Gisele Pelicot: Who are her children? Were they abused? What did they say in court
As Gisele Pelicot’s husband Dominique is jailed for the horrific gang rapes he organised on his drugged wife, what of the rest of the family?
Gisele Pelicot and her husband Dominique lived, on the face of it, very ordinary retired lives, in a pleasant small town. As the world now knows, the reality was far from the case, and for a decade Dominique had been drugging his wife with sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication for sex and inviting strangers round to her abuse her.
After a marathon trial, the retired estate agent has now been jailed for 20 years - and the case has ignited a new campaign to look again at rape in French law - but the effect on the Pelicots’ family will inevitably linger.
Gisele and Dominique Pelicot have three children - David, Caroline Darian and Florian. The court was told during the trial that pictures of Caroline were found on Dominique’s laptop. She was asleep in bed - and she was wearing underwear she did not recognise. Caroline believes she was abused by her father as well.
Caroline
Middle child Caroline screamed at her father in court as she demanded to know the truth about photos. They were titled “My naked daughter”, and the images show her semi-naked and, she says, clearly drugged. Caroline Darian accused her father of lying to the court, saying she was convinced he abused her
Dominique offered at times contradictory explanations for the pictures, but always denied abusing his daughter. “You are a liar,” she shouted at him. “I am sick of your lies, you are alone in your lie, you will die lying.”
At one point she accused her father of looking at her “with incestuous eyes”.
Caroline Darian has said she feels like a “forgotten victim” as there is no record of the abuse she believes was inflicted on her.
She has founded a charity to highlight the dangers of drug-induced assault and published a book in 2022 detailing her family’s trauma. In it, she hinted at a rift with her mother, who she found had dropped off a bundle of warm clothes for her father in jail, weeks after his crimes came to light.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Caroline wrote. “She was still looking after the person who got her raped for a decade.”
David
David urged his father to tell the truth about what happened to Caroline - and Dominique replied that he had never abused his children or his grandchildren.
Dominique asked his son for forgiveness, and David replied: “Never.”
David, a sales manager from outside Paris, told the court he and his family’s “lives were destroyed” when investigators found video evidence of multiple rapes of his mother following. They emerged after Dominique was arrested for filming up the skirts of women in a supermarket in Carpentras.
Naked photographs of David’s wife Celine, pregnant with their twin daughters, were also found among Dominique’s files. She had been pictured in the bathroom with a hidden camera.
Florian
Florian, the youngest of the family, told his father: “If you have any dignity and humanity – you don’t have anything left to lose anyway – tell Caroline the truth.”
He had been married to Aurore, the mother of his three children, but the marriage foundered after it was revealed that Dominique also took secret photographs of her.
The sentences
Dominique Pelicot has been sentened to 20 years in jail for drugging and raping her and allowing other men to rape her while she was unconscious. The sentence against him was the maximum possible under French law. He was declared guilty of all charges against him. At the age of 72, it could mean that he spends the rest of his life in prison.
Roger Arata, the lead judge of the court in the southern French city of Avignon, told him to stand for the sentencing. After it was delivered, he sat back down and cried.
The judge read out the verdicts one after the other against Dominique Pelicot and the 50 other men tried in the case that shook France.
“You are therefore declared guilty of aggravated rape on the person of Gisele Pelicot”, the judge said as he worked his way through names on the list.
Gisele Pelicot was seated on one side of the courtroom, facing the defendants as the verdicts were announced. Of the 50 accused of rape, just one was acquitted but was found guilty of aggravated sexual assault. Another man was also found guilty on the sexual assault charge that he was tried for – meaning all 51 of the defendants were found guilty in one way or another.
In a side room where family members of the defendants watched the proceedings on television screens, some burst into tears and gasped as the sentences were revealed.