"When the world crowned Gisèle Pelicot a feminist hero, it did so for good reason. Her refusal to hide, her insistence that the trial remain public, and her decision to shift shame back onto the men who drugged and raped her was extraordinary in the face of horrific realisations of what her husband (and many others) were capable of. What she endured at the hands of Dominique Pelicot was prolonged, calculated, and unspeakable.
But feminist analysis cannot stop at hero worship. It must also ask some uncomfortable questions.
Because there is another voice in this story: Caroline Darian, the daughter of Gisèle and Dominique. I am increasingly concerned that her voice has been lost in the rush to canonise her mother. In fact, I have not really seen anyone talk about her - possibly because it disrupts the narrative building around her mother.
Caroline reported publicly that she was incredibly distressed to learn that her father had unconscious photos of her on his phone, where she was wearing underwear that she doesn’t own. Caroline did not receive support from her mother. She reported that her mother had tried to convince her that it didn’t happen, and felt she had not supported her or believed her.
That’s despite the photos discovered by detectives on her rapist father’s phone.
This disbelief by her mother caused a signifcant rift in the family and in their relationship - understandably.
I wanted to write this article to explore this, as I am sure many will be surprised to learn about Caroline and the way she has been edited out of the feminist hero story.
There is a deeply embedded cultural belief that women who have been abused will naturally believe other women, and become more compassionate towards other women who disclose abuse. It sounds intuitive. Trauma makes you softer. Suffering makes you kinder. Victimhood creates solidarity.
The academic evidence does not support this. Even my own PhD on the psychology of victim blaming women and girls did not find this.
Research on internalised misogyny, victim blaming, and just world beliefs repeatedly shows that women, including women with lived experience of sexual and domestic violence, are just as capable of victim blaming as anyone else. They blame and disbelieve at the same rates as women who have no lived experience - but most interestingly - they also blame at the same rate as men, too.
Lived experience then, does not make us more supportive of other victims - something I have been writing and teaching for years now. And something I see often in our own feminist work.
Defensive attribution theory suggests that people protect their sense of safety by distancing themselves from victims. Women are not immune to this mechanism.
Many women who have been abused are extremely judgemental of other victims, either feeling that they can ‘tell’ when another woman is ‘lying’ or that their abuse was worse. Or that the other woman should have done something different.
In fact, trauma can intensify those responses.
When someone is still trying to metabolise their own abuse, another disclosure, particularly within the same family, can destabilise fragile meaning making. Acknowledging a daughter’s abuse by the same man requires confronting the full scale of betrayal and the generational harm. It may also trigger unbearable guilt.
How did I not see this? How did I not protect her?
Psychologically, denial is not uncommon in such situations. It is not proof of cruelty. But nor is it proof of empathy.
Women who have been abused do not become morally purified by that experience. They remain human. They retain their biases. They defend themselves psychologically. They may minimise others in order to survive their own reality.
Caroline Darian has publicly expressed fear and belief that she, too, was drugged and assaulted by her father - and if we were to talk in statistics, offended theories, and likelihood - she’s probably right.
In the context of a case where a man systematically drugged his wife, filmed her being raped by strangers, catalogued the assaults, and stored the material, what is the statistical and theoretical likelihood that images of his adult daughter asleep, in unexplained underwear, are benign?
We are not talking about an isolated photograph in a neutral context. We are talking about a perpetrator with a proven pattern of drugging, sexual violation, documentation, and retention of images.
Serial sexual offending literature consistently shows behavioural consistency across victims and contexts. Offenders who cross certain boundaries do not typically maintain rigid moral firewalls elsewhere. Where access exists, particularly within a family, risk expands rather than contracts.
Why would any father possess photographs of his daughter unconscious or asleep in underwear she does not recognise? What legitimate explanation survives scrutiny in this context?
How did he even get them? Why are they on his phone?
To raise that question is not to declare a legal verdict. It is to acknowledge probability, pattern, and behavioural logic.
Gisèle has since spoken of nagging doubt and of trying to reconnect with her daughter. Their relationship reportedly fractured when Caroline felt disbelieved or insufficiently affirmed.
This is psychologically comprehensible.
A woman discovering she has been drugged and raped over years, thrown into a global media frenzy, is in acute trauma processing. Her entire marital reality collapses. Her identity as wife, mother, partner is shattered. In that state, to be told that the same man may also have assaulted your daughter is existential. But it could also be about her own values and biases. It doesn’t have to be borne out of trauma.
Acknowledging it means accepting that the abuse was not only about you, that your child may have been harmed under your roof, and that the betrayal was deeper than you imagined.
Defensive minimisation in such circumstances is not rare. Studies of intrafamilial sexual abuse have long documented maternal disbelief or partial disbelief, even among mothers who are themselves victims of the same perpetrator. It is because cognitive dissonance and shame can be hugely overwhelming.
But understanding the psychology does not erase the impact on Caroline - or any other daughter who has been disbelieved by their mother.
If Caroline experienced minimisation, that experience matters. If she felt her reality was sidelined, that matters. If the global narrative now frames her mother as heroic while her own victimhood remains a footnote that no one even knows about, I think that matters profoundly.
We know from trauma research that invalidation, being told implicitly or explicitly that your perception is wrong, compounds trauma and harm. It increases self doubt and shame. When the invalidation occurs within family, its impact deepens.
There is also another uncomfortable truth here.
Women are not immune from protecting men they love, even abusive men. Nor are they immune from minimising harm when acknowledging it would destroy family structures. Patriarchal conditioning runs deep. Loyalty scripts run deep. Shame scripts run deep.
Research on internalised patriarchy shows that women sometimes do prioritise relational stability over confrontation of male wrongdoing, particularly where confronting it implicates their own perceived failures.
So the idea that a woman who has been raped would obviously believe her daughter is not evidence based. It is hopeful thinking. Empathy is not automatically amplified by shared victimhood. Sometimes it is complicated by it.
Gisèle deserves admiration for her courage in court. She does.
The question is whether feminist analysis is willing to hold space for Caroline simultaneously, and recognise that she has been minimised and dismissed.
Given the established pattern of Dominique’s behaviour, the presence of images of his daughter unconscious in unfamiliar underwear, and the broader criminological understanding of serial sexual offending, the theoretical likelihood that Caroline was also targeted is not at all low.
We must be honest about that. We must also be honest about the fact that mothers, even abused mothers, can struggle to face the full horror of what happened under their watch.
That does not make Gisèle a villain. It makes her human. But Caroline’s humanity and her trauma deserves equal weight.
If feminism is about believing women, then that commitment cannot become selective when the story is complicated. It cannot stop at the most photogenic symbol of resistance.
Caroline’s voice should not be lost in the applause."
