French court jails man for 20 years over sexual abuse of teenage daughter, offering her to strangers

A court in southeast France on Friday sentenced a man to 20 years in jail for raping his teenage daughter and offering her up to strangers for sex for years.

The case echoed the ongoing high-profile trial that has shocked the nation in which 51 men are accused of raping Gisele Pelicot, drugged by her husband so he could invite strangers to their home to abuse her.

The court convicted the 38-year-old father in the southeastern Var region of forcing sexual acts on his daughter from the age of 13.

Prosecutor Estelle Bois described how the father exercised total control over the young girl, his adoptive daughter. He also brought her to other men, many of whom were much older, whom he contacted through online classified ads.

The father claimed to the other men that he and his daughter were both consenting adults living out a sexual fantasy. But he was convicted and sentenced to the maximum 20 years in prison, in line with the prosecutors’ demands.

Some of the defendants in the Pelicot case have claimed that they were given that same impression by the victim’s then-husband, Dominique Pelicot.

Also like Dominique Pelicot, the father in Friday’s case directed, participated in and filmed the sex acts involving his daughter, who was blindfolded during the encounters.

He admitted to the accusations but claimed in court that he had a loving relationship with the young girl and had responded to her allegedly initiating sexual contact.

“This is not about love, but about power and domination. He doesn’t love [his daughter], he loves having total control over her, her belonging to him, her obeying him,” prosecutor Bois said.

She also asked judges to jail a second defendant for 16 years, the only one of the other men to have abused the girl who could be identified.

As in the Pelicot case, the second defendant — a man in his 60s with six children — was identified thanks to the photo and video documentation by the father of the abuse, this time via geolocation data.

The second defendant told the court that he had been taken in by the father’s claim that the girl was consenting in three of his four meetings with them.

In the fourth, “things went badly. Rather than acting like a responsible man, he followed through on his own pleasure and closed his eyes” to the abuse, his lawyer Christophe Mairet said.

Now aged 18, the girl was accompanied in court by a golden retriever trained to comfort victims of abuse. She had, like Gisele Pelicot, declined the option of the trial being held behind closed doors.

It was the teenager, then aged 15, who put a stop to her own abuse in 2021 by fleeing after her father’s violence and humiliation escalated.

She ran from their home in Cavalaire-sur-Mer, south of the glitzy resort town Saint-Tropez, before being brought to the police by a holidaymaker. Her father had bombarded her phone with calls and texts throughout her escape.