Béatrice Zavarro has tried to explain, not excuse, why Dominique Pelicot invited strangers to rape his wife, while hoping the case will lead to social change in France
Béatrice Zavarro, a diminutive figure in a long black robe and heavy red glasses, who has described herself as the “devil’s advocate”, stood up in a packed courtroom in Avignon to sum up the defence for Dominique Pelicot, on trial for drugging his wife, Gisèle, and arranging more than 50 men to rape her.
What could his lawyer say about the man who has admitted to the charges in the notorious mass rape trial, and whose perversions and depravity have been played out in words and pictures around the world since proceedings opened three months ago?
For the next hour and 15 minutes, Zavarro trod a fine legal line.
She did not try to defend the indefensible; she did not seek to mitigate the actions of the man nicknamed the Monster of Mazan, after the Provençal village where the couple lived and most of the 200 rapes took place. She did not mention the maximum 20-year prison sentence the public prosecutor has demanded for Pelicot, except to suggest the judges might “stray” from this request.
Instead, she sought to explain the inexplicable: what made a husband and father, who said he spoiled his three children and adored his wife, invite the men in the dock with him into the family home to rape and sexually abuse her?
“You are not born a pervert, you become one,” she said, suggesting that Pelicot’s traumatic childhood had irreparably damaged his brain and split his personality, citing the French neuro-psychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik, Sigmund Freud, French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne and even British poet and writer John Betjeman.
Outside the courtroom afterwards, Zavarro, said she had done her job:
“I believe I have clearly explained who Dominique Pelicot was. As a lawyer, I speak for a man – even one who has been called the devil or monster. It is my mission to defend, while not forgetting that I am in front of a woman who has asked for nothing and whom I profoundly respect.
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