on to become child sex abusers. There have been interviews done with men like that who say, I was consuming so much extreme hardcore pornography that I stopped being aroused by anything. And therefore, I have to push the boundaries further and further. So you might start off with looking at some incest porn because it's weirder, it's dirtier, it's more perverse, it's taboo busting. Then that stops working. Then you go further and further. Then you're talking about children and animals where does that end it eventually ends with people like this committing hands-on crime again we

talked about it a million times before in hunting warhead that line will always stay with me it is not as simple as somebody just looking at online images of child sexual abuse when they do that there is a very high chance that they are then going to go on and become a hands-on offender and i am definitely the kind of person i was like how do you police the internet how do you stop these kind of things but my god the accessibility of that kind of stuff that is out there is terrifying and I think it's not a push to say it's fundamentally reshaping the way in which the people who are consuming its brains work and the people who are consuming it is everyone an old housemate of mine once brought a guy home and they were like getting down to it and he just said you know as if

it was the most blase thing in the world he was like i'm not gonna come i watch too much porn it's so normal it is it's destroying not just these men's brains but also their ability to form relationships to have healthy sex lives i i mean it is mind-boggling and we've talked about this before in a previous episode though i think it may have been a bonus episode about how the rate of children who are committing sexual violence against other children is absolutely through the roof it is horrific so after caroline was taken to be examined and then went to the psych ward police spoke to the whole pellicleico family. And with the handy benefit of hindsight, more and more things started to crop up from their memories of the past.

Things that seemed just slightly strange at the time were now seen in a whole new light. The Pellicos remembered the grandchildren talking about seeing a little red flashing light from the living room when they were playing by the pool. And there was a time when Dominique told the grandchildren in the supermarket that he'd like to buy them sweets if they took their clothes off. Or when Dominique was overheard moaning to the kids that they never wanted to play doctor anymore, which he insisted they undress for. Or one night in 2017, when the children went to see their grandmother and they just could not wake her up. Dominique flatly denies any involvement

with the children or the grandchildren, and his defence team points out that that is not what he is on trial for. And thankfully, there were no visits from Coco Forum members while the Pelico grandchildren were on holiday in Avignon. Small blessings. Yes. So once the family had finally learned everything there was to know

about what Dominique Pellico had been up to, they went back to the house and cleared it out. The family sold all the furniture and took countless bin bags to the dump. Everything had to go. During this time, they also discovered papers revealing the astronomical debts that Dominique had put the family in. And all these debts had been taken out in Giselle's name. Giselle left the house with two suitcases and started proceedings for a divorce. In the following months, she talked a lot

to her friends, to her children and grandchildren and to a psychiatrist that she could call at any hour of the day. And then in February 2021, Dominique received an eight-month suspended prison sentence for the supermarket upskirts. But of course, the police continued preparing for the drug rape trial, spending the next two years tracking down the other men involved.

But in the meantime, as they dug further into Dominique's past, they found something even more sinister, if you can believe it. And this was something that could potentially put him away for life. In October 2022, Dominique was taken from his cell in the prison in Marseille he was kept in. Two investigators had come down from Paris to see him.

They were part of a brand-spanking-new department set up to look at cold cases from the Nantes suburb. And there were two crimes, from 1991 and 1999, that these officers were very keen to chat to Dominique Bellico about. On the 11th of May 1999, an estate agent called Estella turned up to a viewing on the outskirts of Paris. She let the man into her apartment, and he grabbed her by the throat he choked her and then held a box cutter to her carotid artery and told her to lie on her stomach the man tied Estella's hands behind her back and held a compress soaked in ether over her mouth as Estella fell into a stupor this man took off her shoes and trousers and forced her to fondle him.

Remarkably though, even though she'd been ethered, Estella fought back and she managed to escape. This man was never found, but DNA was taken from Estella's shoe and from the apartment carpet. The case was linked to another victim from eight years before. Sophie Nome. Sophie was also an estate agent and had turned up to a viewing in northeast Paris on the 4th of December 1991. Both her and Estella had been young women in their 20s.

In both cases, the appointments had been made using a false name, and the acts had been committed within the apartment. There was also a common use of ties, chemicals to subdue the victim, and a blade. The main difference was that Sophie didn't survive. She was found in the apartment raped and killed, covered in stab wounds. So why are we telling you this? Well, you might remember that when Dominique was arrested for upskirting in that supermarket the first time back in 2010, he got that 100 euro fine, but his DNA was also taken.

