Mass Hypnosis and a French Château: Inside Rapist’s Shock Arrest in Florida

The Château de Valloubière in southwestern France offers sumptuous guest rooms, magnificent food, and fine Languedoc wines from grapes grown on the estate’s verdant grounds. The 25-acre vineyard is located in Saint-Jean-de-Fos, an ancient potters’ village known for its ceramics and one of the oldest existing Romanesque bridges in the republic.

But for all its charms, the magnificent property also served as a hunting ground for 77-year-old proprietor Gilbert Greaux, a supposedly impotent helicopter-pilot-turned-vintner and new-age healer who was convicted in 2018 of sexually assaulting 17 female guests after performing what he claimed were “collective hypnosis” ceremonies on visitors already plied with copious amounts of the chateau’s flagship product, followed by an “energy session” or “magnetism massage.”

Once in the treatment room, Greaux told his victims he would help “open up their chakras,” instead assaulting them under the guise of legitimate therapeutic treatment, according to French prosecutors. Many say they were under the spell of Greaux’s “hypnotic hold,” and that they knew something was wrong but “felt hypnotized” or too “heavy” to do anything. One woman described to French investigators being in a “dreamlike state” during Greaux’s assault, and said that although she felt “disgusted” by what he was doing to her, she simply found herself “unable to react.” Another was so shaken by the attack, she quit her nursing job and moved to Corsica to work as a caterer. Multiple victims have been diagnosed with PTSD.

Read more at The Daily Beast.