Caroline Darian, the daughter of main defendant Dominique Pelicot, yelled at him from the courtroom that he would “die alone like a dog” in the ongoing French mass rape trial.
Ms. Darian, 45, accused her father of drugging and abusing her, citing disturbing semi-naked photos discovered on his laptop. Mr Pelicot denies abusing his daughter, but he has admitted to drugging his wife, Gisele Pelicot, for years and orchestrating a plan for men to rape her while she was unconscious.
On Wednesday, Mr Pelicot took the stand and discussed his daughter. “Some may laugh, but I wish I could look my daughter in the eyes. It hurts to see her like this. “I would love to see her and talk to her,” he said.
Ms. Darian replied, “I will never come see you. Never. “You will die alone, like a dog.”
“Everyone dies alone. “You, especially.”
In her book, Et j’ai cessé de t’appeler papa, Ms Darian, writing under a pen name, recounts her growing agony over the suspicion that she, too, had fallen victim to her father’s “perversity”.
The book will be published in English under the title And I Stopped Calling You Father next month.
Mr Pelicot admitted to drugging his wife and orchestrating a scheme for men to rape her while she was unconscious in his closing statement on Wednesday, claiming that his actions were motivated by a desire to fulfill a “fantasy”.
“I came to do what I did through people who willingly accepted what I proposed,” he explained to the jury.
Ms Pelicot is the primary victim in what her daughter describes as a case of “unbearable atrocities”. She was left with four sexually transmitted infections as a result of the assaults.
Ms Pelicot advocated for a public trial, giving up her anonymity in the hopes that her testimony would protect other women from similar suffering.
Investigators have documented 92 alleged rapes of Ms Pelicot, with 72 male suspects, 51 of whom have been identified.
She has stated that she was “sacrificed on the altar of vice”.
Mr Pelicot was initially arrested in September 2020 on suspicion of secretly filming women’s skirts at a supermarket in Carpentras, France.
A subsequent search of his devices allegedly uncovered hundreds of photos and pornographic videos of women, including some of his own family members.
