‘My father should die in prison’

Warning: This story contains descriptions of sexual harassment

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

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

“He announced to me that he found that in the morning [my father] “Dominique drugged her for about 10 years so that different men could rape her,” Darian recalled in an exclusive interview with Emma Barnett of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“At that moment, I lost my normal life,” said Darian, now 46.

“I remember shouting, I cried, I even cursed him,” he said. “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 have also been jailed.

He was caught by the police after he ransacked a supermarket, leading investigators to take a closer look at him. In this seemingly innocent retired grandfather’s laptop and phones, they found thousands of videos and photos of his wife Gisèle, apparently unconscious, being raped by strangers.

In addition to bringing the issues of rape and gender-based violence into the spotlight, the case also highlighted a lesser-known issue of chemical trafficking – drug-fueled attacks.

Caroline Darian has waged a lifelong struggle against substance abuse, which is thought to be underreported as most victims have no recollection of being assaulted and may not even realize they were drugged.

In the days following Gisèle’s terrible phone call, Darian and his brothers, Florian and David, went to the south of France where their parents lived to support their mother as she heard the news that her husband—as Darian says now. “it was one of the worst molesters of the last 20 or 30 years”.

Soon after, Darian himself was called by the police – and his world was disrupted again.

He was shown two photos 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, he couldn’t tell that the woman was him. “I was living with the result of separation. I had difficulty knowing myself from the beginning,” he says.

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

Darian says she is certain her father abused and raped her – something she has always denied, although she has given conflicting accounts of the images.

“I know that he gave me drugs, maybe to abuse me sexually. But I have no proof,” he said.

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

“And how many victims are there? They don’t believe because there is no evidence. They are not listened to, they are not supported,” he said.

Soon after his father’s crime came to light, Darian wrote a letter.

I’ll Never Call Him Father And he explores the trauma of his family.

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

“Painkillers, sedatives. Medicines,” Darian said. As happens with almost half of the victims of chemical poisoning, he knew his abuser: the danger, he says, “comes from within.”

He says that during the grief of discovering that he had been raped more than 200 times by different people, his mother Gisèle found it difficult to accept that her husband might have beaten their daughter.

“For my mother, it is difficult to combine all that at the same time,” he said.

However, when Gisèle decided to open the case to the public and the media to reveal what she had done to her husband and a number of men, mother and daughter were in agreement: “I knew that we had gone through something… bad, 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 abuser and the victim – something she calls “a heavy burden”.

Now she can’t think back to her childhood with the man she calls Dominique, but from time to time she returns to the habit of calling him her father.

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

“But I have his DNA and the main reason I’m so engaged is the invisible victims and for me it’s a way to put real distance with this guy,” he told Emma Barnett. “I’m completely different from Dominique.”

Darian added that he doesn’t know if his father was a “monster,” as others called him. “He knew exactly what to do, and he is not sick,” he said.

“This man is dangerous. There is no way he can get out. He won’t.”

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 themselves. Gisèle, Darian said, was tired because of the trial, but she is also “recovering… She is doing well”.

As for Darian, the only question she’s interested in right now is raising awareness about chemical exports – and better educating children about sexual abuse.

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

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

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

‘You can watch the full interview on ‘The Pelicot Case – A Daughter’s Story’ – Monday at 7pm on BBC 2 or iPlayer. If you are affected by some of the issues raised in the film, information for help and support is available at bbc.co.uk/actionline’.