“An unbearable ordeal”: the children of 71-year-old Giselle Pelico, who was drugged and raped by her husband for a decade together with dozens of strangers he was recruiting onlineleft the courtroom visibly shocked after the long and raw presentation of the facts, in nauseating detail.

Giselleremained stoic and he showed no emotion on the second day of the hearing in a case unprecedented in French judicial annals. The woman, the main victim, is facing them 51 defendants at the criminal court of Vaucluse, Avignon.

In addition to her husband, 50 other men, aged between 26 and 74, are being prosecuted for aggravated rape and could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

During the presentation of the facts by the president of the court, Roger Arata, who summarized, in a monotonous and cold tone, the 31 volumes of the indictment, the main accused, Dominic Pelico was looking on with a plain look. Sometimes he talked with his lawyer, Beatrice Zavaro, who sat on the other side of the glass cage where the defendants are.

Then, with a simple “yes”, the 71-year-old pensioner, the “orchestrator” of the rapes according to the prosecution, he admitted his guilt.

When asked in turn one by one, only 14 of his 48 co-defendants who were present they admitted the facts. The three even apologized to the victim. One of the accused escapes and is being tried in absentia, while a second one was absent from the court today for health reasons.

Sitting next to Giselle, the couple’s three children struggled to contain their emotions during this long and busy day. The couple is in the process of divorcing after the facts came to light. Twice, Carolyn Darian (aka the pen name used by her daughter Giselle for her 2022 book, I Stopped Calling You Dad) had to leave the room while sobbing. Supported by her brothers, Caroline “broke” when the president of the court referred to the photos of her – the product of photomontage – found on her father’s computer and where she appeared naked…

“For the children, the suffering is enormous,” their lawyer, Antoine Camus, said in a break in the trial. “Caroline had to go out, it was unbearable. Although they did not discover anything new, although they were aware of the case, it was particularly difficult this morning, but necessary,” he added.

On Monday, Giselle and her children disagreed with defense lawyers’ request that the trial be held behind closed doors. Instead, they demanded that everything be made public “so that shame can change sides.”

Before returning to her seat after her second exit from the courtroom, Carolyn Darian paused for a moment in front of the glass cage where the 18 incarcerated defendants sit. He looked at them, but no one he did not raise his eyes to face her. Not even her father, whom she now calls her “father”.

Of the 51 defendants, 18, including the husband, remain in custody. The rest had been released on bail. Those being held are those who went to rape Giselle multiple times – some, as many as six times – or had a checkered criminal record, previous convictions for domestic violence or rape, even of children.

Apart from the main accused, only 50 of Gisele’s total of 72 rapists recorded in photos and videos by her husband himself have been identified and found, following an investigation that started completely by chance, on September 12, 2020. She day Dominique P. was arrested in a supermarket in Carpentras, in the south of France, for filming female customers up their skirts. In questioning he said he had “impulses” that he “couldn’t control”. But in the successive, back-to-back searches that followed, the police came across thousands of photos and videos showing his wife, drugged and unconscious, being raped by strangers. The rapes began in July 2011, when the couple were still living in Paris, and continued from March 2013 until October 2020, after they moved to Mazan, a picturesque village near Mount Vaduz.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, the police officers are going to testify about how the accused were arrested. The next day, Thursday, Giselle P. will take the floor for the first time.