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Bada bing, bada boo.
Dominique doesn't know it yet, but his wife is about to divorce him.
They have been married for 50 years.
They have three children together.
They have six.
They have almost seven grandchildren together.
They're in their sixties, but Giselle, his wife, is about to divorce him.
It's never an easy thing to tell your partner that you've been arrested.
For what?
There's these two girls at the supermarket.
Well, the officer says there's three girls.
There might've been a phone placed underneath their skirts as they bent down to grab items
from the bottom shelf.
The phone might've also been on camera mode and perhaps recording.
He has been arrested for filming illegal secret upskirt videos of strangers at the supermarket.
This 60 year old man, he's crying trying to explain to his wife that it must be the old
age.
It must be the madness.
I mean, maybe it's dementia.
There's no way that this is really him.
He's never done anything like this for the past 50 years.
So why would he start now?
He's trying to explain this whole thing.
It's just silly.
Giselle is almost kind of relieved.
Maybe it's all some sort of big misunderstanding.
Perhaps he was recording something with his phone.
He dropped it and then a woman happened to walk over it.
And in this moment of temporary madness, he just picked up his phone, saved the video.
Giselle even follows her husband to the police station to sort things out.
On the way, he does not seem anxious or stressed.
This is all one big misunderstanding.
I mean, surely.
Why is she going to police station?
Like she found out about a video?
So she needs to go to the police station because they just need to do some paperwork now.
The police calling him.
Yes.
It's not a big deal.
It's just a big misunderstanding.
She's going as moral support.
I mean, they're all going to figure this out.
She waits in the waiting room.
He gets taken into an interrogation room.
After an hour, Giselle is asked to come into a room.
And the officers have a few questions for her.
For me.
Madam, what are the adjectives that characterize your husband's personality?
Well, my husband is caring.
This is exactly what she says.
A very, very caring person, always ready to help.
He's very much appreciated by those around him.
We met when we were both 18 years old and shortly got married after that.
And you would say that after all these years, you and your husband are still quite close?
Well, yes, of course we experienced our lows, but we've always managed to overcome them.
Do you have any friends in the area?
Are you inviting them over often?
Yes, of course.
We have friends.
We invite them over for lunch, sometimes dinner.
We lead just very normal lives.
The line of questioning is definitely getting a little bit odd, but it just keeps getting weirder.
Madam Giselle, do you take naps often?
How often do you take these naps?
How often do you wake up in the mornings and you feel a little groggy?
Do you always wake up feeling fresh every morning?
How often are you and your husband intimate?
Are you guys swingers?
At this point, Giselle responds, oh my gosh, no, I wouldn't stand the hands of another
person on me.
I need emotion when I connect with someone.
I am a married woman.
I am not a swinger.
The officer looks at her kind of compassionately.
He pulls out this thick folder of files.
The images I'm about to show you will not be pleasing to look at.
She's so confused.
What images are you talking about from the supermarket?
She takes out her glasses, puts them on.
In the very first photo she's shown, she sees a picture of herself.
She's laying on her stomach, on the bed, completely nude, unconscious.
There is a stranger standing nude behind her.
She does not know this man.
Then another photo, another strange man that she does not know and she does not
remember these photos.
Another man, a new strange man, each a different stranger, but she doesn't
remember any of this.
How could she not remember any of this?
That's her bedside table.
That's her lamp.
Those are her bedsheets.
That's her bed.
That's her bedroom.
What are these?
After arresting Giselle's husband Dominique for filming upskirt videos in a
supermarket, they searched his devices and in a folder on a USB, the folder is
called abuses.
They find nearly 20,000 digital files.
Inside that folder, they found new subfolders, at least 80 of them, each with
names and sexual acts.
The name of each man that came to essay his wife Giselle had their own folder.
From 2011 till 2020, for almost 10 years, Giselle did not know that her own
husband of 50 years was drugging her so that she could be essayed by strange
men from the internet.
We would like to thank today's sponsors who have made it possible for Rotten
Mango to support the Nomi network.
This international nonprofit provides life-changing opportunities, connections
to safer employment, life skills, and resources for survivors of sexual abuse
and exploitation.
This episode's partnerships have also made it possible to support Rotten
Mango's growing team.
We'd also like to thank you guys for your continued support as we work on our
mission to be worthy advocates.
As always, full show notes are available at rottenmangopodcast.com.
This is currently an ongoing case.
The trial is still taking place and it's presumed to be concluded in December of
this year.
Most of the in-depth information on the case is in French.
There is a book written by the daughter using her pen name, Caroline Darian.
It's titled, and I stopped calling you Papa.
I couldn't find an English translation of this book, so I took the French book and
I just translated it page by page so I could get you guys a deep dive on this
case.
This book is one of the most insightful books I think I have ever read.
It is so incredibly raw in its honest depiction of how one deals with such an
intimate betrayal.
Her vulnerability has provided us with so much insight into what happened, not just
in this case, but what's likely happening to women everywhere.
So with that being said, a few disclaimers, heavy themes of essay, family essay
abuse, as well as intentional drugging and use of illegal substances.
If that is too much for you today, please be safe, take care of yourself, and we
will see you in the next one.
So with that being said, let's get into it.
There's a medical mystery in the family.
Giselle is sick.
Giselle's kids know that something is wrong with her.
Sometimes she would call them and in the middle of the phone conversation, she
would start rambling or she sounds like she's in a fog and she doesn't understand
what's going on, who she's on the phone with.
Sometimes they'd be talking to her on the phone on Monday about something.
They call her Tuesday.
She doesn't remember a single thing about yesterday's conversation.
Other times she would be FaceTiming one of her six grandchildren and the kids
would be excitedly telling her about their weekend, but Giselle would just start
asking some incoherent questions.
The questions are not even related to what the child is talking about, but the
questions itself don't make sense.
It's starting to scare the kids.
Like what, what's wrong with grandma?
Caroline, one of Giselle's kids would take the phone.
Mom, what's going on?
Are you all right?
One time she asked, mom, what day is it today?
Giselle couldn't even answer.
Giselle did not know what day it was.
Her three adult children, they live hundreds of miles away.
They live in Paris and Giselle and her husband Dominique, they live in like
the south of France, the mountainside in a tiny little town.
When did this happen?
Like this whole, she not asking weird questions.
From 2011 to 2020.
Oh, so this whole time she's not doing well.
No.
So Giselle's three adult children, they would have these conversations about her.
I mean, I'm worried about mom, you know, what if it's Alzheimer's?
They would ask each other about dad.
Well, what does dad think?
Dominique, the dad always downplayed it.
Your mother doesn't know how to save herself.
She's always on the move.
She's hyperactive.
If she could just rest without worrying about every little detail, you know how
she is, but still maybe it's best if she sees some sort of neurologist, no?
She had her scans done.
Nothing.
There is nothing wrong with her.
She spoke to multiple neurologists.
Nothing is wrong with her.
Their uncle, a retired doctor mentioned an analogy that
made sense for the whole family.
It's on par with what their dad was saying.
The former doctor, the uncle says, I think it's like when, when a bag of a
vacuum cleaner is full, the machine stops.
So it doesn't burn out.
That's how you disconnect and you recharge your batteries.
She just needs to recharge.
Everyone thought that's pretty simple.
Maybe it just ends there.
The solution is that just get some rest, enjoy the retired life.
Take it easy.
Smell the roses Giselle, but in the next eight years for most of Giselle's
sixties, it just only gets worse.
Giselle has insomnia.
She's losing chunks of her hair.
Her weight is just shedding off.
She's already quite a frail woman and it's alarming when someone at that
age starts just rapidly losing weight.
She's losing 17 pounds in the span of just a few years.
She's scared that she's going to suffer some sort of stroke to the
point where Giselle, she stops driving.
If she has a stroke on the road, God forbid she hits someone.
She hurts herself.
There are times that she remembers starting the evening, having dinner with
a bunch of their friends that came over.
And then nothing.
It's just a blank after that.
She doesn't know when they left.
She doesn't know what happened during the dinner.
She doesn't know how she got to bed.
She just wakes up the next morning.
Not a single memory.
It's not getting better.
At one point, one of the adult children, the youngest son, he comes over to visit
for the weekend with his kids.
Go say hi to grandma, go say hi to grandma Giselle and grandpa.
The truth is he likely came over to make sure his mom was okay, but it's not okay.
They're all sat at the dinner table, getting ready to eat.
And after a few minutes, a phone starts ringing.
This is almost like a trigger or something.
Giselle goes to grab it, but her elbow almost gives out.
She's scrambling, almost falling onto the table.
She's sitting.
It's like in slow motion.
It's not a moment of genuine clumsiness.
It looks like she's drunk, where the body moves slowly.
She can't catch herself.
It's like her body is suddenly drained of all its energy and she just deflates
like a rag doll.
He later tells his siblings, it's like she was under hypnosis.
So strange.
Just motionless limp.
She had this blank stare all night.
She wouldn't respond to us.
Dad had to take her to bed.
It's not until 2019 that Giselle goes to see yet another neurologist.
He tells her melatonin.
