The daughter of Gisèle Pelicot has described her anguish at not knowing whether she was a victim of her depraved father’s drug-rapes after he was jailed for 20 years.
Caroline Darian, 45, was unable to sleep for days after her mother Gisèle Pelicot, 72, phoned to reveal her husband Dominique, also 72, had for years laced Gisèle’s food with medication and invited strange men into their family home to rape her unconscious body.
Last month Dominique was locked up for 20 years – the maximum prison sentence for a sex offender under French law – after being found guilty of drugging Gisèle and allowing men to abuse her for at least nine years.
He had connected with other rapists on a now-banned online chatroom called Without Her Knowledge and invited them to participate in the abuse, telling them to park away from his front door, remove their shoes and clothes in the kitchen and to warm their hands on the radiator so as to not wake his wife.
He insisted they keep their fingernails short as he couldn’t stand the idea of dirty fingernails on Gisèle. He was cavalier about her health, however: condoms weren’t necessary and Gisèle now lives with the long-term consequences of four sexually transmitted diseases.
Caroline still remembers the exact moment in November 2020 when her mother rang to quietly tell her that Dominique had been arrested for secretly taking photos up a woman’s skirt in the supermarket.
It was then Gisèle also revealed police had discovered the trove of sickening images on Pelicot’s computer showing Gisèle passed out in their marital bed being raped by more than 70 men – 50 of whom were convicted in the biggest sex crimes trial France has ever seen.
But while Caroline was still reeling from her mother’s news, worse was to come: French police had found images of Caroline herself passed out in underwear that wasn’t hers with the duvet lifted off her unconscious body.
It was only when they showed her the photos found on Dominique’s computer and pointed out the marks on her face matched those of the woman in the pictures that she realised her father had likely drugged and raped her, too, on multiple occasions.
Sleep, unsurprisingly, eluded her for days at a time. Unable to let go of the incomprehensible horrors her mother, and possibly she, had gone through at the hands of her own father, Caroline was too terrified to drift off.
After five nights without sleep, she was admitted to an emergency psychiatric ward where staff clumsily attempted to sedate her – “the reason we were in this nightmare”, as she told the Guardian. With even her body resisting the medication, the hospital staff “had to use this massive dose … it was really experimental”.
Halfway through Pelicot’s trial, Caroline once again had to go into a clinic for a few days after “weeks of repeated insomnia” to try to recover.
And no wonder. While her father was on the stand, he refused to ever admit what he had done to his own daughter, instead changing his story constantly.
Unlike Gisèle, who had over 20,000 files of picture and video evidence of the violence inflicted on her body, Caroline had to piece together what Pelicot had done to her from the two images of herself lying in the foetal position on her side.
There is still a question mark over the vaginal tear she suffered that would not heal, which she required several surgeries to fix. She told the judges she was convinced her had drugged and raped her while she was unconscious: “It’s not a hypothesis; it’s reality, I know it,” she told the court.
Her TV journalist husband Pierre also took the stand, saying the pictures found on Pelicot’s computer of Caroline asleep in beige underwear she’d never seen before only “added horror to the horror”, adding it wasn’t a question of “whether she was drugged, but why she was drugged”.
To compound the horror, Pelicot hadn’t kept his sick crimes confined to his and Gisèle’s house in Mazan, but had allowed men to rape his wife at Caroline’s own home outside Paris, inviting a 34-year-old warehouse worker to abuse Gisèle inside Caroline’s guest bedroom while she was away on holiday.
Another time, Pelicot and Gisèle were taking a break in Caroline’s cottage on the Île de Ré when he drugged his wife and let a retired nightclub worker rape her in Caroline’s bed, filming the five hours of horrific abuse for his own gratification.
The stranger had previously been jailed for raping his own 17-year-old daughter – a fact not lost on Caroline. “That detail is so difficult to cope with,” she said. “Home is supposed to be a safe place, not that kind of crime scene.” Knowing Pelicot had violated both of her homes “was like being abused a second time. I was betrayed by my father in different ways.”
Bravely, Caroline confronted her father during her last appearance in court. “I’m a forgotten victim in this case,” she declared, before telling Pelicot: “I know you abused me. You don’t have the courage to tell me.”
Despite Caroline, her brothers and Pelicot’s own lawyer asking him to come clean about what he had done to her, Dominique insisted he hadn’t taken the photos of her in bed and had never touched her. A psychiatrist later said never knowing the full truth would be “mental torture” for victims like Caroline.
“I know that he drugged me, probably for abuse, for sexual abuse, but I don’t have any evidence,” she told the BBC’s Emma Bartlett in her first televised interview, which is available on iPlayer now. “He has always denied it, but much more than that, he communicated a different version. He told different versions each time. So he lied.”
In court she had screamed at Pelicot that he will “die alone, like a dog”. “I knew it would be the very last time I would see him. It was the very last step, that he had a chance to say the truth.”
Following the horrors uncovered by the trial, Caroline is now pouring her efforts into campaigning for other victims of sexual abuse, especially those who have been targeted with ‘chemical submission’.
She has launched the #MendorsPas – Don’t Put Me Under – campaign, which supports victims of drugged rapes and aims to raise awareness of the type of rapes that can happen within families. “I didn’t have a clue about drugging or drug-assisted rape [before Pelicot’s arrest],” Caroline said.
“I knew about GHB, the date rape drug, in nightclubs and bars, but I didn’t know it was so much more widespread and mostly happened using the contents of the family medicine cabinet.” She also wants more training for health staff and police, as well as improved access to toxicology tests for victims.
It’s not easy work but Caroline derives her strength from her husband, her brothers and her 10-year-old “lovely son”, she says, full of affection. She agrees Gisèle, who insisted on waiving her right to anonymity because “the shame has to change sides”, is an icon, and has helped redirect the narrative about rape in France.
But she now faces the prospect of living life without ever knowing the truth about what Pelicot did to her, as she writes in her book, I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again.
“As a daughter, I have the DNA of Dominique. And the main reason why I’m so engaged for invisible victims, it’s also, for me, a way to put a real distance with this guy,” she says in the BBC interview. “Our family will never be the same.”
