‘An earthquake. Unthinkable. Unimaginable’.
The words used by Caroline Peyronnet to describe the moment her family was irrevocably split apart four years ago are by no means an exaggeration.
She and her two brothers had enjoyed an idyllic childhood and were blessed with a seemingly stable and happy family life.
Their loving parents, Dominique and Gisele Pelicot, met as a pair of wide-eyed 18-year-olds in 1971 and married just two years later, beginning a passionate and strong relationship that blossomed over forty years.
As the pair approached their 60s, they wanted to trade the town of Villiers-sur-Marne near Paris, where Dominique had worked for French energy company EDF while Gisele built a 20-year career as a company manager, for sunnier climes in the South.
Money hadn’t always been easy to come by – the 2008 financial crash ruining Dominique’s foray into the world of real estate and attempts at entrepreneurship – but Gisele’s stable income meant they’d saved enough to rent a lovely bungalow with a pool and a lush garden.
They settled into a rosy retirement in Mazan, a cozy village nestled in the foothills of Mont Ventoux in the green haven of Vaucluse, and revelled in their role as doting grandparents, hosting the whole family for holidays and enjoying late evening meals out on the terrace in the summer haze.
But it was around then that Caroline and her siblings began to notice their mother’s health steadily deteriorate.
Gisele P. re-enters the courthouse during the trial of her husband accused of drugging her for nearly ten years and inviting strangers to rape her at their home in Mazan
Caroline and her two brothers David and Florian had enjoyed an idyllic childhood and for most of their lives were blessed with a stable and happy family life
Dominique Pelicot, the once warm and dedicated father and husband, is now on trial for a near-decade long campaign of drugging and sexually abusing his wife for the camera – along with 50 other men he invited to the family home to take part in the heinous activity
The mother-of-three had moved to the Provence village with her husband, former electricity worker Dominique, from Villiers-sur-Marne, near Paris, in 2013
Gisele began complaining of symptoms of fogginess and disorientation, and on several occasions suffered memory loss so severe that she began to suspect Alzheimer’s disease.
Doctors performed brain scans but were left at a loss as to why Gisele was experiencing such crippling amnesia, all while battling what seemed to be a growing abundance of gynaecological problems, weight loss and debilitating fatigue.
The true cause of her physical and mental malaise, revealed in 2020, turned out to be darker and more perverse than the even the most sordid and cynical observer could have dreamt up.
Mr Pelicot, the once warm and dedicated father and husband, is now on trial for a near-decade long campaign of drugging and sexually abusing his wife for the camera – along with 50 other men he invited to the family home to take part in the heinous activity.
All 51 men stand accused of aggravated rape – the largest number of defendants to have been tried together in recent years anywhere in France.
Prosecutors were unable to identify several other individuals believed to have participated in the barbaric operation who are now set to escape justice.
Having agreed to meet via a shady chatroom on a now defunct website whose servers were seized by police, dozens of men frequented the Pelicot family home, where they sometimes spent up to six hours raping an unconscious, snoring Gisele while Dominique stood behind the camera – but sometimes participated himself.
Yet the Pelicots’ adult children all said that they had no reason to suspect their father – whom Caroline can no longer refer to as such – had waged one of the most vile programmes of sexual abuse to have ever reached the country’s courts.
Caroline’s book was released in 2022, roughly a year and a half after her father’s crimes were revealed, under the pen name Caroline Darian
Their eldest son said nothing in Mr Pelicot’s behaviour suggested any deviance and that ‘he had always fulfilled his role as a father’, while Caroline told Paris Match earlier this year: ‘We were very close to him.’
In her 2022 book entitled ‘And I Stopped Calling You Papa’, published under the pen name Caroline Darian, Dominique’s estranged daughter described him as a considerate, kind man who was heavily involved in her youth.
She explained how Mr Pelicot – whom she now calls her ‘progenitor’ – tirelessly accompanied her to school and dance classes, drove her to and from parties in her teens and later went on to show the same care for his grandkids, splashing about with them in the swimming pool in Mazan.
‘I think of us as happy,’ Caroline wrote. ‘I thought my parents were.’
Gisele Pelicot speaks to the press alongside her lawyer on September 5, outside the courtroom in Avignon, France
Madame Pelicot is determined that the public knows that she played no part in her husband’s warped sexual fantasies that he played out at their picturesque chalet home in the Provence village of Mazan (pictured)
A court drawing shows Madame Pelicot taking the stand, facing her husband and the 50 others accused of raping her
Dominique Pelicot broke down in court when his wife described their once happy family
That’s not to say there weren’t some signs in the years prior to the skin-crawling revelation of Dominique’s crimes that the Pelicots’ once blooming relationship was strained.
Writing about one incident in the summer of 2018, Caroline recalls how her brother went to visit their parents for an evening meal only to see his mother practically falling asleep at the dinner table.
‘Only a few minutes after sitting down Maman was swaying in her chair as though she was drunk,’ he told Caroline.
‘Suddenly her whole body was drained of energy, like a rag doll.’
‘It happens. It’s better if I take her to bed,’ his father was reported as saying, feigning the role of a concerned husband acting in his wife’s best interests.
‘In reality the cocktail of drugs, poured into her glass of rosé, was beginning to take effect,’ Caroline said.
As the various symptoms of her abuse grew ever more difficult to ignore, Mr Pelicot committed to a deplorable approach of manipulation and gaslighting to avoid suspicion.
