‘You’ll die alone like a dog’: Daughter tells French man accused of drugging wife in mass rape trial
Dominique Pelicot has admitted to orchestrating scheme to have men rape his wife while she was unconscious
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Your support makes all the difference.Caroline Darian, the daughter of main defendant Dominique Pelicot, shouted at him from the courtroom that he would “die alone like a dog” during the ongoing French mass rape trial.
Ms Darian, 45, has accused her father of drugging and abusing her, citing disturbing semi-naked photos found on his laptop. While Mr Pelicot denies abusing his daughter, he has confessed to drugging his wife, Gisele Pelicot, for years and orchestrating a scheme to have men rape her while she was unconscious.
On Wednesday, Mr Pelicot spoke about his daughter from the stand. “Some may laugh but it is my daughter I wish I could look at in the face. It hurts to see her like this. I would love to see her, I would love to talk to her,” he said.
Ms Darian responded: “I will never come see you. Never. You will die alone like a dog.”
“We all die alone. You especially.”
In her book, Et j’ai cessé de t’appeler papa, Ms Darian, writing under a pen name, recounts her growing torment over the suspicion that she too had fallen victim to her father’s “perversity”.
The book is set to be published in English, with the title And I Stopped Calling You Father, next month.
In his closing statement on Wednesday, Mr Pelicot again admitted to the charges of drugging his wife and orchestrating a scheme where men would rape her while she was unconscious, stating that his actions were driven by a desire to fulfil a “fantasy”.
“I came to do what I did through people who willingly accepted what I proposed,” he told the court.
Ms Pelicot is the main victim in the case that her daughter has described as one of “unbearable atrocities”. She has been left to suffer with four sexually transmitted infections from the assaults.
Ms Pelicot pushed for a public trial, choosing to forgo her anonymity in the hope that her testimony might shield other women from similar suffering.
Investigators have documented 92 alleged rapes of Ms Pelicot involving some 72 male suspects, 51 of whom have been identified.
She has described being “sacrificed on the altar of vice”.
Mr Pelicot was first arrested in September 2020 on suspicion of secretly filming up women’s skirts at a supermarket in Carpentras, France.
A subsequent search of his devices reportedly found hundreds of photos and pornographic videos of women, including some of his own family members.
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