Mazan rape trial: Caroline Darian “the great forgotten one”

Caroline Darian, the daughter of the Pelicot couple, considered on Monday to be “the great forgotten one” in the Mazan rape trial, saying she was convinced that she too had been drugged and raped by her father Dominique, like her mother Gisèle.

“The only difference between her and me is the lack of evidence against me. For me, it’s an absolute tragedy,” she explained before the Vaucluse criminal court.

Heard from the first week of the trial, which began on September 2, Caroline Darian (editor’s note: her pen name under which she published a book in April, “And I stopped calling you dad”), 45 years old, repeated that she was “trying to rebuild herself” because her life had been “on hold for four years”.

In the fall of 2020, the couple’s three children learned of this decade of rapes orchestrated by their father, on their mother, whom he drugged with anxiolytics to offer to dozens of men recruited on the internet. But, on the files stored in Dominique Pelicot’s computer, investigators also discovered images of Caroline naked, taken without her knowledge.

“The courage to tell the truth”

In some, she appears asleep, sometimes wearing her mother’s feminine underwear. Since then, she has been “convinced” that she too was drugged by her father, with the nagging doubt of having also been raped in her sleep. Facts that Dominique Pelicot persisted in denying on Monday.

After attending the first weeks of the hearing, in September, Caroline returned to the Paris region, where she works and lives: “I asked to return to the clinic, to hope to find inner peace, because I know that I cannot will never have my answers. (…) You will never have enough love for your daughter,” she told her father on Monday.

“In your disgusting files, (…) you do not look at me as a father looks at his daughter, but in an incestuous way. But you will never have the courage to tell the truth,” she insisted.

Associative commitment

“If I manage to get through it, it’s because I am committed through my association” to help victims of chemical submission, “because the Gisèle Pelicots are 1% of the victims,” according to her.

“For me, this trial (…) is also the historic trial of chemical submission in France. I work behind the scenes, I challenge the public authorities. But at what cost? That of my mental health, at the cost of my survival and my personal repair,” she said.

“I will not give up, I am committed to the end: as long as we have not succeeded in obtaining measures (on this question of chemical submissions) in France, I will continue to mobilize on the ground,” concluded Caroline Darian.

“Latest news”

Want to stay on top of the news? “Tribune de Genève” offers you two meetings per day, directly in your email box. So you don’t miss anything that’s happening in your canton, in Switzerland or around the world.

Other newsletters

Log in

AFP

Did you find an error? Please report it to us.

0 comments