Take some melatonin to go to sleep.
What?
Yeah, that's it.
That's the solution.
Throughout the years, Giselle had severe gynecological problems.
And even those are all brushed off.
Too much stress, they told her.
Just calm down.
It's it's impacting your whole system.
On one occasion, Giselle was so frustrated that as a joke, she told her husband,
Dominique, you must be dragging me because I mean, normally I have excellent memory.
This doesn't make sense.
She was completely joking and he just breaks down into tears.
You really think that I could do something like that to you?
Giselle felt bad.
It's a joke, but she can see how it offends him.
I mean, through it all, Dominique was by his wife's side.
One might think that it's a promise that he made in the vows.
Even in their aging days, he's going to take care of her.
That's what he said.
But he also did it with so much love.
He would always calm his kids down, reassure them.
You just know how mom is.
She just needs a good night's rest.
And she'll be back on her feet, worrying about the garden, worrying about this,
worrying about that, obsessing over the details.
You know how she is.
He took her to every doctor's appointment.
He would hold her hand.
He tried to think of all the reasons that this might be happening to her.
I mean, what else was he supposed to say or do?
He could never tell the doctors.
It had something to do with the lorazepam that he would crush up and mix
into her dinners at night before he invited special guests over.
Dominique would post online about the few rules that he has.
One, no cologne, no fragrances, no smoking or tobacco.
Two, upon entering, you must wash your hands thoroughly in hot water
or warm them up next to a heater.
Three, by the time you leave the kitchen before heading upstairs,
you must be fully nude.
Leave all your clothes on the front porch.
Four, park near the school and walk in the dark to not wake up the neighbors.
Five, your cell phone must be left in your car.
Why such specific rules?
It's not random or specific for the sole purpose of being arbitrary.
There is a reason behind every single one of these rules.
One, no fragrances.
He said his wife is a light sleeper.
Doesn't want to wake his wife up with unfamiliar sense.
Two, you must wash your hands in hot water.
He can't risk having cold hands touch his wife.
She might wake up from the sun and change in temperature.
Three, taking off clothes in the kitchen.
That way, if his wife moves around or is about to wake up,
the our winners can hide without having to worry about picking up
after their socks, their clothing, their little underwear left behind.
What?
Four, obviously he can't park outside in the driveway in case the neighbors see
and they ask Giselle about it the next morning and the phone's got to be left
in the car in case it vibrates or rings and wakes people up in the house.
Because how do you explain that you've just invited over strange men
from the online forum to come and essay your wife?
Dominique would post pictures of his wife, Giselle, all nude
or in very skimpy, sexual lingerie and in very suggestive poses.
In each and every single picture, she is completely unconscious.
In each posting, he would even offer to show videos of previous strangers
essaying his wife to help get that initial arousal started.
So the guy's face are in there, too, right?
Yes.
Wow.
He's posting on a forum called Without Them Knowing.
It's part of a bigger website where the chat messages are immediately
erased after a few hours.
It's a very controversial website to begin with.
I think this website alone has been the topic of about 20,000
investigations in France.
It has been since shut down.
At one point, the site was linked to investigations into pedophilic activity,
racist activity, as well as selling drugs online.
But on this particular forum, on this website, the Without Them Knowing,
it was active in 2020.
Some members would come onto the forum to post photos and videos
of their partners without their consent.
Most of them were alarmingly young.
Other times, members would come together to talk about performing sexual acts on
their unknowing, non-consensual partners.
And most of the time, their partners have been drugged.
That's where Dominique is posting about his wife.
He did not ask for any sort of payment.
This wasn't some sort of one-for-one situation either, crime for a crime.
All Dominique demanded from them was that he be allowed to film the whole
crime, the whole thing.
Once these men would sneak into his marital home, Dominique would meticulously
film each of the essay incidents.
Some of them lasted five to six hours.
They were all filmed, recorded and logged, kept in his precious USB drive
under a file titled abuses.
Gisele broke down when she saw those videos and photos of her.
She said, I was his thing.
Upon finding out the truth of what happened for the past 10 years of her
marriage, what her mysterious health issues were caused by, Gisele
immediately leaves her husband of 50 years.
She packs her things, leaves the house.
Their daughter Caroline says in the book, my mother left her
marital home with hardly a tear.
50 years of a shared life suddenly vanished.
I saw her packing boxes, sorting through furniture, emptying their
closets, taking down photos with incredible dignity, frail, exhausted,
yet modest, resilient.
She had no choice.
She had to leave.
A member of the family said for crimes like this, chemical
submission is what they call it.
You're forcing someone to submit through chemicals.
Technically, date rape would be inside of this category, but chemical
submission, a lot of the times when you hear it referred to in France,
it's almost someone you know.
It's like a friend or in a social environment.
It's not a stranger at a club.
It's typically, it can often be your own partner.
So someone you know drugs you and then essays you.
Yes.
It's called chemical submission.
I mean, it does apply to strangers, but it seems like more often than not,
it is someone you know, because I think there is this connotation of date
rape being between strangers or like acquaintances, but chemical submission.
There's almost this feeling of it happens inside the home.
It could happen between fathers and daughters, husband to wife.
It's which can be even worse because you just broke that trust.
And you likely don't know what's going on at all.
Now, chemical submission is insidious.
It's so hard to detect so much so that months, even years can go
by without anyone noticing anything.
It's like turning off a lamp.
She becomes an inert thing, a puppet at the mercy of the aggressor.
There is this illusion that the victim will feel nothing, that she will
have forgotten everything upon waking up, but that is not true.
The victim does not forget everything.
Even if they were drugged and don't remember their body and their
unconscious states bear the scars of brutality.
Giselle's daughter said, my father offered his wife to the first person
who came along without even demanding protected sex.
Sometimes he even forbade the wearing of condoms.
Giselle would soon get a call of very bad news afterwards.
One of the perpetrators was HIV positive.
He had come to essay her six separate times.
She went to the hospital afterwards and her test results for HIV came back negative.
But she did have an incredibly inflamed cervix, which is very dangerous.
And she had contracted four separate STDs that are curable.
They're treatable, but still, I mean, one of these could trigger cervical
cancer if left untreated, which is what was happening.
When she would go to the gynecologist, nobody would test her for STDs
because she's she's in a loyal, faithful relationship.
She's been married for X amount of years.
Truly, the odds of her catching an STD were slim.
So when she was being filmed, was the husband in the room too?
Yes. And he would watch, he would film and he would call her a slut hundreds of times.
At 42 years old, Caroline's life is perfect.
This is their only daughter.
So they have three kids, two sons and a daughter, Caroline.
Caroline is the one who authored the book.
Her life is genuinely very mundane is how she describes it until she finds out that
her mom is an essay victim of over at least 50 men and her dad is the main perpetrator.
Caroline says, at that moment, my 42 year old life, I have a job that I'm passionate about.
I have a husband, I have a child, a house, a simple life, ignorant of earthquakes, a
privileged life, living each day, thinking tomorrow will be a promise, not a threat.
My life revolves around my family.
I mean, all of it is absolutely mundane, but nobody measures the price of mundane until it's lost.
Caroline's son is about to turn six and a half years old, which this is in 2020.
So it's rough.
She has to teach him how to properly wear a mask to school.
It's COVID times.
It's kind of cute how they make masks small enough to fit little kids' faces.
But while practicing how to wear the mask properly, Caroline takes a picture, posts it
onto her Facebook and immediately Caroline's father dominate comments.
My poor little Tom, these are all fake names, by the way.
So you can find Giselle and Dominique's names online.
Now you'll see why they've requested it for it to be public.
Caroline Darien, I believe is a pen name.
Her brothers are listed under fake names in her book.
You can find their real names online right now, but I'm going to go with the pseudonyms
as well as for her son.
Immediately father comments online, my poor little Tom, good luck for this rather special
back to school, your Papa who loves you.
That would be the last time Caroline would ever interact with her father.
November 2nd, 2020, Caroline's husband Paul receives a voicemail on the family landline.
Caroline's at work.
He goes to the phone.
He picks it up.
It's Caroline's mom, Giselle.
It's me.
It's urgent.
It concerns Dominique, your dad.
Call me back, please.
Caroline says they're instantly going into panic.
Paul's panicking because this is the height of COVID.
Dominique has respiratory problems.
We don't know what's going to happen.
Naturally, they believe he's in the ICU.
But then another voicemail.
You have one unheard voicemail from the local police lieutenant.
Paul doesn't listen to that one.
Instead, he calls his mother-in-law back first.
Wait, what's going on, Giselle?
What's happening?
Dominique, he's going to be incarcerated.
He was caught in the act filming under the skirts of three women in a supermarket.
He was held in custody for 48 hours, then released.
And in the meantime, the police had searched his mobile phone, several sim cards,
his camcorder, his laptop.
It's much more serious than that.
The facts are much more serious.
Caroline's mom says she'll call Paul back once Caroline is home because she needs
both of them there.
She needs to tell them at the same time.
In the meantime, Paul calls the police station back and they tell him, we have
found the videos showing your mother-in-law asleep, visibly drugged with
men as saying her.
