My father is “without doubt one of the greatest sexual criminals of the last 20 years”, said on Friday the daughter of Dominique Pelicot, the man on trial in Avignon for drugging his wife and having her raped by dozens of strangers recruited on the internet.
“How do we rebuild ourselves when we know” that, asked Caroline Darian, 45, daughter of the main accused, who now presents herself publicly under her pen name, with which she published a book in April, “And I stopped calling you dad”, in order to protect her relationship and her child.
Heard on Friday morning for around twenty minutes by the criminal court of Vaucluse, where her father and 50 other men, aged 26 to 74, have been on trial since Monday for four months, the daughter of the main accused returned to the day when she learned everything.
“On November 2, 2020, at 8:35 p.m., my life literally changed,” she explained, recounting the moment when her mother, after also learning everything from the police in Carpentras (Vaucluse), called her to inform her.
“My mother told me, ‘I spent a good part of the day at the police station, your father was drugging me to rape me with strangers. I must have seen photos’,” she says.
“This is what we call a tipping point, this slide where we have no idea how far we will go,” she explains, touched, barely holding back her sobs: “I call my brothers, we are helpless, we cry, we do not understand what is happening to us. We are in pain, a pain that I would not wish on anyone.”
The next day, November 3, 2020, the three children found themselves in Carpentras, in front of the police.
“I will always see David, white, stoic, and my little brother Florian collapsing,” she describes, returning to this moment when a police officer estimated the number of her mother’s attackers at “between 30 and 50”.
At the end of the investigation, 72 men were finally identified as having abused Ms. Pelicot, between July 2011 and October 2020, of which only 50 were identified and are being tried in Avignon.
On the same day, November 3, 2020, the police showed him two photos of a naked woman, apparently asleep: “We see her buttocks in close-up, this woman is sleeping in the fetal position, I don’t recognize her,” explains Caroline Darian.
But it is indeed her, the investigator explains to her: “But madam, it is indeed you who has a spot on your right cheek.”
“I discovered that my father had photographed me, without my knowledge, naked, why?” asks his daughter, now convinced that her father had also drugged her, as he had done with her mother.
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