It was 8:25p.m. on a Monday evening in November 2020 when Caroline Darian got the call that changed everything.
On the other end of the phone was her mother, Gisèle Pelicot.
“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,” Ms Darian recalls in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme’s Emma Barnett.
“At that moment, I lost what was a normal life,” says Ms Darian, now 46.
“I remember I shouted, I cried, I even insulted him,” she says. “It was like an earthquake. A tsunami.”
Dominique Pelicot was sentenced to 20 years in jail at the end of a historic three-and-a-half month trial in December.
More than four years later, Ms Darian says that her father “should die in prison”.
Fifty men who Dominique Pelicot recruited online to come rape and sexually assault his unconscious wife Gisèle were also sent to jail.
He was caught by police after upskirting in a supermarket, leading investigators to look closer at him. On this seemingly innocuous retired grandfather’s laptop and phones, they found thousands of videos and photos of his wife Gisèle, clearly unconscious, being raped by strangers.
On top of pushing issues of rape and gender violence into the spotlight, the trial also highlighted the little-known issue of chemical submission – drug-facilitated assault.
Caroline Darian has made it her life’s struggle to fight chemical submission, which is thought to be under-reported as most victims have no recollection of the assaults and may not even realise they were drugged.
Caroline has written a book about her family’s trauma – I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again
In the days that followed Gisèle’s fateful phone call, Caroline Darian and her brothers, Florian and David, travelled to the south of France where their parents had been living to support their mother as she absorbed the news that – as Ms Darian now puts it – her husband was “one of the worst sexual predators of the last 20 or 30 years”.
Soon afterwards, Ms Darian herself was called in by police – and her world shattered again. -BBC