At the moment, 73, 73 men, as we speak.
We have identified at least 50 of them.
Your father-in-law was very organized.
He photographed and filmed all the acts.
I myself had a lot of trouble watching all the videos, but we are far from having
finished assessing everything.
Paul and the police are terrified for Giselle's life.
The amount of drugs that must have been carelessly and recklessly, heartlessly
shoved into our system, she's elderly.
And now all the trauma that comes with all of this, but also Paul is terrified
for his wife, Caroline, how she's going to handle this about her parents.
So that evening, Caroline walks in through the front door.
Tom's running around going crazy because Tom is ignorant to all of this.
Tom is a child, but Paul is just staring straight at his wife.
His face is so serious.
And at that exact moment, Caroline's phone rings.
It's her mom.
Caroline says in moments of trauma, a traumatic shock in particular, people
often remember just one detail.
Sometimes it's a smell or a noise or some sort of sensation, something
time-y that becomes enormous that they will remember forever.
In that moment, Caroline remembers looking past Paul and staring at the
oven and in white blocky numbers, it reads 8.25, 8.25 PM.
It's ingrained in her brain.
She said 8.25 PM, I would be living the last seconds of a normal life.
The rest are a blur.
In the book, Caroline details, hearing her mom's voice, shakingly telling her,
your father invited men to the house when I was unconscious in our room.
I saw several pictures of me asleep, lying on my stomach and on my bed with
different men each time, all strangers.
Giselle stated that Caroline made a whelping noise akin to an animal being
wounded.
Her daughter just made this noise.
It was like a howl.
Giselle tells her daughter about being in the police station where the officers
asked her to ID one of the videos, but the photos were already too unbearable.
Look at, let alone a video.
She said, I thought my heart was going to stop beating.
He told me, sorry, ma'am, but what your husband has done is monstrous.
I'm so sorry.
Caroline can't help but think about her mom.
And she writes, she had become his sexual object, his toy, his thing.
And we did not know how to protect her.
Caroline's brothers are alerted.
All three of them, they rush to meet up with Giselle and take her away from
this small little mountain town together.
They go to the police station and the siblings are old.
They're all adults and they they're informed.
Your father has been drugging your mother regularly for at least eight years.
To essay her, he filmed her and posted some images on the internet.
Since September 2013, he has invited out at least 53 individuals
to abuse your unconscious mother.
He posted photos of her to bait them and shared his fantasies.
He did not request financial compensation.
Caroline said she found that more perverted, more perverse.
She said, my father has always had many problems, but he did
not do business with my mother.
That means he was acting then purely for his own pleasure.
Caroline said she had to know.
She asked the detective sitting there and she's like, I don't even know
if I want to know the answer to this.
Did my father show any remorse for my mother, for his children, his
grandchildren, for betraying his whole family like this?
No, your father simply thanked us for taking the weight off his shoulders.
Caroline and her siblings, they leave the police station.
They're fuming, but right when they get to their parents house,
cause Dominique is already detained at this point, so he's not there.
They're trying to help Giselle pack her things, trying to leave.
Caroline gets a call from the police officers.
Hello?
They tell her that she needs to come back to the police station.
Well, surely I can wait till tomorrow.
No, it cannot.
And she remembers checking the clock.
5.25 PM, the kitchen microwave was singed into her brain.
And she knew that this was an omen.
This can't be good.
It only gets worse when she arrives at the police station with her
little brother, Julianne, fake name.
They won't let her brother come into the room with her.
He has to wait outside.
She sits down in this interrogation room practically, and the officers show
her these giant computer monitors with big blue folders and the officer is oddly
calm, he tells her, there is nothing that you cannot overcome in this life.
To the daughter?
Yeah.
She's like, what are you talking about?
I just need to know if you recognize yourself in any of these photos.
He shows her a few images.
He shows her the first photo.
She's probably not even breathing at this point.
It's of a woman in bed with her butt exposed.
It's not her.
It's not me.
It's not me.
Then another picture.
It seems like the same brown haired woman, but not the same bedroom or the
same pajamas or even the same underwear.
I'm sorry.
I don't recognize her.
The officer looks down and they all kind of look at each other very uncomfortably.
I'm sorry, ma'am, but could you look again?
Do you not have the same brown spot on your cheek as the woman in these two pictures?
What?
She looks back at the photos and she says in that moment, tingling in her body,
stars like spots prevent me from seeing clearly my ears start buzzing.
I go backwards.
It's her.
She didn't recognize herself because probably her brain and the trauma and
she's like, no, I refuse, but also those aren't her clothes.
That's not her underwear.
She's been put into some sort of lingerie that is not hers.
She cannot even, and she looks drugged.
You know, if you ever see pictures of yourself, if you've ever been black
out drunk, which is so dangerous, if you ever see pictures of yourself, it almost
doesn't look like you because you're like, that doesn't even, cause your muscles
are not working like they normally do.
It's a weird, and in this environment, those aren't her clothes.
She doesn't recognize anything, but it's her and she starts panicking.
How, how could he photograph her without waking her up?
That's her biggest question.
She wants to know whose underwear is she wearing?
Did he drug her?
Did he abuse her?
Did somebody else abuse her?
When the buzzing finally stops, Caroline looks up and nods.
Yes, that's me in the photos.
And she said she dropped her knees and she became hysterical to the point
where Julian had to come and pick her up.
On the way back to the house, Caroline is just thinking there's no way she wasn't
drugged. It just doesn't make sense.
She's normally an incredibly light sleeper.
The smallest thing will wake her up.
She tells her brother, I don't naturally sleep like that.
The lights are on in the picture.
The lights are on and the lights are too strong.
I know myself.
If I was asleep and someone turned on the light, I'd wake up.
I wake up every single time from the light.
I never go to sleep dressed in that.
In fact, I don't even recognize those clothes or that underwear.
How, how could I be an underwear that I don't recognize or in that position on my
stomach?
It doesn't make any sense.
How is that even possible?
An even more unsettling part in all of this is so far the documented abuse from
Giselle is from 2013 to 2020.
Eventually they'll find more evidence that it spans from 2011 to 2020.
But one of the pictures Caroline's brother tells her,
it looks like the old apartment that the parents used to live in,
which was way before.
So it was around like 2011.
One of the photos that the daughter was in.
Meanwhile, Paul, Caroline's husband, isn't with her.
It's just the three siblings helping Giselle at the house.
Paul is at home taking care of their son and they're watching the game,
soccer game.
This is like their tradition every single night during the season.
The little boy turns to Paul and says, dad, tell grandpa, I'm betting on teammate.
This is their nightly tradition.
Usually they call their grandpa to talk about their prediction for the game.
Paul decides to send one last message to Dominique.
It reads, I'm writing to you a message that you will never read.
I'm watching an OM match with your grandson.
I hear tell grandpa every five minutes,
but I won't be able to say anything more to grandpa and neither can he.
You are pathetic for having done what you did.
You are pathetic for having deprived my son of his last grandfather.
And I am crying and fuck you.
Soon afterwards,
if older would be found on Dominique's computer titled around my daughter,
naked, it's just photos of his daughter naked.
Those two photos.
There are at least 72 suspects in this case.
Only 51 have been ID'd and tracked down and are going on trial.
Currently their ages range from 26 years old to 73 years old.
They seem so ordinary.
These perpetrators, they have regular jobs.
One is a firefighter.
There's an IT worker from a bank, a prison guard, a nurse,
journalists, soldiers, carpenters, truck drivers, which side note,
the firefighter is said to have essayed Giselle wearing parts of his firefighter uniform.
So it seems like it was agreed upon,
like he wanted to wear parts of his uniform because it would help with his fantasy.
These people were described in France as Mr.
Everybody.
That's the terminology they use, meaning that they could be anybody.
It could be everybody.
Many of them are fathers to very young children.
Most of them are married in relationships.
Others are single.
Some of them are grandparents.
One of them only lives a few blocks away within walking
distance of Giselle and Dominique's house.
He even visited, pretending to check out bicycle wheels for sale that never existed.
Giselle remembers meeting him.
He was nice, she thought.
She would see him around at the bakery, always polite.
She never knew that he was coming around to essay her whenever he felt like it.
Most of them are facing 20 years in jail for aggravated assault.
If they're convicted.
A few of them have been accused of abuse by others too.
And a few of them are accused of coming back as many as six times to assault Giselle.
And five of them, while their electronics were searched, they found CP on their computers.
Giselle does not remember or cannot identify a single one of them except that neighbor.
A few of them tried to argue that they had no idea that Giselle was not consenting.
Others flat out denied it was essay.
One of them straight up said, it's fine.
It's his wife.
He does what he likes with her.
Another attorney repping one of the perpetrator states, well, the sexual
relations did in fact take place, but it's part of a sexual game between the husband
and wife, Dominique and Giselle.
My client was invited to take part in it.
He was not aware that Giselle was drugged or under any sort of medications, which
Giselle's attorneys have stated is very vile to even say out loud.
They say it's been very difficult.
