Pélicot case: the accused's daughter also drugged and raped ? This “intimate conviction” which destroyed her

This Thursday, the daughter of Dominique Pélicot, accused of drugging his wife so that she could then be raped by strangers, testified at the trial.

On Monday, the trial of 51 men accused of aggravated rape of Gisèle Pèlicot, while she was drugged by her husband, opened in Avignon. This Friday, Caroline Darian, her daughter who is a civil party and who wrote a book “And I stopped calling you dad”, testified on the alleged facts at the one she now calls her “father”. The one who has engaged in a fight against chemical submission with her association, #Mendorpas, has told the story of the day her life changed.

On November 2, 2020, Gisèle Pélicot calls her daughter, who fears bad news about her father's health, suffering from respiratory problems. Gisèle Pélicot actually tells her that she spent the day at the police station. She then tells her about the horrors committed by her father: “Your father drugged me to rape me, by strangers. I was able to see photos, they wanted to show me videos, but it was “beyond my strength”, she reveals on the phone.

“For me there was a before and after November 2, 2020, precisely at 8:25 p.m., my life literally changed,” Caroline Darian said during the trial, as reported by BFMTV. She could never have imagined that her father could commit such atrocities, thinking he lived in a “united” family. She realized that she didn't know him at all, assuring that she had never “detected a misplaced look, an unwelcome gesture”. A revelation experienced as a real “cataclysm”. “I call my brothers, we are helpless, we cry, we don't understand what is happening to us. We are in pain, a pain that I do not wish to “nobody,” she recalled.

This horrible doubt that persists

The mother then discovers that she is concerned even more closely than she thought. A police officer summons her following photos of her taken by her father, grouped together in a file “Around my daughter, naked”. “There “I discover myself and I understand that the man who was my father, in whom I had total confidence, who I thought had integrity, who respected his daughter, who was proud of her, who had always encouraged her, I discover that in fact, my father photographed me without my knowledge, naked,” she said. to the trials.

Looking at the staging, “a woman who, a priori, is sleeping, lying on her side, the light on”, buttocks visible, the forty-year-old is seized by enormous doubt. She mentioned during the hearing her “intimate conviction that it is not her” asleep in these photos but she is “drugged”, never sleeping in this position. Was she then also ” victim of chemical submission, or even rape like her mother? Caroline Darian did not mention the second hypothesis.

Although he admitted to having drugged his wife, Dominique Pélicot has always denied the facts concerning his daughter. This lingering doubt prevents the mother from rebuilding her life: “Today, I am not trying to “If I put my father down, justice will take care of it (…) What do you do when you appear before you in a criminal court, when the characterization of the facts does not match what the victim knows about what she suffered, how do she rebuild herself, especially when her father does not have the intellectual integrity. When he is not faced with irrefutable evidence, he does not confess.” She estimated that his father is “one of the biggest sexual predators of recent years.” The trial may be able to provide him with some answers.