This Thursday, the daughter of Dominique Pélicot, accused of having drugged his wife so that she could then be raped by strangers, testified during the trial.
On Monday, the trial of 51 men accused of aggravated rape of Gisèle Pélicot, while she was drugged by her husband, opened in Avignon. This Friday, Caroline Darian, her daughter who is a civil party and who wrote a book “And I stopped calling you dad”, testified about the alleged facts to the man she now calls her “progenitor”. The woman who has engaged in a fight against chemical submission with her association, #Mendorpas, recounted the day her life changed.
On November 2, 2020, Gisèle Pélicot called her daughter, who feared bad news about her father’s health, suffering from respiratory problems. Gisèle Pélicot actually told her that she had spent the day at the police station. She then told her about the horrors committed by her father: “Your father drugged me to rape me, by strangers. I was able to see photos, they wanted to show me videos, but it was beyond my strength,” she revealed on the phone.
“For me there was a before and after November 2, 2020, precisely at 8:25 p.m., my life literally changed,” Caroline Darian said during the trial, as reported by BFMTV. She could never have imagined that her father could commit such atrocities, thinking she lived in a “united” family. She realized that she did not know him at all, assuring that she had never “detected an inappropriate look, an unwelcome gesture”. A revelation experienced as a real “cataclysm”. “I call my brothers, we are helpless, we cry, we do not understand what is happening to us. We are in pain, a pain that I would not wish on anyone”, she recalled.
This horrible doubt that persists
The mother then discovers that she is concerned even more closely than she thought. A police officer summons her following photos of her taken by her father, grouped together in a file “Around my daughter, naked”. “There I discover myself and I understand that the man who was my father, in whom I had total confidence, of whom I thought had integrity, who respected his daughter, who was proud of her, who had always encouraged her, I discover that in fact, my father photographed me without my knowledge, naked”, she told the trials.
Looking at the staging, “a woman who, a priori, is sleeping, lying on her side, the light on”, buttocks visible, the forty-year-old is seized by a huge doubt. She mentioned during the hearing her “intimate conviction that it is not her asleep in these photos but she is drugged”, never sleeping in this position. Was she then also a victim of chemical submission, or even rape like her mother? Caroline Darian did not mention the second hypothesis.
Although he admitted to drugging his wife, Dominique Pélicot has always denied the facts concerning his daughter. This lingering doubt prevents the mother from rebuilding her life: “Today, I am not trying to sink my father, justice will take care of that (…) What do you do when you appear before you in a criminal court, when the characterization of the facts does not match what the victim knows about what she has suffered, how do they rebuild themselves, especially when their father does not have the intellectual integrity. When he is not faced with irrefutable evidence, he does not confess”. She considered that her father is “one of the greatest sexual predators of recent years”. The trial may be able to provide her with answers.