Caroline Darian remembers the day and time she received the call from her mother, Gisèle Pelicot, that changed everything: 8:25 p.m. on a Monday in November 2020.
“She announced to me that she discovered that morning that (my father) Dominique had been drugging her for about 10 years so that different men could rape her,” Darian told CBS News sister network BBC News in an exclusive interview. “It was like an earthquake. A tsunami.”
Just over four years later, a judge in France would find Dominique Pelicot, along with dozens of men he invited, to assault Gisèle. guilty of aggravated rape. He was given the longest sentence allowed under French law for his crimes: 20 years in prison.
bbc
Gisèle Pelicot renounced her anonymity and went to court every day with her head held high, becoming a symbol of bravery in the fight against sexual violence.
In 2020, after Gisèle’s phone call, Darian and his two brothers traveled to support their mother, where she lived with her father in the south of France.
Then Darian received another call, this time from the police.
The officers showed him two photographs they had found on his father’s computer. In the images an unconscious woman was seen in a bed wearing only a T-shirt and underwear.
“The police officer said, ‘Look, you have the same brown mark on your cheek… that’s you,'” Darian said. “So I looked at those two photos differently… I was lying on my left side like my mother, in all of her photos.”
Darian is convinced that her father drugged and assaulted her as he did her mother, Gisèle, although he has denied it.
“I know he drugged me, probably for sexual abuse. But I don’t have any proof,” he said.
There is no evidence of what they could have done to Darian, “and that is the case with how many victims? They are not believed because there is no evidence. They are not listened to, they are not supported,” he said.
Darian said that amid the trauma of learning she had been drugged and raped by a man she trusted more than 200 times, Gisèle struggled with the idea that this could have happened to her daughter.
“For a mother, it’s hard to integrate all of that at once,” Darian said.
He now advocates for other victims of so-called chemical submission, which is believed to be underreported as most victims and survivors do not remember it happening at all.
“When I look back, I don’t really remember the father I thought he was. I look right at the criminal, the sexual criminal that he is,” Darian said. “But I have his DNA, and the main reason I’m so committed to invisible victims is also, for me, a way to put real distance with this guy… I’m totally different from Dominique.”
Darian says it is a “terrible burden” to be the son of both the victim and the torturer.
“I should die in prison,” he said. “He is a dangerous man.”
