Latest news with #Gisèle
Winnipeg Free Press
10-05-2025
- Winnipeg Free Press
Father's assaults shatter family, spur action
While it is generally understood that 'date rape' drugs such as gamma hydroxybutyrate, (GHB) are a potential threat in bars, clubs and other public settings, the notion that 'chemical submission… typically happens within the confines of the home' has scarcely been imaginable. That began to change in 2020, when French police arrested pensioner Dominique Pelicot for 'trying to film up womens' skirts.' After confiscating Pelicot's phone and other electronic devices, officers found he had been drugging and raping his wife Gisèle Pelicot for years, filming and photographing all the while. What's more, he had 'served her up to strangers to be raped,' again and again. As their daughter and first-time author Caroline Darian writes of receiving this news, 'It should not be possible to string such words together, for the sentence that they form to make any sense. The very idea is so steeped in violence it is almost impossible to contemplate — like a knife so sharp that the gleam of the blade blinds you, its edge so keen that you don't immediately realise how deep it cuts.' I'll Never Call Him Dad Again With the force of a cleaver, the discovery of Dominique's brutality severs his family's life in two: before, when 'life was so simple… even… banal,' is lopped off and replaced by, after, 'a crushing weight we will have to carry for the rest of our lives.' This catastrophe compels Dominique's family members to re-evaluate the past and to wrestle with challenging questions including, writes Darian, 'How can I reconcile the anger and shame I feel with the stubborn empathy that comes with being someone's child?' Noting that her mother had often 'seemed… lost in her mind,' Darian, her husband and her two brothers suspected Alzheimer's. Gisèle consulted a neurologist in 2017, followed by having a brain scan, but neither proved helpful. Gisèle grew anxious and experienced 'episodes of amnesia… She couldn't sleep, began to lose her hair, and her weight plummeted.' Sometimes she 'collapsed like a rag doll.' In 2019 another neurologist proclaimed Gisèle 'simply prone to anxiety (and) prescribed melatonin to help her sleep more soundly.' Winnipeg Jets Game Days On Winnipeg Jets game days, hockey writers Mike McIntyre and Ken Wiebe send news, notes and quotes from the morning skate, as well as injury updates and lineup decisions. Arrives a few hours prior to puck drop. The revelation of Dominique's crimes explains Gisèle's symptoms and the reason he always dismissed their children's concerns, blamed his wife for 'burn(ing) the candle at both ends,' or even rebuked family members for wearing her out before sending her home so that he and the rapists he recruited online could further assault the woman he persists in calling 'the love of my life.' Their horrific acts are inconceivable, yet Darian berates herself for being 'blind to it all.' As police unearth more details, Darian and her family learn that the sordid nightmare they now live in contains many rooms. One of the hardest for Darian to enter contains evidence that her father preyed upon her too: 'I start to shiver, my vision is disturbed by a host of tiny starbursts, my ears start ringing, and I jerk back. How did he manage to take my photo in the middle of the night without waking me up? Where did the underwear come from, as I'm sure it's not mine? Did he drug me?… Did he — I can't keep the unthinkable at bay — abuse me?' To paraphrase writer Kenji Miyazawa, Caroline Darian uses pain to fuel her journey. Joining forces with others working to end violence against women, she advocates for vastly improved and expanded supports for victims, helps create a safe house, shuts down the website her father used to recruit rapists, launches the 'Stop Chemical Submission (#MendorsPas): Don't Put Me Under' movement and writes her book 'to sound the alarm about the prevalence of chemical submission in France and around the world.' It's a pity the copy editing is inconsistent throughout the text and startlingly poor in the preface's first sentence, where the word 'also' has no business being, yet the flaws do not detract from the power of this gripping, heartrending, consciousness-raising 'chronicle of horror and survival.' Jess Woolford is a writer and sexual assault survivor in perpetual recovery from misogyny.
New Indian Express
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
Patricia's choice: the first Indian-origin director of Alliance Francaise Delhi on her two mothers & adoption story
Facing it Loison tells this story with the openness of someone who has told the story before. Writing the book also made her look at her biological mother's decision closely, obsessively, repeatedly. It was also the chance to tell her story, her way. 'It is said if a chick is made to leave the mother, some die and some survive. So, it is with a human child. Whether you blend or cling, it's a decision you make. You make your new family yours. Whichever family or the mother you came from, whatever happened before, you can't have that. You can't have both….' When she was in her 30s, Gisèle gave her her case file. 'I am told she breastfed me,' Loison says softly. Each detail has added to her mental picture of how she wants to imagine her biological mother right up to the moment of separation — from her skin, hands, and bosom to another's. These feelings she also confronted when she gave birth. 'When you give birth, you put yourself in a lineage of women but when I was giving birth my biological mom wasn't there….' The book was Loison's way to give her corporeal form, make her seem alive, and around. This is perhaps not a story she wants to close; when she was part of the Press contingent covering French president Nicolas Sarkozy's official trip to India in 2010 for LCI, the news channel of TF1 France's first private TV channel and the biggest in Europe, she went to Shishu Bhavan to try to get a lead that she could follow up about her mother but to no avail.
