Four years ago, Caroline Darian thought she had a normal life. She was in her early 40s, she had a home in the Paris area, a job as a communications manager, a husband who worked for a TV breakfast show and a six-year-old son. She got on well with her parents, who had retired to the picturesque village of Mazan in Provence in the south of France, to a house with pastel-blue shutters where they would all often spend long summers together in the garden under the mulberry tree and splashing in the pool – with barbecues and music, dinner and board games on the patio and country bike rides with her dad.
Darian remembers the exact moment that this all shattered. It was 8.25pm according to the clock on her kitchen cooker, on a Monday night in November 2020. She had been working from home all day on Zoom calls. She had just put down a bag of Japanese takeaway on the kitchen counter when her mother, Gisèle Pelicot, called and told her to sit down in a quiet spot; she had something difficult to say.
Darian thought of her father’s health – he was heavy, had breathing problems, and France had been in and out of Covid lockdowns. But instead she learned that police had arrested her father, Dominique Pelicot, for secretly filming up women’s skirts in a supermarket with a hidden camera in a bag. Officers investigating his phones, computer and hard drive had found thousands of images and videos stretching over almost 10 years showing that he had drugged his wife then filmed her, unconscious, being raped in her own bed by him and dozens of strangers. There had been at least 70 men, aged from 22 to 71, and police were still trying to identify them all.
Darian didn’t understand what was being said. She felt herself lose control: shaking, shouting, screaming insults about her father, hardly able to breathe. “It was like being hit by a wave,” she says, still struggling to comprehend it four years later. “It was a cataclysm. All my foundations collapsed.”
Darian is sitting in a book-lined room, up a creaky wooden staircase in a publisher’s office on the Left Bank in Paris. The first time we speak, it is days before the verdict in what has become the biggest rape trial in French history, after her mother decided to waive her anonymity and hold the four months of hearing in public, saying “shame must change sides”. Gisèle was embraced by the world as a feminist hero for her bravery and refusal to be shamed, as the trial made global headlines and the family was thrown into the spotlight. Darian is poised and calm, although nervous about the verdict. Channelling her anger into a public campaign to raise awareness of drug-facilitated sexual violence has been a “question of survival”, she says. But on the inside, she describes herself as a “field of ruins”. The previous few nights, she began dreaming about Dominique Pelicot again.
The trial was an “ordeal”, Darian says, “really hard from a human perspective”. Dozens of accused men, now aged between 26 and 74, including a soldier, journalist and lorry drivers, had sat on benches in court, at close proximity to her and her mother. The men seemed so relaxed and “comfortable in their seats”, Darian observed. Video evidence was shown of many of them raping Gisèle in her bedroom when she was in a comatose state, lying limp and lifeless and snoring loudly, with family photos on the dresser and spotty pillowcases on the bed.
Dominique Pelicot hid prescription drugs in a tennis sock inside a hiking shoe in his garage. He crushed sleeping tablets and anti-anxiety medication into Gisèle’s mashed potato, coffee, or the raspberry ice-cream he served her in front of the TV. This would give him seven hours, he told the court, in which his wife was in a state akin to being under general anaesthetic. He would take off her pyjamas, dress her up in underwear he had bought. Then he and the other men would rape her while a camera filmed. Afterwards, Dominique Pelicot said he would wash her and dress her in her pyjamas before she would wake up, groggy but unaware, thinking the blackouts and memory lapses meant something was wrong with her brain. He contacted men online with messages such as “I’m looking for a pervert accomplice to abuse my wife who’s been put to sleep” or “You’re like me, you like rape mode.”
Days after we meet, Dominique Pelicot is sentenced to 20 years in prison and all 50 other men are found guilty of rape, attempted rape or sexual assault. At least 20 more could not be identified and are presumed to be still at large today. Most had denied the allegations, saying they had never “intended” to rape and thought it was a game by a couple of swingers in which “the wife” was pretending to be asleep. Some said that if the husband gave consent it was OK.
Darian has total admiration for her mother – “the true victim of this whole story” – for agreeing to hold the trial in public. Darian went public herself, in 2022, while the investigation was ongoing, publishing a book called I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again, which has now been translated into English for a new edition. It was a kind of diary of the first year after the revelations, illustrating how “trauma expands outwards like a shock wave” through a family.
