Gisele Pelicot’s daughter reveals family thought drug effects could be dementia

Gisele Pelicot’s daughter has said the family thought her incoherent behaviour after being drugged might have been brain cancer or the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.

Caroline Darian’s father Dominique Pelicot was jailed for 20 years for spiking his wife with sedatives, raping her and inviting dozens of other men to do the same over the course of a decade.

She is now seeking to take the so-called ‘Monster of Avignon’ back to court, accusing him of abusing her too.

‘I know he drugged me, and he probably did a lot more,’ Caroline said.

Caroline, who published I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again on the trauma of discovering her father’s shocking abuse, appeared on ITV’s This Morning where she discussed the case and her relationship with mum Gisele, who she calls a ‘hero’.

Looking back, she described how she and her brothers noticed their mother’s occasional ‘incoherent behaviour’ or how she would speak ‘in a different way’.

They now know this to be the effects of the drugs administered by their father to facilitate his and others’ abuse of her.

‘She was here without being here,’ Caroline recalled. ‘It was really weird. She didn’t seem in her right mind.

‘But we were far from this reality. We thought about brain cancer. We thought about Alzheimer’s. We thought maybe she was starting to have a dementia disease.

‘How could we think about that?’

Dominique Pelicot and 50 other men were jailed for a total of 428 years following a mass rape trial which culminated at the end of last year.

Caroline said the police officers who initially investigated Dominique when he was first held on suspicion of upskirting in a local supermarket had unwittingly ‘saved’ her mother.

When they examined his phone and other devices, they found 20,000 photos and video clips showing Gisele being abused by scores of different men while clearly unconscious.

But Caroline says there are two which haunt her more than the thousands of others and show her lying unconscious in an unfamiliar position.

Caroline said she ‘knew right from the beginning’ that she was also abused by her father and described feeling like ‘the invisible victim’ during his trial.

‘I need to get the truth, she said. ‘I don’t know what the next steps are going to be, but I am aligned with myself. I know something wrong happened before or after those pictures.

‘I am not sleeping – I am sedated and in the same position as my mother.’

Caroline described having a close relationship with her father, saying she ‘trusted him 100%’ before his depravity was revealed.

‘I never saw him staring at a woman,’ she said. ‘He had some respectful comments about women, so when we as his children discovered that, our world collapsed. All our foundations fell down.’

She could only bear to look at one of the photographs seized from her father, saying it was ‘too violent’ and left her in a ‘state of shock’.

‘The worst thing is to discover you are betrayed by one of the most important men in your whole life,’ Caroline went on.

‘For my mum, it was her husband, now they are divorced. But for me, it was my father. I have his DNA.’

Caroline and her brothers say their mother is a ‘hero’.

‘She is 72 years old and had every single day during four months facing her sexual abuser, facing Dominique,’ she went on.

‘She has tremendous courage. We are really proud of her.’

But rather than driving them together, Caroline revealed the trauma inflicted by her father’s abuse has driven her and her mother apart.

‘We have to rebuild each other in a different way, and we can’t help each other,’ she said.

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