David, Florian and Caroline, the three children of the Pelicot couple, told the Vaucluse criminal court how much their family was destroyed by this extraordinary criminal affair, each having been affected in a different way by the explosion that was the arrest of their father in November 2020.
At the Vaucluse criminal court, once again packed with the return of the 51 accused, the confrontation is terrible, this Monday, October 18, at the Mazan rape trial, where the three children of Gisèle and Dominique Pelicot, civil parties alongside of their mother.
David, 50, the eldest son, stares angrily at his father, sitting in the box and not looking down.
Dominique Pelicot cuts off his son
“I'm waiting if you have a little humanity, you tell the truth, about the actions you had on my sister who suffers every day and who will suffer all her life, on my son. What did you do?” Dominique Pelicot, furious, cuts him off.
“Nothing! On none of the children and grandchildren!”
David raises his voice: “Relax, relax! You'll talk later!” The president intervenes. David Pelicot explains: “It’s unbearable! He’s been in this posture for a month!”
Caroline is in tears when David speaks
Caroline Darian, his sister, is in tears while her brother speaks. After her father's arrest on November 2, 2020, she learned that in addition to the thousands of photos and videos of her unconscious mother being raped, the file also contained photos of her dozing, in lingerie that she doesn't recognize it.
“I know that I was sedated, to be abused by Dominique Pelicot. It’s not a hypothesis, I know that” she assures, staring at her father. “At that moment, you don't look at me like a father looks at his daughter. You have an incestuous look and you will never have the courage to say it. But I understood that I will never have the answers to my questions to you.”
“The big one forgotten in this trial”
FREE NOON – François Barrère
She, who founded an association against chemical submission, believes she is “the great forgotten person of this trial. Four years ago, when my life turned upside down, I really lost my footing because I immediately understood that I myself was a victim of Dominique Pelicot. But I only thought of one thing about my mother, Gisèle, and not about me. I realized during this first month of trial that I had thought so much about her and not about me, that I found myself a little invisible.” She recalls: “When they show me these photos of me at the police station, they don’t ask me to do this hair test”being able to determine if she too had undergone chemical submission.
The cruel questioning of Florian Pelicot
The specter of incest and abuse committed by Dominique Pelicot weighs on the entire family, suspicions relating to “the doctor's game” which he allegedly indulged in on his grandson, and on requests for naked photos from his granddaughters.
Florian Pelicot, 38 years old, the youngest of the siblings, has a completely different question, having been born at a time when his mother had experienced an extramarital affair, an episode very cruelly experienced by her husband.
A perverse revenge?
“Indeed I have this question of knowing if my father is really my father” he admits. The president: “Do you ever think that you could be the motive that caused your father to go crazy?” The question is one of the keys to this extraordinary affair, this desire to humiliate and subject his wife to degrading acts is perhaps a revenge as terrible as it is perverse.
Florian Pelicot turns to his father: “Is this what conditioned all the facts, this choice to rape all these women?” The response comes from the box: “Aabsolutely not!”
Florian also wants to go further. “It’s not necessarily easy to be Dominique Pelicot’s son today. Often in these major criminal cases, the name we remember is that of the bad guy and there, it is that of Gisèle Pelicot. And it's not the same thing at all. I want my children to be proud to carry the name Pelicot.”
Aurore's return to the helm
Aurore, the mother of their three children, from whom he is now divorced, asks to return to the stand. She herself was sexually abused as a child by her grandfather, and was photographed naked without her knowledge by Dominique Pelicot, in her bathroom.
“TEveryone in this room had a responsibility to make choices other than what they did. When we experience abuse, we have the choice to take charge or not, to reproduce things, or to give in to deviance. Perhaps if he had gotten out of this bond of dependence that existed with Gisèle, Dominique could have experimented with other things in his sexuality. But he did the choice to stay with her and the frustrations piled up.”
Trial suspended Wednesday evening
Dominique Pelicot should be questioned one last time this Tuesday, November 19. The pleadings of the two lawyers for Gisèle Pelicot and her children, civil parties, must begin Wednesday morning. The trial will then be interrupted until Monday, November 25, for the indictment, scheduled to last until Wednesday, November 27. The first defense argument, that of Me Béatrice Zavarro for Dominique Pelicot, is scheduled for Thursday, November 28 in the morning, before that of the forty other lawyers intervening for the 50 co-defendants of the septuagenarian.
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