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Frenchman on trial for recruiting 72 strangers to rape drugged wife over 10 years – World

A French pensioner went on trial Monday on charges of allowing scores of strangers to rape his wife after he drugged her, in a case that has horrified the country.

Fifty men, recruited online, are also being tried in the southern city of Avignon alongside the main suspect, a 71-year-old former employee at France’s state-owned power utility company EDF.

Police counted a total of 92 rapes committed by 72 men, 51 of whom were identified. The men, aged between 26 and 74, are accused of raping the 72-year-old woman who, her lawyers say, was so heavily sedated she was not aware of the abuse that went on for a decade.

Presiding judge Roger Arata announced that all hearings would be public, granting the woman her wish for “complete publicity until the end” of the court case, according to one of her lawyers, Stephane Babonneau.

“She wants to raise awareness, as widely as possible, of what happened to her so that events like these never happen again,” Babonneau said.

Another of her attorneys, Antoine Camus, said the trial would nonetheless be “a horrible ordeal” for her. “For the first time, she will have to live through the rapes that she endured over 10 years,” he told AFP, adding that his client had “no recollection” of the abuse that she discovered only in 2020.

The woman, who arrived at the court supported by her three children, did not want a trial behind closed doors because “that’s what her attackers would have wanted”, Camus said.

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