“Did he drug me too?”: How Gisèle Pelicot’s daughter feared she had also become a victim of her father | Rape trial against Gisèle Pelicot

WWhen detectives told Caroline Darian that her father had spiked her mother’s food and drink with a powerful drug mixture and invited strangers to rape her, she thought nothing more could shock her.

But just a few hours later, an urgent call to return to the gendarmerie brought even more devastating news. Among the 20,000 photos and videos taken by her father Dominique Pelicot of the abuse of her mother Gisèle were two images of a much younger woman sleeping in a bed.

At first, Darian didn’t recognize the person in the photos.

“The blanket was raised on the right side so you could see her bottom up close. She was sleeping. I found her surprisingly pale and had dark circles under her eyes. The police officer handed me the second photo. The sheets vaguely reminded me of something, but nothing more. I repeated that I didn’t recognize myself,” she recalls. “No, it’s not me, I said.”

It wasn’t until the officer asked if she had a brown birthmark on her right cheek like the woman in the pictures that the truth came to light, and with it more troubling questions.

“How could he photograph me in the middle of the night without waking me up? Did he drug me too? Worse, did he mistreat me?”

In her book Et j’ai cessé de t’appeler papa In the book (And I Stopped Calling You Father), published in English next month, Caroline Darian – the pseudonym she adopted – describes how she became increasingly tormented by the idea of ​​being another victim of her “perversity”. to be a father.

Dominique Pelicot, 71, has admitted spiking his wife’s food and drink with a powerful mix of sleeping pills and anti-anxiety drugs between 2011 and 2020 and bringing at least 73 men to their home in Mazan, near Carpentras in Provence while raping her unconsciously.

He has vehemently denied abusing his daughter, but is also accused of violating Darian’s privacy by sharing other images he secretly took of her online, which police reported in a file titled “To my “Daughter around, naked”.

Standing with him in the Avignon court are 50 men between the ages of 26 and 74 who he recruited from an online chat room and who are accused of raping or sexually abusing 72-year-old Gisèle Pelicot.

In a case whose scale and depravity has horrified even hardened defense lawyers, Gisèle Pelicot, who has become an icon for women around the world after defiantly renouncing her anonymity, is the main victim of what her daughter called “intolerable atrocities”.

Darian’s book reveals how the affair also disrupted her life and at one point threatened to spark a lasting argument with her mother, who for months was convinced she had the “perfect” husband and father of her three children.

In a chapter entitled “14. December 2020” writes Darian, 45: “It is unbearable for her. She (Gisèle) tries to convince herself that the man she loved for so many years wasn’t always a sexual criminal and so twisted. She’s trying to find extenuating circumstances.”

She reveals how her father hid the medication used to render her mother unconscious in a sock inside a hiking boot in the garage, how he took out loans in his wife’s name and amassed “astronomical debts.”

Darian also tells how she and her two brothers were so concerned about their mother’s frequent and unexplained “absences” and memory loss – caused by the medication used to render her unconscious – that they encouraged her to see a neurologist because they feared she had Alzheimer’s. When they expressed their concerns to her father, whom Darian now refers to as their “father,” he would attribute it to stress and insomnia or change the subject, she says.

Why would we even think about a drug test,” she writes. “But over time, as the number of absences increased, Maman became increasingly worried. She often had trouble sleeping, her hair fell out, and she lost weight – more than 10 kg in eight years. She was afraid that she would have a stroke at any moment…”

Gisèle Pelicot’s memory would be good if she stayed with her children, says Darian. “But when they left, we had difficulty contacting her for 48 hours when she returned to Mazan. My father answered the phone. He would say that she was resting and recovering from her stay. Always the same lie…and to think we believed it.”

She adds: “I lost track of how often my mother seemed to be out of it. Most worryingly, she had no recollection of our conversations just a day or two before. Like their brains are updating.”

Darian says her mother’s last “absence” was on October 22, 2020, the day of the last recorded rape. It took more than a month until Pelicot was arrested on September 20 after filming women’s skirts at a local supermarket, and 11 days before he was finally taken into custody.

In addition, her mother had unexplained gynecological problems, which in turn were due to stress or exhaustion.

As Gisèle Pelicot previously told the court: “There were signs. I just didn’t see them back then.”

At least a dozen other men Dominique Pelicot filmed have not been traced. Most of the defendants lived within 40 miles of the couple’s home; Many were recruited by Pelicot from an online chat room called “without their knowledge,” which has since been closed.

In court, psychiatrist Laurent Layet, who interviewed 20 of the defendants – including Pelicot three times – said they could not be described as “normal men” because that would be tantamount to saying that all men are capable of such acts.

The hearing, which enters its tenth week on November 11th, is expected to last until December 20th.