It is unbearable for Giselle to hear people say that they thought she was
pretending to be asleep and they were convinced it was consensual.
She had no idea what was being inflicted on her.
She has no memory of these essays that she suffered for the past 10 years.
The firefighter insist he didn't know that Giselle was not consenting.
He thought she was just so shy she was pretending to be asleep.
Later he admits, OK, it did excite me that she was unconscious.
His computer was searched and the police found 728 images of CP, as well as a
conversation with a man from the same forum where the man was organizing for
the firefighter to come into his home to essay his own 15-year-old daughter.
The man was advertising someone to come essay his daughter while he watched.
What kind of platform is this?
What kind of website?
It's like dark web stuff, right?
Yeah, that's why it was shut down.
A I don't know if this person was caught.
I'm assuming he was a journalist.
He works for a regional newspaper.
He's part of the perpetrators.
He said he was confused why Giselle wasn't moving.
But the husband told him that she agreed to all of this beforehand.
So he just went with it.
Do you believe him?
Well, 4300 images and nearly 300 videos of CP were found on the journalist's computer.
A 53-year-old construction worker said, well, I was just doing what he told me to do.
I don't know why I listened to him.
He says he just listened to the husband, even though there was no threat or risk.
If he didn't essay the woman, he just didn't ask questions.
He said he thought her being unconscious was just part of their little married
games, fun, part of a couple sex games.
In prison, he attempted to self-ex it, which side note, I'm sure we're going to get
more of their names confirmed later on during the trial.
I've seen some sources of names, but I cannot be a thousand percent certain that
these are the correct names associated with the exact crimes.
So I don't want to say their names yet for the risk of them not being accurate.
I'm hoping by December, when the trial is set to conclude, we will have a full list
of names, all of their crimes, as well as their sentencing.
But it's not because I'm trying to give them privacy.
Dominique, on the other hand,
is insisting that none of these men who came to his house gave up going through
with these sexual acts on his wife, given her state.
He's saying they came into the house.
They saw her unconscious.
I didn't force anyone.
I didn't threaten anyone.
I didn't use violence.
And they still did what they did.
He said each individual was in possession of their own free will to leave
and stop these acts, but they never did.
Yet each individual was in possession of their own free will to stop these acts
and leave, except his wife, a 54 year old electrician, stated he never received
consent to do what he did, but he doesn't believe it to be non-consensual.
He said, I didn't get consent, but it's not non-consensual.
Why? Because Dominique, the husband, was there.
And he said it was OK.
So that's consent.
We live in a world where at least one man out there that's truly being ultra,
ultra conservative, one man out there believes a husband can just give consent
on behalf of his wife. As a husband, you own your wife's body
and you can freely dispose of it as you wish.
Actually, a few more, because another perpetrator said, well,
since the husband was present, it's not rape.
Besides, she never said no.
In that logic, since the prison guard was present,
it's not assault in prison with a makeshift weapon.
Since the prison guard was present, it's not essay within the prison walls.
What are you saying?
It's just nonsensical.
A 66 year old perpetrator agreed saying,
if it was essay, it was unintentionally essay.
He said he didn't feel remorse because at the end of the day,
he didn't go there with the intention of essaying someone.
So he doesn't feel bad because he's not a bad person because he didn't go there
with bad ideas.
It was unintentional.
Another one states that he didn't know that she was
unconscious because she was lying face down.
Also, they say that she was consenting and just pretending to be asleep.
Yet in most of the footage, they're all whispering.
They're actively doing everything to try and not wake her up.
In one video, another man is heard
essaying Giselle and saying, it's crazy she doesn't wake up.
To which Dominique is heard responding, I've been fucking like this for years.
This is the crazy part.
So a lot of the documented abuse is also
Dominique drugging and essaying his wife.
Another man argued, it's not his fault that he essay Giselle.
It was during COVID.
It was lockdowns.
He's in a long distance relationship,
and there's no other way to meet people to have intimate relations.
So he went on this forum and yeah, bad things happened,
but it was just very unfortunate circumstances.
Yeah, COVID lockdowns should equate to committing felonies.
Another perpetrator, a truck driver,
just stated that Giselle being completely submissive and reduced to a pure
sexual object truly excited him, the I.T. guy from the bank.
He denied essaying Giselle, but the police showed him the message he sent
to Dominique that read, does the sleeping pill work?
Let me know when it kicks in, because I still have 20 minutes of driving ahead to
get there. There were CP images found on his computer.
Some of the perpetrators during depositions prided themselves in being part
of the community where they like to participate in
having intimate relations with other people's partners.
While that partner watches, Caroline says about this of all the perpetrators.
This is the daughter.
While most of the perpetrators acknowledge the
non moral nature of their actions, none of them express empathy or remorse for the
mother, they are often unaware that they themselves are dangerous criminals.
Giselle says, all I have to say is it is 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.
How can you even try and make the public
believe that a woman would knowingly take part in all of this?
To those who deny it was essay, I say to them for once in your life,
take responsibility for your acts.
Caroline says victims are far too often
terrorized, muzzled by fear, but also prevented by the weight of shame and guilt.
My mother, like so many other women, is guilty of nothing.
Let's refuse the unbearable.
The reason that this is a big deal is in France, it is Giselle and the victim's
right to have a closed door trial so that they can live the rest of their lives
without the press and media hounding them.
They can live in anonymity, which is arguably probably the best for healing.
Nobody knows what happened.
You get to heal in peace.
The perpetrators will still be tried.
They'll go to prison, but it won't be public.
But that is not what Giselle wants.
She and her daughter Caroline have been
speaking with other victims of chemical submission and they say,
why should the perpetrators get away easy?
Why should they get to hide from the shame?
Giselle would be the one to request the trial be public.
She said the 51 men involved should be
confronted with the public gaze, and she knows what this means because,
I mean, Giselle is also under fire, like not under fire from the public,
but everything about her whole life is getting dug up.
Every financial detail about her life,
every text message she's ever being sent is being put into discovery.
The fact that she had an affair one time in their 50 year long marriage is also
being brought up over and over and over again.
She has to bring it up, be questioned.
Everything about their personal lives is being laid bare.
So it's not just, hey, let's make this crime public.
Let's talk about what he did.
Everything is becoming public because that's how trials work.
And she's OK with that.
She said they should answer for their crimes to all the people.
Giselle says you cannot want to help victims if you yourself are ashamed of being one.
She refuses to have closed door proceedings because, quote,
that's what the attackers would have wanted.
She wants the shame to change sides, so it's no longer on the side of the victims.
But the shame should be with the perpetrators.
During the investigation, a few more things were revealed.
It's been a pretty common theme that
Dominique would speak very highly of his wife to his friends and family.
Yet on the messages he shared with the other
are worders that would come into his house to assault Giselle.
He only spoke of his wife in the most degrading terms.
Just he called her a slut like hundreds and hundreds of times.
He talks about how he's excited to host rape parties and he praises the power
of the cocktail of drugs he has her under.
He also asks other men if they like it in the mode that he likes it.
They're like, what mode?
He calls it rape mode.
What is he drugging her with?
We're going to get into it, but it's Lorazepam and Ambien.
Lorazepam is from the Asanta case, crazy powerful anti-anxiety medication.
And then there's Ambien, which is a sleep medication.
Like you give that to someone who has severe insomnia.
He would dress her up in lingerie that she would never willingly purchase her wear.
So just think about how drug someone has to be for them to be dressed in clothing.
She has to be undressed from her pajamas,
dressed in the lingerie, essayed, then cleaned up.
He said that he cleaned his whole wife's body after the assault.
So she would not wake up suspicious, then undress her from that lingerie,
redress her back into her regular clothing.
And she she does not have even these hazes.
She never once said, I did have a dream where this man was in the room.
She never said anything like that.
She just had no clue what happened.
I had this dream that my husband was undressing nothing.
This sounds like a surgical level of being sedated.
I mean, perhaps an exaggeration, but still for her to not have even a slight
recollection of events or even a slight suspicion, I wouldn't be surprised if the
amount of drugs she was given was damaging her brain on a consistent basis.
One expert comments on the case.
Her state was likely closer to a coma than to sleep.
He even teaches others to drug their partners.
He mentions if your wife smokes, it can alter the effects of the dosage.
So take that into consideration, like a little helpful hint from your neighborly
friend, another helpful hint.
It's better when mixed with a little alcohol.
If you read the back of a lorazepam or
ambient, you should never mix it with alcohol.
It's so dangerous for your body.
But he's encouraging it because it works stronger.
I mean, there's clearly a sense of pride when he gets his wife into a coma like
state, he would even post last time I didn't force myself enough on the dosage.
But now I did.
So we're good to go.
Meaning he upped the dosage.
He would also send these hand drawn sketches,
maps of where to park their car at the park, how to walk on foot to their house
without triggering any motion cameras or anything of neighbors.
Remember how you never asked for financial
compensation or a trade off for the crimes that were committed on Giselle?
He did indeed, though, go to other people's homes.
Dominique was not just the one inviting our workers over.
He was also an our worder.
He would go to other people's homes with the intention of essaying
drugged wives, drugged victims.
