Giselle Bellico removes all trace of husband in French gang rape trial

It was November 2011, and Gisèle Bellicot was sleeping a lot.

She spent most of her weekends hibernating. She was upset, because she worked hard during the week as a supply chain manager, and her vacation was precious.

However, she can't seem to stay awake, often drifting off without realizing it and waking up hours later without remembering that she went to bed.

Despite this, Gisele, 58, was happy. She considered herself lucky to have her husband of 38 years, Dominic, by her side. Now their three children, Caroline, David and Florian, were grown, the couple was planning to retire soon and move to Mazan, a village of 6,000 people in France's idyllic southern Provence region, where Mr. Bellicot could go cycling and she could ride Lancôme. , their French bulldog, on hiking tours.

I have loved Dominic ever since they met in the early 1970s. “When I saw that young man in the blue jacket, it was love at first sight,” Giselle said much later. They both had complex family histories marked by loss and trauma, and they found peace with each other. Their four decades together had their rough patches – recurring financial problems and her affair with a colleague in the mid-1980s – but they made it work.

Years later, when a lawyer asked her to sum up their relationship, she said: “Our friends would say We were the perfect couple. “I thought we would spend our days together.”

At that moment, Giselle and Dominique were sitting on opposite sides of the courtroom in Avignon, close to Mazan: she was surrounded by their children and her lawyer, dressed in gray prison clothes, in the defendants' glass box. .

It was He faces the maximum prison sentence for aggravated rape He quickly became known in France and abroad as, in his daughter's words, “one of the worst sexual predators of the last 20 years.”

But in 2011, when Gisele felt like she was sleeping too much, she couldn't have imagined this would be the way it would turn out.

She had no idea that her husband, Dominique Bellicot, who is in his late 50s and about to retire, was spending a lot of time online, often talking to users in open forums and chat rooms where sexual material – often extreme or illegal – was – Available for free. .

In court, he later identified that phase as the motivation behind his “deviance” following his childhood trauma of rape and abuse: “We become deviants when we find something that gives us the means: the Internet.”

Sometime between 2010 and 2011, a man claiming to be a nurse sent Mr Bellicott pictures of his wife, drugged with sleeping pills to the point of unconsciousness. He also shared precise instructions with Mr. Bellicot so that he could do the same with Giselle.

He hesitated at first, but not for long.

Through trial and error, he realized that with the right dose of pills, he could put his wife into a sleep so deep that nothing would wake her. They were legally prescribed by his doctor, who believed Mr Bellicott was suffering from anxiety due to financial problems.

He would then be able to dress her in underwear that she refused to wear, or subject her to sexual acts that she would never have accepted while conscious. He can shoot scenes Which she wouldn't allow while she was awake.

At first, he was the only one who raped her. But by the time the couple settled in Mazan in 2014, he had perfected and expanded his operation.

He later said he kept the tranquilizers in a shoebox in the garage, and changed brands because the taste of the first was “too salty” to be surreptitiously added to his wife's food and drink.

In a chat room called “Without Her Knowing” he recruited men of all ages to come and abuse his wife.

He was photographing them too.

He told the court that his wife's unconscious condition was clear to the court 71 men came to their house Over a decade. “You're just like me, you love the rape situation,” he told someone in the chat.

As the years passed, the effects of the abuse Mrs. Bellicot endured at night began to increasingly seep into her waking life. She lost weight, clumps of hair fell out, and blackouts became more frequent. She was filled with anxiety, and was certain that she was about to die.

Her family became worried. She seemed healthy and active when she visited them.

Her brother-in-law Pierre said: “We would call her, but most of the time it was Dominique who answered. He would tell us that Giselle was asleep, even in the middle of the day.” “But it seemed possible because she was doing a lot (when she was with us), especially running after the grandchildren.”

At times, Giselle bordered on suspicion. One time, she noticed the green color of a glass of beer her husband had given her, so she hastily poured it into the sink. Another time, she noticed a bleach stain she didn't remember ever being on new pants. “You're not drugging me anyway, are you?” I remembered his question. He broke down in tears: How can you accuse me of such a thing?

Mostly, though, she felt lucky to have him as she dealt with her health issues. She developed gynecological problems and underwent several neurological tests to determine whether she had Alzheimer's disease or a brain tumor, as she feared, but the results did not explain the increasing fatigue and loss of consciousness.

Several years later, during the trial, Dominique's brother Joel, a doctor, was asked how it was possible that the doctors had not put the evidence together and understood that Giselle was the victim of the little-known phenomenon of chemical subjugation – drug-facilitated rape. . He replied: “In the field of medicine, we only find what we are looking for, and we search for what we know.”

