“My father should die in prison”

Warning: This story contains descriptions of sexual abuse

It was 20:25 on Monday evening in November 2020 when Caroline Darian got the call that changed everything.

On the other end of the phone was his mother, Gisèle Pelicot.

“That morning (my father) Dominique announced to me that he had been taking drugs for about 10 years so that he could be raped by different men,” Darian recalled in an exclusive interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today program Emma Barnett.

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

“I remember that I screamed, I cried, I even insulted her,” she says. “It was like an earthquake. A tsunami.”

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

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

The 50 men Dominique Pelicot hired online to rape and sexually assault his unconscious wife Gisèle were also sent to prison.

Police caught him after he got up in a supermarket, and investigators took a closer look. In a seemingly innocuous search on the retired grandfather’s laptops and phones, thousands of videos and photos were found of his wife Gisèle, clearly unconscious, being raped by strangers.

In addition to bringing the issues of rape and gender-based violence into focus, the trial also highlighted a lesser-known issue of chemical shipments: drug-facilitated assault.

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

In the days after Gisèle’s fateful phone call, Darian and his brothers, Florian and David, traveled to the south of France, where their parents lived to help their mother, as Darian now says, when she picked up her husband. was “one of the worst sexual predators of the last 20 or 30 years”.

Soon after, the police called Darian himself, and his world was shattered again.

They showed him two photos they found on his father’s laptop. An unconscious woman is shown lying on a bed, wearing only a T-shirt and underwear.

At first, he couldn’t tell that the woman was him. “I experienced a dissociation effect. From the beginning I had difficulties to know myself,” he says.

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

Darian says he is convinced his father also abused and raped him, something he has always denied, though he has offered conflicting explanations for the photos.

“I know he drugged me, probably for sexual abuse. But I have no proof,” he says.

Unlike the mother’s case, there is no evidence of what Pelicot might have done to Darian.

“And how many victims are they? They are not believed because there is no evidence. They are not listened to, nor accepted,” he says.

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

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

He also delves into the issue of chemical delivery, with commonly used drugs “coming from family medicine.”

“Painkillers, sedatives. It’s medicine,” says Darian. As is the case with nearly half of the victims of chemical submissions, he knew his abuser: the danger, he says, “comes from within.”

She says that in the midst of the trauma of learning that she had been raped more than 200 times, her mother Gisèle found it difficult to accept that her husband could also attack her daughter.

“It’s hard for a mother to integrate all of that at once,” she says.

However, when Gisèle decided to open the trial to the public and the media, to reveal what her husband and dozens of men had done to her, the mother and daughter agreed: “I knew we had gone through something… terrible, but we had to go through it with dignity and strength.”

Now, Darian must understand how to live knowing that she is the daughter of the torturer and the victim – something she calls “a terrible burden”.

Today she can’t think of her childhood with the man she calls Dominique, she’s gotten into the habit of calling him her father only occasionally.

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

“But I have his DNA and the main reason I’m so committed to Invisible Victims is also a way for me to put some real distance with this guy,” Emma Barnett told him. “I am completely different from Dominique.”

Darian added that he doesn’t know if his father was a “monster” or not, as some have called him. “He knew exactly what he did, and he’s not sick,” he says.

“He’s a dangerous man. There’s no way out. No way.”

It will be years before 72-year-old Dominique Pelicot gets parole, so he may never see his family again.

Meanwhile, the Pelicots are rebuilding themselves. Gisèle, Darian said, was exhausted from the trial, but also “recovering… She is doing well”.

As for Darian, the only question he is interested in now is raising awareness about chemical shipments, and better educating children about sexual abuse.

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

The events that unfolded that November day made him who he is today, says Darian.

Now, this woman whose life was ruined by a tsunami one night in November is only looking forward.

You can watch the full interview “Pelicot trial – The daughter’s story” on Monday at 7pm on BBC 2 or iPlayer. If you are affected by any of the issues raised in this film, help and support details are available at bbc.co.uk/actionline’.