There were late dinners on the terrace that ended in dance contests, noisy games of Trivial Pursuit and youngsters splashing about in the pool while Granddad prepared dinner.
The family home of the Pelicots, in Mazan, a cozy village nestled in the foothills of Mont Ventoux in the green haven of Vaucluse, was a ‘tender place filled with wonderful memories’ for their grown-up children.
Recalling a typical family gathering, their daughter Caroline said of her father: ‘You light the fire on your little barbecue and start the grilling, you raise your head and smile at me. Around, the walls of the house never stop reflecting this beautiful sun that brings us all joy. Tom swings, Paul brings the wine. A terrace, a summer, a family.’
Her next words, however, bring a dramatic change in tone: ‘I hate you. Have you always been unhinged? And we would have seen nothing? Can we miss a father? But who are you really?’
These are the powerful questions of Caroline Peyronnet, whose father Dominique is on trial for a near-decade long campaign of drugging and sexually abusing his wife Gisele – along with 50 other men he invited to the family home.
He’s also accused of taking half-naked photos of Caroline when she was unconscious in a case that has generated shock around the world – not least because of the terrible depravity of the crimes.
According to those closest to him, the Pelicots were a textbook happy family and their home was a ‘paradise’ that they ‘thought was immutable’.
There have been no tales of domestic violence, controlling behaviour or childhood trauma in this case.
Indeed, experts in the case have referred to Dominique as a ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ character with a split personality, who was capable of both being a loving father and carrying out the most heinous acts.
Hard as it is to comprehend, all reports suggest a harmonious household where a middle class couple were living a very typical lifestyle for a retired couple in their 60s who were enjoying a quieter pace of life and all the joys of being grandparents.
Dominique spent his days playing boules at the local club and cycling on his racing bike. He’d made plans with is son-in-law to take his grandson out on his bike on the route of the Tour De France in the last message they ever exchanged before his arrest.
His wife, meawhile, spent her days looking after their grandchildren and pottering about the garden.
One small detail stands out from Dominique’s routine, albeit only with the benefit of hindsight.
Caroline recalls her father spending ‘all his free time’ at his computer. Even when his children and grandchilldren were at home, he would sit there vaping late into the night with his eyes ‘glued to his screen’.
If they thought, perhaps, that their father spent rather too much time on his computer, what nobody had any inkling of was the depravity of his online activities.
Having agreed to meet via a chatroom on a now defunct website whose servers were seized by police, dozens of men frequented the Pelicot family home, where they sometimes spent up to six hours raping an unconscious, snoring Gisele while Dominique stood behind the camera – but sometimes participated himself.
Yet the Pelicots’ adult children all said that they had no reason to suspect their father had waged one of the most vile programmes of sexual abuse to have ever reached the country’s courts.
Their eldest son has insisted that nothing in Mr Pelicot’s behaviour suggested any deviance and that ‘he had always fulfilled his role as a father’, while Caroline told Paris Match earlier this year: ‘We were very close to him.’
In her 2022 book entitled ‘And I Stopped Calling You Papa’, published under the pen name Caroline Darian, Dominique’s estranged daughter described him as a considerate, kind man who was heavily involved in her youth.
She explained how Mr Pelicot – whom she now calls her ‘progenitor’ – encouraged her in her studies, her projects and her sporting activities.
He accompanied her to school and dance classes, drove her to and from parties in her teens and supported her professional choices – and later went on to show the same care for his grandkids, splashing about with them in the swimming pool in Mazan.
‘I think of us as happy, I thought my parents were,’ she said in her 2002 book, entitled ‘And I Stopped Calling You Papa’, published under the pen name Caroline Darian.
She admits that even now, it’s a struggle to comprehend how the father she loved and the man whose heinous crimes are detailed in court are the same person.
‘I tried in vain to detect and understand the true identity of the man who raised me,’ she said.
‘Even today, I wonder about the fact of having seen nothing, suspected nothing. I will never forgive what he did over so many years. However, I am left with the image of the father I thought I knew. Despite everything, it is anchored in me and in the background.
She speaks of dreaming about her father before facing him in court and admits she misses him.
