Giselle PelicotA 72-year-old woman is making headlines for filing a lawsuit against her ex-husband, Dominique Pelicot, alleging that he raped her multiple times and recruited strangers to abuse her while she was heavily sedated in her home. Year.
During the trial, their daughter Caroline Darian tearfully recounted the abuse she learned from her mother after Gisele spoke to investigators on Nov. 2, 2020.
“Did he drug me too?”
When investigators revealed that her father had drugged her mother’s food and drinks and arranged for strangers to attack her, Darian initially thought she had heard the worst news.
However, just hours later, an emergency call revealed more disturbing evidence. Among 20,000 photos and videos documenting Gisele’s abuse, investigators found two images depicting a young woman unconscious in bed.
Initially, Darian was unable to identify the person in the image.
She didn’t realize this until the officer asked her if she had a brown mole on her right cheek similar to the woman in the photo, which led to more disturbing thoughts.
“How could he film me in the middle of the night without waking me up? Did he drug me too?” she said.
“What’s worse, is he abusing me?” she added.
“I won’t call you father anymore”
Her upcoming book, “Et j’ai cessé de t’appeler papa” (I No Longer Call You Dad), will be released next month under her pseudonym Caroline Darian, according to The Guardian Darian, published in English, reveals how she became increasingly disturbed to realize that she, too, might be the victim of her father’s escapades.
“The quilt was lifted up on the right side so you could see her buttocks up close. She was sleeping. I thought she was shockingly pale and had dark circles under her eyes. The policeman handed me a second photo. The sheet made me I vaguely remembered something, but that was it. I repeated that I didn’t recognize myself,” she recalled. “No, this is not me,” Darian wrote.
“Surrounded by my daughter, naked”
While Dominic denies the accusations of abusing his daughter, he also faces additional charges related to violating Darien’s privacy. Police found evidence that he shared secretly recorded videos of her online, which were stored in a folder labeled “Around my daughter, naked.”
Darien left the courtroom in agony just 20 minutes into the second day of proceedings when the judge revealed that a montage of her nude photos had been found on her father’s computer.
Dominique, 71, admitted giving his wife a mixture of sleeping pills and anti-anxiety pills from 2011 to 2020. Sexual assault.
The trials of 50 men, ranging in age from 26 to 74, are being tried simultaneously in an Avignon courthouse, and they were contacted through an online chat room. They are accused of sexually assaulting or raping 72-year-old Gisele.
Darian’s book details how the events disrupted her own life and almost led to an irreversible break with her mother, who initially struggled to accept the truth about her long-time husband and father of her three children.
“Repeated unexplained power outages”
She described how her father hid sedative drugs in the socks of his hiking boots in the garage, racked up loans in his wife’s name and racked up massive financial debts.
Darian explained how she and her siblings were concerned about their mother’s recurring unexplained comas and memory problems (caused by the use of sedatives), leading them to recommend a neurological consultation with suspicion of Alzheimer’s disease.
She said that when confronted by their father, who Darian now calls her “genitor,” he would dismiss their worries, attribute them to stress and insomnia, or change the subject.
“Why should we consider drug testing,” she wrote. “But as time went on and the absences increased, my mother was always worried. She often suffered from insomnia, her hair fell out, and she lost weight – more than 10 kilograms in eight years. She was worried that she would have a stroke at any time. “moment…”
“She doesn’t remember our chat”
According to Darian, Gisele’s memory function was normal during her visits with the children. “But after they left, when she returned to Mazan, we had difficulty reaching her for 48 hours. My father would answer her calls. He would say she was resting and recovering. Always the same lie. …and think we believe it,” the Guardian reported.
She continued: “I’ve lost count of the times my mother has seemed no longer around. The most worrying thing is that she doesn’t remember what we chatted a day or two ago. It’s like her brain is updating.
Darian said her mother last lost consciousness on October 22, 2020, coinciding with the last recorded attack. The incident occurred more than a month after Pellicott was arrested on September 20 for inappropriate filming in a supermarket and 11 days before he was detained.
Her mother also experienced unexplained gynecological problems that were attributed to stress or fatigue. As Gisele previously said in court: “There were signs. I just didn’t see them at the time.”
“Without their knowledge”
Authorities have yet to find at least a dozen other men recorded in Dominic. Most of the defendants lived within 40 miles of the couple’s home; Dominique recruited many of the people through a now-shuttered online forum called “Without Their Knowledge.”
Forensic psychiatrist Laurent Layet, who evaluated 20 defendants, including in three meetings with Pelicot, said they could not be considered “ordinary people… because that would be to say that all men are capable of such behavior.”
Pellicott, who chose a public trial to raise awareness of sexual abuse and drug-induced coma, has had to face 51 alleged rapists in a case that will last until December.
