At 8:24 p.m. on Nov. 2, 2020, Caroline Darian was a happily married 42-year-old working mother, close to her parents and two brothers, David and Florian, content with a life so ordinary that she would later characterize it as “banal.”
Then, one minute later, she became someone very different. The phone rang and her life was split in two.
From that moment, Darian’s personal timeline would exist on two opposing planes: The years before she learned that for more than a decade, her father, Dominique Pelicot, had systematically drugged, raped and enabled more than 70 men to rape her mother, Gisèle Pelicot, and the days, weeks and months that followed.
Days, weeks and months that Darian chronicles with powerful precision and detail in “I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again: Turning Our Family Trauma of Sexual Assault and Chemical Submission Into a Collective Fight,” published in the United States in March. (Caroline Darian is a pen name for Caroline Peyronnet.)
“Later on, I learned that those who experience sudden trauma can often only recall a single isolated detail — a smell, a noise, a particular sensation; something infinitely small, which expands to take up all the available space, ” Darian writes. “For me it’s the clock on the cooker. Twenty-five minutes past eight, etched in stark white.”
In 2020, Dominique Pelicot was arrested for “upskirting” — attempting to take photos underneath the skirts of three women. During the subsequent search of his phone and computer, police found an enormous cache of photos and videos of Dominique and men he solicited on the internet raping a drugged Gisèle.
Last year, the world watched the Pelicot trial with a mixture of horror and awe — horror at the enormity of the crime, which led to the conviction of 51 men, including Dominique, and awe inspired by Gisèle’s courage. The tiny woman with the red bob became a feminist icon for her decision to waive her right to anonymity and allow the trial to be made public in order to shift the shame that often surrounds rape, from the victims to the perpetrators.
But Gisèle was not the only victim as “I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again” makes clear. The international bestseller, which was published in France in 2022, is drawn from Darian’s journals of the living nightmare that followed Dominique’s arrest.
Day after day, Darian and her brothers attempted to care for their mother as they grappled with a cascade of proof that the loving father and husband they thought they knew was, in reality, a cold, conniving and manipulative monster.
The various concerns they had after Dominique and Gisèle moved from Paris to Mazan, a small town in the south of France, now filled them with guilt. Darian and other family members were worried enough about her mother’s episodes of mind-numbing fatigue, bouts of memory loss and other physical symptoms to take her to various doctors. But, having no reason to demand a toxicology report and with their father ascribing the symptoms to Gisèle’s tendency to “overdo,” they were forced to accept vague diagnoses associated with aging.
After the shocking revelations, memories of their mother falling dead asleep at the dinner table, being unable to remember past conversations and, in one instance, experiencing vaginal bleeding, took on new and agonizing meaning.
Then, still reeling from the crimes committed against her mother, Darian was called back to the Mazan police station to be shown two photos of herself, asleep in an unusual position, her buttocks exposed to reveal panties that were not hers. Photos she had absolutely no memory of.
Confronted with these images, and the possibility that she too had been drugged and raped, Darian experienced a mental breakdown and required hospitalization. The passages recounting her shattered emotional state and her understandable fear of the sedatives that were administered to calm her, are terrifying in their battered simplicity and clarity of purpose.
It was after this breakdown, Darian says, that she became determined to write a near-journalistic account of her experience.
“I started writing two weeks after I was released from a psychiatric hospital,” she says over Zoom from France. “It was a real deep need — I work in communications and this book became a means of survival. First putting down the words, then sharing as a form of therapy.”
She wanted to recount her story as matter-of-factly as she could so people might understand how a crime like this could be committed, and the widespread damage it had done. “It isn’t just the Pelicot family that was destroyed,” she says. “All the other rapists had families too, families who had no idea what they were doing.”
As she worked through her own anger, shock and grief, Darian realized that society’s ignorance of the prevalent use of drugs in sexual abuse was one reason Dominique had been able to get away with his crimes for so long.
“I’d heard of GHB, the date rape drug, but had no idea how widespread it had become,” she writes. “Nor did I know that rapists were turning more and more to sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medicine … my ignorance strikes me as almost culpable.”
With the French publication of “I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again” in 2022, Darian began a campaign to raise awareness about the role drugs play in rape and sexual abuse. “I’ve received so many testimonials from other women but also teenagers because of incest, when drugs are often used.”
With the #MendorsPas (Don’t Put Me Under) movement, Darian hopes to help create medical and law enforcement protocol for investigations into potential cases of chemical submission.
“The [general practitioners] my mother saw, the neurologists, they couldn’t help,” she says. “They couldn’t analyze her symptoms properly because there were no trends available. We thought she had brain cancer. We thought she had Alzheimer’s.”
Once the truth was discovered, the small Mazan police force was not equipped to deal with the nature of the crimes or the emotional impact on the victims. “We were given this information, shown these images and then just left alone,” she says. “We were offered no support, we were totally alone.”
The bulk of the evidence police found involved Dominique’s abuse of Gisèle, but Darian points out that there were also photos of her and both her sisters-in-law — “no woman in our family was spared” — as well as connections to cold-case rapes.
Last month, Darian filed new charges against her father, who is also being investigated in connection with several cold cases. Dominique has denied ever touching his daughter. “The original investigation lasted two and a half years, but the south of France is a very small place. They were overwhelmed. That is why the investigation focused on Gisèle.”
A second book, recently published in France, is Darian’s account of the trial, during which she openly challenged her father’s denial of harming her, and her work battling chemical submission. She has been working with a politician on a government report that she hopes will offer concrete solutions.
“I knew I needed to make this useful,” she says. “I am a mum, I have a job, but I want to add my own experience to help identify victims in France and the world. I’m an activist and I knew that if I had to go through this, it’s not by chance. I have the strength to carry it.”
Speaking about her experiences, including those early days when her life cracked apart, hasn’t become easier with time — during a 45-minute interview, Darian’s voice chokes with emotion on more than one occasion, particularly when speaking about her mother. In “I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again,” Darian discusses Gisèle’s refusal to even consider that Dominique would abuse Darian and the wedge that drove between her and her mother.
Darian is proud of her mother’s decision to make the trial public. “I told her from the beginning that it could not be closed door,” she says. “I told her that would be a gift to only one person.” Gisèle is also working on a memoir, “A Hymn to Life,” set to be published early next year, but the mother and daughter have limited communication.
“We are each on a different path,” Darian says. “It’s too heavy; she needs to recover. She needs to rebuild herself — she’s almost 73 — and me, I’m on another journey. Dominique was judged for her and that’s right. The way she’s handling this belongs to her, but it’s too painful for me. She is well-supported and is dealing with her life the way she decided to do. But we are not a family anymore.”
“Dominique succeeded,” she adds sadly. “He split our family in two.”
The post Commentary: Her father drugged and facilitated her mother Gisèle Pelicot’s rape by dozens. Caroline Darian recounts how she survived appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
