For the millions of captivated viewers watching worldwide, the sentencing of depraved rapist Dominique Pelicot and 50 other men for the decade-long sexual abuse of his unwitting wife Gisele yesterday brought the horrific saga to a close.
For the Pelicot family, however – particularly Gisele and daughter Caroline – the impact of their patriarch’s crimes will be felt for the rest of their lives.
Gisele, of course, bore the brunt of the abuse and the intense scrutiny surrounding the case, having waived her right to anonymity, thus inviting the media to cover the story in excruciating detail.
But her 46-year-old daughter, known by her pen name Caroline Darian, believes she too was subjected to sordid abuse by her father.
She said the ordeal, plus the trying court proceedings, have caused her to ‘lose her mother’, with Pelicot’s heinous actions having driven a stake through the heart of his family.
Throughout the months-long trial, Caroline reportedly only sat with 72-year-old Gisele on a few occasions and the pair did not appear to show much affection to one another. She has previously said she felt her mother did not accept her concerns that she too may have been abused.
‘I consider myself to be the forgotten victim of this trial,’ Caroline told the court.
‘Gisele was certainly raped. She was chemically subdued, of course. The only difference between Gisele and me is that for her, there is proof. For me, it’s an absolute tragedy.’
The majority of the horrific photos and videos found meticulously catalogued on Pelicot’s hard drives depicted various strangers abusing an unconscious Gisele.
But some showed Caroline, also sleeping, in various states of undress.
Though there was no direct evidence that married mother-of-one Caroline was sexually abused, she strongly believes she was drugged by her father and says she will never know for sure if she was also raped.
While the knowledge that they are both victims has brought them together in court, Caroline’s diary has revealed that her relationship with her mother has been on a knife edge for four years.
The diaries, kept by Caroline in the wake of her father’s shocking arrest in 2020, were published in France as the memoir I No Longer Call Him Daddy and reveal the way in which the mother-daughter bond was eroded by the ordeal.
This alienation began as soon as Pelicot was first taken into custody.
Caroline was furious when her mother, who’d suffered years of debilitating abuse, still packed a bag of clean clothes and supplies for her husband languishing in a cell.
This was the first of many incidents in which Caroline felt as though Pelicot was manipulating his spouse from jail – and Gisele was allowing it.
‘Because of my father, I am losing my mother,’ a desperate Caroline wrote after learning that despite being banned from contacting his wife, Pelicot had smuggled a letter from prison to Gisele via another prisoner, in which he begged forgiveness and pleaded with her not to abandon him.
‘He’s still toying with his puppet,’ Caroline added, after learning that her mother had tried to keep the letter a secret from her and refused to let her see it.
In a diary entry for December 2020, she writes: ‘Relations with mum have become strained. She can’t imagine that I could also have been a victim of my father.
‘The idea is intolerable to her and I understand. But I am also angry at her for not being able to consider my doubts, to hear my rage and my pain.
‘She persists in telling me not to inflict such nervous and psychological tension on myself.
‘Officially, there is no evidence of chemical submission relating to me. No trace of molestation or rape. And yet, that doesn’t reassure me. I also know that she is hurt and trying her best to keep her head above water. She is in “survival mode”.
‘Bit by bit she’s settling into a kind of numbness in order to protect herself while I’m fighting with all my might against my own demons.’
Caroline briefly checked into a psychiatric facility as her mental health spiralled amid the fallout of her father’s arrest.
Gisele told the court during the trial that she preferred being left alone by her kids as she found Caroline’s fragile mental and emotional state to be ‘a burden’.
Caroline’s diaries also tell the story of her childhood as part of what she believed was a normal family.
She explained how Pelicot – whom she now calls her ‘progenitor’ – tirelessly accompanied her to school and dance classes, drove her to and from parties in her teens and later went on to show the same care for his grandkids, splashing about with them in the swimming pool in Mazan.
‘I think of us as happy,’ Caroline wrote. ‘I thought my parents were.’
That’s not to say there weren’t some signs in the years prior to the skin-crawling revelation of Dominique’s crimes that the Pelicots’ once blooming relationship was strained.
Writing about one incident in the summer of 2018, Caroline recalls how her brother went to visit their parents for an evening meal only to see his mother practically falling asleep at the dinner table.
‘Only a few minutes after sitting down Maman was swaying in her chair as though she was drunk,’ he told Caroline.
‘Suddenly her whole body was drained of energy, like a rag doll.’
‘It happens. It’s better if I take her to bed,’ his father was reported as saying, feigning the role of a concerned husband acting in his wife’s best interests.
‘In reality the cocktail of drugs, poured into her glass of rosé, was beginning to take effect,’ Caroline said.
As the various symptoms of her abuse grew ever more difficult to ignore, Mr Pelicot committed to a deplorable approach of manipulation and gaslighting to avoid suspicion.
In the late eighties, Gisele had embarked on a two-year affair with the only other man she ever willingly slept with besides her husband, according to her testimony.
The couple overcame the incident and remained happily married, going on to have three children.
But when his wife complained of severe pain and tested positive for a sexually transmitted disease after years of having been raped by strangers, Mr Pelicot seized the opportunity to blame it on another episode of supposed infidelity.
Caroline claimed that when Gisele told her husband she needed treatment for the unexplained illness, he remarked: ‘So, what are you doing with your days?’ and accused her of playing around while he was out playing boules or cycling.
Despite the nasty accusation and mounting evidence something was wrong, the loving wife remained unaware that her husband had anything to do with her malaise.
So blind was Gisele to Pelicot’s horrendous misdeeds that she was even willing to forgive him when he was arrested by police in September 2020, after he was caught snapping pictures up the skirts of female supermarket shoppers.
Police investigating the case confiscated Dominique’s computer and later discovered he had meticulously recorded, filed and catalogued a near-decade-long string of incessant abuse.
It wasn’t until officers sat Gisele down and confronted her with the undeniable evidence that the unconscious, gasping body she was watching being violated was her own did her litany of hitherto inexplicable symptoms make sense.
That realisation, of course, brought her entire world and that of her cherished family crashing down.
In a powerful 90-minute-long testimony before the court in Avignon, Gisele opened up on how the discovery drove her to the brink of suicide and left her daughter in a psychiatric ward.
‘We had everything, we had a great life. I don’t understand how this could have happened.
‘I only wanted one thing and that was to disappear. I told myself: “I am going to get in my car with my dog and end it all”.
‘I had to tell my children that their father was in custody. I called my son-in-law and told my daughter and told them: “He raped me”. Then I heard my daughter screaming a deep cry that I cannot get out of my head.
‘When I told my sons about this, I don’t think they really understood. They withdrew.
‘[That] evening, the children rang all the time saying “don’t disappear”… they were worried I might die.’
Caroline herself recounted to the judge the moment she heard, from her own mother, exactly what kind of monster her father was.
‘Then my mother called me to say that there was a problem with my father. I imagine that he is in intensive care, that he is dying,’ she said.
‘But she tells me that my father has been drugging her for years so that strangers can rape her in her own bed.
‘She says she has seen photos of what happened to her and that the police want to show her videos of what happened.
‘I totally lost my foundations. Fortunately my husband [Pierre] was there and my six year old son too. We took him away so that he did not hear his mother’s screams.’
