Caroline Darian: Daughter of Dominique Pelicot says ‘I’m sure I was drugged & raped too’
The daughter of Dominique Pelicot, who drugged his ex-wife to let dozens of strangers rape her, is convinced that she too was drug-raped by her father.
Caroline Darian says photographs of her asleep in bed — among thousands of images stored on a laptop to document the serial rape of her mother, Gisèle — show her in underwear she didn’t own.
In her first interview since Pelicot, dubbed the Monster of Avignon, was jailed, she said he should die in prison after his decade-long reign of abuse.
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.“He is a dangerous man,” she said. “There is no way he can get out.”
Ms Darian, now 46, told how she was invited to a French police station shortly after detectives began their investigation into Pelicot four years ago after his arrest for upskirting women in a supermarket.
Officers showed her two photographs of a woman in bed. “I had difficulties recognising myself from the start,” she said.
“All they want to know is if I’m in either of them,” she writes in her newly published book I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again.
“The first picture shows a young woman with dark brown hair and a straight-cut fringe lying on a bed on her left side. She’s wearing a thick white pyjama top and beige underwear. She’s asleep, but the quilt covering her has been lifted aside to expose her buttocks.
“How did he manage to take my photo in the middle of the night without waking me up? Where did the underwear come from, as I’m sure it’s not mine? Did he drug me? Did he go beyond the photos?”
Ms Darian — not her real name — told BBC’s Radio 4’s Today programme she is convinced her father, now 72, abused her. At Pelicot’s trial, she said she was “probably raped”, telling the judge: “It’s not a hypothesis; it’s reality. I know it.”
Pelicot has always denied abusing or raping her although he has put forward conflicting explanations for the photos.
Last month he was sentenced to 20 years for rape and sex crimes.
Fifty co-defendants got sentences of between three and 15 years.