And when it hit the database, it was a match for the traces of DNA that had been left on Estella's shoes and the carpet in the apartment where she was attacked. But Dominique was never even contacted by the police when they got this match in 2010. Why? Well, the closest explanation we can find is an anonymous but apparently high up judicial source saying things like, there was a screw up at the time. So this DNA hit on two unsolved cases stayed in a judicial blind spot for years. And it is extremely worth pointing out here that this dna match like i said was found in 2010 before the assaults on giselle even started so if the police had identified the fact that they had this dna hit and contacted dominique and arrested him none of this would have ever happened to giselle so So yeah, pretty big screw-up.

When this evidence was put to Dominique in that interrogation room in 2020, he quickly admitted that he had attacked Estella. He'd seen her through the estate agency window and, quote, acted on impulse. He disagreed, though, that it was an attempted rape. Bullshit. Fuck you, Dominique. acted on impulse. He disagreed though that it was an attempted rape. Bullshit. Fuck you, Dominique. Like the bookings were made under a false name.

Somebody called the estate agency and booked that viewing. He didn't just see her through the window and like lose his mind and did it out of nowhere. Also, he used to be an estate agent. I think he knew damn well the vulnerability that a young female estate agent would have had showing him around an apartment. Absolutely. When the police asked Dominique what he would have done if Estella hadn't fought back and escaped, he said, I didn't know, I can't tell you. But later on, he told a judge that he intended to immobilize her, perhaps to look at her. Yeah, fucking right. As for Sophie Nam's murder, that one Dominique flat out denied.

And as his attorneys were hasty to point out, the DNA from Sophie Nam's case had been lost. Yeah, he only admits to a seller because they have the dna match putting him there yeah there was no evidence in the case of sophie tying her death to him or anyone else for that matter still the non-tare cold cases unit came through and a judge indicted dominique pelico for both crimes and as you are listening to this if you're listening to it in the now times if you're from the future hi what's it like? But at the time we are recording this episode, the investigation is nearing completion. So that just about covers the crimes of Dominic Pelico.

Serial chemical rapist, secret camera hider, upskirter and potential cold case murderer. But he is not the only person on trial. As we've already said, there are 50 more men in the dock, probably sitting there right now as we speak. And they are all, all 50 of them, charged with the rape of Giselle Pellico. After two years of investigation, police managed to identify 50 of the 83 men seen in those pictures. They were the men who came to Giselle's house and raped her without her knowledge.

Of those 50, there was only one other than her husband that Giselle recognised as we told you at the start. The neighbour. And I think this is like one of the things that is so awful about it is of course the men on the forum that's one thing the husband but this man how can he say that he thought Giselle consented because they ran into each other like at the local bakery they'd say hello sometimes he'd even pop by to chat to the pelicos about cycling it's just so sick because all the while all the while this man is just like making small chat with giselle he knew that he had raped her unconscious body while she was drugged into oblivion and it just really like gut punch hits home how these people are everywhere they

could quite literally be living next door to you it's horrific i mean i don't even like people coming into like my bedroom when they come to the house i'm like there's just parts of your house parts of your life that you're just like this is not for public consumption and people you know if you have a break-in the feeling of violation you have that somebody has been in your house been through your things this is on a level that is just there's there's no comparison where is Giselle meant to go and get like support group work how many people has this happened to it is absolutely bonkers the 50 men that they've caught up with all had to be interviewed and profiled separately, and of course had to figure out their own individual defence. But most of them came up with pretty similar excuses,

that the facts had been misunderstood or overstated. And thanks to Le Monde newspaper, whose subscription was the best seven euros we spent on this case, we know quite a lot about these 50 men. The youngest of them is 26 and the oldest is 73. And they're all from the region around Valcluse. None of them had come that far. Many of them worked in the public sector.

They were firefighters, soldiers, prison guards, nurses, journalists. And there was one local counsellor. The majority of them had their own families and relationships. Still, among these squeaky clean seeming secret slime balls, there was a handful of known offenders. And, as we'll go on to find out, quite a few of them are now subject to a separate indictment due to what police found on their computers.

