Gisele Pelicota 72-year-old woman made headlines after filing a lawsuit against her ex-husband, Dominique Pelicot, accusing him of repeatedly raping her and enlisting strangers to abuse her while he was strong sedated in their home for a decade.
During the trial, their daughter Caroline Darian tearfully recounted the abuse she learned from her mother on November 2, 2020, after Gisèle spoke to investigators.
“Did he drug me too?”
Darian initially thought she had heard the worst when investigators revealed her father had spiked her mother’s food and drink and arranged for strangers to assault her.
However, just hours later, an emergency call revealed more disturbing evidence. Among the 20,000 photos and videos documenting Gisèle’s abuse, investigators discovered two images showing a younger woman unconscious in bed.
Darian was initially unable to identify the person in the images.
The realization hit only when the officer asked if she possessed a brown mole on her right cheek, similar to the woman in the photos, which led to further unsettling thoughts.
“How could he have photographed me in the middle of the night without waking me up? Did he drug me too?” she said.
“Worse, did he abuse me?” she added.
“I stopped calling you dad”
According to The Guardian, in her forthcoming book, “Et j’ai cessé de t’appeler papa” (And I Stopped Calling You Father), to be published in English next month under the pseudonym Caroline Darian, she reveals how she becoming increasingly troubled by the unsettling realization that she too might have fallen victim to her father’s deviant behavior.
“The quilt was lifted on the right side so you could see her bottom up close. She was sleeping. I thought he was amazingly pale and with dark circles under his eyes. The policeman handed me the second photo. The sheets vaguely reminded me of something, but nothing more. I repeated that I didn’t recognize myself,” she recalls. “No, it’s not me,” Darian wrote.

“Around My Daughter, Empty”
While denying the allegations of abusing her daughter, Dominique faces additional allegations of violating Darian’s privacy. Police uncovered evidence that he had shared secretly recorded images of her online, stored in a folder labeled ‘Around my daughter, naked’.
Darian left the courtroom in distress just 20 minutes into the second day of proceedings when the judge revealed blank photo montages of her had been found on her father’s computer.
Dominique, 71, testified that he drugged his wife with a mixture of sleeping pills and anxiety medication from 2011 to 2020. During that time, he facilitated the sexual assault of his unconscious wife by at least 73 of men to them. residence in Mazan, near Carpentras in Provence.
The court in Avignon is simultaneously trying 50 men, aged between 26 and 74, who were contacted through an online chat room. They are accused of sexually assaulting or raping 72-year-old Gisèle.
Darian’s book details how these events disrupted her own life and almost caused an irreparable rift with her mother, who initially struggled to accept the truth about her husband of many years and the father of their three children.
“Recurring unexplained blackouts”
She describes how her father hid sedative drugs in a sock in a garage hiking shoe, racked up loans in his wife’s name and amassed substantial financial liabilities.
Darian explains how she and her siblings were concerned about their mother’s unexplained recurring periods of unconsciousness and memory problems – caused by administered sedatives – prompting them to suggest a neurological consult, suspecting Alzheimer’s.
When confronted by their father, who Darian now calls “the parent,” he would dismiss their concerns, attributing them to stress and insomnia, or deflect the conversation, she points out.
“Why would we even consider a drug test,” she writes. “But over time, as the number of absences increased, my mother was always worried. He often had trouble sleeping, his hair fell out, he lost weight – more than 10 kg in eight years. moment…”
“He didn’t remember about our discussions”
According to Darian, Gisèle’s memory functioned normally during visits with her children. “But when they left, we had difficulty reaching her for 48 hours when she returned to Mazan. My father was answering the phone. He said he was resting and recuperating from their stay. Always the same lie… and to believe we believe. this,” The Guardian reported.
She continued: “I lost count when my mother didn’t seem to be all there. The most worrying was when she had no recollection of our discussions a day or two before. It’s like her brain has updated itself.”
Darian indicates that his mother’s last period of unconsciousness occurred on October 22, 2020, coinciding with the last documented seizure. This came more than a month after Pelicot’s arrest on September 20 for inappropriate filming at a supermarket and 11 days before his detention.
Her mother also had unexplained gynecological problems that were attributed to stress or fatigue. As Gisèle previously stated in court: “There were signs. I just didn’t see them at the time.”
“without their knowledge”
Authorities have not located at least twelve other men registered by Dominique. Most of the defendants lived within 40 miles of the couple’s residence; Dominique recruited many through an online forum called “without their knowledge,” which has since been shut down.
Psychiatrist Laurent Layet, who evaluated 20 defendants, including three sessions with Dominique, said they could not be considered “ordinary men … because that would be tantamount to saying all men are capable of such acts.”
Opting for a public trial to raise awareness of sexual abuse and drug-induced disruptions, Gisèle was forced to face 51 of her alleged rapists, with the case set to continue until December.