Dominique Pelicot was too ill to appear, thus Presiding Judge Roger Arata declared, “He is ill,” implying that this unique case involving 51 alleged rapists will be postponed for “one, two, three days” or potentially longer.
Later, according to his lawyer, he was admitted to the hospital.
Gisèle Pelicot, seated on the right side of the courtroom with her head resting lightly against a wall covered in wood panels, appeared indifferent to the news that she would not, in the end, be seeing her husband.
Gisèle Pelicot, 72, told the court last week that her calm exterior belied a “field of devastation” that had been triggered four years earlier by an incident in which a French policeman had told her that her husband, who seemed devoted, had been drugging her for ten years and had invited strangers—more than eighty local men—into their bedroom and house so he could rape her while filming them.
