Latest news with #GisèlePelicot
Irish Independent
2 days ago
- Irish Independent
Gisele Pelicot's daughter says mother ‘would die' before acknowledging she was victim of rapist father too
Caroline Darian, the daughter of French serial rape victim Gisèle Pelicot, says she thinks her mother would 'die' if she acknowledged that her daughter was also a potential victim of Dominique Pelicot.
The Independent
3 days ago
- Health
- The Independent
Why Gisèle Pelicot and her daughter no longer speak
Caroline Darian, the daughter of Gisèle Pelicot, believes her mother denies Ms Darian's potential abuse by her father, Dominique Pelicot, as a form of self-protection. The pair no longer speak. Ms Darian claims her mother is unable to acknowledge that she was likely drugged by her father due to the taboo nature of incest in France. Dominique Pelicot was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2024 for drugging and raping his wife and arranging for other men to rape her, resulting in 51 convictions. Ms Darian claims she was also a victim of chemical submission by her father after discovering pictures of herself unconscious and partially undressed, but lacks concrete evidence of sexual abuse. Ms Darian has written a book about her experiences and founded the campaign 'Don't Put Me Under: Stop Chemical Submission'.
The Independent
3 days ago
- Health
- The Independent
Caroline Darian says mother Gisèle Pelicot would ‘die' if she acknowledged her daughter was also a potential victim
Caroline Darian, the daughter of serial rape victim Gisèle Pelicot, says she thinks her mother would 'die' if she acknowledged that her daughter was also a potential victim of Dominique Pelicot. Speaking at Hay Festival, the activist and author claimed that the denial of her mother, whom she no longer talks to, was an act of self-protection. 'She is not able to recognise that I probably was drugged by my father. It is a way for her to protect herself,' Darian said while in conversation with actor and presenter Jameela Jamil. 'Incest in France is taboo. And there are a lot of victims where it's always the same situation. To recognise that your daughter, your son, is a victim – it's quite difficult. 'I think my mum is not able to recognise it because, otherwise, I think she's going to die.' Dominique Pelicot was sentenced to the maximum sentence of 20 years in prison in 2024 after being found guilty of drugging his wife Gisèle multiple times over the course of a decade and both raping her and arranging for dozens of other men to rape her while he watched and filmed. A total of 51 men were convicted following France's worst ever mass rape trial, which sent shockwaves around the world. Gisèle waived her right to anonymity, telling media outlets after the verdicts: 'I wanted... to ensure that society could see what was happening. I never have regretted this decision. I now have faith in our capacity to collectively take hold of a future in which everybody... can live together in harmony, respect, and mutual understanding.' Darian claims to have also been a victim of chemical submission at the hands of her father, after being shown two pictures of her unconscious and 'almost naked', wearing underwear that was not her own. 'At the very beginning of the revelations, it was November (2020), I discovered some pictures of me, taken from my beloved father, where I'm totally sedated… He sedated me, like my mum. The main difference between my mum and me: my mum has all the evidence, all the proof of having been raped. But not me. I only have those pictures, almost naked, lying on the bed, with pants which are not mine.' She added: 'But I don't know what's happened before or after.' Darian claims the pictures of her had been shared online by her father, and she believes that she too was likely a victim of sexual abuse, something Dominique has always denied. According to Darian, she feels like an 'invisible victim' after the French legal system failed to recognise that she had been sedated by her father. She and Gisèle 'are not talking anymore', Darian revealed in the interview, stating: 'It's difficult to talk about my mum.' She added that her mother is 'going well, she's well-supported, she's writing'. She needs to tell her own story,' Darian said, concluding by urging others to share their experiences of abuse. 'I'd like to help all victims, invisible victims, to have the courage to talk, and to share their stories,' she said. 'Because every story, each of us, that's how we'll change the world. It's not only one person. It's all of us together.' Darian has authored the book I'll Never Call Him Dad Again about her experiences and founded the campaign 'Don't Put Me Under: Stop Chemical Submission'.