It doesn't appear that it's the same
men that were coming to assault Giselle, but still.
He had been the drugger, the filmer,
the facilitator, but also the assaulter.
He writes on the forum that one time he was caught trying to assault a woman.
He says it was a failed operation that night.
He walked into the bedroom and the victim had clearly suspected her husband.
She did not drink whatever he had put in her glass.
She poured it down the sink.
She pretended to be asleep to see what
the fork was going on before turning on the light.
She heard wrestling.
She heard whispering.
She heard someone coming in.
She whips on the light.
Dominique is in the room trying to pull off his pants and he writes on the forum.
I was like a rabbit trapped in the headlights of a car.
Damn, I thought I was done for.
I was pulling down my pants.
Boom. Lights turn on.
She's standing up next to the bed.
The rest of the post goes on to scold
the host husband for his lack of vigilance.
He says he screwed up the entire plan.
He could have ruined this all is how he puts it.
And then what happened?
He just left.
He just left.
Wow.
Will these women ever get justice?
Do they know what's happening?
Because I don't think this is the only woman that Dominique won an essay or
that is being offered up on these websites or forums by their husbands.
Caroline says, how many victims have been raped by my father exactly?
The question is dizzying.
Other new findings include there is in an occasion where Dominique had taken
Giselle to visit their daughter Caroline at her house in Paris on the drive back
home, Giselle does not remember a single thing.
This is in the middle of the day.
They're road tripping back home morning time.
The whole thing is worrisome for the whole
family because she's calling her kids like I don't remember a single thing from
that drive.
It's been reported that Dominique drugged his wife so he could have her be essayed
at the truck rest stops on the highway.
Giselle does not remember a thing
past leaving Caroline's house and getting back home.
But it's she never sleeps in cars.
I'm also like this, like when you are someone who doesn't sleep in cars,
even if you're on a road trip, maybe 30 minutes, she slept for eight hours.
She said the whole time she doesn't remember she must have been asleep because
she doesn't remember a single thing.
And the kids are like, this doesn't make sense.
He would also tie his wife to the bed during some occasions.
There were other occasions like once when Caroline and her family went on a
vacation, Dominique and Giselle came over to house it.
The authorities found videos of Giselle
being unconscious and essayed by a 34 year old man in Caroline's house,
in his daughter's house. The assault lasted several hours.
When Caroline was shown screenshots of the video to verify that it was her house,
she said, how could he commit these acts of just
barbarianism in my home, in my privacy?
How are we going to be able to live normally in this house after all of this?
But the authorities tell her that's not all.
They found a few more photographs.
And it's Giselle, unconscious, dressed in black lingerie.
In Caroline's bedroom of her vacation home,
they asked Caroline if they could stay in her vacation home.
And even there, he was inviting strangers over.
That specific assault in the vacation home lasted more than five hours.
Caroline says, knowing strangers have entered my home to abuse my mother is
unbearable, I feel like vomiting. Dominique in general has had some very
odd responses to questions during this whole investigation.
He has excuses for everything.
At one point, he told the investigators
he only started drugging his wife because he wanted her to dress in these
sexy lingerie clothes and stuff.
And she would have never agreed to it because she's so modest.
So he started drugging her just so he could see his beautiful wife in these
clothings. And then eventually that led to him inviting others to participate.
He doesn't appear to be mentally ill, even though that is like a mentally ill
sentence to state, but court documents state that he described feeling the quote,
need to be all powerful over the female body.
He is heard calling his wife a slut hundreds of times in the videos while she's
being essayed by strangers, he refers to his wife as a slut.
He then later tells the judge he meant that as a compliment.
He meant that as a compliment.
And in front of the judge, he only refers to his wife as a saint.
The love of my life.
She is a saint, which is fascinating because he was just calling her a slut
hundreds of times in the crime videos.
He states Giselle was his first love, the only love of his whole life.
He really, really loves her.
Yet folders on his computer are titled my slut, her rapist abuses.
Dominique was asked if he was attracted
to his daughter, to which he responds, he does not remember having those photos of
his daughter nude in his possession, even though he must have drugged her and fully
put her into lingerie and then taken those pictures.
He states, yes, she is my daughter.
But that doesn't mean anything to me.
And you can see that in addition, she is way too young compared to what I'm usually
into. She's not my type at all.
I never touched my daughter.
Which is a very weird response.
Caroline said hearing those words, she felt, quote, an unquenchable rage.
But the biggest revelation came in March,
four months after the initial supermarket investigation.
Four months later, both the two brothers,
fake names, Julian and Thomas, their wives were asked to come to the police station.
No way.
Photos were found of the daughter in-laws.
When he would visit, it doesn't appear that they were drugged.
It appears that he hid cameras in their
bathroom and bedrooms to take pictures and videos of them changing and getting nude.
He would hide cameras in his bathroom whenever they came to visit and stay for
the weekend. He would post pictures of them onto these CD forums.
And oddly enough, one of the sexual crimes against one of his daughter in-laws
started when she became pregnant with his grandchild,
which is a lot to unpack, like psychologically.
In another picture of his other daughter in-law,
he had taken a picture of his computer screen with his daughter in-law in the
computer screen, and in that same photo, he's just aggressively
self-pleasuring himself to his daughter in-law.
He would then post those photos online
with filthy, degrading comments against his family members.
And side note, he would even post the pictures of his own daughter, Caroline.
Right. And they discovered that he's actually
taken a few more photos of her getting undressed as recently as 2020.
So in those, it doesn't appear that she's drugged.
But when she's visiting, he would hide hidden cameras throughout the house.
Here's the crazy part.
He always referred and captioned his daughters explicit photos as his wife's
daughter. He never said, this is my daughter.
He referred to her as wife's daughter.
Caroline says he disassociates himself from his status as a father because he
sees us as mere sexual objects.
Yeah, even with all of that coming to light,
he still has the audacity to write to one of his sons.
My son, I've thought for a long time since my detention before writing to a member
of the family, I think your sensitivity as an artist will be able, I hope,
to transmit these few words, which will be the last as a correction to all.
I will respect your silence, which I understand.
I tried to do my best until these last
terrible, dark years of my personality. I'm thinking of all of you.
I miss you all very much.
I wish everyone many beautiful things in your lives.
I miss all the little ones, even if the last one is unknown to me.
Maybe it's better that way.
Know that your mom is and will still remain the love of my life.
Like all of you, I will never forget your mother.
I am aware of the harm and shame I have
done to you, and I'm treating myself here for this.
The deprivation of liberty is less
difficult to bear than the deprivation of your absences.
I love you all, and I kiss you all.
Sorry, Dad.
Caroline would state no women in our family was spared by my father.
Dominique has pled guilty of the charges against him,
but there will still be a trial.
He has charges of aggravated rape, gang rape,
administration of harmful substances, invasion of privacy by fixing,
recording or transmitting the image of a person of a sexual nature.
A panel of five judges will determine the verdict and sentencing in December.
The evidence against Dominique.
I mean, there's no way he couldn't plead guilty.
He had even gone out of his way to hide the medications he was drugging his own
wife with. He put them in the garage in one of his hiking boots that he barely
wears, and inside that hiking boot is a sock.
In underneath that sock were the medications.
Which, by the way, he was using a combination of Lorazepam and Ambien.
Lorazepam is typically used to treat anxiety disorders.
It's a benzodiazepine.
It essentially causes these calming chemicals in your brain to work better.
It essentially tells your nerves to relax, slow down.
You will feel less anxious, less worried,
a bit sleepier and your muscles will relax.
It's pretty strong.
It makes people feel very sleepy.
You're not allowed to drive.
You're not supposed to drive or even ride a bike while taking Lorazepam.
It's more often than not used as a short term medication.
More severe side effects include, which at this point, Giselle was likely feeling
some of these severe side effects, weakness, slurred speech, blurred vision,
memory problems, short term memory loss, loss of consciousness and coma and death
in severe cases.
Most medical professionals will typically
advise if you experience even a little bit of any of these above symptoms,
you need to seek medical attention immediately.
An overdose of Lorazepam is life threatening.
Side note, a lot of people think that the doctor should also be investigated because
he's getting a lot of these prescribed to him.
He's getting a ton of Lorazepam and Ambien, 450 tablets in the space of a year,
which is a lot.
Additional evidence on top of that.
He has all these files saved under abuses.
He posted photos of his family members all over the Internet with degrading
comments. The evidence is seemingly never ending and it does not appear that he's
going to be finishing off this trial with the potentially last remaining ounce of
dignity that he may have.
He has since since the start of this trial, this month, taken to trying to make it
seem like his wife Giselle had multiple affairs outside of their marriage.
He has also tried.
Yeah.
He's also tried to blame this on the fact that his dad was not a good man.
He also alleges that he was essayed as a child when he was hospitalized at one
point for a sickness that is now caused something in his brain to get messed up.
He is facing 20 years in prison.
What? 20 years.
How is that possible? Yeah.
20 years. So people are upset about that.
They're trying to get more.
How old is he?
He is 71 now.
