A series of questions on Friday, October 18, the principal defendant persisted in accusing his fifty co-defendants, sparking a contentious discussion and highlighting their shared objective of securing everyone’s conviction.
Doses of Temesta were prepared in advance: three 2.5-milligram tablets crushed and stored in “a little pipette.” All Dominique Pelicot had to do was slip the powder “into a morning coffee,” “into a purée” or “into an ice cream,” which he would bring to his wife after dinner, in front of the television. “After that, you had to wait at least two hours.”
On Friday, October 18, Pelicot revealed some of the details of the chemical submission process inflicted on his wife over many years, and once again found himself at the center of the trial. The presiding judge of the Vaucluse criminal court, Roger Arata, wanted to take a break from the marathon of questioning that the court had been conducting for five weeks so that Dominique Pelicot could answer a number of questions that had been piling up over the past days.
In particular, Arata wanted to understand how the 71-year-old defendant had managed to get his wife to ingest the drug for so long – he is being questioned about at least 200 rapes in 10 years – without arousing her suspicions, in a house that was “not a 50-room castle.”
