Latest news with #I'llNeverCallHimDadAgain
NDTV
4 days ago
- NDTV
Gisele Pelicot's Daughter Says Pornography Responsible For Rape Cases
Caroline Darian, the daughter of Gisele Pelicot who was drugged and raped by her husband and multiple other men, has blamed pornography for what her mother endured during her lifetime. She said her mother wouldn't have been raped over 200 times if there were no such pornographic content and websites. Speaking at the Hay Festival, the author-activist said abuse could result from "so many social problems like online porn," which is a "part of the system" of violence and misogyny. She attended the festival to promote her book 'I'll Never Call Him Dad Again.' A male audience member asked how men could "step up" and help end abusive patterns. Ms Darian said that "you need to talk between guys" about pornography, The Guardian reported. Gisele Pelicot was raped by multiple men, including Darian's father, Dominique Pelicot, for nearly a decade. She received massive support after refusing to remain anonymous during her ex-husband and other defendants' trial. Pelicot received a 20-year prison sentence last year. Ms Darian expressed sympathy for her mother, whom she no longer talks to. She claimed in her book that they had reached a "point of no return" in their relationship after her mother did not believe Ms Darian when she said her father had raped her. She said her mother's reluctance to stand behind her was a "means for her to protect herself." In a conversation with actor-activist Jameela Jamil, the author said her mother was unable to acknowledge that 'I probably was drugged by my father.' 'It is a way for her to protect herself,' she continued. She claimed it is "quite difficult" to acknowledge that your child has experienced abuse. "I believe my mother cannot recognise it because if she does, I think she's going to die," she said. In 2024, Dominique Pelicot was found guilty of drugging his wife Gisele several times over ten years and raping her. He also arranged for dozens of other men to rape her while he watched and recorded. He was ultimately given the maximum punishment of 20 years in prison. France's worst mass rape trial ever resulted in the conviction of 51 men. Darian Pelicot said that Dominique's actions had "a real impact on the whole family, and everyone from her family had a different position." She had accused Dominique Pelicot of drugging her and engaging in "sexual abuse" against her in a complaint filed in March. She said she filed a lawsuit as a "message to all victims" of drugged-out sexual abuse to keep fighting.
Irish Examiner
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Gisèle Pelicot's daughter believes online pornography played role in rape case
There is 'no way' that Gisèle Pelicot would have been raped more than 200 times without the existence of pornography websites, her daughter has said. Caroline Darian said there were 'so many social problems like online porn' that can lead to instances of abuse. Pelicot survived nearly a decade of rapes by dozens of men, including her then husband Dominique Pelicot, Darian's father, who drugged his wife and facilitated the abuse. Pelicot rose to international fame last year for waiving her right to anonymity in the trial of her ex-husband and other defendants. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Darian was at the Hay festival in Wales promoting her book, I'll Never Call Him Dad Again. Asked by a male audience member how men can 'step up' and be part of breaking cycles of abuse, she said 'you need to talk between guys' about pornography, because it is 'part of the system' of misogyny and violence. The actor and activist Jameela Jamil, who was chairing the event, said that 'there are so many men in my life, even, who don't know all of the facts of this case in the way that women do'. What we 'desperately need' men to do 'is to check your mates' and challenge their misogynistic comments and behaviour, she said. Darian is a pen name, a combination of her brothers Florian and David's names, because she wanted to honour the fact that they have been so involved in the process of telling her story. Caroline Darian spoke with great compassion and admiration about her mother Gisele Pelicot (pictured). File photo: Christophe Simon/AFP via Getty Images The author spoke with great compassion and admiration about her mother, but explained that they were not currently on speaking terms. In her book, she wrote that they reached a 'point of no return' in their relationship after her mother did not believe Darian when she claimed her father had raped her. Darian told the Hay audience that she thinks her mother's reluctance to support her was a 'way for her to protect herself'. It's 'quite difficult' to accept that your child has been abused, she said. 'I think my mum is not able to recognise it because otherwise I think she's going to die.' Dominique Pelicot's actions have 'really impacted the whole family, and everyone from her family had a different position', she added. 'But I just have to be grateful for what [Gisèle Pelicot] did.' Telling her son, who was six at the time, about her father's actions was particularly hard, Darian said. She felt a responsibility to tell him the truth but 'it was a shock' as he had previously had a good relationship with his grandfather and 'loved him very much'. Her son saw a psychiatrist for almost four years after finding out the news, and Darian said she was 'trying to educate him about what is consent'. Raising a young man in a positive way was 'a question of open dialogue', she said, and 'a question of education'. The Guardian Read More Dominique Pelicot's daughter presses charges accusing him of sexual abuse
