She stood by her mother Gisele Pelicot in France’s shocking rape trial. They no longer speak

“I can still see you behind the steering wheel of your black Renault 25, stuffed with bags and cases as we set off on holiday,” writes Caroline Darian in her book. “You told jokes, put on Barry White and sung along, your head swaying along with the beat, just as excited as us, the kids in the back seat.”

I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again (Allen & Unwin) is every bit as harrowing as the title suggests, but these banal childhood memories are perhaps the hardest to read, I tell its author, the 46-year-old daughter of Gisèle Pelicot.

“Because it’s so hard to believe that we were a normal family?” Sitting opposite me in a quiet corner of a literary cafe on Paris’s Left Bank, Darian doesn’t wait for an answer. “I know.” She nods. “I know it is.”

She scrapes her thick, shoulder-length hair back into a makeshift ponytail. It’s blonder than it was during Dominique Pelicot’s trial last year when, day after day, she was pictured holding her then-71-year-old mother’s hand outside that Avignon courthouse, and she’s swapped the sombre outfits for a linen maxi dress and Birkenstocks. But the look on her face today is as unflinching as it was during the biggest rape trial in French history: a trial that convicted 50 men, alongside her father, to more than 400 combined years.

Everything about Darian, from the way she walks into the restaurant to the way she sits and speaks, exudes dignity. Not once in our 90 minutes together does the mother of one lower her voice. Not even when discussing the twisted acts of the man she no longer calls her father. It’s not up to her to feel embarrassment or humiliation. As her mother – whose courage made her a feminist icon across the world – famously said: “Shame must change sides.”

“I promise you, we couldn’t have been more normal,” says Darian, a senior communications manager who uses the pen name – a composite of her brothers’ names – to honour the familial bond that has sustained her.

“There we were, a middle-class family who had never wanted for anything, who lived in a nice big house [on the outskirts of Paris] and went away on holiday every summer.” Her mother was a logistics manager, her father an electrician. She and her brothers, Florian, 38, a musician and David, 50, a sales manager “were very close, and we grew up and studied and were very sociable and went on to get good jobs …” Darian breaks off, looking out of the window onto the streets of the Latin Quarter for a moment. “And we didn’t see a thing. We didn’t suspect a thing. We had no idea who our father was.”

In retrospect, so many of the issues her mother had suffered from made sense. Her occasional blackouts and incoherent phone conversations, which the children suspected might be a case of developing Alzheimer’s; her weight loss and hair loss. But before Darian’s life was split into two by a single phone call at 8.25pm on Monday, November 2, 2020, there was nothing to suggest that her father was anyone other than the man she’d grown up with: a man who liked to go cycling on Sundays, took his son and grandson to football matches and always remembered birthdays.

After that phone call from her mother in Mazan – the picturesque Provençal village Darian’s parents had retired to seven years earlier – a very different picture emerged.

Caroline Darian: “You stay a mother until you die, whatever the trials and tribulations – but she didn’t,” she says of Gisèle Pelicot.Credit: Laura Stevens / Guardian / eyevi

Her father had been arrested for trying to film up women’s skirts in a supermarket, she was told and there was more. Much more. His phone was seized, his computer too. Within days, Dominique Pelicot was revealed to be one of the most abominable sexual predators in French history.

Dark secret exposed

He wasn’t just an “upskirter”, but a serial rapist who had repeatedly drugged and raped his wife over a period of at least nine years. He was a depraved monster who had invited over 50 strangers, found online, to come and rape Gisèle at home, at night, after having rendered her unconscious with a potent blend of sleeping pills and tranquillisers, mixed into her food and drinks. All this not for money, but his own sick pleasure. Hundreds of these rapes were filmed and catalogued on a hard disk.

Then there were the deleted photographs of Darian the police recovered from Pelicot’s hard drive: photographs in which she, too, appeared to be unconscious and wearing underwear that was not her own; photographs kept in a deleted file called “My Daughter Naked”.

“It was a deflagration,” she says of that first month. “Every day we were learning something new, and that’s when I started writing about the sequences of events in real time, like a daily diary.” Realising that she was her father’s “second victim” but not having any knowledge of what had been done to her was too much for Darian, who had suffered from mysterious gynaecological issues over the years, such as a vaginal tear that refused to heal, and she had to be admitted to an emergency psychiatric hospital for 72 hours. “When I came out, I knew that I had to keep writing everything down, otherwise I would never get through it. In those first few days and weeks,” she says slowly, “I think it was actually a way for me to stay alive.”

Darian and her brothers Florian (centre) and David, with whom she is “very close”, at the court.Credit: GUILLAUME HORCAJUELO/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

She was that close to the edge? “There were moments when I just wanted it all to stop.” She reinforces this with a series of nods. “Where I wanted to end it. Because it was too difficult, you know?” I’m nodding too, now, but how can I or any of us imagine? “It was too painful. I wasn’t just mourning a father that I loved, but the loss of a couple who were my parents – the loss of a family. I was mourning my whole childhood.”

