‘He should die in jail’: Angry daughter of man who organised multiple men to rape wife
The daughter of Dominique Pelicot, the Frenchman found guilty of drugging and facilitating the rape of his ex-wife by dozens of strangers, has said her father “should die in prison”.
In her first television interview since Pelicot was jailed for 20 years in December, Caroline Darian told the BBC that her father “was always a sexual pervert”.
She said: “He should die in prison, he is a dangerous man.”
Speaking in Pelicot Trial: The Daughter’s Story that will air on Monday, Ms Darian, 45, said: “There is no way he can get out. No way.
“When I look back I don’t really remember the father that I thought he was. I look straight to the criminal, the sexual criminal he is.
“But I have his DNA, and the main reason why I am so engaged for invisible victims is also for me a way to put a real distance with this guy.”
Last month Pelicot, 72, was found guilty of drugging and raping his former wife, Gisèle Pelicot, also 72, and for more than a decade soliciting men to assault her.
His horrific crimes prompted descriptions of him as the worst sexual predator of the past 20 or 30 years.
In the interview, Ms Darian said: “There’s no way you can wake up one morning and say ‘OK, I’m gonna drug my wife’.
“So I think there are two Dominiques co-existing in him. He decided to choose the dark side.
“I don’t know if he is a monster but he perfectly knew what he did, he’s not sick. He did everything consciously.
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Some 50 of Gisèle Pelicot’s other rapists were also identified, convicted, and sentenced to between three and 15 years in prison. Her decision to waive her right to a closed trial was lauded as heroic and brave.
Ms Darian says she believes her father abused and raped her as well, as pictures of her naked and unconscious were also found among her father’s computer files – he kept detailed records of his crimes – though there is no direct evidence of this.
Her father denied this during the trial. Ms Darian has accused him of lying.
She said: “I know that he drugged me, probably for sexual abuse. But I don’t have any evidence.”
Ms Darian has since engaged on a campaign to raise awareness of chemical submission, and of sexual assault and abuse.
Dangers of this can come “from the inside”, she said, as it was in her experience. The drugs her father used were painkillers and sedatives – pills that “come from the family’s medicine cabinet”.
Mr Pelicot’s crimes emerged after he was caught filming up the skirts of three women in a supermarket and was locked up for 48 hours.
While investigating, police seized his phone, camcorder and computer, on which they found images that showed Gisèle asleep, drugged, and being raped.
Ms Darian first learned of her father’s actions in 2020, a phone call that dramatically upended life as she knew it, as described in her memoir that exposed the family “chamber of horrors”.
That book, I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again, details the grim reality of what was happening inside the family home, including that her father sometimes wouldn’t allow rapists to wear a condom.
“Ultimate perversity,” she wrote in the book. “Father, who always had money problems, didn’t profit from Maman. He did it purely for his pleasure.”
The drugs Mr Pelicot used to drug his wife were hidden in the house. He went to extreme lengths to bring strange men into his house to rape her, and to allow the crimes to continue.
He asked them to wash their hands in warm water, so cold fingers wouldn’t shock her. He asked them to leave their mobile phones in their cars, so they wouldn’t ring and risk waking her up.
“My father is a criminal,” Ms Darian wrote, ”and I have to learn to live with this grotesque reality, to accept being torn apart by the needs of justice, truth, and the love I once felt for him.”
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Gisèle Pelicot, a grandmother of seven has since become a feminist icon for refusing to remain in the shadows, choosing instead to confront those who abused and raped her.
“I wanted all woman victims of rape… not just when they have been drugged, rape exists at all levels,” Ms Pelicot has said before. “I want those women to say, ‘Madame Pelicot did it, we can do it too’.
“It’s up to them to feel ashamed,” she said of the accused during the trial.
Anne-Cécile Mailfert, founder of the Fondation des Femmes, said. “She’s a symbolic figure because she’s a woman whose life was perfectly normal. She has three children, a husband, she’s retired.
“She can’t be sexualised. You can’t say it’s because she’s wearing a skirt, or because she’s had too much to drink, or because she asked for it. In that sense,she’s the perfect victim.”
Ms Darian will narrate a TV documentary on the use of drugs to enable rape and sexual abuse. Set to be broadcast on France 2 on Jan 21, the 90-minute film will include testimony from six other victims raped after being drugged unwittingly.
Written by Sakinat Musa Abubakar, Editor at Neptune Prime
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