Shauna Truong

‘I’ll never call him dad again:’ Gisèle Pelicot’s daughter says she suspects her father also drugged her for sexual abuse Caroline Darian, the daughter of Gisèle Pelicot who sustained years of horrific sexual abuse by her then-husband and other men, has described how she’s certain her father drugged her and strongly suspects she was raped too. In a wide-ranging interview with the BBC, Darian, aged 46, described the mental "burden" of being the daughter of both victim and perpetrator, as she expressed her strong desire for her father to die in prison. A horrifying, monthslong mass rape and drugging trial that shook France to its core concluded last month, with 51 guilty verdicts. Dominique Pelicot and 49 others were found guilty of the rape or sexual assault of his former wife, while one of those on trial was convicted of the attempted and aggravated rape of his own wife, rather than Gisèle, having copied Pelicot’s methods. The trial – which has pushed the country to examine a culture struggling with pervasive misogyny and casino bonus systemic sexual assault – has galvanized women to demand changes in the way it approaches gender-based violence. Darian described receiving a fateful phone call from her mother, one evening in November 2020, in which Gisèle informed her that her father, now 72, had been drugging Gisèle for around 10 years in order to facilitate her rape by different men. "At that moment, I lost what was a normal life," Darian told the broadcaster.