Beyond Gisèle Pelicot, raped for ten years in France by dozens of strangers recruited on the Internet by her husband, it is an entire family that has been broken, her daughter said, calling him “one of the greatest sexual criminals of the last 20 years.”
“How do we rebuild ourselves?” asked Caroline Darian, 45, daughter of the main accused, who now presents herself publicly under the pen name with which she published a book (And I stopped calling you dad), in order to protect his couple and his child.
Heard by the criminal court of Vaucluse, in the south of France, where her father and 50 other men, aged 26 to 74, have been on trial since Monday for four months, she returned to the day when she discovered everything.
“On November 2, 2020, at 8:35 p.m., my life literally changed,” she explained, recounting the moment when her mother, after also learning everything from the police, called her to inform her.
“My mother tells me, ‘I spent a good part of the day at the police station, your father was drugging me to rape me with strangers,'” she says. “I call my brothers, we are helpless, we cry, we don’t understand.”
The next day, the three children found themselves in Carpentras, in front of the police.
“I will always see David, white, stoic, and my little brother, Florian, collapsing,” she describes, about this moment when a police officer estimates “between 30 and 50” the number of attackers on her mother.
“The End of Innocence”
At the end of the investigation, 72 men were finally identified as having abused Mme Pelicot, between July 2011 and October 2020, of which only 50 have been identified and are being tried in Avignon.
On the same day, November 3, 2020, the police showed him two photos of a naked woman, apparently asleep: “We see her buttocks in close-up, this woman is sleeping in the fetal position, I don’t recognize her,” explains Caroline Darian.
“But madam, it is you who has a spot on your right cheek,” the investigator points out to her.
“I discovered that my father had photographed me, without my knowledge, naked. Why?” wondered his daughter, now convinced that her father had also drugged her, as he had done with her mother, whom he had overwhelmed with anxiolytics. Photos that her father had also distributed on the Internet.
And Caroline is not the only one, along with her mother, to have been the victim of Dominique Pelicot, now 71, who remained huddled in a corner of the dock all morning.
Céline, 48, wife of David Pelicot, and Aurore P., 37, ex-wife of Florian Pelicot, were also photographed, naked, still without their knowledge, by their father-in-law. However, they felt they had joined the “ideal family”, “demonstrative” and “loving”, with a “helpful” father-in-law despite his occasional outbursts of anger.
“Pictures of me pregnant with our twins, naked, […] “zoomed in on my private parts,” dating from 2011, Celine specified in court. And others, from 2019.
These images were also posted on the Internet. “But whose and where are they now, in 5 years, in 10 years?” asks the mother, according to whom “all the grandchildren in the family (editor’s note: six in total) have lost their innocence.”
“I was so angry.”
Céline Pelicot recalls the day her children found their grandmother unconscious, around 11 a.m.: “They tried to shake her, she didn’t react, she emerged around 5 p.m.” The night before, “our children could have heard things, so were present,” while their grandmother was probably being raped, she deduces.
For Aurore, herself a victim of abuse in her childhood, this case also caused damage. The investigators showed her photos of herself, naked in a bathroom, or at the swimming pool. Among them, “a photo of my stepfather’s penis on my swimsuit, a montage with ‘My slutty stepdaughter'” as the caption.
“The feeling I had was such anger at seeing the lack of respect with which a human being can be treated, I had such rage,” she said, evoking her guilt at not having perceived anything, no doubt because it was simply “inconceivable.”
Through her lawyers, Gisèle Pelicot, who gave a moving testimony on Thursday, requested on Friday that the support kits opened for her be stopped, including the one launched by the former reality TV star Nabila, now closed after reaching almost 40,000 euros.
She also called for “the greatest moderation on social networks”, where the names of all the accused circulate.