She had grown up happily with her parents and three brothers. Her father, an electrician who had also worked as an estate agent, and mother, a logistics manager, met when they were 19 and 20 and married soon after. The family lived in a house provided by her mother’s company with five bedrooms and a walled garden in a coveted neighbourhood on the banks of the river Marne just outside Paris. Dominique Pelicot encouraged Darian’s dance lessons and would drive her to school to avoid her getting the bus. She remembered him singing Barry White songs in his Renault 25 as he drove the kids on holiday. All that was sunk for ever by the revelations. She now doesn’t even keep old photographs. “I can’t keep hold of those memories,” she says. “Sometimes they pop up, but that was a previous life; this is now.”
My mum’s a hero. She walked into court every single day with dignity
Campaigning “is a way for me to recover some kind of dignity”, she says, having founded a movement called Don’t Put Me Under (#MendorsPas) to raise awareness and support victims of drug-facilitated rape, pushing a new expression into the mainstream in France: “chemical submission”. Drugging most often happens in the home, enacted by family members or people you know, she says, and victims can be adults or children. Before her father’s arrest, “I didn’t have a clue about drugging or drug-assisted rape. I knew about GHB, the date rape drug, in nightclubs and bars, but I didn’t know it was so much more widespread and mostly happened using the contents of the family medicine cabinet.” She wants better training for health professionals and police, and better access to toxicological testing for victims.
She would also like more respect for rape victims in court. She watched in horror when even her mother, a grandmother, who had been drugged into a coma with no recollection of the assaults, was questioned by defence lawyers about whether she might have led the men on.
“I’m really proud of my mum,” Darian says with determination. “She has opened the door. She has led the way for other victims of sexual violence. She’s told them they’re not alone any more. That is strength. So to me she’s a hero … And she did it brilliantly. She walked into this court every single day with hundreds of journalists, being scrutinised by everyone, being humiliated by all these [defence] lawyers. Frankly, you have be strong to do that … She’s an independent and strong woman. And she did it with dignity.”
She describes her mother as having the calm of a “medieval queen” presiding over ruins – a resilience she says Gisèle has had since losing her own mother to cancer aged nine.
Darian, 45, attended the trial with her brothers, David, 50, a sales manager, and Florian, 38, an actor. (She uses the pseudonym Darian because it is a composite of her brothers’ names, in honour of their support, but has taken her husband’s surname). She was a striking figure in the courtroom, head held high, arms folded, sitting metres away from the accused men – many of whom were around her own age – and visibly staring them all in the eye. What did she feel? “I felt anger. They’re cowards.” She said the men stared right back at her: “I was looked at like a sex object during this trial by many of them.” While reporting the trial, I saw Darian’s appearances shift the mood in the courtroom. She was unflinching about the unbearable emotional toll – “How are you supposed to rebuild yourself from the ruins when you know your father is the worst sexual predator of the past 20 years?” she asked the head judge. She was not afraid to regularly shout across the courtroom, “You’re lying!” to the man she no longer called her father, or get up and walk out. At one point, when her father was speaking about her, she retorted: “I want to throw up.”
Within the first days of the trial, it became clear that Dominique Pelicot was reserving perhaps his most twisted evasions for his daughter, refusing to explain what he had done to her and appearing to change his story several times.
What had emerged in the four-year investigation of Dominique Pelicot’s crimes was that no woman in his family was safe. He had hidden cameras in bathrooms and bedrooms at his home and in relatives’ homes, secretly photographing his sons’ wives naked and sharing the pictures and photomontages online, boasting that he was “surrounded by sluts”. He hid cameras in the guest bedroom in Mazan to secretly film his daughter naked and make photomontages of both her and Gisèle naked, comparing their bodies under the title “The slut’s daughter”, which he shared online alongside obscene commentary.
Turning to her father in court, Darian said: ‘I know you abused me. You don’t have the courage to tell me’
On his computer equipment, police had found a deleted folder called “my daughter naked” and recovered two pictures of Darian, then aged roughly in her 30s, taken at different times, asleep on her side in the foetal position, wearing beige underwear with the duvet pulled back. When police first showed her those pictures, she initially didn’t recognise herself. The lights were on, and she was a light sleeper who would have woken up. She never slept in that position, or went to bed dressed like that, and the underwear she was wearing definitely wasn’t her own. She said in court she was certain she had been drugged, and also probably raped and abused by Dominique Pelicot. “It’s not a hypothesis; it’s reality, I know it,” she told the judges. She said the difference between her and Gisèle Pelicot was that her mother – most unusually in a rape case – had the confirmation of thousands of files of video evidence. Darian, without video evidence, felt, she said, more like the remaining 99% of women who allege drugging, unable to ever know the truth, locked into “doubt and silence”.
