Caroline Darian: “I want him to die in prison,” says Dominique Pelico’s daughter

It was 20:25 on Monday night of November 2020 in , when Caroline Darian received the call that changed everything – on the other end of the phone was her mother, Giselle Pelico. “She announced to me that she found out that morning that my father, Dominique Peliko, had been sedating her for about 10 years, so that various men could rape her,” she recalls in an interview with the BBC. ADVERSION “At that moment, I stopped living a normal life,” says 46-year-old Darian. “I remember yelling, crying, I even insulted him,” he says. “It was like an earthquake. A tsunami”. The end of a three-and-a-half-month historical trial in December. CORVERSE Darian says her father “must die in prison”. Fifty men whom Dominique Pelicot “sold” from the internet for rape and sexually abuse his unconscious wife Giselle, were also taken to prison. Dominique Pelico, was arrested when he was upskirting at a supermarket, leading investigators to “scan” him thoroughly. On the laptop and phones of this seemingly innocent retired, they found thousands of videos and photographs of his wife, clearly unconscious, being raped by strangers. In addition to bringing to the fore the issues of rape and gender violence, the trial also highlighted the little known issue of chemical submission – the drug-assisted attack. Caroline Darian, has made a purpose of her life to combat chemical submission, which is believed not to have been adequately reported, as the majority of victims do not remember the attacks and may not even realize that she has suffered drugs. Darian wants to hear the voices of abused women. In the days following Gisèle’s fatal call, Darian and her brothers, Florian and David, traveled to southern France, where their parents lived, to support their mother. As Darian now says, her father was “one of the worst sexual predators of the last 20-30 years”. Soon after, Darian herself was called by the police – and her world collapsed again. They showed her two photos they found on her father’s laptop. They showed an unconscious woman lying in a bed, wearing only a shirt and underwear. At first, he couldn’t understand that the woman was her. “I experienced a phenomenon of denial. I had a hard time identifying myself from the beginning,” he says. “Then the policeman said, ‘Look, you have the same brown mark on your cheek… it is you.” Then I looked at the two pictures differently… I was lying on my left side, like my mother, in all her pictures.” Darian says she is convinced that her father abused and raped her – something he has always refused, although he has given conflicting explanations about the photographs. “I know he drugged me, probably for sexual abuse. But I have no proof,” he says. Unlike her mother’s case, there is no evidence of what Pelicot may have done to Darian. “And that goes for how many victims? They can’t be believed because there’s no evidence. They don’t listen, they don’t support them,” he says. Immediately after her father’s crimes were revealed, Darian wrote a book, I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again exploring her family’s trauma. It also deepens into the issue of chemical submission, in which medicines commonly used “come from the family pharmacy”. “Pesticides, sedatives. They are drugs,” says Darian. As with almost half of the victims of chemical submission, she knew her perpetrator: the danger, she says, “comes from within.” She says that amid the trauma of the discovery that she had been raped more than 200 times by different individuals, Gisèle’s mother had difficulty accepting that her husband may also have attacked their daughter. “For a mother it’s hard to incorporate all this together,” he says. However, when Gisèle decided to open the trial to the public and the media, to reveal to her what her husband and dozens of other men, mother and daughter had done to her were in agreement: “I knew we went through something… horrible, but that we had to go through it with dignity and strength”. Now, Darian must understand how to live knowing that she is the daughter of both the torturer and the victim – which she calls “a terrible burden. ” She can no longer remember her childhood with the man she calls Dominique, except occasionally she slips back into the habit of calling him her father. “When I look back, I don’t really remember the father I thought it was. I look directly at the criminal, the sexual criminal he is,” he says. “But I have his DNA and the main reason why I deal so much with invisible victims is also for me a way to get a real distance from this guy,” he tells Emma Barnett. “I am completely different from Dominique”. Darian adds she doesn’t know if her father was “a monster”, as some have called him. “He knew very well what he was doing and is not sick,” he says. “He is a dangerous man. There’s no way he’s getting out. No way.” It will be years before 72-year-old Dominique Pelicot can be released on parole, so he is likely to never see his family again. As for Darian, the only issue she is interested in now is to raise society’s awareness of chemical submission – and better educate children about sexual abuse. She draws strength from her husband, her brothers and her 10-year-old son – her “great son”, she says with a smile, with her voice full of affection. The events that took place that day in November made it what it is today, says Darian. Now, this woman whose life was destroyed by a tsunami on a November night tries to look only ahead.