In the late eighties, Gisele had embarked on a two-year affair with the only other man she ever willingly slept with besides her husband, according to her testimony.
The couple overcame the incident and remained happily married, going on to have three children.
But when his wife complained of severe pain and tested positive for a sexually transmitted disease after years of having been raped by strangers, Mr Pelicot seized the opportunity to blame it on another episode of supposed infidelity.
Caroline claimed that when Gisele told her husband she needed treatment for the unexplained illness, he remarked: ‘So, what are you doing with your days?’ and accused her of playing around while he was out playing boules or cycling.
Despite the nasty accusation and mounting evidence something was wrong, the loving wife remained unaware that her husband had anything to do with her malaise.
So blind was Gisele to Mr Pelicot’s horrendous misdeeds that she was even willing to forgive him when he was arrested by police in September 2020, after he was caught snapping pictures up the skirts of female supermarket shoppers.
Police investigating the case confiscated Dominique’s computer and later discovered he had meticulously recorded, filed and catalogued a near-decade-long string of incessant abuse.
It wasn’t until officers sat Gisele down and confronted her with the undeniable evidence that the unconscious, gasping body she was watching being violated was her own did her litany of hitherto inexplicable symptoms make sense.
That realisation, of course, brought her entire world and that of her cherished family crashing down.
Village of Mazan where Dominique Pelicot and his wife Gisele Pelicot lived. When she tested positive for a STD, Mr Pelicot said she must have been cheating on him when he was out playing boules
The son of Gisele Pelicot, Florian (L) and her daughter Caroline Peyronnet (R) leave the criminal court in Avignon, France, 05 September 2024
Madame Pelicot this week was forced to relive the trauma that she experienced when police investigator showed her graphic films of her being raped repeatedly by her husband and dozens of strangers
In a powerful 90-minute-long testimony before the court in Avignon this week, Gisele opened up on how the discovery drove her to the brink of suicide and left her daughter in a psychiatric ward.
‘We had everything, we had a great life. I don’t understand how this could have happened.
‘I only wanted one thing and that was to disappear. I told myself: ”I am going to get in my car with my dog and end it all”.
‘I had to tell my children that their father was in custody. I called my son-in-law and told my daughter and told them: ”He raped me”. Then I heard my daughter screaming a deep cry that I cannot get out of my head.
‘When I told my sons about this, I don’t think they really understood. They withdrew.
‘[That] evening, the children rang all the time saying ”don’t disappear”… they were worried I might die.’
Caroline herself recounted to the judge the moment she heard, from her own mother, exactly what kind of monster her father was.
‘Then my mother called me to say that there was a problem with my father. I imagine that he is intensive care, that he is dying.
‘But she tells me that my father has been drugging her for years so that strangers can rape her in her own bed.
‘She says she has seen photos of what happened to her and that the police want to show her videos of what happened.
‘I totally lost my foundations. Fortunately my husband [Pierre] was there and my six year old son too. We took him away so that he did not hear his mother’s screams.’
Caroline later learned that Mr Pelicot’s repulsive exploits were not limited to his wife.
She too had been photographed half-naked and unconscious by her father – a fact police proved when they pointed out one of the vulnerable bodies in his stack of images bore her unmistakable birth mark.
‘I discover that my father photographed me without my knowledge. I understood immediately that it was me in those photos. I do not sleep like that. So I strongly believe that he drugged me,’ she said.
Gisele Pelicot, 72, told the court in Avignon how she wanted to ‘disappear’ when police revealed the dark truth to her after arresting her husband in late 2020. Pictured: Gisele Pelicot (R), accompanied by her son David (C) and Florian (L) as they leave the criminal court in Avignon, France, September 5
Caroline, 45, told the Avignon court on Friday how she believed her father had drugged her too, after police showed her photos of her lying unconscious on a bed in her mother’s underwear
Gisele Pelicot’s daughter Caroline enters the court room to give evidence against her dad Dominque Pelicot. Pictured: Artist drawing from inside the court of Caroline in the dock
Mr Pelicot and 14 of his co-accused have admitted their part in France’s worst rape case.
But another 35 men – from all walks of life – deny that they forced themselves on Madame Pelicot while she was unconscious, claiming that she in some way consented.
Gisele has unequivocally rejected their claims and is outspoken about her desire to see them all brought to justice.
‘Some of the defendants admit the facts, others contest all the facts, and others confirm they were present but deny it was rape,’ her lawyer said.
‘You caught four sexually transmitted diseases and were exposed to HIV six times. What have you got to say to people who claim you consented to all this?’
The brave mother-of-three replied: ‘All I have to say is, it’s an insult to my intelligence. These individuals were totally aware of what state I was in. I never knowingly took part in any of these things.
‘I was a dead woman and these men take advantage of me, they defile me, they treat me like a bin bag.
‘How can you even try and make people think that a woman would knowingly take part in all this?’
It remains to be seen whether every defendant in the scarcely believable case will be found guilty, with the trial set to stretch until Christmas.
Mr Pelicot’s scrupulous documentation of the abuse, not to mention the trove of vile messages he exchanged with each man who visited the family home, means prosecutors were able to charge 51 people in total.
But even if justice is eventually served, the halcyon memories shared by every member of the Pelicot family will remain forever tainted by their patriarch’s inescapable betrayal.
Afterall, as Caroline asks: ‘What do you do when your father is one of the worst sexual predators of the last 20 years?’
