Draguignan, France — A court in southeast France on Friday sentenced to 20 years in jail a man who for years raped his teenage daughter and offered her up to strangers for sex. The case echoed the ongoing high-profile trial that has shocked the nation in which 51 men are accused of raping Gisele Pelicot, drugged by her husband so he could invite strangers to their home to abuse her.
The 38-year-old father was convicted by the court in the southeast Var region of forcing sexual acts on his daughter from the age of 13. Prosecutor Estelle Bois described how the father exercised total control over the young girl, his adoptive daughter. He also brought her to other men, many of them much older, who he contacted through online classified ads.
The father claimed to the other men that he and his daughter were both consenting adults living out a sexual fantasy. But he was convicted and sentenced to the maximum 20 years in prison, in line with the demands of the prosecutors.
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Some of the defendants in the Pelicot case have claimed that they were given that same impression by the victim’s then-husband, Dominique Pelicot.
Also like Dominique Pelicot, the father in Friday’s case directed, participated in and filmed the sex acts involving his daughter, who was blindfolded during the encounters.
He admitted to the accusations, but claimed in court that he had a loving relationship with the young girl and had responded to her initiating sexual contact.
“This is not about love, but about power and domination. He doesn’t love (his daughter), he loves having total control over her, her belonging to him, her obeying him,” prosecutor Bois said.
She also asked judges to jail for 16 years a second defendant, the only one of the other men to have abused the girl who could be identified.
As in the Pelicot case, the second defendant — a man his 60s with six children — was identified thanks to the photo and video documentation by the father of the abuse, this time via geolocation data.
The second defendant told the court that he had been taken in by the father’s claim that the girl was consenting in three of his four meetings with them.
In the fourth, “things went badly. Rather than acting like a responsible man, he followed through on his own pleasure and closed his eyes” to the abuse, his lawyer Christophe Mairet said.
Now aged 18, the girl was accompanied in court by a golden retriever trained to comfort victims of abuse. She had, like Gisele Pelicot, declined the option of the trial being held behind closed doors.
It was the teenager, then aged 15, who put a stop to her own abuse in 2021 by fleeing after her father’s violence and humiliation escalated. She ran from their home in Cavalaire-sur-mer, south of glitzy resort town Saint-Tropez, before being brought to police by a holidaymaker.
Her father bombarded her phone with calls and texts throughout her escape.
Closing arguments have been given in the Pelicot case this week, with a verdict and sentencing of her husband and the dozens of co-defendants expected in December.