‘He talks to me, we laugh, we are together,’ she said. ‘Waking up brings me back to the nightmare: now. And I miss my father. Not the one who will stand before the judges; the man who took care of me for forty-two years. Yes, I loved him so much before discovering his monstrosity.’
She also admits to struggling with letting go of all empathy that’s mixed with her ‘anger and shame’, and has wondered how he was coping during his four years in prison ahead of the current trial.
‘Was he able to adapt? Does he suffer from our absence, from the solitude, violence in isolation? A second voice squeaks: “This is only justice, when we see the harm he has done to us. To Mom, to us, to our family. Let this deviant manage, he reaps what he has sown.
‘Sometimes a feeling of abandonment arises. It invades me, crushes me. Dad, why are you so far away from us? I thought I had mourned my father. The truth is that this trial awakens the little girl in me. The one who has not yet succeeded in killing the paternal image.
‘And I’m afraid I won’t be able to hate him. Perhaps this trial will help me achieve some form of definitive mourning. My father is alive and well, but perhaps I will never be able to tell him straight in the eyes that he counted, and ruined part of my life, extinguished the spark before, trampled on trust that I naturally felt towards men.’
Dominique and Gisele Pelicot, met as 18-year-olds in 1971 and married two years later, beginning a passionate and strong relationship that blossomed over forty years.
As the pair approached their 60s, they wanted to trade the town of Villiers-sur-Marne near Paris, where Dominique had worked for French energy company EDF while Gisele built a 20-year career as a company manager, for sunnier climes in the South.
Money hadn’t always been easy to come by – the 2008 financial crash ruining Dominique’s foray into the world of real estate and attempts at entrepreneurship – but Gisele’s stable income meant they’d saved enough to rent a lovely bungalow with a pool and a lush garden.
They settled into a rosy retirement in Mazan, a cozy village nestled in the foothills of Mont Ventoux in the green haven of Vaucluse, and revelled in their role as doting grandparents, hosting the whole family for holidays and enjoying late evening meals out on the terrace in the summer haze.
But it was around then that Caroline and her siblings began to notice their mother’s health steadily deteriorate.
Gisele began complaining of symptoms of fogginess and disorientation, and on several occasions suffered memory loss so severe that she began to suspect Alzheimer’s disease.
Doctors performed brain scans but were left at a loss as to why Gisele was experiencing such crippling amnesia, all while battling what seemed to be a growing abundance of gynaecological problems, weight loss and debilitating fatigue.
The true cause of her physical and mental malaise, revealed in 2020, turned out to be darker and more perverse than the even the most sordid and cynical observer could have dreamt up.
Mr Pelicot, the once warm and dedicated father and husband, is now on trial for a near-decade long campaign of drugging and sexually abusing his wife for the camera – along with 50 other men he invited to the family home to take part in the heinous activity.
All 51 men stand accused of aggravated rape – the largest number of defendants to have been tried together in recent years anywhere in France.
Prosecutors were unable to identify several other individuals believed to have participated in the barbaric operation who are now set to escape justice.
That’s not to say there weren’t some signs in the years prior to the skin-crawling revelation of Dominique’s crimes that the Pelicots’ once blooming relationship was strained.
Writing about one incident in the summer of 2018, Caroline recalls how her brother went to visit their parents for an evening meal only to see his mother practically falling asleep at the dinner table.
‘Only a few minutes after sitting down Maman was swaying in her chair as though she was drunk,’ he told Caroline.
‘Suddenly her whole body was drained of energy, like a rag doll.’
‘It happens. It’s better if I take her to bed,’ his father was reported as saying, feigning the role of a concerned husband acting in his wife’s best interests.
‘In reality the cocktail of drugs, poured into her glass of rosé, was beginning to take effect,’ Caroline said.
As the various symptoms of her abuse grew ever more difficult to ignore, Mr Pelicot committed to a deplorable approach of manipulation and gaslighting to avoid suspicion.
In the late eighties, Gisele had embarked on a two-year affair with the only other man she ever willingly slept with besides her husband, according to her testimony.
The couple overcame the incident and remained happily married, going on to have three children.
