Gisele Pelicot’s daughter has revealed she no longer speaks to her mother following a heartbreaking ‘spectacle’ comment made during the Monster of Avignon trial.
Caroline Darian remained a pillar by her mother’s side during the trial of Dominique Pelicot, 72, where he was sentenced to 20 years in prison for raping and organising the mass rape of his wife.
However, although she never admitted this in court, the 46-year-old communication manager from Paris believed she too was subjected to sordid abuse by her father – something she claims her mother never fully ‘believed’.
Darian has now revealed that she and her mother do not speak, following a series of actions from the 72-year-old that made Darian feel as if she had been ‘abandoned’ by her mother during the trial.
The mother of one also told how she had to have a conversation with her son, 11, to explain that he would no longer be seeing his grandmother.
Speaking to The Telegraph, she revealed that on several heartbreaking occasions, Gisele had told her to ‘stop making a spectacle of yourself’ in the outside courtyard during the historic trial, after she yelled: ‘You will die alone like a dog in jail!’ as Dominique’s sentence was delivered.
She claims that despite the fact she stuck by her mother for the months-long trial in 2024, Gisele did not want to ‘believe or hear’ her allegations that Dominique had also raped her.
During the investigation into Dominique, police found some 20,000 lurid images and videos of Gisele being abused in files on his computer, as well as pictures of Darian naked, and in underwear that did not belong to her in a deleted file called ‘My Daughter Naked’.
Within this secret file there were two images of Caroline, then aged in her thirties, sleeping in beige underwear.
When showed this by the police, Darian claimed that she did not sleep in this position, that she has never seen that specific pair of underwear before and that she would never have gone to bed dressed like that.
Following on from this revelation she told the court that she was convinced that she too had probably been raped and abused by Dominique.
Although there is no suggestion that Gisele knew about any of her husband’s activities, from the start, Darian writes in the book, her mother found it impossible to believe that her husband had preyed on his own daughter, assuring her: ‘Your father is incapable of such a thing’.
According to Darian, she and her brothers Florian, 38, and David, 50, implored Dominique to tell the truth about the photos, but he consistently denied any wrongdoing.
Darian claimed that her mother was the only person who could convince her father to confess to the crimes against her, but that she chose to remain silent.
‘And that, I can never forgive her for, never,’ she told the newspaper.
Following the trial which gripped the world, Darian said she feels like a ‘forgotten victim’ as her mother catapulted into the limelight and became a global icon.
‘Gisele was certainly raped. She was chemically subdued, of course. The only difference between Gisele and me is that for her, there is proof. For me, it’s an absolute tragedy,’ she told the court.
But she insists that despite Gisele’s international recognition, ‘my mother isn’t an icon – not to me’.
Speaking out on the heartbreak, Darian took a swipe at her mother, saying that while Gisele had chosen Dominique as a husband, she had no say as to who her father was – and this made her pain ‘two-fold’.
And following her alleged lack of support during the trial, Darian claimed that if she were to bump into her mother at the supermarket today, she would only say a short hello and goodbye.
She said her mother has made her choices, and is now happily living life with her new partner – an ex-Air France steward known only as Jean-Loup – but did not fulfil her contract as a mother to her.
Dominique, who came to be known as the Monster of Avignon, drugged, raped and organised the repeated rape and sexual abuse of his then-wife Gisele by dozens of other men.
Firefighters, soldiers, lorry drivers, a DJ and a journalist were among those found guilty of raping Gisele at the behest of her husband Dominique over the course of a decade – all without her knowledge.
He had found the strangers online, via a chat site called Coco.fr which has since been closed down, and invited them to rape Gisele at home during the night after rendering her unconscious with a concoction of sleeping pills and tranquilisers mixed into her food and drinks.
Dominique was given a 20-year prison term, but several abusers escaped justice, with police unable to identify more than 20 men involved in Gisele’s abuse.
In all, the court found 47 of the defendants guilty of rape, two guilty of attempted rape and two guilty of sexual assault.
