When detectives told Caroline Darian her father had been lacing her mother’s food and drink with a powerful concoction of drugs and inviting strangers to rape her, she thought nothing more could shock her.
Just a few hours later, however, an urgent call to return to the gendarmerie brought more devastating news. Among the 20,000 photographs and videos her father Dominique Pelicot had recorded of her mother Gisèle being abused were two images of a much younger woman asleep in a bed.
At first Darian did not recognize the person in the photographs.
“The quilt was lifted on the right side so you could see her bottom close up. She was sleeping. I thought she was astonishingly pale and with dark circles under her eyes. The police officer handed me the second photo. The sheets reminded me vaguely of something but nothing more. I repeated that I didn’t recognize myself,” she recalls. “No, it’s not me, I said.”
It was only when the officer asked if she had a brown mole on her right cheek like the woman in the pictures, the truth dawned and with it other disturbing questions.
“How could he have photographed me in the middle of the night without waking me? Did he also drug me? Worse still, did he abuse me?”
In her book, Et j’ai cessé de t’appeler papa (And I Stopped Calling You Father), published in English next month, Caroline Darian – the pen name she has adopted – describes how she became increasingly tormented by the idea she was another victim of her father’s “perversity”.
Dominique Pelicot, 71, has admitted spiking his wife’s food and drink with a powerful concoction of sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication between 2011 and 2020 and bringing at least 73 men into their home at Mazan near Carpentras in Provence to rape her while she was unconscious.
He has vehemently denied abusing his daughter but is also charged with violating Darian’s privacy by sharing other images he secretly recorded of her online that police found in a file named “Around my daughter, naked”.
On trial with him at the court in Avignon are 50 men aged between 26 and 74 he recruited from an online chat room who are accused of raping or sexually assaulting Gisèle Pelicot, 72.
“How could he have photographed me in the middle of the night without waking me? Did he also drug me? Worse still, did he abuse me?”
In a case whose scale and depravity have appalled even hardened criminal lawyers, Gisèle Pelicot, who has become an icon for women everywhere after defiantly waiving her anonymity, is the principle victim of what her daughter describes as “unbearable atrocities”.
Darian’s book reveals how the affair also derailed her life and at one point threatened to spark a permanent rift with her mother, who remained convinced for months she had the “perfect” husband and father of her three children.
In a chapter headed 14 December 2020, Darian, 45, writes: “It’s unbearable for her. She (Gisèle) is trying to convince herself that the man she loved for so many years was not always a sexual criminal and so depraved. She’s trying to find attenuating circumstances.”
She reveals how her father hid the drugs used to render her mother unconscious in a sock inside a hiking shoe in the garage, how he had taken out loans in his wife’s name, and run up “astronomical debts”.
Darian also recounts how she and her two brothers were so concerned by their mother’s frequent and unexplained “absences” and loss of memory – caused by the drugs used to render her unconscious – they encouraged her to see a neurologist, fearing she had Alzheimer’s. When they raised their concerns with their father, who Darian now refers to as her “genitor”, he would attribute it to stress and insomnia or would change the subject, she says.
“Why would we have even thought of a drug test,” she writes. “But over time with the increasing number of absences, maman was always worried. She often had difficulty sleeping, her hair fell out, she lost weight – more than 10 kgs in eight years. She was afraid she’d have a stroke at any moment…”
Gisèle Pelicot’s memory would be fine when she stayed with her children, Darian says. “But when they left we had difficulty reaching her for 48 hours when she got back to Mazan. My father would answer her phone. He’d say she was resting and recuperating from their stay. Always the same lie … and to think we believed it.”
She adds: “I lost count of the times my mother seemed not all there. The most worrying was when she had no memory of our chats only a day or two before. As if her brain was updating.”
Darian says her mother’s last “absence” was on 22 October 2020, the day of the last recorded rape. It was more than a month after Pelicot was arrested on 20 September after filming up women’s skirts in a local supermarket and 11 days before he was finally taken into custody.
There were also her mother’s unexplained gynecological problems again attributed to stress or exhaustion.
As Gisèle Pelicot told the court earlier: “There were signs. I just didn’t see them at the time.”
At least a dozen other men filmed by Dominique Pelicot have not been traced. Most of those in the dock lived within a 40-mile radius of the couple’s home; many were recruited by Pelicot from an online chatroom called “without their knowledge”, since shut down.
In court, expert psychiatrist Laurent Layet, who interviewed 20 of the accused – including Pelicot three times – said they could not be described as “ordinary men…because that would be tantamount to saying that all men are capable of such acts.”
The hearing, which is now in its tenth week, is expected to last until 20 December.
Kim Willsher is a Paris-based foreign correspondent