But when his wife complained of severe pain and tested positive for a sexually transmitted disease after years of having been raped by strangers, Mr Pelicot seized the opportunity to blame it on another episode of supposed infidelity.
Caroline claimed that when Gisele told her husband she needed treatment for the unexplained illness, he remarked: ‘So, what are you doing with your days?’ and accused her of playing around while he was out playing boules or cycling.
Despite the nasty accusation and mounting evidence something was wrong, the loving wife remained unaware that her husband had anything to do with her malaise.
So blind was Gisele to Mr Pelicot’s horrendous misdeeds that she was even willing to forgive him when he was arrested by police in September 2020, after he was caught snapping pictures up the skirts of female supermarket shoppers.
Police investigating the case confiscated Dominique’s computer and later discovered he had meticulously recorded, filed and catalogued a near-decade-long string of incessant abuse.
It wasn’t until officers sat Gisele down and confronted her with the undeniable evidence that the unconscious, gasping body she was watching being violated was her own did her litany of hitherto inexplicable symptoms make sense.
That realisation, of course, brought her entire world and that of her cherished family crashing down.
In a powerful 90-minute-long testimony before the court in Avignon this week, Gisele opened up on how the discovery drove her to the brink of suicide and left her daughter in a psychiatric ward.
‘We had everything, we had a great life. I don’t understand how this could have happened.
‘I only wanted one thing and that was to disappear. I told myself: ”I am going to get in my car with my dog and end it all”.
‘I had to tell my children that their father was in custody. I called my son-in-law and told my daughter and told them: ”He raped me”. Then I heard my daughter screaming a deep cry that I cannot get out of my head.
‘When I told my sons about this, I don’t think they really understood. They withdrew.
‘[That] evening, the children rang all the time saying ”don’t disappear”… they were worried I might die.’
Caroline herself recounted to the judge the moment she heard, from her own mother, exactly what kind of monster her father was.
‘Then my mother called me to say that there was a problem with my father. I imagine that he is intensive care, that he is dying.
‘But she tells me that my father has been drugging her for years so that strangers can rape her in her own bed.
‘She says she has seen photos of what happened to her and that the police want to show her videos of what happened.
‘I totally lost my foundations. Fortunately my husband [Pierre] was there and my six year old son too. We took him away so that he did not hear his mother’s screams.’
Caroline later learned that Mr Pelicot’s repulsive exploits were not limited to his wife.
She too had been photographed half-naked and unconscious by her father – a fact police proved when they pointed out one of the vulnerable bodies in his stack of images bore her unmistakable birth mark.
‘I discover that my father photographed me without my knowledge. I understood immediately that it was me in those photos. I do not sleep like that. So I strongly believe that he drugged me,’ she said.
Mr Pelicot and 14 of his co-accused have admitted their part in France’s worst rape case.
But another 35 men – from all walks of life – deny that they forced themselves on Madame Pelicot while she was unconscious, claiming that she in some way consented.
Gisele has unequivocally rejected their claims and is outspoken about her desire to see them all brought to justice.
‘Some of the defendants admit the facts, others contest all the facts, and others confirm they were present but deny it was rape,’ her lawyer said.
‘You caught four sexually transmitted diseases and were exposed to HIV six times. What have you got to say to people who claim you consented to all this?’
The brave mother-of-three replied: ‘All I have to say is, it’s an insult to my intelligence. These individuals were totally aware of what state I was in. I never knowingly took part in any of these things.
‘I was a dead woman and these men take advantage of me, they defile me, they treat me like a bin bag.
‘How can you even try and make people think that a woman would knowingly take part in all this?’
It remains to be seen whether every defendant in the scarcely believable case will be found guilty, with the trial set to stretch until Christmas.
Mr Pelicot’s scrupulous documentation of the abuse, not to mention the trove of vile messages he exchanged with each man who visited the family home, means prosecutors were able to charge 51 people in total.
But even if justice is eventually served, the halcyon memories shared by every member of the Pelicot family will remain forever tainted by their patriarch’s inescapable betrayal.
After all, as Caroline asks: ‘What do you do when your father is one of the worst sexual predators of the last 20 years?’