Family in gang rape case falls apart with stifled sobs and harsh accusations

At the epicenter of this devastating family drama is Gisèle Pelicot, a diminutive 71-year-old woman who was drugged by her ex-husband and abused for a decade by dozens of strangers she recruited online.

Watching her enter the court in Avignon and testify was astonishing, imagining the extent of abuse her body had endured.

But as other members of his family took their stand, it became painfully clear that no one could emerge unscathed from the storm unleashed by the Pelicot patriarch’s actions.

The damage this family has done is obvious. Individually, they described the destructive force that engulfed them in November 2020 as a “tsunami” that left nothing but destruction in its wake.

Dominique Pelicot was finally caught after a security guard caught him filming under women’s skirts.

But it took weeks for police to finally discover the full truth that tore his family apart.

Warning: This story contains details some readers may find disturbing

He had been drugging his wife for years and recruiting men online to rape her while she was unconscious.

He filmed the abuse and carefully classified each visit into folders on his hard drive. We are faced with the evidence, Dominique Pelicot admits rape charges.

In addition to the suggestive language describing her videos, she added captions with the men’s names. Fifty other men were tried alongside him, and only a handful confessed to rape. More than 20 unidentified people have still not been caught.

Gisèle Pelicot attended almost the entire hearing. He waived his anonymity and allowed the public to see what he was going through.

The videos leave no doubt that the sexual acts were not consensual. Mrs. Pelicot can be seen lying in bed, snoring, while her husband whispers instructions to various men to touch, poke and use her.

Artificial sleep provides his mind with a degree of protection, but his body becomes an object.

In his own words, he was treated “like a rag doll, like a garbage bag.”

“I’m 72 now and I don’t know how much time I have left,” he told the court last week.

‘You will die by lying’

Dominique Pelicot’s betrayal and the magnitude of his crimes are so great that the aftershocks have gone far beyond his ex-wife.

The Pelicots’ middle child, Caroline Darian, now 45, cried out in court to her father, demanding to know the truth about the photos found on his father’s computer. The images, titled “Naked girl”, describe her as half-naked and clearly drugged.

Although Mr Pelicot denied abusing his daughter, he gave various and sometimes contradictory statements about the images. “I never touched you,” she begged him.

However, during this trial his hypocrisy became abundantly clear and he clearly lost his daughter’s right to believe him.

“You’re a liar,” she shouted at him. “I’m tired of your lies, you’re alone in your lies, you’ll die lying.”

Resisting her tears, the woman accused her father of looking at her with “incestuous eyes”.

Caroline Darian told the court she felt she was the “forgotten victim” of the case and, unlike her mother’s case, there was no record of the abuse she believed was inflicted on her.

He founded a charity to highlight the dangers of drug-fuelled attacks and published a book in 2022 detailing his family’s trauma. In it, he hinted that he had fallen out with his mother, who he learned had left a pack of warm clothes in prison for his father, weeks after his crimes were discovered.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Caroline wrote. “For ten years she was still looking at the person who raped her.”

This apparent disagreement was exploited by a combative defense attorney who argued that Gisèle Pelicot had chosen her ex-husband over her daughter by not demanding the truth about Caroline’s photographs. Gisèle nodded, but Caroline responded with a slight smile, as if accepting the lawyer’s explanation.

When Caroline’s brothers, David and Florian, took the stand, they repeatedly touched on her pain and encouraged their father to tell the truth.

Florian, 38 years old, the youngest of the family, turned to Dominique Pelicot, who was sitting in the glass box to his left, and said: “If you have any honor and humanity, you have nothing to lose anyway, tell me. Caroline truth.”

He also spoke of his long-standing suspicion that he was the product of an affair his mother had in the 1980s; this suspicion was combined with a slight but lifelong feeling that his father loved his siblings more than him.

In a desperate search for answers, he wondered aloud whether he might have been the “motive” for his father’s crimes. He said he would take a paternity test and that it would be a “relief” not to be Dominique Pelicot’s son.

Through tears, Florian painted a desolate picture of what his life had become. His marriage to Aurore, the mother of his three children, did not survive the revelation that Dominique Pelicot was also secretly taking photographs of him.

Despite their separation, the slim, soft-spoken woman frequently attended the hearing and said she exposed the “banality” of the abuse.

Aurore, herself a survivor of incest, regrets not listening to her instincts regarding Mr. Pelicot. “If that were the case, it could have changed the course of events,” his lawyer said.

‘My childhood is lost’

David, the eldest of the Pelicot children, is a portly man of 50 and bears a striking resemblance to his father.

Taking a stand this week, he opened up about how he approached Dominique Pelicot when he became a father himself.

Then, his voice growing more sorrowful and as he stood up as if trying to pull himself together, he remembered the harrowing detail from the night his mother had told him about his father’s arrest. “We all know where we were when the tsunami hit,” he said.

Nude photographs of his wife Celine, who was pregnant with his twin daughters, were also found among Mr Pelicot’s files. He was filmed with a hidden camera while he was in the bathroom.

In his voice full of emotion, David described watching his mother, weak and lost, standing on a train platform, her life reduced to her dog and a suitcase.

Recalling her parents’ birthday parties for her and her siblings that were the envy of their friends, she said: “My childhood is gone; was deleted.”

There seems to be no end to the trauma rippling through this family. David’s son, now 18, wonders what really happened when Dominique asked him to “play doctor” as a child.

The family’s lawyer said Wednesday that their younger siblings “will have to find their place in a family where their grandmother, mother, brother and aunt were victims of their grandfather.”

Caroline’s young son is still deeply shaken by the carefully worded revelation that his beloved grandfather harmed his grandmother four years ago.

“This is just one example of the depth of pain caused by rape in the family,” lawyer Stéphane Babonneau said in his closing statement.

The decision is expected to be made on December 20. Mr Pelicot faces 20 years in prison, the maximum penalty for rape in France.

And for the rest of his family, the trauma will continue. Because none of them will know for sure what he did or didn’t do.

In one of the shaky phone videos shown in court, a tall, naked man stands in the middle of a dark bedroom. Another man sits on the bed, smiling and snoring softly next to an unconscious woman lying next to him.

Behind him, on a dresser, is a photograph clearly visible despite the dim light.

The Pelicot family huddled together on the beach on a sunny day and smiling at the camera.