A lot of people wonder, how are there really no signs at all?
I mean, no suspicions throughout the 50 years, because,
you know, I think in a lot of cases, people say they're the perfect couple.
They're the perfect couple.
And then you get these court documents and you're like, well,
they were the perfect couple on the outside.
But look at all the people next to them that saw all these signs, right?
So people are unsettled about this case because it truly feels like they were
the perfect couple, like there's no the whole family was confused as well.
Were they just extra oblivious?
Was it right in front of their face
this whole time and they just didn't see it? Would anybody else have seen it?
In the book, Caroline tries to recount any and all red flags that might have come up
over the years because maybe it can help somebody else.
And she says, there's really none.
These are the only ones.
Giselle had a falling out with one of her best friends from college.
This best friend would often come over to stay with the family.
But Giselle's kids knew her well.
They loved her. They all like her.
One day she's just no longer part of their lives.
The story that Giselle's kids heard were little bits and pieces.
And there was some sort of big falling out between Giselle and her best friend.
And for some reason, their dad Dominique was a big part of it.
Giselle's best friend told her,
Dominique has been trying to be inappropriate with me while I've been staying at your house.
She told Giselle, you don't know who you live with.
You don't know the man that you're sleeping with.
It's time to open your eyes.
Your husband is not who you think he is.
And she backed her husband.
There was no proof.
She spoke to the friend, got her side of the story, spoke to her husband,
got his side of the story.
But you have to remember, she met her husband when they were 18.
They got married.
She met this friend in college.
They at this point had probably been together at least 20 years.
Yeah, I'm not saying this is what I would do in this situation.
I'm just saying a lot of people can see why she may have chosen to
more or less believe her husband.
They have this whole life together.
And this has never happened before.
It's not like multiple friends had said this to her.
Giselle tried to question Dominique.
He just denied everything.
After this, her and her college best friends stopped talking for good.
20 years of friendship just destroyed.
Looking back, Caroline thinks this was the beginning of her dad's
insidious hold on their mother.
Eventually, it just got worse.
When Giselle's mysterious health problems would get worse,
he told her, you can't drive, you can't go out alone.
She couldn't remember things.
Her husband was the only one there for her to remember.
Hey, honey, you got to remember to do this.
You got to do this.
I will go shopping.
You can't go shopping.
I will do this out of love because your health isn't good.
You can't take care of the finances.
It's too stressful.
I will take care of the finances at the time.
I'm sure Giselle felt very grateful at the time.
I'm sure Giselle felt very grateful that she had someone that wasn't
annoyed with her health issues, but rather wanted to shield her from the
world instead turns out he's drugging her and letting men assault her.
Side note, when Giselle divorces him, she realizes that he wasn't just
managing the finances out of love.
He had taken out significant loans in her name.
Almost all the loans are in her name.
Not only did he shatter her entire existence, but he left her in a pile, a
mountain of debt to crawl out of while she's trying to recover from this level
of betrayal.
Obviously, this is not a sign of anything, but Caroline writes in her
book about her father never made her uncomfortable, but her father's father
had, so Caroline's grandpa, Dominique's dad had been married for most of his
life and together with his wife, he, they had adopted this little girl
named Lucille.
So this is Dominique's adoptive sister.
After Dominique's mom passes, his dad ends up marrying the adopted daughter.
The one that he raised and she was little, everyone called it in the family,
an incestuous, inappropriate relationship with a vulnerable person.
She's 30 years younger.
They were, she was 25 when they got married.
I mean, he raised her and now he's marrying her and is practically
full on abusing her.
Caroline remembers going to grandpa's house, seeing Lucille step grandma.
She's 25.
She can hardly write.
She's not even allowed to change the TV or radio station
without her husband's consent.
All she does all day long is run errands for him, put the laundry away, put
the dishes away like a prisoner.
Sometimes they would see her go out into the back garden, staring off into the
horizon and she would just pick at fistfuls of her hair.
She would literally rip out fistfuls of her hair as a trauma response.
In this case, after her quote, husband's death, she was hospitalized.
Not from grief, but likely from the PTSD of trauma and abuse.
Everyone practically disowned the grandpa at this point, including Dominique.
He never confronted his father about it.
He just backed away.
Nobody wanted to associate with him anymore.
I mean, it was weird.
Caroline now thinks back and says to her father, from your father,
you really took the worst.
A few other red flags.
There was this strange incident in 2011.
The youngest brother Julian and his future wife are going to visit the parents.
They were staying with them for the weekend.
One day Julian's future wife comes up to him and she's looking
so uncomfortable, a little panicked.
What's going on?
She had just caught Dominique, aggressively self-pleasuring, sitting
behind his computer screen in his office, but the door was left wide open.
I mean, he has guests over.
Either he forgot, which is strange.
I mean, maybe, but it's almost like he wanted someone to catch him.
It's, it's not like he was home alone.
Imagine you have guests over staying with you for the weekend.
You leave the door.
It's weird.
It's weird.
Recently, Giselle has stated that there was one incident in around
2011 where she woke up in the middle of the night to Dominique having
intimate relations with her.
She knows now in 2024, it's, it was our word because she didn't consent at that
point and yeah, you still need to get consent from your significant other.
She just asked, what are you doing?
And then went back to sleep.
She said in that moment, she thought, I mean, I thought he had the urge to do it
and we were married, so I didn't take it any further.
There was another incident in 2015 when Giselle looked over and saw a text
message from an unknown number pop up on Dominique's phone.
The text read, I did not receive the photos yet.
She's like, who is that from?
He gave some sort of excuse at the time that made sense.
In another instance, Dominique gave her a beer to drink, but it had this
very strange green hue to it and she was upset.
She wanted to take it back to the store to let them know, Hey, we got a bad batch.
Can we get a new beer?
Can we get another case of beer?
He quickly took it from her, put it down the sink and was like, you're being dramatic.
We don't have to do all of that.
She didn't think anything of it.
She just thought maybe I'm being a Karen.
Like, you know, maybe I don't need to do that.
Other signs include Dominique was very bad with money, but that hardly counts as a sign.
Caroline remembers growing up.
He just was always in need of money and would never pay her back.
He would even go into her savings and take all the money that she
earned from her summer jobs, which is also explains how he does not
care to leave his wife in a pile of debt.
Other things would include Dominique was obsessed with taking pictures of Giselle
just going about her normal everyday life.
She found it very annoying.
She would tell him, stop, could you stop?
But he said, you should be pleased that after 50 years, your husband
still wants to take photos of you.
She said at that moment, she thought, I mean, it was flattering perhaps, but it
annoyed me and I told him to stop anyway.
He did ask her casually one time.
Do you want to try swinging?
Okay.
So yes, these isolated incidents of me telling you back to back seem like a
lot of signs, but he never pressured her.
He never asked again.
And this is in the span of like 50 years.
She said categorically, no, I will never do swinging.
Never brought it up again.
Never pressured her.
Nothing.
Yeah.
I'm sure she's doubting every single, you know, every single conversation,
everything.
Yeah.
And that's all she could have found, which means how good at masking he is.
There, yes.
And there's one incident that I do think is much more alarming, but I
don't think it ties to this.
So when she was caught for her affair, he grabbed her by the collar of her shirt
and slammed her up against the wall in anger.
The kids witnessed this.
I think at that moment, they also wrote it off as like a very sticky situation.
She was having an affair.
And so, I mean, that's about it really that they could come up with, unless
there's going to be new revelations that are revealed during the trial.
But yeah, he truly was so good at masking.
There was not even an inkling that he was drugging her, not even a
single suspicion of any of this.
Truly.
There is no way the family could have suspected anything like this going on.
Caroline said he was the one who took me to school early in the morning
to avoid me taking the bus.
He never hesitated to pick me up on weekends at any time of the night.
Before I passed my driver's license, he would pick me up from my friend's house.
He always made sure to comfort me when I was heartbroken or when my mother and
I disagreed and got into a fight, he would take my side.
The only thing he always told his kids were, may your journey
of life be better than mine.
He said that was his only wish as a father, that their journey of life
be easier and better than his.
I mean, to them, it just seems like there's, clearly there's small things,
little, little things here and there, but nothing that would ever make them
suspect that Dominique is doing this.
I mean, maybe some things suspect like, okay, he's not a good person.
He's not good with his finances.
He's a little strange.
He definitely shouldn't have slammed his wife up against the wall.
It did never happen again, it seems, but still not acceptable.
It just, in comparison to all families out there, there's
nothing so standout alarming that would make them freak out.
Ultimately, their lives were so ordinary, too ordinary.
Caroline says, I think of us as happy.
I thought my parents were very happy.
Giselle says, we had everything.
We had a great life.
I don't understand how this could have happened.
We had it all.
We had everything we needed to be happy.
While all of this is unfolding, Giselle has filed for divorce.
When she first found out about the secret tapes, the abuse, she said
she had thoughts of self exiting.
She said, I feel dirty, soiled, betrayed.
It's a tsunami.
I've been hit by a high speed train, but she wants to see it
through for her kids and other victims.
