The day when his father and dozens of other men were condemned for raising his mother in a trial that had grabbed France was an acute personal tragedy for Caroline Darian.
She fled the court of Avignon and was surrounded by a gigantic crowd of women who block traffic and sang their love and gratitude for her and her mother, Gisèle Pelicot, who had become a feminist icon in France for insisting on the trial against her husband and 50 other men were public and refused to feel ashamed as the victim of rape.
But Mrs. Darian did not listen to them. It was overwhelmed by despair.
The trial was finished and had not obtained the answers he had hoped for from his father, Dominique Pelicot, who also believes drugged and raped.
“Dominique was not tried for what he did to his daughter,” said Mrs. Darian, 46, in a recent interview for lunch in a Parisian restaurant off the Champs-Élysées. “He didn’t even adequately face what he did to his daughter.”
The process that led to the beliefs of 51 men inspected the horror forensic, Mr. Pelicot inflicted on his wife for almost a decade, while mixing sleeping pans and drug drugs in his drink and food and then, when he was deeply passed out, he dressed it in lingerie and invited the strangers to come and join him in the rap that he took it and filmed it.
But the suspicions of his only daughter Caroline were little more than a part of the trial. Instead of going out with a degree of healing, Mrs. Darian felt deeply injured.
“My case, in that court, was as if it didn’t exist,” said Mrs. Darian, who uses a pen name.
“It was terrible,” he said.
At the beginning of this month, he presented his police complaint against his father for rape and sexual aggression. He coincided with the publication of Mrs. Darian’s second book on his father’s crimes and on the cataclysmic impact they had on his life.
His first book, a raw diary that documents the intimate horror he suffered in the year following his father’s arrest, was released in the United States on Tuesday as “I will never call him dad again”. He accepted an interview with the New York Times in collaboration with his publication.
At the center of his case there are two intimate photos that his father had canceled but that forensic investigators had managed to recover from Mr. Pelicot’s electronics. Both captures Mrs. Darian sleeping in bed, with the lights on and the covers pulled back to reveal her beige underwear.
The underwear, he told Mrs. Darian to the court, was not his. He said he had no memory of the photos taken and that it was a light dormant. He believes that she was also drugged and that her father used the same modus operandi on her like him on his mother.
During the trial, Mr. Pelicot initially denied having taken the photos and said he didn’t believe he was his daughter. Later, he said he took them because he was blackmailed.
The investigators also found evidence of a folder canceled with the title, “My Naked Daughter” and photographic collage of Mrs. Darian and Mrs. Pelicot, both naked, that Mr. Pelicot had shared with foreigns online. In an exchange on Skype, he referred to his “trapped daughter”.
But when it was his daughter, he was condemned only on charges of taking the intimate photos without his permission.
Mrs. Darian is convinced that she is the test of much more serious crimes that investigators have lost or ignored, overwhelmed by the case of her mother.
His 30 -page police report, seen from the New York Times, includes material found by investigators although not grown in the trial.
They include transcriptions of the Skype interactions that Mr. Pelicot had with another user in 2020 when he had shared photographic assembly. After the user admired his daughter, Mr. Pelicot wrote: “More than eight years have passed, I have offered her like this.
Mr. Pelicot’s lawyer, Béatrice Zavarro, said he had not yet seen the complaint. He noticed that the prosecutor general in the last year trial had recognized Mrs. Darian’s complaints, but had said that there were not enough “objective elements” to pursue Mr. Pelicot for them.
During the trial, Mr. Pelicot repeatedly claimed to have never ducked his daughter. He denied it sexually touching her or one of her children and grandchildren, the eldest of whom also filed a police complaint that he too was sexually abused by Mr. Pelicot.
Before the arrest of his father, neither she nor her brothers suspected that he was a sex predator, they told the court. They were a close -knit family, often gathering for the holidays in Provence, where Mr. and Mrs. Pelicot had retired. Their parents had been together for 50 years and seemed very happy.
His arrest and admission to the crimes against the mother caused a sudden deep shock. Mrs. Darian started suffering from panic attacks. He stopped sleeping and was briefly hospitalized in a psychiatric ward.
“As long as I was 41, I thought my father was a good and kind person,” said Mrs. Darian. “In 2020, all our children from children crumbled.”
In 2019, Mrs. Darian was paralyzed by pain by an anal tear could not explain and this required three operations, according to her police report. Now he believes that he was probably caused by his father or by men who may have invited to rape it.
In addition to the reporting of the police for sexual abuse filed by the major nephew, Pelicot was also indicted in two cold cases, involving young women’s real estate agents in the 90s. The first was raped and assassinated; The second managed to escape an attempt to rape and took refuge in a wardrobe.
During the trial, while Mrs. Pelicot remained calm and emotionally detached, Mrs. Darian was a cyclone of emotion. Anger and suffering rise in waves. Apart from the process, he announced on Instagram that he was checking in a clinic “to be able to sleep again”.
“You are lying – you don’t have the courage to tell the truth,” he shouted, towards the end of the trial when his father once again denied having abused her. “You will die with your lies, alone with your lies.”
Remembering that day months later for lunch, Mrs. Darian broke into tears. The refusal of his father to recognize the evidence and explain it, he said, was “the utmost betrayal”.
“He had to truth,” he said. “I’m not just a victim.
Mrs. Darian lost not only her father, but also her mother. The two don’t speak anymore, he said. While he is sure that his father abuse her, his mother was more equivocal. When he was asked in court, he replied only that “he could not be excluded”.
For Mrs. Darian, it seemed an abandonment.
“My relationship with my mother will never be the same again,” he said.
Gisèle Pelicot refused all the interview requests. One of his lawyers says he will not speak publicly before the appeals of the convictions are listened to.
Mrs. Darian’s younger brother, Florian Pelicot, 38, said he believed that their mother showed a huge strength in facing her husband and dozens of other men, inflicted on her. By opening his mind to the accusations of his sister, he thinks, “he would have made her collapse”.
“You can’t save you and reconstruct and also help your children reconstruct yourself,” he said.
Florian Pelicot emerged from the trial with his deep wounds: his 18 -year -old wedding ended and started the trial to obtain a paternity test after his father raised doubts that he was his son during one of his preliminary interviews with the investigative judge, he said.
Towards the end of the trial, Mrs. Darian said he scarred through the courtroom for the glass box for the accused during a break for a short last private word with the man who had been his father.
He told him that their relationship was over, he said, but that his search for truth was not.
“I will go all the way to my personal dignity,” he said in the interview. “Because I know I’m not wrong.
Ségolène The Stradic Relationships contributed by Paris.