Her father’s day and dozens of other men were convicted The rape of mother in the trial that caught France was an acute personal tragedy of Caroline Darian.
She escaped from the Avignon courtroom and was wrapped in a giant crowd of women who blocked traffic and sang their love and gratitude for her and mother, Gisèle Pelicotwho in France became a feminist icon for insisting at trial against their husband and 50 other men to be public and refuse to be ashamed of the victim of rape.
But Mrs. Darian didn’t hear them. She was overwhelmed by despair.
The trial ended and did not receive the answers she hoped for from her father Dominique Pelicota, whom she believes to be drugged and raped.
“Dominique was not destined for what he had done to his daughter,” said Mrs. Darian, 46, in a recent interview during lunch at a Paris restaurant outside Champs-Élysées. “He did not even fit in the right way for what he had done to his daughter.”
Trial that led to Condemnation of 51 men forensically inspected the horror Mr. Pelicot Applied to her wife for almost a decade, as he mixed sleeping pills and anxiety medicines into her drink and food, and then, when she was deeply breathed, she wore in her underwear and invited foreigners to come and join him in rape while taking photos and took him.
But sCoating your only daughter Caroline They were a little more than the side light of the trial. Instead of going with the degree of healing, Mrs. Darian felt deeply wounded.
“My case, in that court, was like it didn’t exist,” said Mrs. Darian, who uses the name of the pen.
“It was scary,” she said.
Earlier this month, she filed her own police appeal against her father for rape and sexual attack. This coincided with the publication of Mrs. Darian’s second book about her father’s crimes and the cataclysmic influence they had on her life.
Her first book, Raw Journal who documented the intimate horror she suffered in the year after her father’s arrest was published on Tuesday in the United States as “I will never call it my dad again. “She agreed an interview with the New York Times in collaboration with his post.
In the center of her case there are two intimate photos her father deleted, but which forensic investigators managed to get Mr. Pelicota’s electronics. They both catch Mrs. Darian sleeping in bed, with lights lit, and the lids withdrew to discover their beige underwear.
Laundry, Mrs. Darian said in court, was not hers. She said she did not remember the photos and that she was a light sleeping. She believes that she was also drugged and that her father used the same modus operandi as he on her mother.
During the trial, Mr. Pelicot initially denied that he had taken photos and said he did not believe his daughters. He later said he took them because they blackmailed him.
Investigators also found evidence of a deleted folder with the title, “My Naked Daughter” and a photo of Mrs. Darian and Mrs. Pelicot, both naked, which Mr. Pelicot shared with strangers online. In one exchange on Skype, he looked back at his “captured daughter.”
But when it comes to his daughter, he was convicted only on charges that he had taken intimate photos without her permission.
Mrs. Darian is convinced that the evidence of much more severe crimes that investigators missed or neglected, overwhelmed by the case of her mother.
Her 30 -page police complaint, seen by The New York Times, includes the material found by investigators, although they were not performed at the trial.
They include Transcripts of Skype Interaction Mr. Pelicot had with another user in 2020 when he shared photo editing. After the user admired his daughter, Mr. Pelicot wrote: “It’s been over eight years I have offered it. Do you want to see her when she was 30?”
Mr. Pelicota’s lawyer, Béatrice weld, said she had not seen a lawsuit yet. She noted that the prosecutor General at last year’s trial confessed to Mrs. Darian’s complaints, but said that there were not enough “objective elements” to prosecute Mr. Pelicota for them.
During the trial, Mr. Pelicot repeatedly said he had never drugged his daughter. He denied sexually touching her or any of his children and grandchildren, the oldest of whom he had filed a police complaint that he was sexually abused by Mr. Pelicot.
Before the arrest of their father, neither she nor her brothers suspect she was a sex predator, they told the court. They were a narrow family, often gathered for resting in Provence, where Mr. and Mrs. Pelicot retreated. Their parents were together for 50 years and seemed very happy.
His arrest and acknowledgment of crime against their mother caused a sudden deep shock. Mrs. Darian began to suffer panic attacks. She stopped sleeping and was briefly hospitalized in the psychiatric ward.
“Until I was 41, I thought my father was a good, kind person,” Mrs. Darian said. “In 2020. All our foundations as children collapsed.”
In 2019, Ms. Darian was mutilated with anal tear pain that doctors could not explain, and this required three operations, according to her police complaint. She now believes that this was probably caused by her father or men, who he may have invited to rape.
In addition to the police report for sexual abuse submitted by his oldest grandson, Mr. Pelicot was also charged in two cold casesInclusion of young real estate agents in the 1990s. The first was raped and killed; The other managed to escape the rape attempt and printed in the closet.
During the trial, while Mrs. Pelicot remained calm and emotionally separated, Mrs. Darian was a cyclone emotion. Anger and suffering lifted her in the waves. Part of the trial, she announced Instagram that she signed up to the clinic “so she could sleep again.”
“You’re lying – you don’t have the courage to tell the truth,” she concealed, at the end of the trial when her father had once again denied that he had abused her. “You will die with your lies, alone with your lies.”
Remembering that day later during lunch, Mrs. Darian fell apart. The rejection of her father to acknowledge the evidence and explain it, she said, “Final betrayal.”
“He owed me the truth,” she said. “I’m not just a single victim. I was his daughter.”
Mrs. Darian lost not only her father but also her mother. The two of them no longer say, she said. Although she is sure her father abused her, her mother was easier. When asked in court, she replied only that “it cannot be turned off.”
Mrs. Darian, it felt like abandonment.
“My relationship with my mother will never be the same again,” she said.
Gisèle Pelicot rejected all interview requirements. One of her lawyers said she would not speak publicly before hearing appeals to condemnation, if ever.
Mrs. Darian’s Younger brother, Florian Pelicot, 38, he said that he believed their mother shows tremendous strength in dealing with the horrors of her husband, and dozens of other men inflicted on her. Opening his mind with the accusations of his sister, he thinks he would “make her collapse.”
“You cannot save yourself and renew yourself, and also help your children renew and,” he said.
Florian Pelicot came out of his trial with his own deep wounds: his 18-year marriage ended and began the process of obtaining a paternity test after his father had suspected that he was his son during one of his searcation interviews with an investigating judge, he said.
At the end of the trial, Mrs. Darian said she had crossed the courtroom to the glass box for the accused while recessing for a quick private word with a man who was her father.
She told him that their relationship was over, she said, but that her search for the truth was not.
“I’m going all the way for my personal dignity,” she said in an interview. “Because I know I’m wrong. I know he must have done some very serious things. And I’ll get to the bottom of that.”
Ségolène Le Stradić Contribute to reporting from Paris.
