REVEALED: The males accused of raping the unconscious French grandmother

Doubtless hoping to curry favour at his trial, the husband who drugged his wife for strangers to rape was all too eager to co-operate with the police after his arrest.

Firstly, Dominique Pelicot helped them track down 50 of the men whom he sneaked into the house to violate the sleeping Gisele and gave damning evidence against them.

Then, after two years in custody, the pervert who took marital betrayal to unthinkable extremes tried to identify the 20 or more attackers who could not be identified from the thousands of videos and photographs in his computer.

At this point, Pelicot made an admission that must have astonished investigators: he suspected one of the men who raped his wife to be a monk living in a nearby monastery.

As the watching world struggles to comprehend why so many outwardly respectable Frenchmen allegedly took pleasure from defiling an unconscious grandmother – and were prepared to risk everything to do so – the possibility that a man of the cloth also succumbed to temptation is perhaps the most extraordinary twist to the story.

I uncovered Pelicot’s bombshell revelation buried in the 360-page case file given to the five Avignon judges presiding over his trial for aggravated rape.

Pelicot’s admission came when the investigators presented him with some images that were difficult to distinguish and a list of the untraceable code names, and asked him to dig deep into his memory.

As his thoughts drifted back over the decade during which he drugged his wife’s evening meals with powerful sedatives and filmed her being used as a sex toy, he recalled how a man dubbed ‘Ludo’ had raped her in 2011, when the couple still lived in Val-de-Marne, in the eastern suburbs of Paris.

After they retired to the Provencal village of Mazan, in 2013, the first interloper to creep into the dimly lit marital bedroom at their secluded chalet was ‘Richard’, who, Pelicot now remembered, worked for the district water company.

Then there was ‘Guillame’, who had returned several times. He was a local greengrocer, while ‘Black Villiers’ worked in the town where his wife shopped and was among the handful of men who had met her while she was awake.

Other names that cropped up in the vast computer file which Pelicot labelled ‘Abuse’, or were found stored on his USB stick and phones, included ‘Luc Pizza’, who appeared to have journeyed 150 miles from Grenoble, in eastern France, to take his vile pleasure.

Pelicot told investigators that ‘Marc Isle’ worked in a restaurant in L’isle-sur-la-Sorge, a pretty riverside town with antique stores favoured by British tourists.

Yet it was when investigators asked Pelicot about a mysterious character named ‘Michel’, who attacked his wife in 2019, that jaws must have dropped in amazement.

He recalled how this stranger claimed to have come from Carpentras, a big regional city 15 minutes’ drive from Mazan, and presented himself as ‘a bookseller’.

Oddly, however, ‘Michel’ had arrived at the house wearing sandals. Pelicot thought this made him appear ‘a bit like a monk’ – a suspicion which grew as the night wore on.

‘I wondered whether he wasn’t (really) a monk, because there are several monasteries around us,’ he told his inquisitors, adding that, on entering the bedroom, the man had ‘thrown himself’ upon his unwitting wife.

So, could it be true? Did the twisted compulsion to defile a sleeping woman even corrupt the seemingly purest of souls?

Given that many of the rapists were, on the surface at least, pillars of French provincial society, serving as town councillors and fire officers, working in banks, running businesses and caring for families, it seems within the realms of credulity.

There are many abbeys and monasteries in the area around Mazan. This part of France has been a cradle of Catholicism since medieval times when Avignon, its principal city, became a papal seat.

But we don’t know whether Pelicot’s suggestion prompted investigators to make inquiries at any of these august establishments.

All we do know is that the investigators failed to find sufficient evidence to charge these other men, and as the case has been formally closed, they will never face justice.

As I discovered this week, however, Pelicot is playing a dangerous game by co-operating with the authorities.

For his lawyer Beatrice Zavarro told me that while awaiting trial he was warned chillingly – by way of a picture of a coffin slipped under his cell door – that someone wants him dead.

It is not hard to see why.

While many of the accused rapists might find it difficult to disprove that they had sex with Mme Pelicot given that they can allegedly be identified in the videos, some claim Pelicot tricked them into believing she had consented and was only pretending to be asleep.

Yet he maintains they are lying, saying he ‘systematically’ told each one of them of his ploy.

This explains why, in court, the haggard, 71-year-old architect of these dreadful crimes is always separated from the other defendants by armed police officers and seated in the furthermost part of a specially built, L-shaped dock encased in bullet-proof Perspex.

But was the death threat made on behalf of someone who wants to silence him? Or was the coffin picture delivered by a fellow prisoner disgusted by his heinous act of betrayal?

The latter explanation may be more likely. For in a letter to a friend, also contained in the court file, Pelicot expressed fears that his daughter, Caroline, had jeopardised his life by telling the parents of his cellmate why he was inside.

‘Please calm her down because I’m going to be lynched,’ he pleaded in the missive, bemoaning the hardship of life behind bars. Whoever sent the menacing picture, when Mme Zavarro alerted the prison authorities he was removed into isolation.

Though he is being held in a penitentiary near Avignon during the four-month trial, Pelicot, who limps into the dock with a stick and brought the hearing to an indefinite halt after being taken ill this week with stomach pain, remains under protection.

Contrast this with the men he allegedly recruited to indulge him in his somnambulistic sexual fantasies, 32 of whom are free on bail and saunter into the drab court building in scruffy clothes, then loll on public benches, sometimes dozing off through boredom.

All this as they sit just a few feet away from the woman they are said to have abused.

As the outcry over the case gathers pace, some defendants have taken to wearing surgical masks and balaclavas. A group of them have also complained to the court that local people are targeting their families.

