In December, a court sentenced Dominique Pelicot to 20 years in prison for drugging his wife Gisèle and inviting dozens of men to their bedroom to rape her between 2011 and 2020.
The trial stunned France and turned Mr. Pelicot into France’s most infamous sexual predator. His wife, Gisèle, became a feminist icon.
But the police and prosecutors suspect that she was not his first victim. “Gisèle Pelicot fears that she herself is only the tip of the iceberg,” one of Ms. Pelicot’s lawyers, Antoine Camus, said in an interview.
While Mr. Pelicot was in prison awaiting his trial, the police confronted him with DNA evidence linking him to the attempted rape of a 19-year-old woman in the Paris region in 1999. After hours of questioning, he admitted to drugging her, telling the police, “It is me.”
He is also being investigated for the rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman in 1991. Mr. Pelicot has denied any involvement in the murder. But prosecutors indicted him in 2022 for both crimes, which are so similar they have been folded into one case.
Both victims were young real estate agents in the Paris area. Both were violently assaulted with a blade, tied up, drugged with ether and the lower part of their bodies undressed. In both crime scenes, the victim’s shoes were found neatly placed in the room.
