Fifth day of the highly acclaimed trial that has shocked France and the daughter of Gisele Pelicot, the woman who was drugged and raped hundreds of times by strangers recruited from the internet by her husband, Dominique Pelicot, took the stand.
Caroline Darian, who uses a pseudonym, was suddenly “orphaned” when she heard her mother reveal to her all the horrible things her father had done for almost a decade. He described him as “probably one of the worst sex offenders of the last 20 years”.
“How are we supposed to rebuild ourselves when we know what he did,” his daughter said, speaking at the court in the southern city of Avignon.
The day of revelation
Caroline Darian said she learned about the abuse from her mother in November 2020 after she had spoken to the police.
“My life turned upside down. My mother said, “I spent most of the day at the police station. Your father drugged me to rape me with strangers. They forced me to look at the pictures.” It was what we call a turning point, the beginning of a slow descent into hell, where you have no idea how low you’re going to sink,” she said, breaking into tears. “I called my brothers… We didn’t know what was happening to us.”
On the second day of the trial, Darian had left the courtroom within 20 minutes as the presiding judge recounted that nude photomontages of her had also been found on her father’s computer in a folder titled “Around My Daughter, Naked.”
The woman in 2022 wrote a book entitled Et j’ai cessé de t’appeler papa (“And I stopped calling you papa”) about the effect the revelation of the crimes had on the family.
The sign
Caroline expressed her belief that she too had been a victim of her father’s practices. In the photos found by the police, a woman can be seen sleeping, with the light on and her buttocks in plain view. The same scene was depicted in a second photo.
When the Police showed her the photos she did not identify herself. A police officer showed her a brown spot on the backside of the woman in the photo. And then, to her horror, she realized that it was herself in the photos. Her father photographed her naked.
“I realized that the man who was my father, whom I trusted completely, who I believed had integrity, who respected his daughter, who was proud of her, who always encouraged her, had photographed me without my knowledge, naked “, she told the court. As she told the court, she believes that she was not asleep in the photos, but that she, like her mother, had been drugged.
Most of the suspects face up to 20 years in prison for aggravated rape if convicted. Eighteen of the 51 defendants are in custody, including Dominique Pelicot. Thirty-two other defendants are free to watch the trial. The latter is tried in absentia. The trial will last until December 20.
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