French courts lost DNA clue that may have prevented Pelicot abuse

The decade-long abuse of Gisèle Pelicot could have been prevented, France’s justice watchdog concluded. Photo / Christophe Simon, AFP

The decade-long abuse of Gisèle Pelicot could have been prevented, France’s justice watchdog has concluded.

Pelicot, 72, was drugged by Dominique Pelicot, her then-husband of almost 50 years, and raped by at least 70 other men in her Provence home, whom he had enlisted off a chat website known to attract predators and criminals, between 2011 and 2020.

A review by France’s justice watchdog found that Pelicot’s former husband could have been convicted 14 years earlier, after a DNA match connecting him with an earlier violent crime was lost inside the judicial system.

Dominique Pelicot was caught filming up the skirts of female customers in a Paris supermarket in 2010. He was released with a €100 fine, but a DNA sample taken while he was in custody matched a sample linked to a violent attempted rape on a woman known as “Marion” in Villeparisis in 1999.

A report ordered by Gérald Darmanin, the French minister of justice, revealed that the letter passing this information from the forensic police to the courts either never arrived or was never processed at the Meaux public prosecution office, which was investigating the attempted rape.

If the letter linking Dominique Pelicot’s DNA with the attempted rape in 1999 had been taken into account by the judicial system in 2010, the abuse of Pelicot could have been prevented or shortened as the serial rapist would have been identified over a decade earlier, the report says.

The justice watchdog has said it cannot conclude “with certainty” that there was a failure, as it doesn’t know if the mail was ever received.

The Meaux office was undergoing extensive reorganisation and was overwhelmed with cases, with documents regularly disappearing, a magistrate who worked at the office at the time has said.

The report also points to a wider malfunction within the judicial processing of mail, with letters containing critical information returned to sender or destroyed before being opened, with a lack of computer records making tracing lost mail impossible.

The watchdog’s investigation also reveals the remaining “unsatisfactory” methods of mail distribution within the French court system, with DNA profiles still sometimes sent by regular post in France, risking their loss, despite their vitally important role in crime investigations.

Dominique Pelicot was sentenced in December 2024 to 20 years in prison, the maximum sentence of aggravated rape, as part of the biggest rape trial in French history, which saw 51 men convicted to serve over 400 years combined.

He has also been under investigation since 2022 for the rape and murder of Sophie Narme in 1991, and the 1999 attempted rape case linked to his DNA sample.

A Nanterre Cold Cases Unit is now trying to identify new potential victims of Dominique Pelicot.

Florence Rault, the lawyer representing the victims’ families in both cold cases, labelled the report’s findings “a farce”, with the state admitting “everything went wrong, but no one is responsible”.

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