‘Did he drug me too?’: Gisele Pelicot’s daughter reveals horrific question

Gisele Pelicot’s daughter has revealed the horrific questions she was forced to consider after learning of her father’s decade of abuse.

When Caroline Darian learned that her father had repeatedly drugged and raped her mother for a decade – and invited dozens of other men to do the same – she was plagued by three horrific questions.

Gisele Pelicot, a retiree living in the small French town of Mazan, was told by police in November 2020 that between 2011 and 2020, her husband Dominique Pelicot had spiked her food and drink with a concoction of sleeping and anti-anxiety pills.

They claimed he had recruited well more than 50 men to come to their home and sexually assault her.

The scale and depravity of his actions have been laid bare in an ongoing court case in Avignon that has appalled people around the world.

Pelicot meticulously documented the raping of his wife, keeping the 20,000 photographs and videos on a hard drive labelled “abuse”.

Among the recordings, however, detectives made another disturbing discovery: two images of a much younger woman asleep in bed.

Ms Darian was promptly called into the police station.

“The quilt was lifted on the right side so you could see her bottom up close,” she writes of the images in her book Et jai cessé de t’appeler papa (And I stopped calling you father), the English translation of which will be released next month.

“She was sleeping. I thought she was astonishingly pale and with dark circles under her eyes.”

Gisele Pelicot arrives at the Avignon courthouse for the trial of her former partner Dominique Pelicot. Picture: Christophe Simon/AFP

Dominique Pelicot is accused of repeatedly drugging his wife and inviting dozens of strangers to rape her. Picture: Supplied

At first the 45-year-old, who is the couple’s only daughter, didn’t recognise the sleeping figure. Then, “the police officer handed me the second photo”.

“The sheets reminded me vaguely of something but nothing more. I repeated that I didn’t recognise myself. ‘No, it’s not me,’ I said.”

When the officer asked if she had a brown mole on her right cheek like the woman in the images, Ms Darian was forced to face the truth.

A file on Mr Pelicot’s computer named “Around my daughter, naked” affirmed it.

“How could he have photographed me in the middle of the night without waking me?” she recalls thinking.

“Did he also drug me? Worse still, did he abuse me?”

Gisele Pelicot's daughter Caroline Darian described how she was increasingly tormented by the idea her father’s may have drugged her as well. Picture: Christophe Simon/AFP

Pelicot has vehemently denied abusing his daughter, but has been charged with violating her privacy by sharing the images he secretly recorded of her online.

The “perversity” of his actions, Ms Darian writes, have increasingly tormented her.

Appearing before the court as part of her father’s trial in September, Ms Darian described him as “probably one of the worst sexual criminals in the past 20 years”.

“My life was literally turned upside down (when I learned of his abuse). My mother said, ‘I spent most of the day at the police station. Your father drugged me to rape me with strangers. I was made to look at the photos’,” she said.

“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. I called my brothers … We didn’t know what was happening to us.”

In her book, Ms Darian details how her father’s actions threatened to destroy her own relationship with Ms Pelicot, who at first refused to acknowledge the abuse orchestrated against her by her “perfect” husband.

“She is trying to convince herself that the man she loved for so many years was not always a sexual criminal and so depraved,” she writes in a chapter titled “14 December 2020”.

She also describes the increasing anxiety she and her two brothers felt over Ms Pelicot’s frequent unexplained “absences” and memory loss – which were eventually found to be caused by the drugs Pelicot had administered.

When they voiced their concern to their father, urging him to take Ms Pelicot to see a neurologist in case she had Alzheimer’s, he attributed her behaviour to stress and insomnia or would change the subject, Ms Darian says.

“I lost count of the times my mother seemed not all there. The most worrying was when she had no memory of our chats only a day or two before. As if her brain was updating.”

Ms Pelicot with her daughter and her son during the trial. Picture: Christophe Simon/AFP

Ms Pelicot’s memory recall was fine when she and her husband visited and stayed with Ms Darian or her brothers.

“But when they left, we had difficulty reaching her for 48 hours when she got back to Mazan,” Ms Darian says.

“My father would answer her phone. He’d say she was resting and recuperating from their stay. Always the same lie … and to think we believed it.”

As Ms Pelicot herself has told the court during the trial, “There were signs. I just didn’t see them at the time.”

The hearing, which has entered its 10th week, is expected to last until December 20

– with AFP