Caroline Darian, the daughter of Gisèle Pelicot who sustained years of horrific sexual abuse by her then-husband and other men, has described how she’s certain her father drugged her and strongly suspects she was raped too.
In a wide-ranging interview with the BBC, Darian, aged 46, described the mental “burden” of being the daughter of both victim and perpetrator, as she expressed her strong desire for her father to die in prison.
A horrifying, monthslong mass rape and drugging trial that shook France to its core concluded last month, with 51 guilty verdicts. Dominique Pelicot and 49 others were found guilty of the rape or sexual assault of his former wife, while one of those on trial was convicted of the attempted and aggravated rape of his own wife, rather than Gisèle, having copied Pelicot’s methods.
The trial – which has pushed the country to examine a culture struggling with pervasive misogyny and systemic sexual assault – has galvanized women to demand changes in the way it approaches gender-based violence.
Darian described receiving a fateful phone call from her mother, one evening in November 2020, in which Gisèle informed her that her father, now 72, had been drugging Gisèle for around 10 years in order to facilitate her rape by different men.
“At that moment, I lost what was a normal life,” Darian told the broadcaster.
Darian spoke of how she strongly suspects that she was also a victim of sexual abuse orchestrated by her father. Days after the phone call, Darian herself was called by police and shown images found on Dominique’s laptop of herself lying unconscious on a bed wearing only a T-shirt and underwear – images she didn’t immediately recognize herself in.
She told the BBC she knows her father drugged her, and surmises she was raped too. “But I don’t have any evidence,” she laments.
“And that’s the case for how many victims? They are not believed because there’s no evidence. They’re not listened to, not supported.”
In court, Dominique maintained he had not abused his daughter. Earlier that day, Darian screamed at him: “I’ll never see you again! You’ll die alone like a dog!,” according to media reports.
Now, she 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.”
She described the reality she is faced with as a “terrible burden” and can now only view Dominique as the “sexual criminal he is.”
The book also explores the concept of “chemical submission” – the use of drugs to facilitate criminal action against a person, including sexual abuse. It was the method Dominique used to orchestrate his wife’s abuse, offering her unconscious body to strangers online.
In December, Dominique received the maximum sentence of 20 years for aggravated rape. Forty-eight other men on trial were found guilty of aggravated rape, with two guilty of sexual assault.
Evidence shows how Dominique recruited the men to rape his then-wife on the now-defunct Coco.fr “dating site” for years, using the chatroom called “without her knowledge,” where he would exchange pictures of an unconscious Gisèle before moving to Skype and text messages to arrange the meeting with his accomplices.
Gisèle testified that she was completely unaware of her husband’s actions. Over time, the frequent sedation and sexual abuse began to take a physical toll. Her husband accompanied her on several doctor’s visits during which she complained about memory loss and pelvic pain, according to court documents.
It was only after Dominique was arrested in a local supermarket in September 2020 for filming up the skirts of female customers, for which he was convicted, that his web of crimes came to light. Pelicot received an eight-month suspended prison sentence for this offense.
Whilst investigating the upskirting, police officers confiscated his hard drive, laptop and phones and found hundreds of images and videos of Gisèle being raped, opening one of the worst sex offense cases in modern French history.