Yahoo
21-04-2025
- Yahoo
Caroline Darian, the Daughter of Gisèle Pelicot, Is Fighting for Survivors Everywhere
All products featured on Glamour are independently selected by Glamour editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, Condé Nast may earn an affiliate Darian never expected to have a worldwide platform. In November 2020, she was a self-described 'simple, normal woman' working in communications in the Paris area and raising her young son, Tom, with her husband Paul. But then, Paul got a phone call from Darian's mother, Gisèle Pelicot. She had something to tell him about her husband, Darian's father, Dominique. 'My mother called Paul. Not me,' writers Darian in her memoir, I'll Never Call Him Dad Again, which was released in the US last month. 'She couldn't bring herself to tell any of her children. But she knew she could count on Paul. She knew he could take it, no matter how bad the news.' The news would not only change Darian's family forever, but the entire world. As she would soon learn, Dominique was discovered to have been drugging her mother for years, and then inviting men to come rape her in her sleep. Once her husband and the men accused of raping her went to trial, Gisèle Pelicot took the extraordinary step of waiving her right to anonymity, so that the names and faces of the accused would also be public. As she memorably stated, in words that would become a rallying cry: 'Shame must change sides.' But while the Pelicot trial—which resulted in 51 men being convicted including Dominique— became an international symbol of the fight against rape culture worldwide, for Darian it was a gutting and life-altering personal tragedy. I'll Never Call Him Dad Again is a diaristic examination of the months following Dominique's arrest, with Darian sharing her raw feelings, emotions, and experiences on the page. Now an activist with her own organization fighting for victims of chemical-induced rape, Darian is also seeking to prove in court that she was another of Dominque's victims, filing a legal complaint last month (Dominique has denied sexually assaulting his daughter). And six months on from the watershed trial, she is seeking to shed a light on not just her family's story, but the scourge of sexual abuse worldwide, which often doesn't see the light. 'To me, it's not only about one woman, you know what I mean?' Darian, who uses a pen name for her writing, tells Glamour via Zoom. 'There are so many victims who have suffered from sexual abuse, and it's not only about one hero, it's about many heroes that we have to support…I don't want to forget about the others. There are so many women, even children, who are really alone and sometimes abandoned by their own family. We have to become aware of that.' Darian spoke with Glamour about her activism during and since the trial, her fight for justice, and what US readers can do to further the message. : Your book was recently released in the US, what has it been like to share your story with an entirely new audience? Caroline Darian: It's amazing to me. Now this book is traveling all around the world. I think it's useful, at least at the moment we're living. I know that in the US it's not that easy, when it comes to all of these DEI topics and so on. So I guess it's useful for the audience and the American citizens, to better understand what's happening over here in Europe. It's a particularly poignant time for your story to be shared here. I was struck by how open and raw you are in describing the experience. Why did you decide to write about it? Well, to me, talking, writing, and sharing is therapeutic. When I discovered the violence of the facts, all those facts that came out, it was kind of an emergency. I just needed to write it down to put a little bit of a distance also just to metabolize all of this stuff. I just wanted to be authentic and true to myself, because it's a big part of me that I have lost in the end. Was there any part of you that wanted to hold back in sharing the harder moments? I just knew that I had to write, without any anticipation. To be honest with you, I said to myself, I'm going to save at least one woman on Earth. But I didn't really know that this book would be a bestseller in France. I'm a simple woman. I'm working. I have a normal life. I'm trying to get a normal life. But I know that writing probably saved me. You write about how you processed the events not just as a daughter, but how you helped your young son, Tom, through it as well. How is he doing now? He is good, he is almost 11 now. I think he's a little bit more mature than probably some other children his age. I think it's a part of his family history, his legacy, but it's not limited or restricted to this. I really loved how you discussed figuring out as a mother how to help your child through such a trauma, and how the two of you worked together to find a therapist for him. It is a great example of parenting. I think it came naturally. I mean, it was so difficult, and we knew that we needed some help because we are not therapists, and I was so shocked and impacted that I knew that I wasn't able to help him. What about the rest of your family? How have you been doing since the trial concluded in December? I don't want to lie. It is still really painful. It's really difficult for us as children…so our life, we are never the same. You recently released a second book in France, covering the trial and its aftermath, right? Yes. It's really different from the first one. The first one was a bit intimate writing as a diary, and the second one, once