A French woman whose husband is accused of enlisting strangers to rape her while she was drugged told his trial on Thursday police had saved her by uncovering the crimes.

"The police saved my life by investigating Mister P.'s computer," his wife Gisele said on the fourth day of the trial in the southern city of Avignon.

"My world is falling apart. For me, everything is falling apart. Everything I have built up over 50 years," she said, recounting the moment when in November 2020 investigators first showed her the images of a decade of sexual abuse orchestrated and filmed by her husband.

"Frankly, these are scenes of horror for me," she said of the pictures, as her husband, Dominique P., kept his head down.

Describing the "barbaric" images, the 71-year-old woman said: "I'm lying motionless on the bed, being raped."

"They treat me like a rag doll," she told a panel of five judges, adding that she had only plucked up the courage to watch the footage in May 2022.

According to investigators, Dominique P., a 71-year-old father of three, abused his wife between 2011 and 2020, drugging her with sleeping pills and then recruiting dozens of strangers to rape her.

He documented the decade-long abuse of his wife with meticulous precision, which allowed French police to track down more than 50 men suspected of raping her while she was drugged.

Gisele P. has insisted that the trial take place in public so the full facts of the case can emerge.

Lawyers for some of the men maintain that their clients were helping a libertine couple live out its fantasies. Not a single man tipped off the police.

Gisele P. reacted with upset to that suggestion.

"Don't talk to me about sex scenes. These are rape scenes," she said, stressing that she had never practiced swinging or any other form of libertine sex.

The investigators counted around 200 instances of rape, most of them by Dominique P., that took place between July 2011 and October 2020.

Fifty other suspects, aged between 26 and 74, have so far been identified and tracked down.

Most of them face up to 20 years in jail for aggravated rape if convicted.