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Health
- The Guardian
Gisèle Pelicot's daughter says she believes online porn played role in rape case
There is 'no way' that Gisèle Pelicot would have been raped more than 200 times without the existence of porn websites, her daughter has said. Speaking at the Hay festival in Powys on Thursday, Caroline Darian said there were 'so many social problems like online porn' that can lead to instances of abuse. Pelicot survived nearly a decade of rapes by dozens of men, including her then husband Dominique Pelicot, Darian's father, who drugged his wife and facilitated the abuse. Pelicot rose to international fame last year for waiving her right to anonymity in the trial of her ex-husband and other defendants. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Darian was at the festival to promote her book, I'll Never Call Him Dad Again. Asked by a male audience member how men can 'step up' and be part of breaking cycles of abuse, she said 'you need to talk between guys' about porn, because it is 'part of the system' of misogyny and violence. Actor and activist Jameela Jamil, who was chairing the event, said that 'there are so many men in my life, even, who don't know all of the facts of this case in the way that women do.' What we 'desperately need' men to do 'is to check your mates' and challenge their misogynistic comments and behaviour, she said. Darian is a pen name, a combination of her brothers' Florian and David's names, because she wanted to honour the fact that they have been so involved in the process of telling her story. The author spoke with great compassion and admiration about her mother, but explained that they were not currently on speaking terms. In her book, she wrote that they reached a 'point of no return' in their relationship after her mother did not believe Darian when she claimed her father had raped her. Darian told the Hay audience that she thinks her mother's reluctance to support her was a 'way for her to protect herself'. It's 'quite difficult' to accept that your child has been abused, she said. 'I think my mum is not able to recognise it because otherwise I think she's going to die.' Dominique Pelicot's actions have 'really impacted the whole family, and everyone from her family had a different position', she added. 'But I just have to be grateful for what [Gisèle Pelicot] did.' Telling her son, who was six at the time, about her father's actions was particularly hard, Darian said. She felt a responsibility to tell him the truth but 'it was a shock' as he had previously had a good relationship with his grandfather and 'loved him very much'. Her son saw a psychiatrist for almost four years after finding out the news, and Darian said she was 'trying to educate him about what is consent'. Raising a young man in a positive way was 'a question of open dialogue' she said and 'a question of education'.
Telegraph
17-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Do you often feel ashamed? Maybe you should
Do we live in a 'post-shame culture'? And whether we do or not, should we? In A Philosophy of Shame, a neat and erudite little book, Frédéric Gros tackles the paradoxes of this most excruciating of feelings. On the one hand, progressives argue that the shame someone might feel at being, say, gay or overweight is a legacy of historical accusations of deviancy or intemperance, and we should sweep it all aside. 'There is a pride in being oneself,' Gros writes. On this side is everyone from lifestyle gurus ('stop being ashamed of yourself!') to feminist campaigners against male sexual violence. Think of the emotion captured in 'the shame isn't ours to feel, it's theirs', as Gros's countrywoman Gisèle Pelicot recently declared of herself and 'all other women who are victims of rape'. Many conservatives, while accepting some of this, nonetheless suggest that there's value in everyday shame: that people in the 21st-century West have become too shameless in their dress and manner, their selfish and anti-social behaviour. On this view, the gradual erosion of shame, a consequence of individualism, has resulted in a degeneration of culture, and the damaging display of unbounded behaviour, particularly online, where one's public image, Gros writes, 'can now be quantified and fluctuate up and down like share values'. Gros understands this conservatism as the desire to return to the 'ethics of antiquity, where shame (aidos, pudor) was a lever of political obedience, a social watchword and a part of people's inner make-up.' Gros beautifully describes how modernity has rendered us members of 'societies without honour'. 'Channels of private vengeance', predicated on family and clan codes, have conceded their power to 'a public body of laws (the state), commercial transactions (capitalism) and the interplay of individual freedoms (liberalism).' In this post-honour culture, in which we live today, shame becomes impossible to avenge: when we're wronged, vigilante action remains unacceptable, because we're all supposedly equal in the eyes of the judicial system. Most of us frown, for instance, on families who for religious reasons murder their daughters in the name of some lapse of 'honour'. Even so, we can't fully transcend the fear of social shame, or the allure of schadenfreude. Think of the glee when a celebrity is caught overstepping some invisible hedonistic line, or of the demonic revelry of a good internet mobbing. Shame is alive and well, then, but we don't know exactly where it lives – and so it falls awkwardly somewhere between inward opprobrium, post-religious hangover and political battering-ram. Gros, crisply translated by Andrew James Bliss, wears his learning lightly, but he draws on an extraordinary range of literary, religious, historical, cinematic, psychoanalytic and philosophical descriptions of shame, from John Cassavetes to Franz Kafka, the rape of Lucretia to Primo Levi's exploration of the shame of surviving the concentration camps. Gros breaks shame down into three kinds: shame after an event, the shame of 'why me?', and shame for the world. Like Marx, who declared that 'shame is a revolution in itself', Gros sees in the third type, shame for the world (as exemplified by Levi), astonishing potential. Yes, shame, being a mixture of 'sadness and rage', can lead us into depression, self-resentment and 'solitary resignation'; but Gros argues that it can also forge 'a fiery and luminous path that transfigures us and fuels collective anger'. For those castigated for their identity, and made to feel ashamed of their poverty, race or sex, shame can reveal the outline of a potential political community. 'We need imagination,' he writes, 'to be ashamed.' But while Gros makes a great theoretical case for the revolutionary potential of shame, it didn't leave me any more sure that, in reality, alchemically converting one's shame into collective anger is the most effective mode (or mood) for bringing about social change. At one point, he suggests, rightly, that shame is often simply 'the expression of a desperate, naked desire to be liked'. In which case, having the courage to speak freely and to defend the truth, however unpopular it might make you, is the best way to confront shame – and any individual with sufficient bravery already has the power to do that.
