The daughter of Dominique Pelicot has said her father must die in prison as she described the “crushing double burden” of being the child of a convicted rapist and his victim, her mother.
Caroline Darian, 46, says her father, who in December was sentenced to 20 years in prison after it was revealed that over the course of a decade, he drugged his then wife, Gisèle, with tranquilisers and sleeping pills before raping her himself and inviting 50 other men to do the same, is a “dangerous man” who cannot ever be allowed free.
It will be years before Pelicot, 72, is eligible for parole, so it is possible he will never see his family again, but Ms Darian is adamant that this never becomes a reality.
Police discovered that Ms Darian’s mother had been subjected to years of rape after Pelicot was caught upskirting in a supermarket and authorities proceeded to search the couple’s property.
On Pelicot’s laptop and phones, they found thousands of videos and photos of an unconscious Gisèle being raped by strangers.
Describing the moment in November 2020 when Gisèle told her daughter what had happened, Ms Darian told the BBC: “At that moment, I lost what was a normal life. I remember I shouted, I cried, I even insulted him. It was like an earthquake. A tsunami.”
She was then shown photographs from her father’s laptop of herself, lying unconscious on a bed dressed in just a T-shirt and underwear. Ms Darian says she did not recognise herself until the police pointed out a birthmark on her cheek.
Pelicot denies abusing his daughter – though he was found guilty of using his daughter’s properties to invite men to rape Gisèle – but Ms Darian is adamant that she was also drugged, like her mother, “probably for sexual abuse”.
Unlike her mother, who has emerged as a feminist icon in France after waiving her anonymity at trial, there is no evidence to prove this abuse.
Ms Darian says she hoped her father would have confessed during his trial but he refused to admit guilt. Now, she is campaigning for more attention to be paid to chemical submission, which is drug-facilitated assault.
She has founded a movement called Don’t Put Me Under (#MendorsPas) and her book, I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again, written in 2022 but recently released in English, depicts that first year after finding out the horrors of her father’s life.
Discovery of her father’s crimes has left her in a difficult position; she says she “lost a part of me … of my identity” when she found out what he had done.
“You can’t imagine the sadness and the loneliness,” she told The Guardian. “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 described it as like having to “mourn someone who is still alive”.