She said almost to her husband at this point during the trial, this is
during the opening days this month, my world is falling apart for me.
Everything is falling apart.
Everything I have built over the years.
Frankly, those videos are scenes of horror for me.
I'm laying on the bed, motionless, being essay'd.
They treat me like a rag doll, like a garbage bag.
It's barbaric.
Don't talk to me about sex scenes.
Those are rape scenes.
There are at least 200 scenes of essay, 90 by strangers.
The rest are Dominique recording himself essaying his wife while she was drugged.
Some of the assaults lasted six hours long.
And side note, she said their intimate life was very normal.
They were very intimate and had good relations.
There was no inkling that he kept asking her to try, quote, darker stuff.
You know, there's no, nothing.
There was no like, Hey, pretend to be asleep.
There was nothing.
Caroline, Dominique's daughter has stated in her book, being the child
of the victim and the child of the perpetrator is a terrible burden.
In an instant, my life wavered in a dizzying way.
The past has been swept away, but for what future?
Our family shipwreck is like a labyrinth where for nearly two years,
each step forward has opened a new door to more sordid revelations.
I tried in vain to detect and understand the true identity
of the man who raised me.
Even today, I wonder how I did not see anything.
Not having suspected anything, I will never forgive what he committed
over so many years, yet I still have the image of the father I thought I knew.
I still dream of him.
He talks to me in my dreams and we laugh.
We are together.
Waking up brings me back to a nightmare now.
I miss my father, not the one who will stand before the judges, but the man
who took care of me for 42 years.
I loved him so much before discovering this whole monstrosity.
How can I calmly prepare to face him in trial?
She says about him going to prison.
At first, a voice whispers to me, has he been able to adapt to prison life?
Does he suffer from our absence, from loneliness?
What about the violence in the closed environment?
A second voice screams at her, this is justice.
When you see the harm he's done to us, to mom, to us, to our family, he is
reaping what he sowed and he deserves it.
This is probably one of the most powerful books I've read in a really long time.
The way she writes is just so raw and unforgivingly honest.
I mean, she writes about how with the upcoming trial, she's scared.
She says, I'm afraid I won't be able to hate him.
And she wants to tell him, the happy image of our family has been shattered.
Now you are the organizer of orgies and you're a terrible liar.
Mom tells me about your last breakfast you had together.
Absolutely normal.
How much insincerity is required for someone to convincingly show a near
comical level of tranquility for all these years?
What if an overdose had killed my mom?
What if she hadn't woken up?
Not for a moment did my father ever think that my mom's heart might not hold.
Caroline says, I feel betrayed and I feel ashamed to be a daughter of this torture.
And just because the whole family is solid to some degree after this, it's not
like they can just lean on each other and move on.
They are now, but in the beginning in 2020, when all of this was unfolding,
it was very rough.
Everyone was recovering slightly differently.
For example, in the very, very beginning, Caroline remembers sometimes
mom would worry out loud, almost like she had quote Stockholm syndrome.
She would hear her mom almost rambling.
Your father is not, your father is not well where he is.
He's suffering.
You know, I must've missed something in the last few years.
I must've missed a sign.
Caroline would have to walk away or hang up the phone.
She almost felt betrayed by her mom in the beginning because not only does
her mom know about the photos of Caroline, but she feels like she's
almost siding with her dad, worrying about her dad.
Why isn't she using all that energy to worry about herself or her children
or her grandchildren who are going to be without a grandfather?
She says, I can't believe this.
My mother watches over the comfort of the man who raped her for 10 years.
Then Caroline finds out why.
Her father is barred from reaching out to his family, but he wrote this letter
to a family friend to be delivered to Giselle, who Caroline refers to as his
puppet. The letter reads, my friends, I know that I disappointed you, but you
are my only link with the outside world because I'm not allowed to contact my
family that I miss terribly apart from the anguish, the fear, the emptiness,
the loneliness. Here it is awful.
I know I'm here to pay for what I've done to the love of my life, to my family,
to my friends, but it's too late.
I don't know where I'm going and how it's going to end.
I come to you in the name of the past friendships because I need you to pick
up some things for me, to drop off at the entrance of the prison, my light brown
jacket, my Adidas jacket, my Nike sneakers, a big gray wool sweater, and a
belt without a big buckle.
If you still have a little friendship for me, I ask you to be indulgent, AKA,
send money to my commissary.
I'm in jail for a long time and I'm asking myself so many questions about
everything, what is going to become home and everything else.
The worst here is the boredom.
We only go out for an hour a day on walks and there are two of us per cell.
It's quite hard for me.
I don't sleep at night.
I lose weight, but that's probably what I deserve.
The end of the year without family is going to be very sad for me.
I hope my love will get over it.
That's what I want.
I love her so much.
I realize it even more here now, even though she has filed for divorce.
She will remain my eternal love.
She is a saint and I have not been able to keep her.
And if you can send me mail, the addresses of my three children.
I don't remember any of them by heart.
What?
Yeah.
He wants to write to his kids.
To Giselle and to one of Caroline's brothers, the letter ignited a tiny bit
of sympathy, which is exactly what Dominique would have wanted for Caroline
and her older brother, they found the letter even more pathetic.
So it caused briefly a rift.
Yeah.
To which Caroline shows to a judge the letter like, look, he's trying
to get in contact and ruin our lives soon enough.
He writes another letter blaming Caroline stating that because of her,
everyone in prison knows what he's in there for.
He writes, I'm going to be lynched in here.
It's unforgiving.
It's urgent.
I'm going to have to self exit.
At least I will try to hold out for as long as I can.
I'm not looking for pity, just a little comfort.
Life is too hard here, especially with Caroline's anger.
Caroline would finally write to him three months of incarceration and
already four fallacious letters.
You always knew what you were doing and still do to this day.
The only difference is I know who you are now.
We all know I ask you from now on to stop your manipulation.
I will go to the end of this.
We will go all the way because to me, you no longer exist and you never will.
There were a lot of frustrating times where Caroline and her mom's grief
just did not line up while Caroline wanted to rewrite all of her past memories
with the truth.
It seems like her mom just wanted to leave the past in the past as good memories.
She would tell her daughter, you forget that he was not always the devil you
describe. He has done so much for you, but also for your brothers.
I was happy with him and I loved him so much.
And I prefer to remember the good times.
So she's like, I just want to remember those as good times.
And this is a separate life now.
Eventually Caroline will come to understand her mom.
Because it's also Giselle's first time going through all of this in life.
This is also her way of protecting herself.
She writes, my mom can't accept reality to admit that my father dangerously
and deliberately manipulated her to degrade her, because if she recognizes
her husband's true nature, she would collapse on the spot.
Everyone looks at her and says she's a strong woman, but inside she's a pile of
ruins. Giselle says everything inside needs to be rebuilt.
During all of this, before the trial, Thomas, the eldest son, welcomed
another child to the family.
He texted a picture to the family group chat of his new baby boy with the text
message, welcome to the world, our son.
We have lost a large oak tree on which we like to rest, Dominique.
But we have gained a new young shoot like a seed that we will have to protect.
Caroline writes in her book, our family history has at least revealed a social
phenomenon that is still largely underestimated in France.
Chemical submission is in the inter-family and social sphere.
It is much more widespread than we think.
We all know about date rape drugs, but can we imagine being chemically drugged
and abused by a loved one with medication straight out of the family's medicine
cabinet? According to France's Drug Security Authority, 42 percent of, quote,
credible reports of date rape drug usage in 2021 happened in the private sphere.
So not at bars, not at clubs.
It was between people who already knew each other.
The effect of what chemical submission does to a family.
I mean, it's pretty clear.
Caroline says about her dad, I had peace.
You annihilated it.
Many French netizens are calling for this trial to help raise awareness of abuse
of chemical submission within families.
And it's not just within families, it's within the whole social sphere.
Many women in France have said the idea of an R word or is still very
much in France, the creepy man in the alleyway, but in reality, it can very
often be someone, you know, more likely than not.
It's someone you interact with.
For example, a senator in France 2023 recently, a senator in France, Joel
allegedly drugged lawmaker Sandrine by allegedly slipping ecstasy into her
champagne at his house for like a work function with the intention of assaying
her. This is just weird.
He kept insisting that they toast champagne several times.
And she's like, why is he so adamant?
She takes the champagne.
It's unusually sweet.
When she finally drank it, she starts feeling palpitations, sweating.
Her legs start shaking.
She leaves.
She's like, I got to go to the hospital.
Something is not right with me.
I feel like I'm going to die.
And he's following her to the courtyard.
He's like trying to get her not to leave.
She finally gets into the taxi, gets to the hospital, tells them everything.
And she even says there was this weird thing.
He just kept turning on and off.
Like he's a light dimmer.
He keeps dimming it on and off, right?
Why?
The hospital said that increases the effectiveness of ecstasy.
Perhaps that was why he was doing that.
Regardless, the police search Joel's home.
They find ecstasy in his apartment, to which his whole argument so far has been.
It's more so a handling error.
He wasn't trying to drug her.
He just mishandled the ecstasy.