Oh, this is also what's the worst thing about this. Like, take a sample size of these 50 men, right? Only a handful of them were known to the police. The rest of them are completely depraved beyond imagining, as we're going to talk about. But nobody had any idea. Ugh. So let's talk about. But nobody had any idea. Ugh. So let's talk about them,

because we have to. One man, Christian L, was shown on video raping Giselle, wearing his fireman's uniform. His defence is that Dominique said his wife had agreed, but that she was shy. So while Christian sat in his cell, police searched his phone and found texts to his girlfriend

because Christian is not the smartest man in the fucking jail cell that day because he had told his girlfriend to go and get his laptop from the fire station. Otherwise, he'd be put away for years. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. You fucking idiot. So yes, when the police searched his computer

they found 728 images of child sexual abuse. And then they found a conversation over Skype direct messaging. Christian had been negotiating with a man in Metz to rape his sedated 15-year-old daughter. Christian told his parents that it was all just a witch hunt. If we're not witch hunting people over raping unconscious women, there's something wrong with us. Bring back the witch hunts. Like, kind of.

My God, it's fucking horrifying. I just can't cope. he's a fireman again it's just this thing of like the people in positions of power seems totally ordinary he's got a relationship with his parents he's got a fucking girlfriend he's holding down a successful job i cannot cope and maybe this is a controversial thing to say but i don't care my friends a lot of them have children i don't feel like i'm that worried about myself anymore like have children I don't feel like I'm that worried about myself anymore like being in these situations I feel like you get to a certain age you feel like your your spidey senses are fine-tuned of course something awful could happen

to me out of nowhere but on the whole I feel like okay my biggest fear now is the thought of having children and putting them out into the world when men like this are hanging about and i was having a conversation with some of my friends who were like you know sending their kids to nursery or hiring nannies or whatever works for them and i was like i would never hire a male nanny i just wouldn't and some of them were like offended that i had said that i don't think that's offensive i would never ever hire a male nanny and if i hire a female nanny i'll still put a fucking camera and a teddy bear in the house not with my children i my children that don't think that's offensive. I would never ever hire a male nanny. And if I hire a female nanny, I'll still put a fucking camera and a teddy bear in the house. Not with my children, my children that don't exist.

I just don't think I'd be able to do it. Yeah. Next up, we've got Charlie A, a 29-year-old journalist for a daily paper who lived with his mum. To police, he described himself as shy, unassertive, but respectful when it came to women the first time because there were multiple that charlie a visited the pellico house he says he didn't know

for sure why giselle wasn't moving but dominique had assured him that she had agreed to it charlie a raped giselle on six different occasions And when his computer was searched Police found 4,284 images And 262 videos Of child sexual abuse Then there's Karames He was an IT expert for a major bank He fiercely denied any knowledge at first

Of anything to do with Giselle until that is police read a text that he had sent to dominique saying is the sleeping pill taking effect not that good at it then are you i mean seriously jesus i saw a really good um just for some light relief saw a really good meme of taylor swift and her partner just like walking down the street holding hands and like people magazine or something had put like oh like they're the it couple like capital it and someone had commented i don't think either of them could fix my computer they say hollywood is where dreams are made a seductive city where many flock to get rich, be adored, and capture America's heart. But when the spotlight turns off, fame, fortune, and lives can disappear in an instant. When TV producer Roy Radin was found dead in a canyon near L.A. in 1983,

there were many questions surrounding his death. The last person seen with him was Lainey Jacobs, a seductive cocaine dealer who desperately wanted to be part of the Hollywood elite. Together, they were trying to break into the movie industry. But things took a dark turn when a million dollars worth of cocaine and cash went missing. From Wondery comes a new season of the hit show

Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder. Follow Hollywood and Crime, The Cotton Club Murder on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of The Cotton Club Murder early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. You don't believe in ghosts? I get it. Lots of people don't. I didn't either until I came face to face with them. Ever since that moment, hauntings, spirits, and the unexplained have consumed my entire life. I'm Nadine Bailey. I've been a ghost tour guide for the past 20 years. I've taken people along with me into the shadows, uncovering the macabre tales that linger in the darkness, and inside some of the most haunted houses, hospitals, prisons, and more. Join me every week on my podcast, Haunted Canada,