Los Angeles Times
14-04-2025
- Los Angeles Times
Her father drugged and facilitated her mother Gisèle Pelicot's rape by dozens. Caroline Darian recounts how she survived
At 8:24 p.m. on Nov. 2, 2020, Caroline Darian was a happily married 42-year-old working mother, close to her parents and two brothers, David and Florian, content with a life so ordinary that she would later characterize it as 'banal.' Then, one minute later, she became someone very different. The phone rang and her life was split in two. From that moment, Darian's personal timeline would exist on two opposing planes: The years before she learned that for more than a decade, her father, Dominique Pelicot, had systematically drugged, raped and enabled more than 70 men to rape her mother, Gisèle Pelicot, and the days, weeks and months that followed. Days, weeks and months that Darian chronicles with powerful precision and detail in 'I'll Never Call Him Dad Again: Turning Our Family Trauma of Sexual Assault and Chemical Submission Into a Collective Fight,' published in the United States in March. (Caroline Darian is a pen name for Caroline Peyronnet.) 'Later on, I learned that those who experience sudden trauma can often only recall a single isolated detail — a smell, a noise, a particular sensation; something infinitely small, which expands to take up all the available space, ' Darian writes. 'For me it's the clock on the cooker. Twenty-five minutes past eight, etched in stark white.' In 2020, Dominique Pelicot was arrested for 'upskirting' — attempting to take photos underneath the skirts of three women. During the subsequent search of his phone and computer, police found an enormous cache of photos and videos of Dominique and men he solicited on the internet raping a drugged Gisèle. Last year, the world watched the Pelicot trial with a mixture of horror and awe — horror at the enormity of the crime, which led to the conviction of 51 men, including Dominique, and awe inspired by Gisèle's courage. The tiny woman with the red bob became a feminist icon for her decision to waive her right to anonymity and allow the trial to be made public in order to shift the shame that often surrounds rape, from the victims to the perpetrators. But Gisèle was not the only victim as 'I'll Never Call Him Dad Again' makes clear. The international bestseller, which was published in France in 2022, is drawn from Darian's journals of the living nightmare that followed Dominique's arrest. Day after day, Darian and her brothers attempted to care for their mother as they grappled with a cascade of proof that the loving father and husband they thought they knew was, in reality, a cold, conniving and manipulative monster. The various concerns they had after Dominique and Gisèle moved from Paris to Mazan, a small town in the south of France, now filled them with guilt. Darian and other family members were worried enough about her mother's episodes of mind-numbing fatigue, bouts of memory loss and other physical symptoms to take her to various doctors. But, having no reason to demand a toxicology report and with their father ascribing the symptoms to Gisèle's tendency to 'overdo,' they were forced to accept vague diagnoses associated with aging. After the shocking revelations, memories of their mother falling dead asleep at the dinner table, being unable to remember past conversations and, in one instance, experiencing vaginal bleeding, took on new and agonizing meaning. Then, still reeling from the crimes committed against her mother, Darian was called back to the Mazan police station to be shown two photos of herself, asleep in an unusual position, her buttocks exposed to reveal panties that were not hers. Photos she had absolutely no memory of. Confronted with these images, and the possibility that she too had been drugged and raped, Darian experienced a mental breakdown and required hospitalization. The passages recounting her shattered emotional state and her understandable fear of the sedatives that were administered to calm her, are terrifying in their battered simplicity and clarity of purpose. It was after this breakdown, Darian says, that she became determined to write a near-journalistic account of her experience. 'I started writing two weeks after I was released from a psychiatric hospital,' she says over Zoom from France. 'It was a real deep need — I work in communications and this book became a means of survival. First putting down the words, then sharing as a form of therapy.' She wanted to recount her story as matter-of-factly as she could so people might understand how a crime like this could be committed, and the widespread damage it had done. 'It isn't just the Pelicot family that was destroyed,' she says. 'All the other rapists had families too, families who had no idea what they were doing.' As she worked through her own anger, shock and grief, Darian realized that society's ignorance of the prevalent use of drugs in sexual abuse was one reason Dominique had been able to get away with his crimes for so long. 'I'd heard of GHB, the date rape drug, but had no idea how widespread it had become,' she writes. 'Nor did I know that rapists were turning more and more to sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medicine … my ignorance strikes me as almost culpable.' With the French publication of 'I'll Never Call Him Dad Again' in 2022, Darian began a campaign to raise awareness about the role drugs play in rape and sexual abuse. 'I've received so many testimonials from other women but also teenagers because of incest, when drugs are often used.' With the #MendorsPas (Don't Put Me Under) movement, Darian hopes to help create medical and law enforcement protocol for investigations into potential cases of chemical submission. 'The [general practitioners] my mother saw, the neurologists, they couldn't help,' she says. 'They couldn't analyze her symptoms properly because there were no trends available. We thought she had brain cancer. We thought she had Alzheimer's.' Once the truth was discovered, the small Mazan police force was not equipped to deal with the nature of the crimes or the emotional impact on the victims. 