Gisèle Pelicot’s Daughter Filed a Sex-Abuse Complaint Against Her Father – The Cut

Photo: GUILLAUME HORCAJUELO/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Nearly three months after the convicted rapist Dominique Pelicot was sentenced to 20 years in prison for drugging his wife, Gisèle Pelicot, and inviting dozens of strangers to rape her at their home in Mazan, France, for almost a decade, the couple’s daughter, Caroline Darian, has filed a legal complaint of her own. She is accusing her father of drugging and sexually assaulting or raping her in the 2010s, when she was in her 30s.

The complaint, which was filed in a French court this week, is the first time Darian’s long-standing sex-abuse allegations against Pelicot will be investigated by French police. After Pelicot was first arrested in 2020 for secretly filming up women’s skirts at a supermarket, police discovered photos of a nude and semi-nude Darian in Pelicot’s vast photo and video catalogue documenting his yearslong violation of his wife. In the images, which police showed to Darian, she says she was wearing underwear she didn’t recognize and that her body was arranged in unfamiliar sleeping positions. Darian, who is 46, wrote a book, I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again, about her family trauma and the shock of the discovery: “I lived in a dissociation effect … I had difficulties recognizing myself from the start,” she told the BBC in January. “I was laying on my left side like my mother, in all her pictures.” Darian — who has become an advocate against chemical submission in France — added that she knew her father had drugged her, “probably for sexual abuse,” but unlike her mother, she did not have concrete evidence: “And that’s the case for how many victims? They are not believed … they’re not listened to, not supported.”

During his widely publicized trial last year, Pelicot was convicted for taking indecent photos of his daughter but was not charged with drugging, raping, or sexually abusing her. In the courtroom, Darian heatedly confronted him about his alleged abuse, which he denied: “I know you abused me. You don’t have the courage to tell me,” Darian told Pelicot in court, per the Guardian. “I never touched you, never,” Pelicot insisted, to which Darian replied: “You are lying!”

Now, Darian, who says she filed her complaint as a “message to all victims” to “never give up,” says the initial investigation failed to prioritize her case, adding that she wasn’t given expert gynecological or toxicological tests at the time. A lawyer for Pelicot told BFM TV that the state prosecutor said there were insufficient “objective elements” to pursue her allegations.

Meanwhile, Darian is represented by lawyer Florence Rault, whom she hired after noticing similarities between herself and another woman she represents, a property agent who goes by the pseudonym Marion and was the victim of an attempted rape by Pelicot in 1999. During his trial, Pelicot admitted to Marion’s attempted-rape crime after DNA evidence found on her shoe was linked back to him. “We look strangely alike,” Darian told Elle France this week, of Marion. “She is blonde, her hair is bobbed, we were born the same year … I wanted to meet her lawyer and hear all the details.”