as we journey through terrifying and bone-chilling stories of the unexplained. Search for Haunted Canada on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. So yeah, Kareem makes to read you the full text wrote is the sleeping pill taking effect let me know in advance because i've got a 20 minute drive images of child sexual exploitation were again found on his computer i just i can't cope i cannot cope with this kind of normalization i don't know if that's the right word but this sort of casualness this casualness this mainstreaming of this many men being into child sexual abuse images that they're just casually finding quite a few of the accused claimed total ignorance of the drugging of giselle. Ludovic B is one of them,

an unemployed warehouse worker who smokes 10 joints a day. Fucking hell. He said he assumed that the Pelicos were just one of those couples who do strange things. Police had to help Ludovic B understand that what he did was rape and he was one of the very few of the 50 to apologize to Giselle. Some of the men admitted that they were turned on by Giselle's lack of consciousness and that her extreme submissiveness turned her into an entirely sexual object. One man said he came around because he had nothing else to do on New Year's Eve and another went to the Pellicoe house the day his daughter was born. Others astoundingly just dug their heels in and seemed genuinely clueless as to what they did wrong.

Patrice M, a 54-year-old electrician, admitted that he never got Giselle's consent, but he still insists that it wasn't rape, because he had her husband's consent. The implication here, obviously, is that Dominique's wife's body is his to do with what he pleases. And it is what has been very disgustingly called consent by delegation in some corners of the press. Yeah, like need I remind anyone that in the UK, raping your wife wasn't possible until 1990. Yeah.

Then there was Redouane, a nurse, who said Dominique, quote unquote, offered his wife, making the whole thing above board. Another said, she's his wife. He does what he wants with his wife. This man only realized that it was serious at all when the case hit national news. So that's the thing I really want to make clear. It's not like these men are using this as a defense post fact, like after they've been arrested and they're just trying to minimize their behavior. Some of these men genuinely didn't understand that what they

had done was wrong until it was all over the news. It is unbelievable. And then we have Didier, presumably not Duchamp. He was a 66-year-old retiree and said that he didn't feel guilty as he had no bad intentions and his personal involvement was minimal. He called it an involuntary rape. Adrian L. said, as long as the husband was present there was no rape i think it's interesting how it does seem that it's the older men the men on the other like the older side of the spectrum that are like he can do what the fuck he wants with his wife it's his wife yeah they're like he was in the room. No one was cheating.

Nobody was raping anybody. He said it was fine. So what's the big deal? Yeah, no, you're totally right. There is definitely an age split here about who uses what defence and what their kind of misconceptions of consent are to put it in the most mild way possible.

And then we've got the violent offenders. Vincent C had already been convicted of domestic abuse. Redouin was charged from prison, serving time for violence against his partner. Mohamed R had served five years for raping his daughter before responding to Dominique's posts on Coco.fr. Adrian L had been sentenced to 18 years for rape and violence against former partners. And he was another one who said, as long as the husband was present, there was no rape. But the worst apple in the world's most putrid orchard

was probably Jean-Pierre. Because he didn't just accept the invitation to rape Giselle while she was unconscious but he also asked Dominique for the recipe to his chemical cocktail. Jean-Pierre wanted to drug his own wife who's referred to as Diane and once he had the recipe Jean-Pierre and Dominique together proceeded to drug and rape Diane as she lay unconscious in Jean-Pierre's house. And they did this more than a dozen times. And it stopped in September 2020. And one day, Diane woke up to find a strange man standing in her bedroom.

It was, of course, Dominique Pellico. When Jean-Pierre came in, he managed to calm his wife down. He told her that it was just a stranger who had passed by on a bike and who wanted to come inside and see Diane's underwear. What? Is that one of those things that sounds better and more believable and makes more sense in French? Because it's not making much sense for me right now. That's your cover-up. What? Just say it's a...

I'm not trying to help these rapists, but say it's the guy that's there to fucking fix the radiator. Anything. What the fuck is going on? I don't know. But Diane chose not to take action and still considers jean-pierre to be a good husband and father she's also not chosen to leave him for the children's sake my god at the center of this cesspit of course the real king of rats is dominique pillico in a pre-trial hearing, he appeared before a judge.

He said he'd always loved Giselle. She was a saint, even if his behaviour did seem paradoxical. A psychiatric examination carried out as a part of the trial described Dominique as highly dangerous and at a significant risk of re-offending. When Dominique had been arrested for the supermarket upskirts and knew the jig was up, he went home and contacted one of the forum users to invite him round. There is zero remorse here. He was not rattled. He just knew that it was all going to be over soon and he wanted one last go. And it makes total sense. Dominique Pellico is a man who lived a Jekyll and Hyde life.

