Gisele Pelicot’s daughter reveals family thought drug effects could possibly be dementia | News World

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Gisele Pelicot’s daughter has said the family thought her incoherent behaviour after being drugged may need been brain cancer or the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.

Caroline Darian’s father Dominique Pelicot was jailed for 20 years for spiking his wife with sedatives, raping her and welcoming dozens of other men to do the identical over the course of a decade.

She is now looking for to take the so-called ‘Monster of Avignon’ back to court, accusing him of abusing her too.

‘I do know he drugged me, and he probably did so much more,’ Caroline said.

Caroline, who published I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again on the trauma of discovering her father’s shocking abuse, appeared on ITV’s This Morning where she discussed the case and her relationship with mum Gisele, who she calls a ‘hero’.

Looking back, she described how she and her brothers noticed their mother’s occasional ‘incoherent behaviour’ or how she would speak ‘another way’.

They now know this to be the results of the drugs administered by their father to facilitate his and others’ abuse of her.

Gisele Pelicot and her daughter Caroline Darian walk towards the criminal court (Picture: EPA)
Caroline appeared on This Morning where she discussed the case (Picture: ITV/This Morning)

‘She was here without being here,’ Caroline recalled. ‘It was really weird. She didn’t seem in her right mind.

‘But we were removed from this reality. We thought of brain cancer. We thought of Alzheimer’s. We thought possibly she was beginning to have a dementia disease.

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‘How could we take into consideration that?’

Dominique Pelicot and 50 other men were jailed for a complete of 428 years following a mass rape trial which culminated at the tip of last 12 months.

Caroline said the law enforcement officials who initially investigated Dominique when he was first held on suspicion of upskirting in an area supermarket had unwittingly ‘saved’ her mother.

FILE - This courtroom sketch by Valentin Pasquier shows Gis??le Pelicot, left, and her ex-husband Dominique Pelicot, right, during his trial at the courthouse in Avignon, southern France, on Sept. 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Valentin Pasquier, File)
Courtroom sketch shows Gisele Pelicot and her ex-husband Dominique during his trial (Picture: AP)

Once they examined his phone and other devices, they found 20,000 photos and video clips showing Gisele being abused by scores of various men while clearly unconscious.

But Caroline says there are two which haunt her greater than the hundreds of others and show her lying unconscious in an unfamiliar position.

Caroline said she ‘knew right from the start’ that she was also abused by her father and described feeling like ‘the invisible victim’ during his trial.

‘I want to get the reality, she said. ‘I don’t know what the following steps are going to be, but I’m aligned with myself. I do know something fallacious happened before or after those pictures.

‘I’m not sleeping – I’m sedated and in the identical position as my mother.’

Caroline described having an in depth relationship along with her father, saying she ‘trusted him 100%’ before his depravity was revealed.

‘I never saw him gazing a girl,’ she said. ‘He had some respectful comments about women, so after we as his children discovered that, our world collapsed. All our foundations fell down.’

She could only bear to take a look at one in all the images seized from her father, saying it was ‘too violent’ and left her in a ‘state of shock’.

‘The worst thing is to find you might be betrayed by one of the crucial necessary men in your whole life,’ Caroline went on.

‘For my mum, it was her husband, now they’re divorced. But for me, it was my father. I actually have his DNA.’

A man holds a placard reading
A person holds a placard reading ‘Thanks on your courage Gisele Pelicot’ outside the Avignon courthouse (Picture: AP)

Caroline and her brothers say their mother is a ‘hero’.

‘She is 72 years old and had each day during 4 months facing her sexual abuser, facing Dominique,’ she went on.

‘She has tremendous courage. We’re really pleased with her.’

But somewhat than driving them together, Caroline revealed the trauma inflicted by her father’s abuse has driven her and her mother apart.

‘Now we have to rebuild one another another way, and we are able to’t help one another,’ she said.

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