The daughter of the victim and the main accused testified for the first time on Friday in the trial which opened on Monday in Avignon, before the Vaucluse departmental criminal court.
Moved but determined, Caroline Darian stepped forward to the bar, through the central aisle of the courtroom, lined on both sides with numerous accused (more than half of whom appear free). We are on the fifth day of the trial known as “the Mazan rapes”, Friday, September 6, and this is the first time that the Vaucluse criminal court has heard, in this context, the story of the daughter of Gisèle and Dominique Pélicot. “I speak on behalf of my siblings,” she began, under the eyes of her two brothers, David and Florian, who were very moved.
“I am the daughter of the main accused and the proven victim, who suffered acts of unbearable atrocity,” she continues, in a calm tone. In order to protect her relationship and her child, she speaks publicly under her pen name, with which she published, in April, And I stopped calling you dadHis solemnity contrasts with the rapid delivery of his mother, heard on Thursday.
On November 2, 2020, his life “literally tipped over”. “There was a before and an after” the day her mother called her from Mazan to tell her the unbearable, “at 8:25 p.m.”, she specifies. “Before November 2, 2020, we were a united family. We went through so much together. I loved my father. I loved the image of the man I thought I knew. The image of this healthy, caring, considerate man.”she explains in detail under the eyes of the man she now calls her “breeder”in tears in the dock.
“Caroline, you need to sit down, I have something very serious to tell you, and it concerns your father.”her mother warns her on the day of this phone call. At that time, her father is being monitored for respiratory problems. “I imagine him in intensive care, I think he’s about to die”she remembers. “Your father drugged me for years to have me raped by strangers,” Gisèle Pélicot then announced to him. “This is precisely what we call, in life, a tipping point.”Caroline Darian said in a trembling voice, describing a “slide, where we don’t know how far we’re going to go.” Her husband was present at the time, as was her son, who was then 6 years old. “We put him in a separate room so he doesn’t hear his mother screaming while she’s unscrewing screws in the living room,” she relates.
The next day, she takes her son to school. The little boy has just started first grade. “I can’t tell him he’ll never see his grandfather again, said Caroline Darian in tears, I can’t tell him that I’m already a broken woman and a mother who will probably have great difficulty continuing to be who I am at that moment.”
She then takes a train to Mazan, with her brothers. When they find their mother, “she is destroyed”, she describes. The police commissioner of Carpentras, who announced the facts to Gisèle Pélicot the day before, receives them. “I can see in his eyes that this man doesn’t know what words he’s going to have to choose to say what he has to tell us.” And there, this terrible sentence: “We think there are about 30 to 50 of them, but we can’t tell you how many.”the police officer says. He is talking about the men recruited by Dominique Pélicot on the site “coco.gg” to rape his wife.
“I will always see David again [son frère]white, stoic, and my little brother, Florian, slumped, I can’t tell you otherwise”remembers Caroline Darian. They are given some details about the case, notably concerning the prescriptions for Temesta, these anxiolytics obtained by their father to sedate their mother.
The same day, the commissioner calls her back and tells her that she has to come back to the police station. “I understand right away that I’m going to have to see things that really aren’t going to please me.”she recalls. As she climbed the stairs to the commissioner’s office, her legs “flagellate”. She is shown a first photograph, which investigators believe represents her. In this photo, we see “a woman who, a priori, is sleeping, lying on her side, the light on, we see her buttocks in close-up, the duvet raised to the side”, explains Caroline Darian, initially assuring that she did not recognize this person. “No, it’s not me,” she said.
He is then shown a second photo. “Same position, same woman a priori. Same panties. Same staging.” She still doesn’t recognize herself. Until the commissioner asks her: “Madam, is it you who has a brown spot on your right cheek?” “I discover myselfshe continues, feeling shocked. I discover that he has photographed me without my knowledge, naked. Why? I understand immediately, before having a tetany attack, that I am myself drugged in these photos, because I do not sleep like that”says Caroline Darian.
“Today, I do not want you to put my father down. Justice will take care of judging him for facts and tangible evidence. What I can tell you is that in this case, it is indeed a question of chemical submission,” she assures, emphasizing that, “in the majority of cases of victims of chemical submission, evidence like that in my mother’s file does not exist”The forty-year-old has since founded the association “Don’t fall asleep: stop chemical submission” to help victims.
Caroline Darian charges her father, in a loud voice, reproaching him for not acknowledging the facts: “Until there is irrefutable proof, he does not confess.” She concluded her testimony by addressing the president of the court, Roger Arata, directly: “How does someone like me get better? How does she hope to have a normal life as a woman, a normal sex life? How does she rebuild herself from the ashes, when she knows that her father is probably one of the…”. She pauses, catches her breath. “When we know that his father is undoubtedly one of the biggest sexual predators of the last twenty years.”