'We were given this information, shown these images and then just left alone,' she says. 'We were offered no support, we were totally alone.' The bulk of the evidence police found involved Dominique's abuse of Gisèle, but Darian points out that there were also photos of her and both her sisters-in-law — 'no woman in our family was spared' — as well as connections to cold-case rapes. Last month, Darian filed new charges against her father, who is also being investigated in connection with several cold cases. Dominique has denied ever touching his daughter. 'The original investigation lasted two and a half years, but the south of France is a very small place. They were overwhelmed. That is why the investigation focused on Gisèle.' A second book, recently published in France, is Darian's account of the trial, during which she openly challenged her father's denial of harming her, and her work battling chemical submission. She has been working with a politician on a government report that she hopes will offer concrete solutions. 'I knew I needed to make this useful,' she says. 'I am a mum, I have a job, but I want to add my own experience to help identify victims in France and the world. I'm an activist and I knew that if I had to go through this, it's not by chance. I have the strength to carry it.' Speaking about her experiences, including those early days when her life cracked apart, hasn't become easier with time — during a 45-minute interview, Darian's voice chokes with emotion on more than one occasion, particularly when speaking about her mother. In 'I'll Never Call Him Dad Again,' Darian discusses Gisèle's refusal to even consider that Dominique would abuse Darian and the wedge that drove between her and her mother. Darian is proud of her mother's decision to make the trial public. 'I told her from the beginning that it could not be closed door,' she says. 'I told her that would be a gift to only one person.' Gisèle is also working on a memoir, 'A Hymn to Life,' set to be published early next year, but the mother and daughter have limited communication. 'We are each on a different path,' Darian says. 'It's too heavy; she needs to recover. She needs to rebuild herself — she's almost 73 — and me, I'm on another journey. Dominique was judged for her and that's right. The way she's handling this belongs to her, but it's too painful for me. She is well-supported and is dealing with her life the way she decided to do. But we are not a family anymore.' 'Dominique succeeded,' she adds sadly. 'He split our family in two.'
CairoScene
08-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CairoScene
Acidusa Honours Feminist Icon Gisèle Halimi With Acid Techno Release
The track, titled 'Gisèle', aims to deconstruct and reinvent the codes of post-modern feminism. Mar 08, 2025 Acidusa, a Paris-based DJ/producer duo that has been making noise across Europe with their inexhaustible energy and bold exploration of their Algerian cultural roots, has just unveiled a riotous double-single titled 'Gisèle', dedicated to the late renowned Tunisian-French lawyer and feminist icon Gisèle Halimi. A two-timed sonic diptych, assembling ticker tape bleeps, acid-licked basslines and hardcore techno, the track is based on one of Halimi's interviews, where she shares key moments of everyday sexism that led her to dedicate her life to defending women's rights. With this double-single, the duo aims to deconstruct and reinvent the codes of post-modern feminism. Acidusa · Gisèle Part 1 & 2
The Independent
07-03-2025
- The Independent
Gisèle Pelicot tells sexual violence survivors ‘you will never be alone' in International Women's Day message
Gisèle Pelicot has told sexual violence survivors they 'will never be alone' in a powerful message marking International Women's Day. The extraordinary French grandmother dedicated being chosen as The Independent 's most influential woman of 2025 to survivors who ' are the true heroes ' in moving personal words shared by her lawyer. Stéphane Babonneau said his client – a global hero and worldwide symbol in the struggle against sexual violence – was emotional and humbled when she found out she had been named as number one on the list. She later told him she is 'honoured' and passed on her gratitude. The 72-year-old highlighted the victims who are still battling for justice, and especially those who are doing so alone and 'in the dark', whom he said she deeply admires. In her personal message conveyed to Mr Babonneau for The Independent, Ms Pelicot said: 'Gisèle is honoured and wishes to dedicate this recognition to all victims, and more specifically to those who are fighting alone to get their rights and the truth acknowledged by courts. To these victims, who most often remain in the dark, Gisèle wishes to express her admiration because she thinks they are the true heroes and tell [them] that they must know they will never be alone.' He added: 'Gisèle and the legal team wishes to thank The Independent.' The courageous and dignified Ms Pelicot has become an icon across the globe, especially to sexual violence survivors, after she waived her anonymity in the horrific mass rape case of her ex-husband and 50 other men and changed the way the world treats victims forever. The public nature of the trial – in which all of the men were convicted of monstrous sexual abuse over the course of a decade after her ex had drugged her – shone a light on the shocking prevalence of rape culture, sparking a worldwide movement calling for an immediate end to it. Ms Pelicot faced her abusers in the courtroom in Avignon, France, every day of the harrowing three-month trial, symbolising her message that would become the slogan of the case - that it is the perpetrators, never the victims, who should feel shame for sexual crimes. Ms Pelicot consequently topped The Independent 's 2025 Influence List, which has been released for a third year running to mark International Women's Day. She is joined by 50 exceptional women from across the worlds of politics, sports, the arts, media, business, fashion and activism – all are united by their extraordinary impact on society, as they push boundaries and break down barriers to shape the world around them.
