The daughter of French serial abuser Dominique Pelicot has told of the moment she found out she was another of his victims. Caroline Darian, 45, how she realised she was her dad’s “second prey” she saw secret photographers he had taken of her fast asleep in bed.
The Mirror reports how at first Caroline, didn’t realise she was the girl in the picture. But it was only when police highlighted a birthmark that it suddenly dawned that it was her. “Normally I’m a light sleeper. So I had been drugged too,” she told the Telegraph. “I was his second prey.”
The chilling realisation caused her to ask disturbing questions about what her perverted father did to her. Pelicot, 71, admitted to spiking his ex-wife Gisèle’s drink with a potent mix of sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication – and inviting a group of over 50 men to sexually abuse her while she was unconscious.
Caroline opens up on how her father’s “perversity” tormented her in her book, Et j’ai cessé de t’appeler papa (And I Stopped Calling You Father), which is set to be published in English next month.
Pelicot furiously denied abusing his daughter but was charged with violating her privacy by sharing images he secretly recorded of her online, which police found in a file named “Around my daughter, naked”.
In court today, Pelicot was found guilty of taking indecent images of his daughter, Caroline and his daughters-in-law, Aurore and Celine.
Caroline and her mum Gisèle watched in court today as the verdicts were read out. However the pair sat apart. The BBC reports that there have been signs of tension between the pair after Caroline accused her mum of not being supportive enough after the shock indecent images of her were found.
Caroline and her two brothers recall incidents from when they thought their mum had passed out from drinking too much. Twisted Pelicot would try and convince them “it happens” and that he needed to take her to bed.
The 72-year-old was unknowingly drugged by her own husband and raped 92 times by strangers he invited into the bedroom. The horror sex assault took place at their home in Mazan near Carpeentras in Provence, between 2011 and 2020.
Pelicot who was married to Gisèle for 50 years admitted to running an online chatroom, disturbingly titled “without her knowledge”, where he would advertise for participants to perform sexual acts on his wife. Today, Dominique Pelicot was found guilty of aggravated rape. He was also found guilty of the attempted aggravated rape of the wife of one of the co-accused, Jean Pierre Marechal, Cillia.
Pelicot will spend a total of 20 years behind bars. As the judge delivered their comments, Gisèle was seen with her eyes closed and resting her head on a wall.
The Pelicots stayed in a large family home around 70 miles from Marseille. They were a well respected retired couple with three adult children. In her book, Caroline has told how tough it was for her mother to come to terms with the fact that a man she had loved since he was 18 was capable of such evil acts.
In one chapter previewed by the Guardian, she wrote: “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.”
Pelicot invited over 50 men from a depraved online forum into the couple’s home. All were told to wash their hands, and not to wear aftershave, so she would not sense she had been around others while unconscious.
The sexual abuse was filmed and stored on a USB drive dubbed ‘Abuses’. Investigators only learned about the horror in 2020, when Pélicot was arrested in a supermarket in Carpentras for filming up the skirts of customers. When police searched his camera, phone and equipment at his home, they found 3,800 photos and videos of Gisèle being abused.
Caroline learned about his crimes when her mother called her a few hours later simply saying: “Your father is going to jail”. During the trial, Ms Pélicot described the moment she shared the news with her daughter. She told the court last month: “When I told my daughter, she screamed like a wild beast. I will never forget this.
“When I told my sons about this, I don’t think they really understood, they were withdrawn and didn’t react much. I think they were in a state of shock. They said, ‘Don’t say such silly things’. That evening, the children rang all the time saying don’t disappear – they were worried I might die.”
The daughter also recounts in the book how when she and her brothers raised concerns about their mother’s frequent loss of memory and their dad, who she now refers to as her ‘genitor’, would put it down to stress or change the subject, shutting down their fears of Alzheimer’s.
Talking about her mother’s strength in her book, in a copy obtained by The Telegraph, Caroline writes: “Even the day when she learned that one of her rapists had HIV, she didn’t collapse.” She tells how her father did what he did “for no financial gain”. Caroline continues: “Ultimate perversity. Father, who always had money problems, didn’t profit from Maman. He did it purely for his pleasure.”
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