French man on trial for recruiting strangers to rape his drugged wife hospitalised

To France now and a trial that has gripped the nation and made international headlines. A man accused of drugging his wife and allowing dozens of men to rape her on camera for almost a decade had been expected to take the stand in southern France for the first time today, but a couple of hours ago it was announced that Dominique Pelicot is sick. Earlier our world affairs correspondent Andrew Harding shared the latest.

They had just come out of the courtroom where Dominique Pelicot was expected to be this morning and to give evidence this afternoon, but he complained yesterday of some sort of unknown stomach bug or illness and left court then.

We were expecting, his lawyer was expecting him to return today to take the stand, but we’ve since been told by his lawyer in a phone call to the courtroom that he won’t be in court. 

The president said there could be a delay of one day, two days, three days, possibly through to next week. So frustration in court. We saw Caroline, the daughter of the Pelicots, showing real frustration as she sat there next to her mother Giselle, who showed no emotion. Giselle of course spoke last week very powerfully, very movingly and talked about the strength that she needed to remain calm, but she talked of this sort of inner trauma that she was disguising.

She continues to hide that trauma, but everyone here waiting to hear how Mr Pelicot will seek to provide context for his act. 

The facts themselves are already clear, they’ve been captured on film, the police have them, Mr Pelicot has confessed, but he’s expected to talk about childhood trauma, the experience he says of being raped at the age of nine, of taking part in some sort of violent group assault on a woman when he was 14, perhaps not to justify but to give context to his extraordinary actions over the past decade or more.

And Andrew, for anyone who might have missed the basic background to this incredibly distressing case, can you just spell that out? 

What is the background here? 

So Dominique Pelicot, 71 now, but for a decade he drugged his wife and invited mostly local men from a 10 kilometre radius, about 80 men, to come for no money but simply so he could film them raping his wife as she lay unconscious, heavily sedated in the couple’s bed.

He was only discovered a couple of years ago when some women complained that they’d seen him upskirting, filming their skirts in a public place, the police arrested him and then during the course of a search of his laptop they found all these other shocking images and it was only then that Giselle Pelicot discovered what her husband had been doing.