A French pensioner went on trial Monday on charges of allowing scores of strangers to rape his wife after he drugged her, in a case that has horrified the country.

Fifty men, recruited online, are also being tried in the southern city of Avignon alongside the main suspect, a 71-year-old former employee at France’s state-owned power utility company EDF.

Police counted a total of 92 rapes committed by 72 men, 51 of whom were identified. The men, aged between 26 and 74, are accused of raping the 72-year-old woman who, her lawyers say, was so heavily sedated she was not aware of the abuse that went on for a decade.

Presiding judge Roger Arata announced that all hearings would be public, granting the woman her wish for “complete publicity until the end” of the court case, according to one of her lawyers, Stephane Babonneau.

“She wants to raise awareness, as widely as possible, of what happened to her so that events like these never happen again,” Babonneau said.

Another of her attorneys, Antoine Camus, said the trial would nonetheless be “a horrible ordeal” for her. “For the first time, she will have to live through the rapes that she endured over 10 years,” he told AFP, adding that his client had “no recollection” of the abuse that she discovered only in 2020.

The woman, who arrived at the court supported by her three children, did not want a trial behind closed doors because “that’s what her attackers would have wanted”, Camus said.

Some came back six times

Police began to investigate the defendant, Dominique P, in September 2020 when he was caught by a security guard secretly filming under the skirts of three women in a shopping centre.

Police said they found hundreds of pictures and videos of his wife on his computer, visibly unconscious and mostly in the foetal position.

The images are alleged to show dozens of rapes in the couple’s home in Mazan, a village of 6,000 people around 33 kilometres from Avignon in Provence.

Investigators also found chats on a site called coco.fr, since shut down by police, in which he recruited strangers to come to their home and have intercourse with his wife.

Dominique P admitted to investigators that he gave his wife powerful tranquilisers, especially Temesta, an anxiety-reducing drug. The abuse started in 2011, when the couple was living near Paris and continued after they moved to Mazan two years later.

The husband took part in the rapes, filmed them and encouraged the other men using degrading language, according to prosecutors.

No money changed hands.

The accused rapists include a forklift driver, a fire brigade officer, a company boss and a journalist. Some were single, others married or divorced, and some were family men.

Most participated just once, but some took part up to six times.

Murder probe

Many have said they thought they were simply helping a libertine couple live out its fantasies, but Dominique P told investigators that all were aware that his wife had been drugged without her knowledge.

An expert said her state “was closer to a coma than to sleep”.

Her husband told prosecutors that only three men left the house quickly after arriving, while all others proceeded to have intercourse with his wife.

Dominique P, who said he was raped by a male nurse when he was nine, was ready to face “his family and his wife”, his lawyer Beatrice Zavarro told AFP on Monday morning.

“He is ashamed of what he did, it’s unforgivable,” she said, adding the case was one of a “sort of addiction”.

This trial may not be his last.

He has also been charged with a 1991 murder and rape, which he denies, and an attempted rape in 1999, to which he admitted after DNA testing.

Experts said the man does not appear to be mentally ill but in documents seen by AFP, they said he had a need to feel “all-powerful” over the female body.

More than a dozen feminists dressed in black protested outside the courthouse.

The trial is to last until December 20.