In her final appearance in court, Darian said: “I’m a forgotten victim in this case.” Turning to her father, she added: “I know you abused me. You don’t have the courage to tell me.” She, her brothers, her lawyer and even Dominique Pelicot’s own lawyer beseeched him in court to speak honestly about what he had done. Despite the photos, he said he had never touched his daughter and didn’t know who had taken them. One court psychiatrist suggested that for a victim like Darian to go through life not knowing was “mental torture”.
When she walked into that courtroom at the start of the trial, was she convinced he would tell her what happened? “There was a small part of me that was hoping,” she says. “I was really determined to make him recognise the facts. And I failed.”
She pauses and the word hangs in the air. Did she think it was her responsibility to make him speak? “You know I’m always reflecting on that, because I was tough and I asked him in a violent way. Maybe if I had been in a more emotional dimension, he would have told the truth. Anyway, it’s a fail for me.”
She says: “The only victim who knows – and not even the entire truth – is my mum. But even for my mum, he didn’t tell the whole truth or the full story. Even today, we don’t know how many men came to abuse my mother, and when it started. We still don’t know.”
Darian’s brothers, in court beside her, described the whole family’s “devastation”. Her husband, Pierre, a TV journalist, who she says has been a crucial support, also took the stand. He said the discovery on Pelicot’s computer of pictures of Darian apparently asleep in underwear that wasn’t her own “added horror to the horror”. He told the judges it wasn’t a question of “whether she was drugged, but why she was drugged”.
For Darian, the case has robbed her of one of the most basic necessities of life: sleep. How do you doze off at night when you fear you might have been abused in your sleep, when you are terrified you might lose control and become someone’s prey? When she first found out about the allegations, she didn’t sleep for five nights straight. She ended up needing medical help and was admitted to an emergency psychiatric ward where – terrifyingly for her – staff tried to sedate her. Yet the whole issue of sedation “was, you know the reason we were in this nightmare”. This hospital approach was “absolutely not what I needed”, she says. Her body and brain resisted drugs, “so they had to use this massive dose … it was really experimental”. This is now part of her campaign for better support of victims. She has tried to be honest in public about her vulnerability as a survivor, and not look like what she calls a “pseudo wonder woman”. She announced halfway through the trial that she would go into a clinic for a few days to try to recover after “weeks of repeated insomnia”.
Her view of herself has been shaken by the case. Her past has dissolved and weakened her foundations, she says. “I lost a part of me, I lost a part of my identity.” She carries what she calls the “crushing double burden” of being the child of the victim and the perpetrator. “You can’t imagine the sadness and the loneliness,” she says. “I’ve got a part of his DNA. And it’s difficult to be the daughter of the biggest sexual criminal for the past 10, 20, even 30 years, and at the same time be the daughter of an icon like my mum … I don’t know if it’s better to be the daughter of Gisèle or worse to be the daughter of Dominique Pelicot. I’ll have to live with that.”
‘She was having a lot of blackouts,’ Darian says of her mother before it was discovered she was being drugged. ‘She would sometimes seem incoherent on the phone’
Back in November 2020, the day after Gisèle broke the news to her children, Darian and her brothers took the train south to the house in Mazan, with its sunny back garden, synonymous with holidays. It was now quite terrifying and they feared all these men would come back at night. Dominique Pelicot had been taken into police custody and would await trial in prison. The children wanted to clear the house and get their mother out in a matter of days – they started selling furniture, emptying drawers, which they found full of debt notices incurred by their father. Darian smashed one of his amateur paintings (a nude). Gisèle left with two suitcases and her dog. Nearly 50 years of marriage had vanished, and she soon filed for divorce.
At that time, Darian was running over in her head odd things that had happened, signs she felt she had missed. She and her brothers, as well as Gisèle herself, had worried she had Alzheimer’s; they had booked neurologists and scans, but the tests always came back normal. Fearful, Gisèle had stopped driving; pinched herself when she took the train to Paris, worried she’d miss her stop; and was convinced she would be diagnosed with a brain tumour. “She was having a lot of blackouts,” Darian says. “She would sometimes seem incoherent on the phone.” Once, Darian’s son called his grandmother to tell her about his rugby tournament, and she started repeating herself nonsensically. Darian took the phone from him and asked: “Mum, what day is it?” Gisèle couldn’t reply.
