Last week, Gisèle Pelicot, 72, told the court that her calm demeanour masked a “field of devastation”, triggered by the instance, four years ago, when a French policeman had informed her that her apparently loving husband had, in fact, been drugging her for a decade and inviting strangers – more than 80 local men – to enter the family home, and the couple’s bedroom, to rape her while he filmed them[…]
Mazan’s 74-year-old mayor, Louis Bonnet, sought to play down those tensions, arguing that most of the alleged rapists came from other villages and seeking to frame the Pelicots as outsiders who hadn’t lived there long[…]
“If they participated in these rapes, then it’s normal that they’re considered targets. There has to be transparency about everything that happened,” he said, while also condemning the accused and their actions

In his interview with us, Bonnet talked about the case itself[…]
“People here say ‘no one was killed’. It would have been much worse if [Pelicot] had killed his wife. But that didn’t happen in this case,” Bonnet said

Then he went on to address Gisèle Pelicot’s experiences

“She’ll have trouble getting back on her feet again for sure,” he agreed, but suggested her rapes were less troubling than those of another victim in the nearby town of Carpentras who “was conscious when she was raped… and will carry the physical and mental trauma for a long time, which is even more serious”

“When there are kids involved, or women killed, then that’s very serious because there’s no way back. In this case, the family will have to rebuild itself. It will be hard. But they’re not dead, so they can still do it.”

When I suggested that he was seeking to play down the gravity of the Pelicot case, he agreed

“Yes, I am. What happened was very serious. But I’m not going to say the village has to bear the memory of a crime which goes beyond the limits of what can be considered acceptable,” he said