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Europe|Pelicot’s Daughter Pursues Conviction That He Raped Her, Too
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/world/europe/gisele-pelicot-daughter-rape-france.html
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Her mother, Gisèle, was at the center of a trial that gripped France and made her a feminist icon. But it left Caroline Darian with her own pains and suspicions unanswered.
Catherine Porter reported on the mass rape trial of Dominique Pelicot and 50 other men over four months from southern France. She reported this story from Paris.
March 18, 2025Updated 8:26 a.m. ET
The day her father and dozens of other men were convicted of raping her mother in a trial that had gripped France was an acute personal tragedy to Caroline Darian.
She escaped the Avignon courthouse and was enveloped in a giant crowd of women blocking traffic and chanting their love and gratitude for her and her mother, Gisèle Pelicot, who had become a feminist icon in France for insisting the trial against her husband and 50 other men be public and refusing to feel ashamed as a rape victim.
But Ms. Darian did not hear them. She was overwhelmed by despair.
The trial had ended and she hadn’t gotten the answers she’d hoped for from her father, Dominique Pelicot, who she believes drugged and raped her, too.
“Dominique was not tried for what he did to his daughter,” Ms. Darian, 46, said in a recent interview over lunch at a Parisian restaurant off the Champs-Élysées. “He wasn’t even confronted adequately for what he did to his daughter.”
The trial that led to the convictions of 51 men forensically inspected the horror Mr. Pelicot inflicted upon his wife over almost a decade, as he mixed sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication into her drink and food and then, when she was deeply passed out, dressed her up in lingerie and invited strangers to come over and join him in raping her while he took photos and filmed.
But the suspicions of his only daughter, Caroline, were little more than a sidelight of the trial. Instead of coming away with a degree of healing, Ms. Darian felt deeply wounded.
