“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 his 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,” Darian recalls in an exclusive interview with Emma Barnett, from BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

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

“I remember screaming, crying and 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 three-and-a-half-month trial in December.

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

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

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

In addition to highlighting issues of rape and gender-based violence, the trial also highlighted the little-known issue of chemical submission: drug-facilitated aggression.

Caroline Darian has fought for her life to fight chemical submission, which is believed to be under-reported as most victims do not remember the assaults and may not even realize they were drugged.

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

Shortly after, the police called Darian herself and her world shattered again.

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

At first, she couldn’t tell that the woman was her. “I experienced a dissociation effect. I had difficulties recognizing myself from the beginning,” he says.

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

Darian says she is convinced her father also abused and raped her, something 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,” he says.

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

“And how many victims do the same thing happen to them? They are not believed because there is no evidence. They are not listened to or supported,” he says.

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

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

It also delves into the topic of chemical subjugation, in which the drugs commonly used “come from the family medicine cabinet.”

“Painkillers, sedatives. They’re medications,” Darian says. As with nearly half of chemical submission victims, she knew her abuser: the danger, she says, “comes from within.”

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

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

However, when Gisèle decided to open the process to the public and the media to expose what her husband and dozens of men had done to her, mother and daughter agreed: “I knew we had been through something… horrible, but that we had to go through it with dignity and strength.

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

Now she can’t remember her childhood with the man she calls Dominique, and only occasionally falls back into the habit of referring to him as her father.

“When I look back, I don’t really remember the father I thought I was. I look straight at the criminal, the sexual criminal that he is,” he 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 real distance from this guy,” she tells Emma Barnett. “I’m totally different from Dominique.”

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

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

It will be years before Dominique Pelicot, 72, is eligible for parole, so he may never see his family again.

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

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

The strength comes from her husband, her brothers and her 10-year-old son, her “beautiful son,” she says with a smile and her voice full of affection.

The events that unfolded that November day made her who she is today, Darian says.

Now, this woman whose life was destroyed by a tsunami on a November night is just trying to look forward.

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