Gisele Pelicot's daughter says chemical castration 'could be part of the solution' for sex offenders
The daughter of Gisele Pelicot has suggested chemical castration could be "one part of the solution" when there is "nothing else you can do" for sex offenders - like her father.
Caroline Darian's father Dominique Pelicot admitted repeatedly drugging and raping his wife Gisele between 2011 and 2020, and inviting dozens of other men to their home in southern France to do the same.
Gisele decided to waive her right to anonymity to hold the trial of her husband and 50 other men in public, saying: "It is not for us to be ashamed, but for those men."
Speaking to Ali Fortescue on The Politics Hub, Ms Darian said the UK government's plans to consider mandatory chemical castration could be "one part of the solution" for men like her father.
She said: "It's probably one part of the solution because you know when you're at that level of crime, that level of criminal, there is nothing else you can do."
Asked if she believed "men like your father" could be rehabilitated, Ms Darian said "no" and "never".
For ten years, Pelicot repeatedly sedated his wife and invited strangers to abuse her after advertising sex with her on a French swinging website.
Some denied the rape charges, claiming they believed Gisele had agreed to be drugged and was a willing participant in a sex game between the couple.
But all the men charged were found guilty of at least one offence, with nearly all convicted of rape, after a trial that shocked France and made headlines around the world.
The defendants were sentenced to a total of more than 400 years, with Pelicot being sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Pelicot also took photos of his daughter Caroline semi-naked while she was asleep.
Ms Darian is pressing charges against her father, having accused him of drugging and raping her. Pelicot has denied this.
Speaking to French media, Beatrice Zavarro, Pelicot's lawyer, said Ms Darian's decision to press charges was "unsurprising".
She added that prosecutors had said there were insufficient "objective elements" to accuse Pelicot of raping and using chemical submission on Ms Darian.
Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood said last week that she will pursue "a nationwide rollout" of a scheme being piloted in southwest England to use medication to suppress the sexual drive of sex offenders.
6:02
It came after an independent review, led by the former justice secretary David Gauke, was commissioned by the government amid an overcrowding crisis in prisons in England and Wales.
The review recommended that chemical castration "may assist in management of suitable sex offenders both in prison and in the community".
Ms Mahmood said she is "exploring whether mandating the approach is possible". The trial is currently voluntary.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
44 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Exposed: 'DIY Ozempic' sellers putting lives at risk by peddling super cheap but super dangerous self-mixing weight loss drugs in booming black market
Cheap 'Do It Yourself Ozempic' is being sold across Britain in a booming black market that puts lives at risk, a Daily Mail investigation has found. Scores of dealers based in the UK and China are using social media to openly advertise their cut-price illegal fat jabs to vulnerable people.
Daily Mail
44 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Why the death of the Tory Party has been greatly exaggerated
Has the death of the Tory Party, like that of Mark Twain, been greatly exaggerated?There are good reasons to think that after nearly 200 years, it has breathed its last as a major force in British politics. The failure to properly address voters' concerns during a decade and a half in government led to a catastrophic collapse in public faith and electoral annihilation. With the Tory brand badly tarnished, the party languishes in the polls behind Labour and Reform UK. No wonder some have read it the last rites. And yet, under Kemi Badenoch there are encouraging signs the party is flickering back to life. She is a thoughtful leader who is determined to do the right thing – insofar as the Westminster circus will allow. She is also a politician of substance, rather than soundbite. It is understandable she wants to take time to put a coherent policy platform together, rather than indulging in knee-jerk politics. Her review into the European Convention on Human Rights, which enables activist judges to prevent the deportation from Britain of foreign criminals and Channel migrants, is a case in point. Like many, the Tory leader increasingly believes that you can faithfully adhere to the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg court, or have an elected Parliament that responds to the wishes of voters, but not both. But it's right she looks at all the issues involved in leaving. One reason for such huge disillusionment with the Conservatives is that in power they repeatedly promised one thing and then did another. This shabby habit has been taken to new heights by Labour. Does anyone seriously believe the Government, led by a die-hard human rights lawyer, will keep its word and legislate to restrict the abuse of the ECHR? With the comprehensive spending review due next week, another claim made by Sir Keir Starmer and his Chancellor will take a bashing: That Labour is fiscally responsible. Before the election, their mantra was never to 'play fast and loose' with the public finances. In fact, Rachel Reeves has made an unholy mess – awarding excessive public-sector pay rises to placate the unions, hiking taxes on businesses and letting borrowing go through the roof. She toyed with reining in the out-of-control welfare budget only to blink at the first signs of disgruntlement among Labour MPs. Then there is Nigel Farage. For all that he is a charismatic politician, with a gift for tapping into the concerns of ordinary Britons, his policies so far lack credibility. His plan to increase the tax-free allowance to £20,000 a year is a wonderful aspiration, but it would cost an eye-watering £80billion. And when one of the UK's biggest problems is the unsustainable rise of the welfare bill, his baffling pledge to end the popular two-child benefit cap would make things worse. Frequent damaging rows also erupt within Reform UK. Has the party the experience and temperament to run the country? As Sir Keir and Mr Farage try to outbid each other with extravagant promises, Mrs Badenoch has an opportunity. While re-energising the Tories, she must communicate vigorously that they represent common sense, law and order, fiscal restraint and controlled migration. She has an impressive team of shadow ministers. Could their talents be utilised more? It would be absurd to defenestrate Mrs Badenoch after just seven months. Anyone who thinks her party can suddenly jump to the top of the polls is delusional. But as Sir Keir's popularity sinks lower by the day, she is beginning to hit her stride.