It was only when she was away from Mazan that Giselle felt better – a strange thing that she barely noticed.

While returning from one of these trips, in September 2020, Dominique tearfully told her: “I did something stupid. I was caught during the trial photographing under women’s clothing in a supermarket.”

She said she was very surprised because “in 50 years he has never behaved inappropriately or used obscene words towards women.”

She said she forgave him but asked him to promise her he would get help.

“So we left it at that,” she said.

But Dominic must have known the end was near.

Shortly after his arrest in the supermarket, police confiscated his two phones and his laptop, where you will inevitably find more than 20,000 videos and photos of his wife being raped by him and others.

Jérémie Boss Platier, director of the investigation, told the court: “I watched those videos for hours. It was disturbing. And of course it had an effect on me.”

His colleague Stefan Gall said: “In my 33 years in the police, I have never seen this kind of thing.” “It was so vile, it was shocking.”

His team was tasked with tracking down the men in the videos. They carefully examined the faces and names of the men Dominic recorded along with facial recognition technology.

They were eventually able to identify 54 of them, while 21 others remained unidentified.

Some of the unidentified men in conversations with Dominic said they were also drugging their partners. “This, for me, is the most painful part of the case,” Mr. Boss Platier said. “To know that there are some women who are still victims of their husbands.”

On 2 November 2020, Dominique and Giselle had breakfast together before heading to the police station, where Mr Bellicot was summoned in connection with the upskirt incident. A policeman asked her to follow him to another room. She confirmed that Dominic was her husband — “a great guy, a good guy” — but denied participating in swinging with him or engaging in threesomes.

The police chief warned her: “I'm going to show you something you won't like,” before showing her a photo of a sexual act.

At first, she didn't recognize either person.

When she did, “I told him to stop… Everything collapsed, everything I had built for 50 years.”

She was returned home in a shocked state, accompanied by a friend. She had to tell her children what happened.

Recalling that moment, Giselle said, “Her daughter’s cries are forever engraved in my mind.” Caroline, David and Florian went down to Mazan and evacuated the house. Later, photos of a drugged-out Caroline were also found on Dominic's laptop, although he denied abusing her.

David, the eldest son, said they no longer had any family photos because they “got rid of everything associated with my father between now and then.” Within days, Giselle's life was transformed into a suitcase and her dog.

Meanwhile, Dominic confessed to his crimes and was officially arrested. He thanked the police for “easing his burden.”

He and Gisele will not meet again until they are seated facing each other in an Avignon courtroom in September 2024.

By then, the story of a husband who drugged his wife for ten years and invited strangers to rape her had begun to spread around the world, with the help of… Gisele's extraordinary and wonderful decision to give up her identity The trial was opened to the public and the media.

“I want any woman who wakes up one morning with no memories of the night before to remember what I said,” she said. “So that no more women fall prey to chemical submission. I was sacrificed on the altar of vice, and we need to talk about it.”

Her legal team also successfully lobbied for the captured videos to be shown in court, arguing that it would “defuse the presumption of accidental rape” — which flies in the face of the defense that the men didn't mean to rape Gisele because they didn't realize it. She was unconscious.

“She wanted to change her attitude about shame, and it happened,” said a woman who came to watch the trial in Avignon in November. “Giselle turned everything upside down. We didn't expect a woman like this.”

Medical examiner Anne Martinat Saint-Beuve said that following her husband's arrest, Giselle was visibly traumatized but quiet and withdrawn – a coping mechanism often used by survivors of terrorist attacks.

Gisele herself has said that it is a “field of ruins” and that she fears that the rest of her life will not be enough to rebuild herself.

Ms. Sainte-Beuve said she found Giselle “exceptionally resilient”: “She turned what could have destroyed her into strength.”

Days before the trial began, the Bellicotes' divorce was finalized.

Giselle reverted to her maiden name. She went to court in the name of Bellicot so that her descendants would be “proud” of their association with her and not ashamed of their association with Dominique.

She has since moved to a village far from Mazan. She goes to a psychiatrist but does not take any medication, because she no longer wants to take any substance. She continues to walk long distances, but she is no longer tired.

In the early days of the trial, Caroline's husband, Pierre, took the stand.

A defense attorney asked him about the Mazan years, when Giselle suffered from memory loss and her husband dutifully accompanied her to fruitless medical appointments. How did the family not know what was happening?

Pierre shook his head.

“I forgot one thing,” he said. “You cannot imagine the unimaginable.”