Writing the book did, in the first instance, help Darian “reappropriate the story”. “It was definitely a kind of therapy,” she says. But when, five months into her family’s waking nightmare, she began to understand that “chemical submission” (the use of drugs to perpetuate rape and sexual assaults) was happening across the world, almost always in a domestic setting, it gave her a larger purpose. “I wanted our story to be useful. I wanted to inject some sense into something that was … senseless.”

To say that Darian and her mother have made something “useful” out of their tragedy would be an understatement. While Gisèle was awarded France’s highest civic order, the Légion d’honneur, in July for her bravery and her continued fight against sexual violence, Darian has become a forceful campaigner for the rights of sexual assault survivors the world over, founding a movement, #MendorsPas (Don’t Put Me Under) in 2023, to raise awareness for chemical submission.

Making sense of what happened, however, has proved harder, and it is surely impossible while Darian still doesn’t know what was done to her – although she has now filed her own legal complaint against her father with the French courts and is waiting to hear whether, after a police investigation that could take months, prosecutors will proceed to trial.

During last year’s trial, she and her brothers implored Dominique to tell the truth about those photos of her. Darian’s own husband, Paul, who works for a morning TV show, was forced to give evidence. He’d seen the photos and explained to the court that his wife never slept in that position – that it was clear she had been drugged. Yet her father said he had no knowledge of the photographs, condemning Darian to “mental torture”, in the words of one court psychiatrist. At the end of the trial, when Dominique was charged only with taking indecent images of his daughter, she told the judge: “I’m a forgotten victim in this case.”

For Gisèle, justice – of a kind – was served. Her (now) ex-husband was sentenced to 20 years in prison and all 50 of his co-defendants were found guilty of rape, attempted rape or sexual assault. But at least 20 of the perpetrators could not be identified and are still presumed to be at large today – and anyone thinking the ordeal had brought mother and daughter closer is mistaken.

The truth, Darian tells me, is that she and her mother no longer speak. “My mother let go of my hand in that courtroom,” she says. “She abandoned me.” For the first time since we sat down together, her voice wavers. “For four years, I accompanied my mum everywhere. I supported her without ever judging her. And it wasn’t always easy, because she didn’t want to hear what I was telling her about Dominique. But in that courtroom, she was supposed to help me,” she says, adding that her mother was the only person who could convince her husband to confess. “And that,” Darian says heavily, “I can never forgive her for. Never.”

There is no suggestion that Gisèle knew about any of her husband’s activities, but from the start, Darian writes in the book, her mother found it impossible to believe that her husband had preyed on his own daughter, assuring her: “Your father is incapable of such a thing.”

Gisèle Pelicot at her husband Dominique’s 2024 trial, where she became an icon – but her refusal to believe that he could prey on their daughter put a wedge between her and Darian.Credit: Getty Images

Sadly, this is not unusual in such cases, when denial can be such a powerful instinct. Then, there is the possibility that after all the trauma she herself had experienced, Gisèle was simply unable to process any more. Darian understands all this, she says. Only she can never forget the look on her father’s face when he wasn’t cross-examined any further on those photos. “At that point he knew that he’d won and would not be answering any questions concerning me. And that was horrific for me. I was forced to shout out in that courtroom, even though it’s not allowed, because indignation was all I had left: ‘You’ll die alone, like a dog’. ”

She gives a brittle laugh. “You know what my mum said to me a couple of times in the courtyard outside during the trial? ‘Stop making a spectacle of yourself’. A spectacle of myself?” she repeats, wide-eyed. “Right there is the difference between her and me.” Because her mother, as she writes in the book, was “like a medieval queen” in that courtroom, “chin up, head high”? “Exactly.” And that public person she has become “doesn’t have anything to do with me”, Darian says. “What I’m trying to say is that my mother isn’t an icon – not to me.”

She sits back in her chair, crosses her arms. “So that’s what things really look like behind the scenes. My mum was catapulted into the limelight; she became an icon. Meanwhile, there we were, back down on earth, with all these unanswered questions – and we are damaged. Really damaged. And we are alone. That’s the truth, but people have no idea,” she says, later underscoring this with the devastating statement: “We no longer have a father or a mother, today.”

Mother-daughter conflict

It’s true that while I watched Gisèle become a global figurehead, cheered and supported every day by supporters outside that court, it never occurred to me how this might affect those already fragile family relationships. “Listen,” Darian says, “it’s great for my mum to preach the good word.” She remembers something, smiles: “You know that she got a letter from the Queen? Saying how wonderful she’d been? Yes, she was very touched by that.” She nods, pauses. “But I hope that one day she’ll look in the rear-view mirror and think: ‘Shit. You know, I wasn’t where I should have been’.”

‘She chose to have Dominique Pelicot as a husband, but I didn’t choose to have him as a father. Do you see? So, for me the pain is twofold.’