BBC News
an hour ago
- BBC News
Madeleine McCann: Hopes of closure fade despite fresh searches
From the moment I arrived in Praia da Luz on Monday the word on everyone's lips was "closure".All the long-term residents of the sleepy Atlantic resort told me closure was what they were hoping for. From the English woman who lived at the time above the apartment from which Madeleine McCann disappeared in 2007, to the former neighbour of the main suspect in the all said: "We hope her family get closure".Of course, any chance of a really positive outcome disappeared years ago. Closure now would mean either finding Madeleine McCann's body, or finding her living with another family, unable to remember her parents or her younger twin siblings. But, frustrated as residents are when the world's media return to Praia da Luz - year after year at the same time that purple flowers appear on the jacaranda trees - they do understand the unbearable pain that Kate and Gerry McCann must feel. How that shock of realisation that Madeleine was not in her bed turned into minutes, then hours, and then days of panic. Then tortuous, unending months and years of 13 years there was no single theory as to what happened to Madeleine McCann. Did she wake up in the middle of an opportunistic burglary and have to be silenced? Was she abducted on behalf of a couple desperate for a child of their own? Had her own parents covered up her accidental death? (A theory given sufficient weight by Portuguese prosecutors that for a while Kate and Gerry McCann were officially under suspicion.)The initial Portuguese investigation failed to preserve the scene adequately, so the opportunity to gather forensic evidence from Madeline McCann's room at the Ocean Club was lost. Long-term residents remember joining in uncoordinated and ad-hoc searches of the Metropolitan Police investigation that began in 2011 built to a peak in 2014, with substantial searches near Praia da Luz - but they did not appear to have any identifiable suspects. They had 60 people of interest, 38 of whom they were investigating. Portuguese prosecutors had allowed them to search only one of three sites they had asked for access changed in June 2020 when, out of the blue, the head prosecutor in Braunschweig in Germany, Hans Christian Wolters, said he had evidence that Madeleine McCann was dead. Working with the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), the German equivalent of the FBI, he said he had identified a suspect, later identified as Christian Brückner."The evidence is strong enough to say that the girl is dead, and to accuse a specific individual of murder," Hans Christian Wolter who spent many years of his life in the Algarve, was a drifter, a petty criminal and a convicted sex offender. It all fitted neatly into place and it seemed that the mystery might finally be solved. Brückner's long list of previous convictions includes ones for sexually abusing children in 1994 and 2016. The Braunschweig prosecution team have never disclosed the extent of any evidence they have, but we do know their suspicions are partly based on a conversation an old acquaintance of Brückner's claims they had at a festival in Busching says the topic of Madeleine McCann's disappearance came up, and Brückner said she "didn't scream". Mr Busching says it was clear to him what Brückner 2019, Brückner has been in prison in Germany for raping a 72-year-old American woman in Praia da Luz in 2005. But he is due for release in September, or in January if he does not pay an outstanding told an RTL reporter earlier this year that he was looking forward to a "decent steak and a beer". The concern is that he will leave the country and head somewhere with no extradition treaty with Germany, though he appears to have no Braunschweig prosecutors' confidence was dealt a severe blow last year when they put Brückner on trial for rape and unconnected attempted child abductions. Mr Busching gave evidence, but the court in Braunschweig acquitted Brückner and suddenly time was very Wolters has made no secret of the fact that he wants more evidence to charge Brückner. That is why the BKA footed the bill for the search this week in ruined farm buildings on merciless, shadeless scrubland in the rising heat of an Algarve summer. The buildings are frequented at night by the kind of drifters and petty criminals that Brückner once was. Nearby residents told us they sometimes find looted suitcases among the ruins that have been stolen from this week's searches were not targeted on one specific building, so any intelligence they were based on was clearly quite all felt a bit like a last desperate attempt to back Mr Busching's statements with concrete, physical some ways this search was similar to those I have seen on previous trips. The use of shovels in the heat, digging up stone-hard the German team were mostly targeting old farm buildings. This meant they needed a large, yellow mechanical digger to break up the concrete floors and sift through the resulting rubble. They also made extensive use of a ground-penetrating radar, slowly pushing the device across the buildings' floors, looking for anomalies and cavities underneath. The Portuguese fire brigade helped on the first day, pumping out an old well so it could be safely searched. The officers were looking for traces of Madeleine McCann, or some of her time I travel to Portugal for a new search it always begins optimistically. Could police find something this time? But on every occasion it quickly becomes apparent the searches are not tightly targeted. The police work always clearly based on quite vague intelligence - or just an investigator's Neves, the National Director of the Polícia Judiciária, the Portuguese equivalent of the FBI, said at the end of the week that, "nothing is in vain, not least because doors are being closed".As we watched the German detectives packing away it felt like the spring of hope of a resolution that had bubbled up in June 2020 was evaporating in the thankless heat.
