The day her father and dozens of other men were convicted of raping her mother in a trial that had gripped France was an acute personal tragedy to Caroline Darian.
She escaped the Avignon courthouse and was enveloped in a giant crowd of women blocking traffic and chanting their love and gratitude for her and her mother, Gisèle Pelicot, who had become a feminist icon in France for insisting the trial against her husband and 50 other men be public and refusing to feel ashamed as a rape victim.
But Ms. Darian did not hear them. She was overwhelmed by despair.
The trial had ended and she hadn’t gotten the answers she’d hoped for from her father, Dominique Pelicot, whom she believes drugged and raped her, too.
“Dominique was not tried for what he did to his daughter,” Ms. Darian, 46, said in a recent interview over lunch at a Parisian restaurant off the Champs-Élysées. “He wasn’t even confronted adequately for what he did to his daughter.”
The trial that led to the convictions of 51 men forensically inspected the horror Mr. Pelicot inflicted upon his wife over almost a decade, as he mixed sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication into her drink and food and then, when she was deeply passed out, dressed her up in lingerie and invited strangers to come over and join him in raping her while he took photos and filmed.
But the suspicions of his only daughter Caroline were little more than a sidelight of the trial. Instead of coming away with a degree of healing, Ms. Darian felt deeply wounded.
“My case, in that court, it was like it didn’t exist,” said Ms. Darian, who uses a pen name.
“It was terrible,” she said.
Earlier this month, she filed her own police complaint against her father for rape and sexual assault. It coincided with the publication of Ms. Darian’s second book about her father’s crimes and the cataclysmic impact they’ve had on her life.
Her first book, a raw journal documenting the intimate horror she suffered in the year after her father’s arrest, is being released in the United States on Tuesday as “I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again.” She agreed to an interview with The New York Times in conjunction with its publication.
At the heart of her case are two intimate photos that her father had erased but that forensic investigators had managed to retrieve from Mr. Pelicot’s electronics. Both capture Ms. Darian asleep in bed, with the lights on and the covers pulled back to reveal her beige underwear.
The underwear, Ms. Darian told the court, was not hers. She said that she had no recollection of the photos being taken and that she was a light sleeper. She believes that she, too, was drugged, and that her father used the same modus operandi on her as he had on her mother.
During the trial, Mr. Pelicot at first denied having taken the photos and said he did not believe they were of his daughter. Later, he said he had taken them because he was being blackmailed.
Investigators also found evidence of an erased folder with the title, “My naked daughter” and photo collages of Ms. Darian and Ms. Pelicot, both naked, that Mr. Pelicot had shared with strangers online. In one exchange on Skype, he referred to his “trapped daughter.”
But when it came to his daughter, he was convicted only on charges of having taken the intimate photos without her permission.
Ms. Darian is convinced they are evidence of much more serious crimes that investigators missed or ignored, overwhelmed by her mother’s case.
Her 30-page police complaint, seen by The New York Times, includes material found by investigators though not brought up in the trial.
They include transcripts of Skype interactions Mr. Pelicot had with another user in 2020 when he had shared photo montages. After the user admired his daughter, Mr. Pelicot wrote: “It’s been more than eight years I’ve been offering her up like this. Do you want to see her when she was 30?”
Mr. Pelicot’s lawyer, Béatrice Zavarro, said she had not seen the complaint yet. She noted that the general prosecutor in last year’s trial had acknowledged Ms. Darian’s grievances, but had said there were not enough “objective elements” to prosecute Mr. Pelicot for them.
During the trial, Mr. Pelicot repeatedly said that he had never drugged his daughter. He denied sexually touching her or any of his children and grandchildren, the eldest of whom has also filed a police complaint that he, too, was sexually abused by Mr. Pelicot.
Before their father’s arrest, neither she nor her brothers suspected he was a sexual predator, they told the court. They were a tight-knit family, often gathering for vacations down in Provence, where Mr. and Ms. Pelicot had retired. Their parents had been together for 50 years and seemed very happy.
His arrest, and his admission to crimes against their mother, caused a sudden profound shock. Ms. Darian began suffering panic attacks. She stopped sleeping and was briefly hospitalized in a psychiatric ward.
“Until I was 41, I thought my father was a good, kind person,” Ms. Darian said. “In 2020, all our foundations as children crumbled.”
In 2019, Ms. Darian was crippled with pain from an anal tear doctors could not explain and that required three operations, according to her police complaint. She now believes it was likely caused by her father or men he may have invited to rape her.
In addition to the police complaint for sexual abuse filed by his eldest grandson, Mr. Pelicot has also been indicted in two cold cases, involving young female real estate agents in the 1990s. The first was raped and murdered; the second managed to escape an attempted rape and took refuge in a closet.
During the trial, while Ms. Pelicot remained calm and emotionally detached, Ms. Darian was a cyclone of emotion. Anger and suffering rose off her in waves. Part way through the trial, she announced on Instagram that she was checking herself into a clinic “to be able to sleep again.”
“You are lying — you don’t have the courage to tell the truth,” she hollered, near the end of the trial when her father once again denied having abused her. “You will die with your lies, alone with your lies.”
Remembering that day months later over lunch, Ms. Darian broke into tears. Her father’s refusal to acknowledge the evidence and explain it, she said, was “the ultimate betrayal.”
“He owed me the truth,” she said. “I am not just any victim. I was his daughter.”
Ms. Darian has lost not just her father, but her mother, too. The two are no longer speaking, she said. While she is sure her father abused her, her mother was more equivocal. When asked in court, she responded only that “it could not be ruled out.”
To Ms. Darian, it felt like abandonment.
“My relationship with my mother will never be the same again,” she said.
Gisèle Pelicot has refused all interview requests. One of her lawyers says said she won’t speak publicly before appeals of the convictions are heard, if ever.
Ms. Darian’s younger brother, Florian Pelicot, 38, said he believed their mother showed enormous strength in facing the horrors her husband, and dozens of other men, inflicted upon her. Opening her mind to his sister’s accusations, he thinks, “would have made her collapse.”
“You can’t save yourself and rebuild yourself and also help your children to rebuild themselves too,” he said.
Florian Pelicot emerged from the trial with his own deep wounds: His 18-year marriage ended and he has started the process of getting a paternity test after his father raised doubts he was his son during one of his pretrial interviews with the investigating judge, he said.
Near the end of the trial, Ms. Darian said she darted across the courtroom to the glass box for the accused during a recess for a quick last private word with the man who had been her father.
She told him that their relationship was over, she said, but that her pursuit of the truth was not.
“I’ll go all the way for my personal dignity,” she said in the interview. “Because I know I’m not wrong. I know that he must have done some very serious things. And I’ll get to the bottom of it.”
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