“Did he drug me too?”: Why Gisèle Pelicot’s daughter fears she too became a victim

Gisele Pelicota 72-year-old woman, made headlines after she filed a lawsuit against her ex-husband, Dominique Pelicot, accusing him of repeatedly raping her and recruiting strangers to abuse her while in their home over the course of a year A year under strong sedatives was a decade.
During the trial, her daughter Caroline Darian tearfully recounted that she learned about the abuse from her mother on November 2, 2020, after Gisèle spoke to investigators.
“Did he drug me too?”
Darian initially thought she had heard the worst when investigators revealed that her father had drugged her mother’s food and drink and caused strangers to attack her.
But just hours later, an urgent call revealed more disturbing evidence. Among the 20,000 photos and videos documenting Gisèle’s abuse, investigators discovered two images that showed an unconscious younger woman in bed.
At first, Darian was unable to identify the person in the images.
The realization only came when the officer inquired whether she had a brown birthmark on her right cheek, similar to the woman in the photos, which led to further troubling thoughts.
“How could he photograph me in the middle of the night without waking me up? “Did he drug me too?” she said.
“Worse, did he mistreat me?” she added.
“I stopped calling you father.”
According to The Guardian, she reveals how she died in her upcoming book, “Et j’ai cessé de t’appeler papa” (And I Stopped Calling You Father), to be published in English next month under her pen name Caroline Darian She became increasingly disturbed by the disturbing realization that she might also have been a victim of her father’s deviant behavior.
“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, that’s not me,” Darian wrote.

“Around my daughter, naked”
While Dominique denies the allegations of abusing his daughter, he faces further charges related to the invasion of Darian’s privacy. Police discovered evidence that he had secretly shared footage of her online, stored in a folder titled “Around my daughter, naked.”
Just 20 minutes into the second day of the trial, Darian had left the courtroom in despair when the judge revealed that nude photo montages of her had been found on her father’s computer.
Dominique, 71, has confessed to giving his wife a mixture of sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication between 2011 and 2020. During this time he facilitated the sexual assault on his unconscious wife by at least 73 men at his residence in Mazan, near Carpentras in Provence.
The Avignon court is simultaneously prosecuting 50 men between the ages of 26 and 74 who were contacted through an online chat room. They are accused of sexually abusing or raping 72-year-old Gisèle.
Darian’s book details how these events disrupted her own life and led to a near-irreparable break with her mother, who initially had difficulty accepting the truth about her longtime husband and father of her three children.
“Recurring unexplained power outages”
She describes how her father hid tranquilizers in a sock inside a hiking boot in the garage, racked up loans under his wife’s name, and amassed significant financial obligations.
Darian explains how she and her siblings became concerned about their mother’s recurrent, unexplained loss of consciousness and memory problems caused by administered sedatives, leading them to suggest a neurological consultation as they suspected Alzheimer’s disease suffer.
When they confronted her father, whom Darian now refers to as a “genitor,” he would dismiss their concerns, attributing them to stress and insomnia or deflecting the conversation, she alleges.
“Why would we even think about a drug test,” she writes. “But as time went on and the absence 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 some point. “Wait…”
“She had no memory of our chats”
According to Darian, Gisèle’s memory functioned normally during visits with her children. “But when they left, we had difficulty contacting her for 48 hours when she returned to Mazan. My father answered the phone. He said she was resting and recovering from her stay. Always the same lie… and to think we believed it,” The Guardian reported.
She continues: “I lost track of how often my mother seemed to be out of her mind. Most worryingly, she had no recollection of our conversations just a day or two before. Like their brains are updating.”
Darian states that her mother’s final period of unconsciousness occurred on October 22, 2020, coinciding with the last documented attack. This came over a month after Pelicot’s Sept. 20 arrest for inappropriate filming at a supermarket and 11 days before his incarceration.
Her mother also suffered from unexplained gynecological problems that were caused by stress or fatigue. As Gisèle previously told the court: “There were signs. I just didn’t see them back then.”
“Without their knowledge”
The authorities were unable to locate at least twelve other men registered by Dominique. Most of the defendants lived within 40 miles of the couple’s residence; Dominique recruited many through an online forum called “without their knowledge,” which has since closed.
Court psychiatrist Laurent Layet, who examined 20 defendants, including three sessions with Dominique, said they could not be considered “normal men” because that would be tantamount to saying that all men are capable of such acts.
Gisèle decided to hold a public trial to raise awareness of sexual abuse and drug-induced impotence. She had to face 51 of her alleged rapists. The case is expected to last until December.