AVIGNON – The children of a French man who for a decade drugged his mother so she could be raped by dozens of strangers spoke on November 18 of their grief and pain, with the daughter insisting she had been “forgotten” despite being also abused.

The couple’s children spoke in court in the southern city of Avignon as the trial entered its final phase, with the last set of defendants giving evidence ahead of sentencing applications later this week and a verdict next month.

Since the beginning of September, Dominique Pelicot was in the bank with 49 other men. Another defendant is still at large.

Pelicot’s ex-wife Gisele has become a feminist icon, refusing to be shamed and calling for the trial to be open to the public to raise awareness about the use of drugs to commit sexual abuse.

Dominique Pelicot documented his wife’s assaults with meticulous precision on a hard drive in a folder labeled “abuse”, leading police to track down 50 men besides himself.

Gisela’s daughter, who uses the pseudonym Caroline Darian, believes she was also assaulted by her father.

He photographed Caroline and his sons’ wives without their knowledge and posted their naked pictures on social media alongside pornographic photomontages.

On November 18, Darian, 45, said she had been “forgotten” during the trial, adding that she was convinced she too was drugged and sexually assaulted by her father, just like her mother Gisele.

“The only difference between her and me is the lack of evidence concerning me. For me, it’s an absolute tragedy,” said Darian, who in 2022 wrote a book, “Et j’ai cesse de t’appeler papa” (“And I stopped calling you dad”).

“In your disgusting records,” she said to her father, “you do not look at me as a father looks at his daughter.”

“But you will never have the courage to tell the truth,” she added.

Dominique Pelicot confessed that it was rape. But he denies abusing his daughter.

“The trial of a whole family”

Darian’s brother David, 50, said that for him it was “the trial of a whole family that was totally destroyed”.

“Hopefully in the future we can put the man on my left out of our minds,” he said, referring to his father.

During his testimony, David described his father as “this gentleman” and expressed hope that he and his co-defendants “will be punished for the horrors and atrocities they committed against my mother.”

Looking his father in the eye, he urged him to tell the court “about what you did to my sister, who suffers every day and will suffer for the rest of her life, because I don’t think you will ever tell the truth. !”

“And about my son,” David added, referring to exchanges between Dominique Pelicot and one of his grandsons, who he allegedly asked to “play doctor.”

His father insisted he did “nothing” to them.

David Pelicot had earlier described how the children moved all their belongings from the “house of horrors” in the town of Mazan when they learned of the decade-long rapes.

“You said she was a saint, but you were the devil himself,” said Florian, David’s brother.