French woman says discovering mass rape trauma ‘saved her life’

AVIGNON, France — A French woman whose husband admitted to recruiting dozens of strangers to rape her while she was on drugs testified during a Sept. 5 hearing that police saved her by discovering the crimes.

“The police saved my life by examining Mr. P.’s computer,” Gisele P. told a court in the southern city of Avignon, addressing her husband – one of 51 alleged attackers now on trial – using only his surname.

Gisele P., now 71, opened up about her emotions in a nearly 90-minute testimony, recounting the moment in November 2020 when investigators first showed her images from a decade-long sexual abuse plot orchestrated and filmed by her husband, Dominique P.

“My world is falling apart. Everything is falling apart for me. Everything I’ve built over 50 years,” Gisele P said, occasionally stopping only to sip from a glass of water.

When she was first called in for an interview, she told police that her husband was a “super guy.” Her daughter and two sons watched the testimony.

At that meeting, Gisele P. was shown “barbaric” photos of me “lying motionless on a bed being raped,” she recalled, while her husband listened with his head bowed.

“They treat me like a rag doll,” she told the five-person jury, adding that it was not until May 2024 that she plucked up the courage to watch the video.

Lawyers for some of the defendants questioned Sept. 4 whether the couple had an abusive relationship and whether it was credible to claim that Gisele P. did not notice anything during the decade of abuse.

“Don’t talk to me about sex scenes. Those are rape scenes,” she said on September 5, emphasizing that she has never engaged in swinging or any other form of promiscuous sex.

“Never complicit”

She reiterated that she was “never complicit” and never “pretended to sleep” when asked about it by chief judge Roger Arata.

Gisele P. insisted that the hearing be held in public so that all the facts of the case could be known.

“I speak for every woman who has been drugged without knowing it, for every woman who may never know it … so that no woman has to suffer” from the same thing in the future, she said.

Gisele P. is in the process of divorcing her husband, who admitted on September 3 to drugging her with sleeping pills and then recruiting dozens of strangers to rape her.

He was exposed by accident when he was caught filming up women’s skirts in a local supermarket.

The husband “will explain again the reasons why he did it. He will explain himself and justify himself if there is any justification for it, because it is unforgivable,” his lawyer, Ms Beatrice Zavarro, told AFPTV.

As lead investigator Jeremie Bosse Platiere testified in court on September 4, the 71-year-old father of three documented his actions with meticulous care on a hard drive in a folder titled “abuse.”

Thanks to this, the French police managed to track down more than 50 men suspected of raping Gisele P., who was under the influence of drugs.

A third of them were identified using facial recognition software, Mr Bosse Platiere said.

He added that he personally selected investigators “who had the courage” to confront videos and images of the abuse.

The police have drawn up a list of 72 people suspected of abusing Gisele P.

Investigators counted about 200 cases of rape, most of them committed by Dominique P., and more than 90 by strangers reported through an adult website.