Another time, Florian and his family had sat down to eat dinner in Mazan after Dominique Pelicot had served his wife a glass of rosé. Her elbow slid off the table and she nearly fell off her chair, seeming to collapse like a rag doll, glazing over, appearing hypnotised. Dominique Pelicot said her family were tiring her out.
Looking back, Darian says, these blackouts always happened in Mazan when Gisèle was with her husband, never when she was in the Paris area with her grandchildren. There were gynaecological problems, too – Gisèle was bleeding despite being post-menopause. A doctor diagnosed an inflammation of the uterus.
Does Darian still feel, as she wrote in her book, that “ignorance is culpable”; that she should somehow have noticed what was going on, despite the extent of her father’s manipulation? “No. Today, I think it wasn’t possible for me to have known. Because everything was premeditated, organised. We are all victims in this family – all collateral victims: my brothers and I, but also our children.”
Video evidence showed that Dominique Pelicot not only invited men to rape his wife in the couple’s marital bed in Mazan. He had also invited men to Darian’s home outside Paris. Just after Christmas in 2019, when Darian was away on a mini-break in Morocco and her parents were house-sitting, Dominique Pelicot invited a 34-year-old warehouse worker to rape his wife in Darian’s guest bedroom. In May of the same year, while alone with Gisèle at Darian’s holiday cottage on the Île de Ré off the Atlantic coast, Dominique Pelicot invited a man to rape her in Darian’s own bed. Video evidence showed the rapes went on for more than five hours that night. Asked in court why he had chosen to do this in his daughter’s holiday home, he said: “There was no symbolism. It could have happened anywhere.”
But Darian thinks the choice of location is meaningful. She also thinks it is significant, given her questions about her father’s potential abuse of her, that the retired nightclub worker who raped Gisèle at the holiday cottage had previously been sentenced to five years in prison for raping his own 17-year-old daughter. “That detail is so difficult to cope with,” she says. “Home is supposed to be a safe place, not that kind of crime scene.” That Dominique Pelicot had raped her mother in Darian’s homes “was like being abused a second time. I was betrayed by my father in different ways.”
With Dominique Pelicot deliberately leaving what she calls a “great fog” over the question of what he may have done to her, she is left with no foothold. She had a vaginal tear that would not heal and needed several surgeries (once, while she was recovering from surgery, her father called her, asking to borrow money). Of the injury she says: “I’ll never know if it’s linked or not. It’s part of an open question – unanswered.”
She believes her father used her as a guinea pig to test out his drug cocktails – his exchanges with men show him commenting on the different effects on a woman who did or didn’t smoke. She was an occasional smoker and her mother was not. It was clear from the police investigation that Dominique Pelicot only confessed to crimes when presented with irrefutable evidence, and often partly at the start. In 2022, while awaiting trial for the rapes of his wife, Dominique Pelicot was questioned about an attempted rape of a 19-year-old estate agent in 1999. She was the same age as Darian at the time, and he had attempted to anaesthetise her with ether. Dominique Pelicot denied it until confronted with DNA evidence on the woman’s shoe. But he offered up a comparison with his daughter, saying that when he undressed the woman and realised she was the same age as her he had felt “blocked”. Instead, the woman broke free and fought him off.
Darian is unsparing in her praise for her mother, with whom she appeared hand in hand in court. But she wrote in her book and says today that, as wife and daughter, they are “in a different place within the family” and have dealt with the bombshell of Dominique Pelicot’s abuse in different ways. She says not knowing if she was drugged or abused weighs heavily on the whole family. Darian feels that without clear evidence, her mother has sought to reassure her that it may not have happened.
In court, near the end of the trial, Gisèle did not want to answer questions from defence lawyers about what Dominique Pelicot may have done to her daughter, saying it was for him to answer that. One defence lawyer suggested there was a family rift. Gisèle replied: “This isn’t a trial of the family.”
