The daughter of a French pensioner on trial for hiring strangers to rape his sedated wife described him on Friday as “likely one of the worst sexual criminals in the past 20 years.”
Dominique Pelicot, 71, has acknowledged abusing his wife without her knowledge from 2011 to 2020, drugging her with sleeping medications and then recruiting dozens of strangers to rape her in her own house.
“How are we supposed to rebuild ourselves when we know” what he did, said his daughter, 45-year-old Caroline Darian, who uses a pen name, appearing in court in the southern city of Avignon on the fifth day of a case that has shocked France.
Pelicot kept careful records of his wife’s abuse, which police discovered by chance after he was arrested filming women’s skirts at a supermarket.
For years, his wife, Gisele Pelicot, 71, who is in divorce proceedings, claims she was plagued by unexplained memory gaps until she was visited by police. Dominique Pelicot told investigators that he gave his wife powerful tranquilizers, including Temesta, an anxiety-reducing medication.
Speaking to the court on Friday morning, their daughter Darian described how she learned about the alleged assault on November 2, 2020, from her mother after speaking with investigators.
“My life was turned upside down,” Darian explained. “My mother said: ‘I spent the majority of the day at the police station. Your father drugged me and raped me with strangers. “I was made to look at the photos.”
“It was what you call a tipping point, the start of a slow descent into hell where you have no idea how low you will sink,” she added, breaking down in tears. “I phoned my brothers… “We had no idea what was happening to us.”
Darian had left the room in tears less than 20 minutes into the second day of the trial on Tuesday when the presiding judge recalled how naked photomontages of her had also been discovered on Dominique Pelicot’s computer in a folder named “Around my daughter, naked.”
In 2022, Darian authored a book titled “Et j’ai cesse de rappeler papa” (“And I stopped calling you dad”) about the impact of the atrocities on the family.
The victim demanded that the trial be public
Gisele Pelicot requested that her husband’s trial be made public to raise awareness about the use of narcotics to conduct sexual abuse.
The story has shaken France, with many people commenting and even sharing alleged lists of the accused online.
Gisele Pelicot and her family expressed gratitude to the public for their support on Friday, but urged “the utmost restraint on social media” throughout the court process.
“Our clients understand perfectly that this case is a tragedy for all families,” including the defendants’, said Antoine Camus.
Paul-Roger Gontard, the lawyer for two of the accused, hailed the decision for protecting the families of his clients and other suspects who may be found innocent.
At least one person has started a crowdsourcing drive for the family.
Gisele Pelicot “does not wish for any crowdfunding campaigns to be launched and requests that any existing ones be terminated,” her attorneys Camus and Stephane Babonneau said in a statement.
“I just wanted to disappear”
Gisele Pelicot testified on Thursday, saying that the police saved her life by revealing the crimes.
“The police saved my life by investigating Mister P.’s computer,” she said in court, referring to her husband.
She testified that up until then, they had been an “ideal couple,” and that she and her husband had surmounted a variety of financial and health-related challenges, according to the BBC. Everything changed when the crimes became public.
“I only wanted to disappear. But I had to tell my children that their father had been arrested. When I told my daughter that her father had raped me and had me raped by others, I begged my son-in-law to stay with her,” she claimed. “She let out a howl, whose sound is still etched on my mind.”