Caroline Darian and her two brothers were frantically moving their mother out of the family house that had effectively become a crime scene when she was interrupted by a call from police saying they had something to tell her in person. It could not wait.

She was already shattered by the news that the father she always believed was loving and supportive had been arrested on suspicion that he drugged and raped her mother, and that he allegedly brought other men to join him in violating her for almost 10 years.

What, she wondered that day in November 2020, could there be left to learn?

What came next was a new shock, Darian testified on Friday in her father’s trial. Besides the thousands of photos and videos the police said her father kept of her unconscious mother being abused, the officers had discovered two photos of another woman asleep in bed, with the covers off and the lights on. It took Darian, who goes by a pen name she created after the accusations, a while to register that the woman was her.

“I realised right away I was drugged in that photo,” Darian, 45, testified before the criminal court in Avignon, France.

The question that still haunts her: “To do what?”

Prosecutors have not charged her father with drugging or sexually abusing her, which she suspects he did and which his lawyer says he denies. But he is accused of violating her privacy by “taking, recording or transmitting” a sexual image of her without her knowledge.

While it is clear that the undisputed victim at the centre of this devastating family drama is Darian’s mother, Gisèle Pelicot, the entire family remains badly wounded and dogged by questions that perhaps will never be answered.

Some 51 men went on trial this week in Avignon, most of them accused of raping Pelicot while she was drugged. Her husband, Dominique Pelicot, has admitted to mixing sleeping pills in her food and drink for almost a decade and bringing dozens of men he met online into their bedroom to join him in raping her.

Three family members testified on Friday: Darian, her sister-in-law and her former sister-in-law.

Until the revelations by the police, the family members say, they all believed that Pelicots, who had been together for about 50 years, had a strong, loving marriage. The couple’s three children loved them so much, they often lived with them as adults, vacationed with them and brought their children down to their home in southern France for long summer vacations.

“It was a bit the ideal family,” said Aurore, Pelicot’s former daughter-in-law, who was married to his younger son and asked that her last name not be used.

Céline Pelicot, who is married to Pelicot’s older son and has three children with him, described Pelicot as caring with the children. And although she said he had grown more ill-tempered in recent years, she had never heard even a foul word about women emerge from his mouth.

New York Times News Service