A woman is dead after her husband allegedly drugged her and allowed random men to rape her in a case reminiscent of Gisele Pelicot’s story.
The unnamed Austrian woman, 39, was reportedly raped dozens of times until emergency services were called on June 25 after she was found dead and covered in blood by her young daughter.
Her 51-year-old husband was not initially a suspect, police said, having first told emergency responders that his wife had an ‘accident during rough sex’.
He quickly became a person of interest after Marchtrenk authorities searched his phone and found he deleted an app and disposed of the bed she was discovered on.
The damning search of his phone found that days before his partner died, he searched ‘how to drug someone’. An investigation found he would allow men to come over and rape her for around £430.
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The husband and the couple’s neighbour have both been taken into custody. The neighbour is accused of raping the woman on the night of her death.
In a text uncovered by police, the husband told his neighbour: ‘I’ll get her properly drunk. Then you can have sex with her again. The way she was whining the other day was amazing.’
In another text, he said: ‘If it worked, if I had date rape drugs, I would regularly make her available for you to rape.’
Similar crimes unfolded in France when it was found that Gisele Pelicot was repeatedly raped by men while being drugged by her own husband.
Pelicot became an unwitting feminist symbol after taking the stand to expose the sexual violence she suffered at the hands of her ex-husband and dozens of other men.
Her ex-husband Dominique Pelicot was found guilty of repeatedly drugging and raping his wife for almost a decade, and inviting dozens of strangers to rape her.
His abuse only came to light in September 2020 when he was arrested for taking upskirt photographs of women in a supermarket.
It was then that police discovered thousands of pictures and videos that Pelicot had taken of the rapes and stored on his computer in a folder named ‘abuse’.
At the beginning of the trial, he admitted to drugging his wife and also recruiting dozens of men to rape her.
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