The depraved husband accused of drugging his wife to film her being r*ped by scores of strangers had already drugged and r*ped her ‘at least 200 times’ before he began inviting them round

Dominique Pelicot, 71, is said to have filmed and painstakingly catalogued more than 20,000 videos and images of his wife Gisele being abused by 72 different men – 50 of whom have been identified besides himself – over nine years from 2011 until his arrest in 2020.

In the Vaucluse Criminal Court, Gisele was forced to listen to police commissioner Jérémie Bosse Platière – the officer who first brought her husband to justice – say that he estimated Mr Pelicot ‘committed at least 200 acts of r*pe against his wife’ before strangers became to arrive at their house in Mazan, some 20 miles from Avignon.

After his litany of attacks on his wife, he then started contacting other men to join him, filming the scores of men as they r*ped his wife.

‘My client was told: “Do this, do that, move this leg here, move that arm there”,’ said French attorney Jalil Amr, who represents one of the alleged r*pists.

‘It was as though he was directing a movie.’

‘He [Pelicot] behaved like a perverted Steven Spielberg, or you could say the director of a scene from James Bond. We will see that when the videos are replayed in court.’

He is defending Redouane Azougagh, a jobless, Moroccan-born man aged 40 with at least three children.

Azougagh is one of the 50 men being tried together in Avignon for the aggravated rape of Gisele Pelicot, whose husband admits to drugging her evening meals with sleeping pills before inviting strangers he met in an internet chatroom to their home to violate her.

Though Azougagh admits having s3x with the unconscious Mrs Pelicot, now 71, on two nights in the spring of 2019, he denies rape – claiming he assumed he was taking part in a kinky game to which she had consented.

According to a file submitted to the court, investigators identified him ‘with 94 per cent certainty’ from videos in Pelicot’s secret stash.

Some of the footage showed Mr Pelicot taking turns defiling his wife with three other men in one single incident, while other episodes of abuse sometimes lasted as long as six hours.

A review of Mr Pélicot’s Skype history revealed ‘one conversation in which he said he was giving his wife Temesta pills [medication for anxiety] so that she was unconscious and could be abused.’

Platière said there were hundreds of photos and pornographic videos showing ‘Gisèle Pélicot asleep and in the presence of other individuals taking part in acts of a s3xual nature.’

The revelations came after the court in Avignon heard yesterday that Mr Pelicot once accused his perplexed wife of infidelity when she discovered she had contracted a sexually transmitted disease.

When Gisele Pelicot, now 72, told her husband she needed treatment for an unexplained sexual illness, he suggested she must be having affairs while he was out cycling and playing boules, asking her with a hollow laugh: ‘So, what are you doing with your days?’

The 71-year-old grandma was oblivious to the grim truth: that her gynaecological trouble resulted from being serially abused after Pelicot slipped tranquillisers into her evening meals.

Together with 50 men from all walks of French life whom he recruited on a website for voyeurs and swingers, Pelicot, also 71, is accused of aggravated rape.

When police searched the Pelicots’ retirement chalet in the pretty Provencal village of Mazan, they found some 20,000 images of the wife being defiled by 72 strange men.

Pelicot, who often directed the rapes, filed his films with tags such as ‘Her Rapists’, ‘Abuse’ and ‘My Slut’.

He also noted the attackers’ names and details of the acts they perpetrated, allowing police to trace 50 of them. However, a further 22 were unidentifiable and will never be brought to justice as the case has now been closed.

The case, which is scandalising France and is expected to last four months, will continue today with evidence from detectives who led the investigation.