Andrew Harding

It was so quick. We were expecting it to take several hours, but the judge president was averaging about 20 seconds per accused as he rattled through the guilty verdicts. The guilt was not really a surprise, given those extraordinary videos. What people were waiting for, though, was the verdicts, and those followed very quickly after, and with the same pattern and speed.

And generally, the feeling was that apart from Dominique Pellico, who got the maximum, that the others had got slightly less than the prosecution had asked in most cases. But outside the courtroom, in the kind of melee that followed as everyone was waiting for Giselle Pellico to speak. Various defense lawyers gave various reactions. Some were quite glad that the sentences were left.

Others were talking about appealing. And there was still some frustration with the fact that this was a mass trial, that their clients weren't individually put on trial. And perhaps there would have been more focus, more attention to those individuals. There was a feeling that the whole process had been sort of steamrolled through the justice system.

Exactly. Back in 2020, in September then, he was in a supermarket in a nearby town called Carpentra and he was filming up women's skirts. He was caught, confronted, and the women who'd been assaulted, essentially, complained to the police. He was arrested. And things could have probably ended there.

In fact, Giselle Pellico once told her husband, look, get some help, but I forgive you, we'll work through this. But then the police decided, partly on the advice of a psychiatrist who talked to Pellico and said, there's something more going on here. They went and investigated his phone and took laptops and...

hard drives from the Pellico's little bungalow cottage on the edge of a village called Mazon. And that's where they came across, out of the blue, this extraordinary cache of more than 20,000 explicit videos and photographs.

For a lot of the accused, they answered a website that was very explicitly talking about a woman who was unconscious or was going to be raped or abused without her knowledge. That was explicit, and Dominique Pellico said in court, these men all knew exactly what was going on.

Some of the men, in fact quite a lot of the men, argued in court, look, we'd go on this website, we would meet other couples and indulge in their sexual fantasies, in threesomes, in swinging scenes. And so when Dominique Pellico said his wife was consenting, they assumed that that was the case.

They insisted that they had no reason to suspect otherwise, that Dominique Pellico had said in the morning, my wife and I watch these videos together, this is our fantasy. But of course, the reality of those actual videos, when they were shown in court, was so profound, and it was so clear that Giselle Pellico was simply in no position to to have consented because she was seen and heard snoring.

She was completely unconscious. And that was the point where I think a lot of these men began to understand really what they were dealing with in terms of consent. And I think for quite a few of the men, it was an education to realize what consent means.

Exactly, yes. I mean, the thing with Dominique Pellico is he has denied everything until the moment it is proved beyond all doubt, when he's confronted with the video or confronted with the 1999 DNA evidence that he had attempted to rape a woman in Paris, and he admitted to that finally.

There's another case back in 1990 where a woman was raped and murdered in almost identical circumstances to the 1999 case. murder. So that's being investigated. There are of course the abuses that we've heard about today about his daughter, a daughter-in-law and possibly even some grandchildren. So this is a man who did not start his retirement and think I'm going to become a rapist.

This is a man who clearly in the decades before was up to no good.