‘My father should die in prison’

Warning: This story contains descriptions of sexual abuse

It was 8:25 p.m. on a Monday night in November 2020 when Caroline Darian received the call that changed everything.

On the other end of the phone was her mother Gisèle Pelicot.

“She announced to me that she had discovered that morning that (my father) Dominique had been drugging her for about 10 years so that different men could rape her,” Ms Darian recalled in an interview with Emma Barnett on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“At that moment, I lost what was a normal life,” says Ms. Darian, now 46.

“I remember shouting, crying, even insulting him,” she says. “It was like an earthquake. A tsunami.”

Dominique Pelicot was sentenced to 20 years in prison at the end of a historic trial that lasted three and a half months in December.

More than four years later, Ms Darian says her father “should die in prison”.

Fifty men recruited online by Dominique Pelicot to come rape and sexually assault his unconscious wife Gisèle were also sent to prison.

Police caught him after he was in a skirt at the supermarket, prompting investigators to take a closer look at him. On the laptop and phones of this seemingly harmless retired grandfather, they found thousands of videos and photos of his wife Gisèle, apparently unconscious, being raped by strangers.

In addition to pushing the issue of rape and gender-based violence into the spotlight, the trial also highlighted the little-known issue of chemical susceptibility – drug-assisted assault.

Caroline Darian has made her life’s fight a battle against chemical susceptibility, which is believed to be underreported because most victims have no memory of the assault and may not even realize they were drugged.

In the days following Gisèle’s fateful phone call, Caroline Darian and her brothers, Florian and David, traveled to the south of France where their parents lived to support their mother as she absorbed the news that – as Ms Darian now says – her the husband was “one of the worst sexual predators of the last 20 or 30 years”.

Soon after, the police called Ms Darian herself – and her world came crashing down again.

They showed her two photos they found on her father’s laptop. They showed an unconscious woman on a bed, dressed only in a T-shirt and underwear.

At first she couldn’t tell the woman was her. “I was living as a dissociation effect. I had difficulty recognizing myself from the very beginning,” she says.

“Then the policeman said: ‘Look, you have the same brown mark on your cheek… it’s you.’ Then I looked at those two photos differently… I was lying on my left side like my mother, in all her pictures.”

Ms Darian says she is convinced she too was abused and raped by her father – which he has always denied, although he has offered conflicting explanations for the photos.

“I know he drugged me, probably for sexual abuse. But I don’t have any proof,” she says.

Unlike her mother’s case, there is no evidence of what Pelicot may have done to Ms. Darian.

“And this is the case for how many victims? They are not believed because there is no evidence. They are not listened to, they are not supported,” she says.

Shortly after her father’s crimes came to light, Ms. Darian wrote a book.

I’ll Never Never Call Him Dad Again explores the trauma of his family.

It also delves deeper into the issue of chemical susceptibility, where commonly used drugs “come from the family medicine cabinet.”

“Painkillers, sedatives. Those are drugs,” says Ms. Darian. As is the case with nearly half of chemical exposure victims, she knew her abuser: the danger, she says, “comes from within.”

She says her mother Gisèle, amid the trauma of learning that she had been raped more than 200 times by different people, found it difficult to accept that her husband might have also assaulted their daughter.

“It’s hard for a mom to integrate it all in one go,” she says.

Nevertheless, when Gisèle decided to open the trial to the public and the media to expose what her husband and dozens of men had done to her, mother and daughter were in agreement: “I knew we had gone through something… terrible, but that we had to go through it dignified and strong.”

Now Ms Darian has to figure out how to live knowing she is the daughter of both a torturer and a victim – something she calls a “terrible burden”.

Now she can’t remember her childhood with the man she calls Dominique, only occasionally returning to the habit of calling him her father.

“When I look back, I don’t really remember the father I thought he was. I’m looking straight at the criminal, sex offender that he is,” she says.

“But I have his DNA and the main reason I’m so engaged with Invisible Victims is also a way for me to really distance myself from the guy,” she tells Emma Barnett. “I’m completely different from Dominique.”

Ms. Darian adds that she doesn’t know if her father was a “monster,” as some have called him. “He knew perfectly well what he was doing and he was not sick,” she says.

“He’s a dangerous man. There’s no way he’s getting away with it. There’s no way.”

It will be years before Dominique Pelicot, 72, is eligible for parole, so it’s possible he’ll never see his family again.

Meanwhile, the Pelicots are rebuilding. Gisèle, says Caroline Darian, is exhausted from the trial, but also “recovering… She’s fine.”

As far as Ms. Darian is concerned, the only issue she’s interested in now is raising awareness about chemical exposure – and educating children about sexual abuse.

She draws strength from her husband, her brothers and her 10-year-old son – her “lovely son”, she says with a smile, her voice full of tenderness.

The events that set in motion that day in November made her what she is today, Ms. Darian says. Now he tries to look ahead.

If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this film, details of help and support are available at bbc.co.uk/actionline.