He presents himself on the outside as normal, stable, respectable. But what lies beneath is an obsessive sexual deviant, with a psychological rigidity, emotional coldness, an ability to objectify others that allowed him to use his own wife of 50 years as bait to indulge in his darkest fantasies, all of which seemed to revolve around increasing his feelings of control. Drug-facilitated sexual assault perpetrators have a variety of motives according to the literature. One, of of course being connections to childhood trauma and as i was sort of like looking through this case it did make me wonder if perhaps dominique's traumatic experience of being sexually assaulted as a nine-year-old in

a hospital bed by that nurse while he was unable to stop it played some role in the development of his future fantasies of course it did yeah it's a very specific age eight nine there are things that can happen to you that obviously that's assault but even innocuous things that can embed themselves and turn into fetishes later in life absolutely um and before anybody loses their mind we're not saying all fetishes are born of trauma. No, no. But there are fetishes that are born of trauma. Yeah.

Yeah. We are the sum of our experiences. Yeah. And I just think that hospital bed assault by that female nurse, it just feels too specific to what he goes on to do so as we said at the beginning the only reason we are using Giselle's real name is because she made it that way until September this year Giselle was only known in the press as Francois P usually no matter how terrible a crime the survivors of sexual abuse are not named in the media there are rules in place to protect

their privacy and encourage them to speak out and prevent harassment at the best of times sexual assault trials are long arduous and impossibly emotionally draining most victims want to minimize the impact on their lives any way they can Giselle Pellico had the legal right to anonymity a private trial which would keep her name and conveniently her husband's name out of the press. But Giselle waived that right. So brave. I know. He's your husband. I know. She and her lawyer specifically requested that her name be used and for the trial to be made public. In her words, it was so that if other women woke up questioning their memories, quote, they might remember the testimony of Miss Pellico. No woman should suffer from being

drugged and victimized. Wow. Put simply, in Giselle's own words, the shame has to change sides. At 72, with her life in tatters and everything taken from her, Giselle Pellico has not one fuck left to give. So she found the strength to own it and take on the stigma. Instead of the idea that an abused woman is some mistreated object with no value or dignity, the shame belongs entirely to the

shitbags that perpetrate these crimes. Now just before we get into the trial, let's add a little bit more context. Rape is usually seen as something that happens down a dark alleyway in the dead of night when a woman is set upon by a stranger out of nowhere. But most sexual assaults are perpetrated by somebody close to the victim. A study by a French health agency found that in 41.5% of cases of sexual assault, the aggressor is a close relative. 42% of rapes happen in a private context.

And druggings are much more common, like I said earlier, than most people think. And they're not always like some chemicals slipped into a glass at a bar. In drug-related assaults, less than 5% of perpetrators use GHB, the so-called date-rape drug. More than half use innocuous things like antihistamines, anxiolytes, sleeping pills or opioids. And while this entire case took place in France and while we're using French data we have to be careful as framing this as just a French issue. All of the issues we mentioned above happen across the world and Giselle's story is not uniquely French. But Giselle's story did come at a particularly important time in France.

Let's very quickly talk about France and sex. We're not here to talk shit about French culture before you all tweet at me. We love pan de chocolat and a crisp glass of rosé as much as anyone, and the only man I have ever loved was French, so you can all fuck off. But historically, at least, France has a fucked up attitude to sexual freedom. French cinema back in the 60s was a wild place to be. Everyone's circle jerking about artistic freedom, and that basically meant that nothing was out of bounds, including assaults and quote-unquote relationships with children. One writer, Gabriel Masneff, even openly defended paedophilia.

He wrote about his many, many sexual experiences with children as young as eight years old, and he was protected for years by the cultural elite. But we're not going to get too bogged down. None of us need to talk about that guy today.'s leave it at in the older generation there is an attitude in france of celebrating the transgression of social norms or sexual freedom as a part of its intellectual and cultural identity the absolute blanchest of carte blanches when it came to sexual tastes. It was just 2020, that's four years ago, after decades of campaigning and resistance, that France finally strengthened any sort of age of consent laws. Sexual contact with under 15s was reclassified as rape when the adult was at least five years older.

