Online pornography played role in mass rape of Gisèle Pelicot, daughter Caroline Darian says
30 May 2025, 15:22 | Updated: 30 May 2025, 15:44
The daughter of Gisèle Pelicot has said there is "no way" her mother would have raped more than 200 times by strangers if online pornography didn't exist.
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Caroline Darian said there were “so many social problems like online porn” that can lead to instances of abuse.
She spoke at the Hay-on-Wye book festival in Powys about how porn is “part of the system” of misogyny and violence.
Dominique Pelicot was jailed for 20 years for drugging, raping and inviting other men to abuse his wife Gisele in their home in France for a decade.
Their daughter also is pressing charges against her father, after being shown photos of herself she doesn't recognise.
Gisèle waived her right to anonymity, allowing the trial to be held in public so that “shame will change sides”.
Darian was at the festival to promote her book, I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again.
Asked by a male audience member onhow men can be part of breaking cycles of abuse.
She replied “you need to talk between guys” about pornography, because it is “part of the system” of misogyny and violence.
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Ms Darian has previously criticised her mother whom she says was reluctant to believe she was also raped by Pelicot.
Darian says her mother let her down during the three-month trial held last autumn in Avignon, southern France.
She describes her reluctance to believe her as a “point of no return” in their relationship, saying: “It is an abandonment too many.”
Darian, 46, describes her father as a sexual predator and claims he is a serial rapist who left a trail of victims in cases so far unsolved by the police, which he denies.
Dominique Pelicot took photos of Darian asleep in underwear that she told the court was not her own.
Darian says she believes the photographs were taken after she had been drugged, like her mother.
“These two photographs knocked me over … I am sure [there] are others. I know that I was sedated and abused by my father, but I cannot prove it,” she writes in the book.
Questioned about her allegations, Dominique Pelicot repeatedly denied having raped or sexually assaulted his daughter.
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