"I'm looking for a perverse accomplice who can assault my sleeping wife."
"I'm putting her to sleep now. Plan to come here around 03."
"Must be clean"
The messages come from Dominique Pelicot's chats on a forum called "without her knowledge" on a now-defunct site. The formulations show how he drugged his wife for years and meticulously planned the assaults to avoid her suspecting anything afterwards.
"You must be clean and not have aftershave, no long dirty nails," reads one of Pelicot's messages to an accomplice.
"She's available now," he continues a little later.
The intended perpetrator responds with a question:
"Has the sleeping pill started to take effect?"
In several messages that CNN has gained access to, the men express admiration for Dominique Pelicot and say they want to do the same thing to their own partners.
"I don't know how you manage, but I dream of doing the same thing to my wife and sharing her with accomplices like you," writes one.
Verdict on Thursday
Pelicot also shared explicit images and videos of his wife, several of them in connection with previous rapes.
One man appears to be concerned about sexually transmitted diseases.
"Do you test her from time to time? Are you sure she's clean?", he writes.
The 72-year-old Dominique Pelicot and the 50 or so co-defendants identified by the police are expected to receive their verdict on Thursday. The youngest is 27 today, the oldest 74.
All the men on trial in Avignon live less than five miles from the Pelicot couple's former home in the village of Mazan.
For several years, Gisèle Pelicot (who has since changed her surname) had strange memory lapses and other health problems and believed she had Alzheimer's.
In 2020, she found out from the police that her husband Dominique Pelicot, also the father of her three children, had secretly given her large doses of sedatives, raped her, and invited dozens of strangers to their shared home to participate. The crimes had been going on for nearly a decade and had been meticulously documented and cataloged by the husband.
The husband was caught more or less by chance in 2020, after he filmed under women's skirts at a local supermarket. The documentation of the assaults led the police to 50 suspected perpetrators, one of whom is still at large.
Dominique Pelicot had also photographed his daughter and his sons' wives without their knowledge, as well as published nude pictures of them on social media along with pornographic photomontages.
The case has sparked shock and outrage in France and other parts of the world. Gisèle Pelicot has been hailed as a feminist icon for her decision to hold an open trial and her refusal to be ashamed of what she has been through.
