In a case that has stunned France, a husband who reportedly drugged his wife and invited over 80 strangers to rape her at their house for nearly ten years is going on trial on Monday.

At the Avignon court, fifty males are also on trial for allegedly participating in the woman's assault. As the trial began, around a dozen black-clad feminists staged a demonstration outside the courthouse.

According to the police, in their Mazan, near Carpentras, Provence, home, Dominique Pélicot crumbled sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication and mixed it into his wife Gisèle's dinner or wine. The father of three recruited men to rape and sexually abuse her from a online chatroom, where members fantasised about performing sexual acts on non-consenting partners.

The presiding judge, Roger Arata, announced that all hearings would be public, granting Gisèle Pélicot her wish for “complete publicity until the end” of the court case, according to one of her lawyers, Stéphane Babonneau.

The trial would nonetheless be “a horrible ordeal” for her, said another of her lawyers, Antoine Camus.

“For the first time, she will have to live through the rapes that she endured over 10 years,” he told Agence France-Presse, adding that his client had “no recollection” of the abuse that she discovered only in 2020.

Gisèle Pélicot, 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.

The accused men were instructed to avoid smelling of any kind of fragrance or cigarette smoke to avoid alerting his wife and to leave if she moved so much as an arm, investigators said.

Dominique Pélicot was arrested on 2 November 2020, after a security guard caught him filming up the skirts of women in the local supermarket. Police found a file labelled “abuses” on a USB drive connected to his computer that contained 20,000 of images and films of his wife being raped almost 100 times.

Since his arrest he “always declared himself guilty”, his lawyer has said, adding that he had said: “I put her to sleep, I offered her, and I filmed.”

Health records reportedly show he obtained 450 sleeping pills in one year alone.

The 50 men on trial with him include a local councillor, nurses, a journalist, a former police officer, a prison guard, soldier, firefighter and civil servant, many of whom lived around Mazan, a town of about 6,000 inhabitants. The men were aged between 26 and 73 at the time of their arrests.

Several of the accused have denied the charges, telling police they had no idea Gisèle Pélicot, who married Dominique Pélicot in 1973, was not a willing partner and accused him of tricking them. Detectives were unable to identify and trace more than 30 other men who were recorded.

Investigators said she was devastated to learn of the abuse, saying she had no recollection whatsoever of being raped. She had been drugged “almost to a state of coma”, investigators added.

“One morning she woke in a panic with a new haircut without understanding how this was possible. She went to her hairdresser, who told her she had been in the previous day,” Babonneau said.

He said his client, now divorced, believed she had an illness nobody could explain and consulted several doctors, always accompanied by her husband, who blamed her symptoms on tiredness after looking after their grandchildren. Her three children and other relatives suspected she had Alzheimer’s disease.

The public prosecutor and lawyers for the defendants had asked for the trial to take place behind closed doors for reasons of “decency” and to protect all parties.

“The trial involves acts of extreme violence repeated over a period of ten years of so. Photographs will be circulated, videos will necessarily be viewed and it appears that publicity would be dangerous for public decency and would undermine the dignity of the individuals, both victims and defendants,” the prosecutor argued.

But Gisèle Pélicot’s lawyers objected. “She wants people to know what happened to her and believes that she has no reason to hide. No one can imagine that my client will find any satisfaction in exposing what she has suffered. She wants this hearing to be open so that justice can be done in public,” Babonneau said.

“Whether one likes it or not, this trial goes beyond the limits of this courtroom. And going behind closed doors also means asking my client to be locked in a place with those who attacked her.”

After deliberating, the five professional judges hearing the case ruled it should be held in public.

Dominique Pélicot is also accused of the rape and murder of a 23-year-old estate agent in Paris in 1991. Sophie Narme was drugged, raped and stabbed in the chest.

Another estate agent, 19, was attacked in similar circumstances but escaped after fighting back. Police have said DNA extracted from blood at the scene matched his profile.

The trial in Avignon is expected to last four months. DominiquePélicot, 71, and the 50 other defendants face 20 years in prison if convicted of aggravated rape.