It was not just Gisèle Pelicot’s life that collapsed the day the police delivered the news that they believed that her husband of 50 years had been drugging her and inviting other men into their house to rape her alongside him for almost a decade.
“It was the whole family,” their eldest son, David, told a court Monday, in a dramatic day when the couple’s three children addressed their father, who was sitting in a box on the edge of the packed courtroom in Avignon, France.
“You need to know this trial is a trial of a devastated family,” David said.
David Pelicot, 50, is haunted by fears that his own son, who remains in psychological treatment, was also abused by his grandfather. His sister, who goes by the pen name Caroline Darian, is a shadow of her former self, convinced she was also drugged and sexually abused by their father. (Their father denies both those charges.) The youngest sibling, Florian, took the stand to say that his marriage had collapsed.
“It cost me a divorce and thousands of questions,” said Florian Pelicot, 38.
He added, in anguish, “How do we rebuild ourselves? What’s the method? How do we do it?”
Some 51 men are on trial, mostly for accusations of aggravated rape of Gisèle Pelicot. Her husband, Dominique Pelicot, , and then inviting dozens of other men he met online into their home to rape her alongside him while she was unconscious.
At least a dozen of the men, including Mr. Pelicot, have pleaded guilty. The rest have admitted that they had sexual relations with Ms. Pelicot, but say they did not intend to rape her. Instead, many have argued that they believed that Ms. Pelicot had consented and that they had been lured by Mr. Pelicot with the promise of a threesome, in which Ms. Pelicot was pretending to sleep as part of the couple’s fantasy.
Some said they believe Mr. Pelicot had drugged them also.
Mr. Pelicot repeatedly has said that all the accused knew he had drugged his former wife without her knowledge, and that he drugged no one but his wife.
The trial, now in its third month, has shaken France and has raised uncomfortable questions about relations between men and women, the prevalence of rape and conceptions of consent. In a country that showed resistance to the #MeToo movement seven years ago, conversations about rape culture and toxic masculinity have suddenly become common.
Ms. Pelicot, 71, has , after making the rare decision to — including while she was drugged.
She did so, hoping it would help other victims and “change society.”
Each day, crowds line up to watch the trial in an overflow room and burst into applause when Ms. Pelicot passes by.
But it has all come at a great cost. Ms. Pelicot that her life was a “field of ruins.” On Monday, the court heard how the case had destroyed the lives of their three children and their own nuclear families, as well as the conception they had of themselves and their family.
Before Mr. Pelicot was taken into police custody in November 2020 on accusations of raping his wife, the family had been very close, spending vacations together, often at the house the couple had rented for their retirement in southern France. David Pelicot, a sales manager for a Champagne company, said he had shared a passion for soccer, tennis and moviegoing with his father. He described the magical surprise birthday parties his parents had planned for him and his siblings, to the delight and envy of all their friends.
“I lost and I have the feeling today, all my childhood has disappeared. It was erased,” he said. Now, his hope was “above all, in the future we can erase, make disappear in our heads, the man who is to the left,” he said, pointing to his father in the box.
Since then, the Pelicot children say, they’ve all been haunted by what they did not see and by what might have happened to them and their own children, who spent a lot of time with their grandfather. The court heard that a criminal investigation into whether Mr. Pelicot abused his grandchildren is ongoing.
Ms. Darian told the court again on Monday that she is convinced the father she had always considered loving and supportive had drugged and sexually assaulted her too.
The police found evidence of photos of her among her father’s collection, including two of her sleeping at night in an awkward position, with the lights on.
“I was sedated to be abused by Dominique, it was not a hypothesis. It’s a reality I know,” said Ms. Darian, who created the pen name after the accusations against her father. When the photos were taken, she said, “you weren’t looking at me the way a father looks at his daughter, but in an incestuous way.”
Ms. Darian has tried to turn her family trauma into action, forming a nonprofit association, Don’t Put Me to Sleep, to publicize the dangers of drug-facilitated crimes, and writing a book, “And I Stopped Calling You Papa,” detailing the horrors.
She was briefly hospitalized in a psychiatric ward soon after the police took her father into custody and showed her the photos they had found. Part way through the trial, she announced on that she was checking herself into a clinic for a few days “to recover all my energy, to be able to sleep again.”
She told the court that she felt like the forgotten victim in the trial, and that very few victims who were drugged in order to be abused have proof as her mother does.
She hoped the trial would help change that and vowed to keep working toward it.
“It’s not only the trial of Gisèle Pelicot. It’s the trial of the whole family. It’s the trial of drugging victims in France,” she said.
On Monday, her two brothers confronted their father directly, asking him again if he had sexually abused their sister or their children.
“If you still have a bit of humanity, tell us what you did to my son and my sister,” David said.
“Nothing of any kind,” Mr. Pelicot shouted from his box.
“I maintain and hope, even if I am no longer here, one day you will have the proof that nothing happened,” he told his son once he was given a microphone.
Then, in the most formal French, he asked to be forgiven.
“Please accept my apologies for what I did,” he said.
The response from David was angry and final: “Never.”