When this law passed, the Justice Minister proudly said, children are off limits. It was 2020. Do we, I mean, we obviously, I was just about to say, do we even need to say that, but obviously we fucking do. Yeah. Anyway, we're getting slightly off point. The key thing we're trying to say here

is that French people have fought tooth and nail against anything threatening their sexual freedoms. And this is the attitude that stuck around in the heads of a lot of Giselle's perpetrators, as Hannah correctly said, particularly the older ones. But Giselle's story was so obviously despicable that it has become a symbol for those fighting for change. In fact, even as Giselle's story was so obviously despicable that it has become a symbol for those fighting for change. In fact, even as Giselle's trial started in September this year, protesters gathered outside, calling to change the legal definition of rape in France. It's currently defined as

penetration by violence, coercion, threat or surprise. Campaigners want it to be extended to include any sexual act without consent. And surprise doesn't sound like the right word. No, no it does not. And of course they also want included specifically that if drugs are used to impair judgment, it is rape.

Like Hannah said, the case of Giselle Pellicot could not have come at a more crucial time. Okay, we made it. Finally, it is trial time. It started on the 2nd of September this year and it was set out to last four months. The day the trial started also happened to be the day that Giselle's divorce from Dominique was finalised. And she turned up looking absolutely amazing. Cool as a cucumber, shades on, totally calm in front of the

global press. Currently, the trial is set to finish on December the 20th. So yes, if you are listening to this anywhere near its release date, the trial is still very much going on. The courtroom has been specifically designed by Giselle's team to accommodate as many people as possible. A second glass box had to be built in the courtroom to accommodate all 51 of the accused. During the trial, 18 of the accused are being held in custody, 33 are walking free awaiting the verdict and one man is being tried in absentia the 51 men were represented by 49 different lawyers they faced up to 20 years each which is the maximum sentence for rape in france all of them obviously apart from one the 71 year old dominique pelico himself who stands charged with rape gang sexual sexual assault, invasion of privacy by

recording the image of a person of a sexual nature, and possession of the image of a minor of a pornographic nature. Which, as Saru pointed out, Hunting Warhead has taught us, it is not child porn, it is a crime scene photo. From the beginning, Dominique Pellico admitted his guilt. He said, I put her to sleep, I offered her, and I filmed. But the main point of contention is how much the other men knew. Dominic and his defence team are hell-bent on getting all of these men to recognise their involvement. And that is not as some sort of come to Jesus moment where he's like you know let's all take accountability for this he's just

trying to minimize his actions and throw as many other people rightfully under the bus as possible he said he was always very clear with them what was going on. He said that she was incredibly heavily sedated and that much must have been obvious to these men anyway. The prosecutor says none of the men who came to this house turned down the option of performing sexual acts on his wife given her condition. Dominique never used violence or threats against anyone to make the rapes happen. Each individual had free will to cease these acts and leave the premises. But Guillaume de Parma, a lawyer representing six of the accused,

disagreed, saying, without the intention to commit it, there is no rape. Oh my God! My clients were totally duped, fooled, tricked and trapped by Mr Pellico. Fuck!

Fuck off. Guillaume de Parma, you're on my fucking list. Fucking in the bin with you immediately. A la poubelle. But seriously, as reprehensible as that statement sounds and how like unbelievable it feels that he would stand up in a court of law and say that his clients were duped fooled and tricked by Dominique Pellico and that they are therefore not guilty of raping an unconscious clearly unconscious woman I think it comes back to the

point that these campaigners are making in France because remember the definition of rape in France currently is penetration by violence coercion threat or surprise basically De Palma is saying well my my clients did not use violence coercion threat or surprise when they did what they did to Giselle Pellicott because there is no mention of consent currently in the definition of rape which is what these campaigners are trying to introduce. So as horrific and unbelievable as what Guillermo de Palma is saying, it does make sense because of the definition of rape in France. He is able to stand up in a court of law and use that as a defense. So again, we don't know if it's going to work. Like we said, the trial is still ongoing.

We're probably going to have to come back to you guys in the new year with an update. But I will be very interested in seeing how the French judicial system navigates this entire case with these 50 men, especially because the world is watching. And amongst this pathetic infighting over whose fault it was, sat 71-year-old Giselle Pellicot, surrounded by her three children. Behind her, the faces of her 51 rapists. The world was blown away by Giselle's bravery and her stoicism. And let's just say that when Giselle got up to speak she didn't waste her platform. She said that rape was not a strong enough word.

