Gisele Pelicot’s daughter has revealed she thought her mother had Alzheimer’s disease before discovering the truth about her father’s horrifying crimes.
Ms Pelicot waved her anonymity in a trial that saw her husband Dominique jailed for drugging her and recruiting dozens of strangers to rape her while he filmed it. The three-month mass-rape trial in France last autumn saw 51 men convicted for a total of 428 years. Retired electrician Pelicot, 72, was jailed for the maximum term of 20 years.
Now her daughter, Caroline Darian, has spoken out about the confusion she and her siblings felt about their mother when Pelicot started drugging her.
“My two brothers and me, we were really afraid because we knew that there was something wrong with my mum. Sometimes we had my mum on the phone,” Ms Darian said in her first live British TV interview on This Morning. “She had incoherent behaviour over the phone, she talked in a different way… She didn't seem in her right mind."
Without knowledge of the years of abuse and drugging, Ms Darian and her siblings thought a medical condition may explain this behaviour.
"We thought about brain cancer, we thought about Alzheimer's, we thought that maybe she was starting [to have] dementia… She was here without being here."
Ms Darian’s interview comes after she claimed her mother did not support her allegations she was also raped by her father. Pelicot denied sexually assaulting or raping his daughter during the trial. Ms Pelicot declined to answer during the trial when she was asked if she supported her daughter’s claims.
Pelicot was found guilty of taking indecent photos of his daughter, which he saved as “around my daughter, naked” and of his daughters-in-law, Aurore and Celine.
"I was devastated… I realised that I didn't know my beloved father,” Ms Darian told This Morning. "Believe me, I was so close to my father, I was the only girl daughter of this family… I trusted him 100 per cent. I never saw him staring at a woman, never ever.
“So, when we discovered that as children, all our worlds collapsed, all our foundations fell down."
Speaking about the images of herself, Ms Darian said: "I was in a state of a shock…You have to realise the reality of what you are seeing but it's too much, it's too violent, it's crazy."
Ms Darian also expressed the difficulty of telling her six year-old son about his grandfather.
“We try to find the best words for a six year-old child at this stage, at the moment of our life, and then with the trial… He knows that he'll never see him again and to be honest with you, he told us quite recently that he doesn't exist anymore for him.”