Because I also have ecstasy tied to the inside of my sleeves when I pour my
guest champagne, and if it slips, it's mishandling.
He has been suspended and the case is being investigated.
But the lawmaker, Sandrine, hopes that this will draw attention to the use
of drugs to prey on women, chemical submission.
Netizens have also pointed out to this case.
It just doesn't make sense that Giselle had gone to so many doctors,
neurologists, gynecologists during the time that this was happening.
And nobody even theorized this could have been the answer.
Nobody even suggested it to her.
And she was like, no, no, no, there's no way.
There's not even training for doctors to
pinpoint what someone suffering from something like this would look like.
Many activists have also stated it's time for France to change some of its older
verbiage of how they define the criminal act of our wording.
By the French law, it is defined as sexual penetration committed
by violence, coercion or surprise.
Many lawmakers want to change the wording to say explicitly,
it happens any time there is not consent.
Consent can be withdrawn at any moment,
at any time, and consent cannot exist when someone is impaired.
One thing to note is chemical submission is not only very hard to detect,
it's also very difficult to treat.
In the book, Caroline writes briefly about how
when all of this was happening, she started having these crazy panic attacks.
I don't know if it's a translation or if the word that was used,
but she would go into these states of hysteria.
She was losing her mind.
I mean, nobody had ever seen her like this to the point where she is hospitalized.
She goes into the mental psychiatric ward and she's in a state of extreme distress.
The doctors basically prescribe her and force her to take the exact pills that she
was drugged. They're like, you cannot leave until you take these anti anxiety meds.
You cannot leave until you take these sleeping medications,
which is the last thing someone with this type of trauma is going to want to take.
But they tell her, take the pills against your will,
like your trauma or stay hospitalized.
So it's just another round of the same exact type of trauma.
She would have to agree to take the pills to get out.
But it's just it's very unfortunate.
Now, this is where it gets crazy.
There are going to be potentially other trials for Dominique.
He is being investigated in the essay
and murder of a 23 year old woman in 1991 and the attempted essay of a 19 year old
in 1999, where some reports state a realtor was showing a house when a man
pretending to be a prospective buyer shows up with a box cutter trying to essay her.
She manages to escape.
According to some reports, he is admitted to the attempted essay in 1999,
but he denies being involved in the murder, even though the same M.O. was used.
They were both realtors showing houses and there was attempted essay involved
or full essay in the murder case. Now, get this part.
Remember how he gets arrested for taking pictures upskirt at the supermarket?
That was actually his second time getting arrested for that.
He was arrested before, but Giselle never knew about it because they were like,
you have no priors, you're free to go.
They take his DNA samples and they do nothing with it.
They don't test it in the database and they just submit it.
Now, the second time he's arrested, they
I believe they had just opened up a bunch of closed cases.
A 1999 attempted essay case gets opened up again.
DNA is a match.
And that is why they search all of his stuff and they build this case against him.
So it's not just by chance of like, hey, you are recording people.
We're going to search all your devices.
I'm sure they would have done that maybe anyway if it was the second time.
But yeah, that's what I'm saying.
Like there's no way that at 60 years old or 50 years old is when he started
committing these type of crime.
That's what people are saying.
People are saying that he didn't start
saying his wife in 2010, that's when he started recording it.
Like there's just no way.
Yeah.
And the fact that he's 70,
which means that he almost lived his whole life without getting caught.
Which is
and the fact that his family did not catch on to anything.
Also means those 70 people or 50 people would have gotten away too.
Yes.
And all the other victims that they've also assaulted.
And the CP files found on their computers.
They were talking about hundreds of people.
Yeah.
Like the report effect that this is all would have gone away without a trace.
And some that is interesting.
If he is indeed involved in the 1991 murder,
he could very likely have some of the characteristics of a serial killer.
The way that he's able to compartmentalize his crimes is very serial killer esque.
It's not just a perverse man, which I mean is horrendous already.
He needs to be thrown in jail.
But it's a little more extreme than not scary because nobody.
How could he get away his whole life without anyone suspecting anything?
Everybody liked him.
They said he was a pleasant guy.
He was even asked what would have happened if that in the 1999 case of the attempted
essay where your DNA was found, what would have happened if she hadn't escaped?
I don't know.
You were well on your way of saying her.
I can't tell you.
Later, he would tell the judge that he quote, I had no intentions of us saying her.
I just intended to immobilize her, perhaps just to look at her.
At least as of right now, there's no firm answer on whether or not he will be tried
for those crimes. Additionally, the police identified another woman who was essayed
by Dominique at least a dozen times between 2015 and 2020.
It seems like this is the one that turned on the light.
She was in a state of chemical submission
because of her husband and Dominique would come and essay her.
But the trial might be tricky considering
the victim is still in contact with her partner, with her husband after he's been
incarcerated and she would prefer not to file a complaint against her husband nor
Dominique. He may face way longer than 20 years if these go to trial as well.
But since then, Dominique's nieces have been coming forward.
They said we've actually kind of had a few more signs than other people.
So this is their uncle. Dominique is their uncle.
They alleged that when they were younger, Dominique, their uncle, would have this
weird insistence on playing doctor.
And he allegedly only agreed to buy them toys if they would undress.
Dominique has rejected the claims.
It doesn't seem like they ever told Dominique's wife or his kids.
So nobody was alerted, it appears.
I think they tried to rationalize it in their minds until this came forward.
And I'm sure everyone around Dominique is thinking, wait, OK,
did I experience anything? Dominique has since rejected the claims.
And he said, it's disgusting to accuse me of this.
This is too much.
I will say most comments about this case are exactly what we're feeling right now.
But there are some unhinged people out there.
One person writes all 72 of them in one session.
Her old CUN team must be sore and overflowing.
First of all, not factual.
And second of all,
another comment reads, I think that our workers are the ones who needed to take
the drugs to commit the act, at least for me, I would need a lot of drugs to do that
with a 70 year old.
Another one reads, well, who would want to knock up a 70 year old sleeping beauty?
Another reads, if the wife had agreed to wife swapping,
none of this would have happened.
Another comment reads, woman and men are such an unholy, unequal pairing.
Imagine being married to and living under the same roof as your natural
predator and biggest enemy, such strange, barbaric, compassionless,
demonic creatures.
And I do think that this is a very intense comment.
But for the case and for the intense feelings that a lot of people have of just
being fed up, I think it's just coming from a place of frustration.
Another comment reads, it's pretty alarming that he found 70 people willing to
participate in this without one, a single one of them turning him into the authorities.
Another comment reads, do they still have the guillotine in France?
Other comments about the doctors, she's a woman, so likely doctors told her all
her health problems were because she should lose her weight and probably her hormones.
Someone theorizes he didn't just start this 10 years ago, he started filming 10
years ago and that's why he's been caught, guaranteed this has been happening for decades.
Another comment just simply reads, a bear would never do this.
Others point to a small survey that was done with a small pool.
I will say a very small pool.
But even then, it's very alarming.
But that study indicated that one in three men stated they would essay a woman if they
knew they could get away with it.
What?
Carolina said this about her mom.
My mother has forged a mind of steel.
It does not bend.
She loves life, whether it is good or bad.
And the surprises are in store for her.
She resembles a medieval queen to me, next straight chin high and not a complaint.
The true heroine standing in the ruins is her.
She was drugged, damaged and thrown to strangers.
She took the time to listen to us, her children.
Mom always encouraged us to go out, to move around, to see people, to take care of our
lives and at the height of elegance, we have never heard her bad mouth our father to us.
People say it's really hard at that age to lose your partner.
So typically around that age of 70s, 80s, 90s, people lose their partner to death.
And that's why people say when you are in a relationship for that long, you pass soon
after your partner because it's just difficult.
Even if you take out the emotional trauma, the mental trauma, there's a lot of learning
to do. Caroline's mom, I mean, Giselle had to move to an area where she didn't know
anyone. She had to learn to live on her own again, drive a car, maintain a house,
manage paperwork, all the things that he had been doing, she had to relearn.
She's got to meet new people while going through this trial, while trying to get
rid of all this trauma.
And she says, all that was left for me of 50 years of life together were two
suitcases. I no longer have an identity.
I don't know if I will ever rebuild myself.
Caroline says one of her mom's favorite motto stands out to her, and it's just
continue to believe in life and the most beautiful things it has in store for you.
As for her father, Caroline writes, the grave digger of families, the murder of
memories. And she says, in the heart of the carnage, my mother's hand is still in
mine. This carnage, here it is.
So the two of them are facing it together with the two brothers and their families.
Caroline started an awareness campaign called Don't Put Me To Sleep to fight
against drug facilitated essays. And as for right now, the trials are currently
ongoing. They're expected to reach a verdict by December 20th of this year.
And that is the current case of what is happening in France right now.
What are your thoughts on this case?
I was trying to go through all of the English media news sources and it's bad,
but the book, it's so much worse than I ever imagined.
And just the way that Caroline is so raw with the amount of trauma that they're
going through, it just cuts very deep.
What are your thoughts?
Please let me know in the comments and I will see you in the next one.
Please be safe.