She called her own bedroom a torture chamber. She said that though her facade may seem solid, inside it's a field of ruins. Everything needs to be rebuilt. Giselle pointed out that none of these men raped her with a gun to their head. And she asked why not one of them went to a police station even when an anonymous phone call could have saved her life especially the three men that left yeah again it's just self-preservation isn't it

these men had treated her Giselle said like a garbage bag or a rag doll and she had been sacrificed on the altar of vice. Caroline's not the only wordsmith. This family, a horrible ship, but very good with their words. During Giselle's testimony, Dominique sat, leaning in the corner of the Tatanis box with his eyes glued to the floor. Giselle was calm, dignified and ready to answer any question. She testified for an hour and a half.

When it was Caroline's turn to testify, she called the revelations a cataclysm in their family and asked the judge directly, How does someone like me go about getting better? Hoping to have a normal life as a woman, a normal sex life? How does one go about rebuilding oneself from the ashes when one knows that their father is undoubtedly the worst sexual predator of the last 20 years? Dominique, the predator in question, was scheduled to testify on the 10th of September, the seventh day of the trial. But the day before it was announced that he'd been hospitalised.

He missed four days of court, and his hearing was postponed. He was diagnosed with kidney stones, a kidney infection and prostate issues. Good, I hope it was fucking agonising. I was going to say. It was another week until experts decided that he was well enough to attend, and only if he could take breaks every 15 to 20 minutes and get a new comfortable chair. On the 17th of September this year, so 2024, Dominique Pellicot hobbled into the courtroom with a cane and finally took the stand. He told

the court that his wife had saved him from the demons of his childhood. He said he admitted to the charges in their entirety. And in a voice that was so weak it was barely audible, he said, I am a rapist, just like all of the others in this room. I ask my wife, my children and my grandchildren to accept my apologies. I regret what I did. I ask for your forgiveness, even if it is not forgivable. And on that giant bag of shit, we're going to leave you today. As we told you, the trial is expected to last until the 20th of December, but it is probably going to overrun. 51 men are on trial,

and in each individual case, the level of blame has to be figured out, and then it will be up to the courts to decide. But really, it does feel a bit like splitting hairs. The 51 men in that box are rapists of the most cowardly and callous kind imaginable, and we will be back for an update once the trial is over we cannot promise when but we will be back i mean i think the takeaway is if we want to end on a note that isn't gonna make me jump out the window oh i was gonna end on one that made everything worse oh okay go on then why the fuck not i'll go first then okay i was gonna say one of the talking points we often hear right from people as soon as they find out you're into true crime

they're like oh we'll never really have like a big serial killer again right because technology's come too far the police have cctv they have so much that they can catch you with phone tracking blah blah blah they'll never be a big serial killer with that kind of like numbers anymore and i'm like that's probably true but the flip side is that technology is also enabling men like dominique pelico to commit atrocities that he wouldn't have been able to commit on this scale pre the internet so sorry that makes everything worse yeah you're right i do feel worse everyone feeling worse i think the takeaway i mean it's the only tiny drop of positivity you can squeeze out of this is giselle's absolutely right that the shame needs to be shifted onto the men and especially when we come across things like you know sarah everard grace malay and things like that cases know, Sarah Everard, Grace Mullane, things like that. Cases like that. Very often, casually in conversation, people will say, well, why was she

on her own? What was she wearing? Why was she out at night? It was lockdown, blah, blah, blah. I really would encourage you to think about how saying those things is feeding into this culture of shame. So don't, or I will put you a la poubelle. I've got lots more things in my head that will make it worse, but I'm not going to say them. Thank you. Goodbye. Bye. So get this.

The Ontario Liberals elected Bonnie Crombie as their new leader. Bonnie who? I just sent you her profile. Her first act as leader, asking donors for a million bucks for her salary. That's excessive. She's a big carbon tax supporter. Oh, yeah. Check out her record as mayor.

Oh, get out of here. She even increased taxes in this economy. Yeah, higher taxes, carbon taxes. She sounds expensive. Bonnie Crombie and the Ontario Liberals. They just don't get it. That'll cost you. A message from the Ontario PC Party.