Her eyes lose focus, and again she looks close to tears. “The difference between us is this: she chose to have Dominique Pelicot as a husband, but I didn’t choose to have him as a father. Do you see? So, for me the pain is twofold.”

If Darian’s mother walked into the restaurant right now, what would she say? “‘Hello mum’ and ‘Goodbye mum’,” she says. “Because she’s made her choices. She’s got her new companion [an ex-Air France steward known only as Jean-Loup, whom she met through friends in 2023] and he was there during the trial. She’s started a new life, and I respect that. What I don’t respect is that she didn’t fulfil her contract with me. You stay a mother until you die, whatever the trials and tribulations – but she didn’t.”

When her mother recently informed her that she was going to go and visit her ex-husband in jail (for the first time), Darian was surprisingly serene about it. “Listen, if she wants to do that in order to close that chapter of her life, that’s up to her.” She pauses. “I think there is still love there.”

Really?

“Yes, because 50 years together doesn’t get erased just like that. And I guess she wants to see if there is any way Dominique is not the monster everyone thinks he is. So, I do respect her decision, just as I respect the trajectory she has chosen ever since we found out.”

Would Darian ever consider going to see him herself, if only to try again to get some answers? She makes a face. “Have you seen Silence of the Lambs? If we ever were face to face again, it would be exactly like that. My father,” she begins, and it’s telling that this is the only time she slips up and refers to him as such, “is incapable of telling me what he’s done when it comes to the issue of incest. Mentally, he just cannot do it.”

Although she has been completely transparent with her 11-year-old son, whom she calls “Tom” in the book, from the start – “he saw me go off to a psychiatric hospital, and coming back from court every day, so he’s seen the damage done” – it still gave Darian a pang when she was forced to explain that she was no longer going to see his grandmother. “You know what he said to me? ‘I feel so sad for you, mummy’.”

Ask how the past five years have affected her marriage and Darian is remarkably honest. “We’ve gone through some difficult moments,” she says with a wry smile. “I’m not going to lie. Of course it has affected something like our sex life, for example. You can’t go through what I did and not have it affect the sexual equilibrium of your couple – and not just for me, the woman, but the man too.” She shakes her head. “It’s a long process.”

‘I have a little boy who will be a man tomorrow … How are we going to educate our young boys and men?’

What it hasn’t done, much to Darian’s credit, is make her hate men. “And thank goodness. Because how sad would that be?”

In fact, she feels very uncomfortable about the “all men have this in them” narrative that tends to gain traction after atrocities such as this are revealed. “Because you cannot say, ‘It’s all men’, or that what happened is even a reflection on all men. That just wouldn’t be fair. I have a little boy who will be a man tomorrow. I have brothers, and those extreme discussions are not helpful. What we do need to be asking is: what is happening here? How are we going to educate our young boys and men?”

What she believes happened with her father is “that he actually met versions of himself over and over”. Dominique claimed in court to have been raped by a nurse in hospital when he was nine years old and being treated for a head injury, adding: “You aren’t born a pervert, you become one.” Certainly, his own father was “twisted”, writes Darian. “And of those 51 men in court, it transpired that more than 30 had been victims of sexual crimes during their childhoods, whether they had been abused by their own fathers or relatives, or endured violence of one kind or another. And that’s really what we’re talking about here, how violence keeps perpetuating itself.”

She tells me that 92 per cent of rape reports are dropped in France. Does she think there’s a cultural issue behind this? After all, it was only in 2021 that the law was changed to enforce an age of consent [15 years old]. “I don’t think so, but laws [around consent] do have a lot to do with it.” Pornography is also “definitely an accelerant”, she says, and as for “all those platforms peddling hate and violence and illegal images”, like the one Dominique used, Coco, that was not finally shut down until last year, “they need to be held to account.”

Moments of happiness

Darian’s checking the time on her phone, worried she’ll be late for work, and there’s something reassuring about the ordinariness of this gesture – from someone who has been to hell and back.

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Although her days are now split into two parts – “with my 9am to 7pm job and then work for the association [#MendorsPas], from 8pm” – “some parts of my life have not changed at all,” she says. She stopped having therapy four months ago, “because expressing myself honestly in the media and the book feels a bit like therapy, for me”. She says it helps that the friends she has kept since childhood have been there for her. “In my heart, I consider them my family.” She may have “big ambitions” for #MendorsPas, she says, “but I have a straightforward life, and I want it to stay that way.”

As she gets up and kisses me goodbye, I think of one last question I want to ask. With everything that has happened to her, all the trauma and all the loss, does she still experience moments of pure happiness in life? The feel of sunlight, the taste of coffee, that kind of thing? “Oh, yes,” she assures me, and what she says next is a testament to the human spirit. “Those simple moments of joy? I still feel them every day.”

This is an edited version of a feature that first appeared in the Telegraph (UK).

If you or someone you know is affected by sexual assault, domestic or family violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732.

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