Now, Darian speculates that maybe the prospect of a daughter’s abuse is just too much horror for her mother to contemplate all at once. “She is not able, from an emotional standpoint, I think, to face the truth. I think it’s too difficult for her. And it’s hard for me – it’s really hard for me.” But the family remains close and she thinks time will change things.
The trial never fully uncovered why Dominique Pelicot did what he did – if there even was a reason. He told the court: “You aren’t born a pervert, you become one,” citing his own abuse as a child. He said he had been raped aged nine by a nurse in hospital when he was being treated for a head injury. Aged 14, as an apprentice on a building site, he said he witnessed – and was forced to take part in – a group-rape of a woman whom he described as disabled. “It was too heavy to bear,” he told the court.
“To me, it was pure manipulation,” Darian says. “He was choosing his words to make us empathise with him. And he knows exactly how it works … where to press the button.” In the high-ceilinged courtroom, where Dominique Pelicot sat on one side in a glass-fronted dock, and Gisèle on the other, Darian felt there had been an invisible “arc between my mum and dad all through this trial”, in which he was trying to communicate with his ex-wife to let himself off the hook of responsibility. “In life, you decide who you want to be,” Darian says, brushing aside any excuses about childhood. This echoes her mother’s view, expressed in court, that, regardless of their past, a person “chooses” who they become.
Darian says she won’t let Dominique Pelicot’s perversity become “this family’s curse”, that she must stop what she calls the “deviance” infecting generation after generation. (The court heard an investigation is ongoing into whether Dominique Pelicot may have abused any of his grandchildren. He denies any abuse). Darian says her father’s family line was mired in abuse – part of a “dysfunctional family system”. Denis, Dominique Pelicot’s father, whom she remembers in jeans and a biker jacket, with a single earring, had been a violent tyrant. He was a caretaker at a rehabilitation centre for convicts. The court heard that Denis was suspected of grooming and abusing a young girl with learning difficulties who was fostered by the family; Darian calls her Lucille in her book. After his wife’s death, Denis made Lucille his partner. In court, questions were raised over whether Denis also ever brought in men to abuse Lucille. Darian now questions why her parents would later send her and her brother to stay with her grandfather and his partner over the summer, until she said she no longer wanted to go.
Darian is disappointed with the sentences handed out. ‘It’s the wrong message. It’s not the message we wanted to send to all the other victims in France’
Her own son, whom she calls Tom in the book, at first didn’t believe his grandfather could have done harm to his grandmother. “We’ve done a lot of things to protect him,” she says. “When it happened he was six. Now he’s 10. He’s had two and a half years of support from a psychologist. And today he’s in good shape. We really wanted to preserve him. But he’s known the truth right from the start. We told him with simple words that his grandfather was in jail.”
Darian, who works as a senior communications manager at a large company in Paris, says the trial has inspired her to campaign even harder in support of victims of sexual violence. Returning to normal life is key. “My son and my husband are my two pillars in life,” she says. “I’m a mum, I’m married, I’ve got a social life, friends.”
A few days later, at the verdict in the packed Avignon courthouse, she watches with quiet anger as most of the men, some silently weeping, are led away to the cells. Dominique Pelicot will likely spend the rest of his life in prison, and all the other men are convicted. As Darian leaves the court with her mother, hundreds of supporters who have travelled from across France and Europe chant, “Thank you Gisèle” and then begin shouting, “Thank you Caroline!”
We speak again the next morning. She is still feeling shaken. The prison sentences, which ranged from three to 15 years, some of which were suspended, were lower than the state prosecutor had recommended. It is a disappointment. “It’s the wrong message,” she says. “It’s not the message we wanted to send to all the other victims in France.”
This means that for her “the fight is only just beginning”. She has decided to write another book, the behind-the-scenes story of the trial. “Because it’s not what you see from watching TV. And while this trial was happening, there were so many other trials going on where the victims were all alone.”
Gisèle Pelicot, her lawyers say, now hopes to resume “as normal a life as possible”. Darian herself will rest and spend time with her son, husband and brothers, before resuming campaigning.
In the final moments in the courtroom, Darian looked only briefly at Dominique Pelicot before he was led away. “It was the very last time I’ll see him,” she says. “It’s an end point. It’s the very last chapter in what was my life before.”
It will take a while to work through.
“There’s a kind of grief,” she says. “It’s a long process, mourning someone who is still alive.”
• I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again by Caroline Darian is published by Leap, an imprint of Bonnier Books UK. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
