Content warning: This story deals with sexual violence. Reader discretion is advised.
Gisèle Pelicot’s daughter Caroline Darian, who suffered years of horrific sexual abuse at the hands of her then-husband and other men, has described how she is sure her father drugged her and strongly suspects she was also raped.
In a wide-ranging interview with the BBC, Darian, 46, described the mental “burden” of being the daughter of both the victim and the perpetrator, and expressed her strong desire for her father to die in prison.
A horrendous months-long mass rape and drug trial that shook France to its core concluded last month with 51 guilty verdicts. Dominique Pelicot and 49 other people were found guilty of rape or sexual assault of his ex-wife, while one of the defendants was found guilty of attempted aggravated rape of his own wife, instead of Gisèle, for having copied the methods by Pelicot.
The trial, which has pushed the country to examine a culture grappling with widespread misogyny and systemic sexual assault, has galvanized women to demand changes in the way it addresses gender-based violence.
Darian described receiving a fateful phone call from his mother one night in November 2020, in which Gisèle informed him that his father, now 72, had been drugging Gisèle for about 10 years to facilitate her rape by different men.
“At that moment I lost what was a normal life,” Darian told the station.
Darian spoke about how she strongly suspects that she was also a victim of sexual abuse orchestrated by her father. Days after the phone call, police called Darian herself and showed her images found on Dominique’s laptop of herself lying unconscious on a bed wearing only a T-shirt and underwear, images in which she did not recognize herself. immediate.
She told the BBC she knows her father drugged her and assumes she was raped too. “But I don’t have any proof,” he laments.
“And for how many victims is this like that? They are not believed because there is no evidence. They don’t listen to them or support them.”
In court, Dominique maintained that he had not abused his daughter. That same day, Darian yelled at him: “I will never see you again! You will die alone like a dog!” according to media reports.
She now describes her father as “one of the worst sexual predators of the last 20 or 30 years” and has written a book detailing her family’s trauma, titled “I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again.”
He described the reality he faces as a “terrible burden” and can now only see Dominique as the “sex criminal that he is.”
The book also explores the concept of “chemical submission” – the use of drugs to facilitate criminal actions against a person, including sexual abuse. It was the method Dominique used to orchestrate the abuse of his wife, offering her unconscious body to strangers online.
In December, Dominique received the maximum sentence of 20 years for aggravated rape. Forty-eight other men tried were found guilty of aggravated rape and two of sexual assault.
Evidence shows how Dominique recruited men to rape his then-wife on the now-defunct “dating site” Coco.fr for years, using the chat room called “without her knowledge,” where he exchanged photographs of an unconscious Gisèle before of moving to Skype and text messages to arrange a meeting with his accomplices.
Gisèle declared that she was completely unaware of her husband’s actions. Over time, the frequent sedation and sexual abuse began to take their toll on him physically. Her husband accompanied her on several doctor visits during which she complained of memory loss and pelvic pain, according to court documents.
It wasn’t until Dominique was arrested at a local supermarket in September 2020 for filming up female customers’ skirts, for which he was convicted, that his crime ring came to light. Pelicot received an eight-month suspended prison sentence for this offence.
While investigating the upskirting, police officers confiscated her hard drive, laptop and phones and found hundreds of images and videos of Gisèle being raped, opening one of the worst sexual crime cases in modern French history.
