Gisele Pelicot and daughter 'torn apart' by 'anger, betrayal and prison gesture'
Gisele Pelicot and daughter 'torn apart' by 'anger, betrayal and prison gesture'
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When Gisele Pelicot's husband was jailed for allowing strangers to rape her, it signalled the start of a new beginning for the mother-of-three. But now, the wider-reaching implications of the horror are coming to the surface and threatening to 'tear her family apart', her lawyer has said. Brave Gisele, 72, waived her right to anonymity after being drugged by her own husband Dominique Pelicot and raped 92 times by strangers he invited into their bedroom between 2011 and 2020.
The mother-of-three was unknowingly sedated and sexually abused dozens of times at their family home in Mazan, a commune in Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, France. The former electrician, 71, was sent to jail for 20 years last month following a landmark trial in France. He had kept evidence of the abhorrent acts, storing 3,800 photos and videos of his wife being sexually abused on a USB drive, called 'abuses'.
Chillingly, there were also images of his daughter, Caroline Darian, 45, which were saved as 'around my daughter, naked'. As well as being sentenced for drugging and raping his wife, Pelicot was also found guilty of taking indecent images of his daughter and his daughters-in-law, Aurore and Celine.
Caroline fears that she too was abused and is a "forgotten victim". It has been suggested that traumatised Gisele is reluctant to back her quest to seek justice. In the courtroom, Caroline's older brother David, 50, confronted his father about the disturbing pictures found of his little sister asleep, in her underwear. He said: "If you have any little bit of humanity left, tell the truth about what you did to my sister, who is still suffering every day and will suffer all her life".