A regional Provencal paper responded by profiling all 50 of them across five pages.

Though the accused men could be jailed for 20 years, however, most appear remarkably sanguine.

Four or five have formed a little clique. Every lunchtime they repair to the same brasserie near the court, where they sit in the sunshine, casually mulling over the morning’s proceedings and washing their baguettes down with beer.

One can only imagine how their alleged victim and her sons and daughter feel as they pass this smiling cabal on their way to their usual lunching place, a salad bar along the road.

During a break in the hearing, one of the accused, a man in his 60s, told me with breathtaking insouciance that he couldn’t understand why he was on trial at all. After all, he said, Pelicot told him his wife had agreed to taking part in a sex game, and he had ‘only’ abused her briefly (he described how in vulgar terms) before realising she was comatose and quickly leaving the house.

So, who are these debauched characters, whose alleged moral bankruptcy and antiquated sense of entitlement (‘a man can do what he wants with his wife,’ one of the accused told police after his arrest) has shamed their nation?

Reading their psychological profiles and biographical details in the grim court dossier, what strikes you is that there is no stereotype.

While some are said to have excused their depravity with stories of dysfunctional childhoods, workplace and domestic traumas, drug and alcohol addiction, depression, broken relationships and so on, others had advantageous upbringings and have led, fulfilling, successful lives.

Those identified by Pelicot’s videos, which he conveniently dated and labelled with the perpetrators’ chatroom log-on names and the type of abuse they carried out, were arrested in six concerted raids, between February and October 2021.

However, one man has since absconded, while Jean-Pierre Herlem, who was twice caught on camera raping Mme Pelicot, died of cancer 17 days before his intended arrest, leaving his widow to come terms with his squalid secret.

Among the first ten men to be held was senior fire officer Christian Lescole, 55.

He was surely the easiest to find because he wore his Vaucluse fire department unform during the alleged rape. The court may also see a video (said to show him giving a thumbs up sign to show his satisfaction) which was labelled ‘Chris le Pompier’ (fireman).

Yet Lescole’s psychological profile describes him as ‘a royal youth’ in the Mediterranean resort of Carry Le-Rouet, where he was raised by ‘loving parents who supported him in all his activities’.

Close acquaintances remarked on his ‘strong tendency to put others first’, a quality which enhanced his fire service career.

However, the report says, after he suffered a ‘burn-out’ his marriage broke down and he began visiting voyeuristic websites while on duty.

Quizzed by police, he is said to have admitted knowing Mme Pelicot was drugged, but in an intercepted letter to his parents he seemed to make light of his offence, mocking the notion that police had uncovered ‘the case of the century’.

With his pointed beard and ponytail, Lescole, who is among the 16 defendants in custody, is now unrecognisable as the once clean-cut firefighter. His current partner was said to be ‘stunned’ when she found out he had been accused of rape.

Also arrested in the first swoop was Nicolas Francis, 42, a studious-looking journalist and past president of the Young Economic Chamber of Greater Avignon, which aspires to transform young people into ‘citizen leaders’.

Testimonies gathered for the court describe him as ‘pleasant, hard-working, funny and loyal’ but his laptop was said to contain images of paedophilic pornography, sadomasochism and zoophilia (sex with animals). He denies collecting them.

Under questioning, the court file states, Francis admitted visiting Mme Pelicot ‘impulsively’ during a troubled period in his life after the break-up of a relationship. In an intercepted phone-call to his mother, he allegedly said the video evidence was ‘damning’.

Later arrests included that of Cyril Fratini, 47, who doubles as the planning chief in Caromb, a village of 3,000 people ten miles north of Mazan, and a councillor in a nearby town.

While he admitted frequenting swingers’ clubs (which apparently operate in many provincial French towns), he claimed to be turned off by ‘non-consensual sex’.

Allegedly videoed raping Mme Pelicot, in January 2020 he is reported to have told investigators he ‘couldn’t remember’ whether she was drugged, but said it seemed ‘enormous’ to him that she had not known what was happening.

Another whose involvement has dumbfounded friends is Hugues Malago, 39, by day a jobbing tiler but at weekends an intrepid motorbike racer.

Depicted in his court personality report as an adrenaline junkie with a thirst for dangerous sexual adventures, his girlfriend said he was serially unfaithful and ‘sexually demanding’ but always ‘respectful’ to her.

Allegedly identified from a film labelled Night with the Biker, shot by Pelicot in October 2019, Malago claims he stopped short of rape and has expressed remorse. Nonetheless, he faces the same charge as the others.

Another notable defendant is Quentin Hennebert, 34, a saturnine, black-bearded man who, before his arrest, happened to be a supervisor at the prison where Pelicot is being held.

Interspersed with these fallen civic stalwarts are a good many ne’er-do-wells, recidivists and oddballs, their common denominator being an addiction to unnatural forms of sex.

Of course, we are yet to hear their defences in court and they may yet qualify or change the statements that appear in the court file.

In French trials, defendants don’t enter a formal plea, but their lawyers will doubtless seek to lessen the seriousness of their offences or even exonerate them.

Citing a well-known French case in which a man was acquitted of rape despite having sex with a woman who had been knocked unconscious in a car accident, lawyer Jamil Amr told me he would argue that his client was not guilty of raping Mme Pelicot because – being asleep – she had not said No.

To any decent observer that argument might sound ludicrous.

But then, in a case so grotesque and incomprehensible that a monk may be among the unpunished offenders, perhaps nothing should beggar our belief any more.

Additional reporting by Rory Mulholland