Gisèle Pelicot’s daughter accuses her of ‘not believing’ she was a victim of her dad
Gisèle Pelicot’s daughter has accused her own mother of being ‘reluctant’ to believe that she was also drugged and raped by Dominique Pelicot.
Caroline Darian – who previously described herself as the ‘forgotten’ victim of the trial against her father – criticised her parent for ‘letting her down by not backing her claim.
She described Gisèle’s reluctance to believe her as a ‘point of no return’ in their relationship, saying: ‘It is an abandonment too many.’
Caroline opened up about the rift in her newly-published book, ‘So That We May Remember.’
Pelicot – Gisèle’s husband of 38 years – drugged her and invited scores of men to rape her while unconscious over a 10-year period.
A court in Avignon found 47 of the defendants guilty of rape, two guilty of attempted rape and two guilty of sexual assault. Some of them were also found guilty of owning child abuse imagery.
Most of the men came from the Pelicots’ home village of Mazan, or nearby towns and settlements.
The retired electrician denied the allegations about his daughter during the trial, and when Gisèle was asked if she backed her claims, she declined to answer.
Caroline wrote in her book that her mother ‘does not want to believe me or hear me’ amid the allegations, The Times reported.
‘It’s as though the ground opened up under my feet,’ she said. ‘Her silence says a lot. I thought we were a united and tight-knit clan … and I am hit by this implacable reality in the face: my mother does not want to believe me or to hear me.
‘The pain runs right through me. I have spent four years trying to be there for my mother, cherishing the bond that counted so much for me.
‘I feel alone facing a wall of desolation and no one seems to understand.’
Caroline said that psychologists had warned her that her relationship with her mother was unlikely to survive the trial.
An extract from her memoir, published in the Guardian, recounted how she learnt that her father took nude pictures of her.
‘How did he manage to take my photo in the middle of the night without waking me up?,’ she thought as she looked at pictures police showed her.
‘Where did the underwear come from, as I’m sure it’s not mine? Did he drug me? Did he go beyond the photos?
‘Did he – I can’t keep the unthinkable at bay – abuse me? It takes some time for me to be able to look directly at the police officers and admit that it is indeed me in the photos.
‘I try to think when they might have been taken. It’s hard to say, but they don’t look recent.’
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.