This has been happening quietly for a couple weeks now, I'm not diminishing the daughter. But news articles have been picking up anti Gisele Pelicot sentiments, they can never let us have a true win. The backlash against her will be happening in earnest now. And frankly going to reporters about this shows you are not united, it's so fucking hypocritical to me of her to do this. Involving the press when you as women should stand united against the depravity of these men. Why does it always end this way? Genuinely. Why can we never just hold our ground.

Maybe I'm just too tired to have empathy, but your mother was raped so brutally and horribly by her husband, her photos and videos out there and you think she's the betrayer. For god's sake, I doubt she's processing her own trauma, especially after being so brave in the public. Once you're an adult, I really think you need to start seeing your parents as their own people and not as parents still raising you. They're not, you're both equal now. I hope this is the only article she makes about this and talks to her therapist instead of the press moving forward. The worst part this is all to sell a book. :/

Edit:

Caroline was furious upon hearing this, she writes, but was even more stunned and taken aback by her mother’s reaction.

“Your father’s in a bad way in prison,” she told her daughter. “He’s suffering so much; I must have failed him in some way over the past years.”

That poor woman. I can never imagine finding this out about someone, much less your husband and knowing how badly he hurt you.

“Her silence says a lot,” Darian writes about her mother’s reaction to her daughter’s belief that she was also her father’s victim. “I thought we were a united and tight-knit clan … and I am hit by this implacable reality in the face: my mother does not want to believe me or to hear me. The pain runs right through me.

I feel for Darian, but she really needs to talk to a therapist and unpack all this because if she wants tight knit then she needs to reciprocate. The public square is not the place for this, and they will tear her and her mother apart. I don't think her mom is even in the realm of being ready to deal with Dairan's issues on top of her own. To me this reads like an adult child asking her mother to drop everything for her own hurt, and I think adult children need to get in the habit of not expecting the world from their mothers. She has nothing left to give, your father took it all. Let her come to terms in her own time, try and speak to your support group about your hurts and maybe when you're both ready you can come together again.

"Her silence says a lot,” Darian writes about her mother’s reaction to her daughter’s belief that she was also her father’s victim. “I thought we were a united and tight-knit clan … and I am hit by this implacable reality in the face: my mother does not want to believe me or to hear me. The pain runs right through me.

I can understand what Caroline feels. But I hope she can come to empathize with her mother and how Giselle just may not have the emotional bandwidth to cope with the realization that she failed to protect herself AND her daughter. And the trauma of finding out that the man she spent decades building a family with violated and betrayed her in the worst way possible. Not to mention the stress of becoming a public figure overnight

I hope both women can get the help they need to process their trauma and come back together

I know this daughter has been to hell and back, but I am having trouble being sympathetic to her making this story tabloid news. I get a real ick feeling about it, and it's just not necessary.

She's also "not sure" if it's her underwear or not. She herself questions the event. Maybe she doesn't want to believe it herself, so it's pretty easy to understand Giselle's point of view. I can't blame her for not being able to go there emotionally.

Whether or not he in fact touched the daughter (she does not recall, but would have been drugged), the photographs themselves constitute sexual abuse. This should be enough. And we know that these men always escalate.

I would not, of course, judge Gisele Pelicot after all she has been through. She might not be able to psychologically withstand the idea that she failed to protect her daughter, on top of failing to protect herself. [Edit: All responsibility lies with him, of course; I'm simply attempting to describe the self-blame that often attends abuse.]

The devastation runs deep and I am sorry this aspect of his abuse has undermined the mother-daughter relationship.

I’m so divided on this

I feel for Caroline. She has lost one parent, and her other parent cannot give her anything right now. The family drama is so very public. she has an unquestionably horrible violation, with a big question mark as to what extent. Still, her violation is being presented as ‘not that bad’, because of how horrible her moms abuse was. She is being made to look greedy and attention seeking for wanting her victim hood acknowledged. As a mother myself, I would want to care for my daughter, and would feel like it was my job. So, as Caroline, I would wonder why my mom didn’t do thst for me. I probably would hold anger, resentment, betray, and a feeling of being denied

And then for Gisele, hell. She ignored her questions, her intuition that something was wrong for decades. She kept things together for family, putting her needs last. And it was all for nothing. In fact, it enabled his abuse. Now she is being asked to mother someone who may actually blame her too. Plus, as horrific as it was, it isn’t of the scale of what Gisele had done to her. As a daughter, I would understand that I was an adult, and my mom couldn’t mother me right now. Therefore, Gisele (who is an adult daughter of someone) may have trouble treating it with the same importance if I was so destroyed by what had been done to me

But her story is more about the complicated dynamics between her parents and herself and how her mother’s submission to her father even continues somewhat today, in what she describes as being like a case of Stockholm Syndrome, where a victim comes to sympathize with their captor.

Her father, after being arrested and jailed, managed to get a letter out to a relative, who in turn delivered it to Gisèle. In it he complained of being “abandoned” by his family and asked for financial help.

Caroline was furious upon hearing this, she writes, but was even more stunned and taken aback by her mother’s reaction.

“Your father’s in a bad way in prison,” she told her daughter. “He’s suffering so much; I must have failed him in some way over the past years.”

“Her silence says a lot,” Darian writes about her mother’s reaction to her daughter’s belief that she was also her father’s victim. “I thought we were a united and tight-knit clan … and I am hit by this implacable reality in the face: my mother does not want to believe me or to hear me. The pain runs right through me.

“It is an abandonment too many… It’s as though the ground opened up under my feet… I have spent four years trying to be there for my mother, cherishing the bond that counted so much for me. I feel alone facing a wall of desolation and no one seems to understand.”

I get it. Even though Gisele Pecot stood up for herself in court, she still defaulted to brainwashed housewives' thinking that "it must have been partly my fault that he turned out like this." Basically, these Stockholm women prioritize the good image of their husband in their head over what reality is actually saying. They will find excuses and blame it on themselves and anyone else they can but never the man.

While the daughter has no such protect-the-man tendencies. Of course she is angry her mother still finds excuses for the rapist after everything he's done. She even feels bad about putting him in prison for his crimes against her, for God's sake.

The daughter is 100% in the right here.

I don’t know what to think of this. I’m wondering if she thinks he may have abused her as a little girl too, and her mom wouldn’t believe it then because she had this good housewife mentality? Otherwise this just feels so unbelievably vindictive. She’s in her 40s and her mom is in her 70s, the roles should be starting to reverse by now. It doesn’t seem surprising at all that Gisele would go into denial rather than believe that this horrific abuse happened to her daughter considering how she’s described her state of mind. Maybe believing it would kill her. Perhaps there were manipulators egging this on for the book sales? Or she hates that her mom, who seems to have more empathy for her rapist dad than her as she sees it, gets to be a feminist icon and she wants everyone to know the truth so that she can stop hearing how great she is, and being so close to the situation and in so much pain she has no perspective on this plan?

I looked at Goodreads and the reviews are positive. Of course the book is mostly her description of her experience of the case. I just don’t understand why she couldn’t have left this ugly detail about her very vulnerable mother out.

The women in this family are going through so much, and maybe some of this is an extinction burst of whatever love and loyalty they had left for Dominique. The horrors and mental trauma they have are bigger than the average person ever has to deal with.