The daughter of the Frenchman who drugged his wife unconscious and allowed 72 men to rape her as he filmed them, now feels betrayed by the mother she loyally stood by — as well as her father, whom she claims also assaulted her.
Caroline Darian, 46, details the harrowing ordeal her once-close family endured beginning in the fall of 2020 when police arrested her father, Dominique Pelicot, for filming up women’s skirts.
She details how things unravelled from there and the nauseating crimes against her mother were revealed, eventually leading to the landmark trial against Pelicot, in her memoir “I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again,” out today.
The book is based in part on diaries Darian kept through the end of 2021 and sets the scene for how the secret drugging and raping of Gisèle Pelicot would upend the whole family.
Darian intends the book to shine a light in part on the growing problem of “chemical submission,” meaning the increasing use of sleeping pills, tranquilizers and other date rape drugs on people and then assaulting them in France and around the world.
But her story is more about the complicated dynamics between her parents and herself and how her mother’s submission to her father even continues somewhat today, in what she describes as being like a case of Stockholm Syndrome, where a victim comes to sympathize with their captor.
Dominique Pelicot, 72, admitted that for years he knocked his then-wife of 50 years out with sleeping pills and anti-anxiety drugs so he and strangers he recruited online in the Mazan area in the south of France could abuse her.
He did this for nearly a decade to Gisèle, now a 72-year-old grandmother, who had what she thought was a happy marriage. Gisèle’s decision to attend the trial and waive the right for it to be private transformed the retired power company worker into a feminist folk icon in France.
In December 2024, 50 of the 51 men on trial, including Dominique, were convicted of raping, attempting to rape, and sexually assaulting Gisèle. Dominique is now serving a 20-year prison sentence, the maximum for his crimes in France.
But despite the three Pelicot children’s steadfast support of their mother, who Caroline still calls a “heroine,” the family has been further fractured, possibly forever, by Gisele’s refusal to believe that her daughter was also attacked by her husband.
Though Gisèle has been portrayed as both a steely and sympathetic figure, Darian writes that her denial around what had happened to her was hard to penetrate in the early days.
Her father, after being arrested and jailed, managed to get a letter out to a relative, who in turn delivered it to Gisèle. In it he complained of being “abandoned” by his family and asked for financial help.
Caroline was furious upon hearing this, she writes, but was even more stunned and taken aback by her mother’s reaction.
“Your father’s in a bad way in prison,” she told her daughter. “He’s suffering so much; I must have failed him in some way over the past years.”
Darian, who testified before the court during the trial in Avignon and called her father “the worst sexual predator of the last 20 years,” had heated exchanges with him during the 16-week trial about whether he assaulted her or not.
Her trauma in the first few weeks after having learned of her father’s crimes upset her so much she landed briefly in a psychiatric ward. However, she was able to pull herself together and testify at the trial, which didn’t begin until 2024.
“I never touched you, never,” Pelicot insisted to Caroline one day in court.
“You are lying!” Ms Darian shot back.
Last week Darian decided to finally press charges against him for drugging and raping her as well, describing herself as the “forgotten victim” in the family nightmare.
However, as there is little evidence further than the two photos uncovered by police, prosecutors will decide if they have enough for the case to proceed to trial. Pellicot has always denied sexually assaulting his daughter.
In the book, Darian writes about being called back to the police station early on in the investigation in 2020 after detectives found two photographs of her asleep in an odd position in underwear she doesn’t recognize — and that she has come to believe her father also assaulted her.
She writes in the book that at first she didn’t think it was her in the photos before realization set in and she almost collapsed.
“How did he manage to take my photo in the middle of night without waking me up? Where did the underwear come from, as I’m sure it’s not mine? Did he drug me? Go beyond the photos? Did he – I can’t keep the unthinkable at bay – abuse me?”
Darian eventually concluded that he did.
Her mother, however, doesn’t believe her.
“Her silence says a lot,” Darian writes about her mother’s reaction to her daughter’s belief that she was also her father’s victim. “I thought we were a united and tight-knit clan … and I am hit by this implacable reality in the face: my mother does not want to believe me or to hear me. The pain runs right through me.
“It is an abandonment too many… It’s as though the ground opened up under my feet… I have spent four years trying to be there for my mother, cherishing the bond that counted so much for me. I feel alone facing a wall of desolation and no one seems to understand.”
“I nevertheless had a lingering hope. I was her only daughter. She could not let go of my hand and especially not in this courtroom. But I am forced to accept that that is the case.”
Darian appeared on Britain’s This Morning recently and said she still believes Gisèle to be heroic but admitted how rough things still are between her and her mother, who moved out of the Provence home she shared with Dominique to a different town shortly after he was arrested.
“We can’t help each other,” she said. “We have to rebuild each other in a different way.”
