Daughter of Gisele Pelicot, who was drugged and raped by sicko husband, feels betrayed by mom an abandonment too many: book
The daughter of the Frenchman who drugged his wife unconscious and allowed 72 men to rape her as he filmed them, now feels betrayed by the mother she loyally stood by — as well as her father, whom she claims also assaulted her.Caroline Darian, 46, details the harrowing ordeal her once-close family endured beginning in the fall of 2020 when police arrested her father, Dominique Pelicot, for filming up women’s skirts.She details how things unravelled from there and the nauseating crimes against her mother were revealed, eventually leading to the landmark trial against Pelicot, in her memoir “I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again,” out today.The book is based in part on diaries Darian kept through the end of 2021 and sets the scene for how the secret drugging and raping of Gisèle Pelicot would upend the whole family.Darian intends the book to shine a light in part on the growing problem of “chemical submission,” meaning the increasing use of sleeping pills, tranquilizers and other date rape drugs on people and then assaulting them in France and around the world.But her story is more about the complicated dynamics between her parents and herself and how her mother’s submission to her father even continues somewhat today, in what she describes as being like a case of Stockholm Syndrome, where a victim comes to sympathize with their captor.Dominique Pelicot, 72, admitted that for years he knocked his then-wife of 50 years out with sleeping pills and anti-anxiety drugs so he and strangers he recruited online in the Mazan area in the south of France could abuse her.He did this for nearly a decade to Gisèle, now a 72-year-old grandmother, who had what she thought was a happy marriage.Gisèle’s decision to attend the trial and waive the right for it to be private transformed the retired power company worker into a feminist folk icon in France.In December 2024, 50 of the 51 men on trial, including Dominique, were convicted of raping, attempting to rape, and sex...