‘My father should die in prison”

Warning: This article contains references to sexual harassment

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

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

“They announced to me that they had found it that morning [my father] “Dominique has been taking drugs for almost 10 years so that different men can get hold of her,” Darian recalled in an interview with Emma Barnett for BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Darian, who is now 46 years old, said: “At that time, my life was ordinary.

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

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

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

The 50 men who Dominique Pelicot hired online to hold and rape his wife Gisèle while she was unconscious were also sent to prison.

He was caught by police after a ride in a supermarket, prompting detectives to take a closer look at him. On the laptop and mobile phones of the retired grandfather who seems to have no problems, he found many videos and pictures of his wife Gisèle, in a coma, being raped by strangers.

On top of pushing the issue of rape and gender-based violence, the case also shed light on the lesser-known issue of drug trafficking – drug-assisted violence.

Caroline Darian has struggled throughout her life with substance abuse, which is thought to be an understatement because most victims have no memory of the assault and may not even know they were drugged.

In the days following Gisèle’s tragic phone call, Darian and his brothers, Florian and David, went to the south of France where their parents lived to look after their mother. he was “one of the worst sleepers of the last 20 or 30 years.

Soon, Darian was also called by the police – and his world fell apart again.

He showed her two pictures that he 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 had mixed results. I had a hard time figuring myself out from the start,” she says.

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

Darian says she believes her father abused her and sexually assaulted her – something she has always denied, despite offering conflicting explanations for the footage.

He said: “I know that he drugged me, maybe with the intention of raping me.” But I don’t have any proof.

Unlike his mother’s story, there is no evidence of what Pelicot did to Darian.

“And it’s like that for how many victims? They don’t believe because there’s no evidence. They don’t listen, they don’t get help,” he says.

After his father’s crimes were discovered, Darian wrote a book.

I won’t mention him again as Father investigates the problems of his family.

It also sheds light on the issue of drug delivery, where the drugs used “come from the family medicine cabinet”.

“Painkillers, sedatives. It’s medicine,” says Darian. As is the case with almost half of drug victims, they knew their abuser: the danger, he says, “comes from within.”

He said that when he was depressed when he learned that he had been raped more than 200 times by different people, Gisèle’s mother found it difficult to accept that her husband might have raped her daughter again.

He said: “It is difficult for women to combine these things at the same time.”

However, when Gisèle decided to open the case to the public and the media to reveal what her husband and many men had done to her, the mother and her daughter agreed: “I knew we had encountered something . . . scary, 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 both abuser and victim – something she calls “bad baggage”.

Now unable to remember her childhood with the man she calls Dominique, she sometimes reverts to the habit of calling him her father.

“When I look back, I don’t really remember the father I thought he was.

“But I have his DNA and the main reason I live with invisible people is my way of getting real distance from this person,” says Emma Barnett. “I’m very different from Dominique.”

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

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

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

Meanwhile, the Pelicots are rebuilding themselves. Gisèle, Darian said, was tired of the crime, and “healing… She’s doing well”.

As for Darian, the only question she has now is raising awareness about drug addiction — and educating children better about sexual abuse.

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

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

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

‘You can watch the full interview’ ‘The Pelicot case – The daughter’s story’ – Mondays at 7pm on BBC 2 or on iPlayer. If you are affected by any of the information released in the film, more information and support is available at bbc.co.uk/actionline’.