again, came out naturally because I started during this trial. I just wanted to raise some different stuff. The behind the scenes, this trial, which was covered by all the media across the world, but in the end, what happened inside of us, within our family during this trial. Once again, I wanted to share this part of me because in the end, to me, it's not over. This ride is over, but for me, it's not the end of the story. It's a never-ending story. You also filed a against Dominique in March, accusing him of drugging and sexually abusing you. Can you tell us about it? I had decided to wait until the end of [my mother's] trial to press charges against Dominique for the real fact that I know it happened for me. I was [drugged], probably for sexual assault. There's pictures of me. There are some serious facts that weren't really investigated by the French police. So with my new lawyer, now we're still waiting for the public prosecutors to give me an answer. I don't know if they're going to help reopen the file, or if they're going to do some more investigating. I'm just waiting. One of the most poignant parts of the book for me was your honest discussion of how your family weathered these events, because they weren't always linear and were incredibly hard to navigate. Have you heard from others who experienced family trauma and related to your story? I received so many. So many people who went through this kind of trauma and traumatic symptoms. A lot of women, I must say that many are women, even if they are not the only victims in France and in Europe…I've heard so many different stories, and most of the time it's someone coming from the inside, from home, from their family, from their even colleagues or even a parent. So, it's really scary. You founded an organization, # or 'Don't Put Me Under,' to raise awareness and fight against the scourge of drug-induced rape and sexual assault. What work has the group been doing lately? We're really driving awareness. We are developing some different kinds of content for training all the health professionals, but we are also helping some victims. I did a partnership with a health structure in France led by a pharmacist, and we are closely working together with a platform where all the victims can have a call and get an interview to talk with some trained people, because it's really specific when you're talking with those kinds of victims. I'm closely working also with politicians. We're currently working on a governmental mission, and the report is going to be sent out to our ministry on May 12th with clear recommendations and guidelines for really improving the support of the victims in France. We're working on the legal stuff, social stuff, but also health. For instance, to make toxicological analysis even more accessible in France, because it's really expensive. Your mother's case was a watershed moment in France. Do you feel like it and the work you are doing has made the government more receptive to implementing some of these protections? How has it changed the culture? Back in 2020, no one talked about chemical submission. When I started to investigate these cases in France, I really discovered that it was really under the carpet. Health professionals were aware of it, but no one from the public opinion, no one. Now it's probably something that is even more well known, of course, from this trial, but also with the first book and all the work that we've been doing since. I think there's something changing about the notion of consent in France. But I think there's also a real awareness that it is everywhere. Everywhere. I thought that we had an ordinary family coming from the middle class with no big issue, and it happened inside of our own family. It also happens at a political level. Look at the [Harvey] Weinstein affair. Seriously, it's everywhere in every level of our society. What do you think are the main, actionable lessons readers can learn from your story? I just want to bear in mind one thing. We all know someone around us who has lived through sexual abuse, and we all have to listen. I think all the victims need to get listened to, believed, and believed and supported. And that's why it's quite a universal story, because I think all the people realize that they know someone. They know someone from their different kind of sphere who lived through that kind of situation. One important thing to me is that I really want to encourage all the people who will be able to read the book to encourage them to talk. Talk to their family and friends. I think we have to be open-minded. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Originally Appeared on Glamour
Daily Mail
21-04-2025
- Daily Mail
No one wants to believe their father is evil. But after he was caught committing a disgusting act on girls in a supermarket, his depraved secret life unravelled. I'll never call him dad again
The following is an edited extract from I'll Never Call Him Dad Again by Caroline Darian, published by Allen and Unwin In November 2020, Caroline Darian received a call from the police. Her father was in police custody. The seizure of his computer equipment revealed the unthinkable: since 2013, he had drugged his wife before handing her over, in a state of unconsciousness, to men, from all ages and stages of life. Here, with exceptional courage, Darian recounts the earth-shattering discovery that a loved one, her own father, was capable of the worst. I drop Tom off at school, just in time. I give him a kiss and rush back home, make myself a coffee and log into work. One meeting, then another. The faces change but there is no escaping the screen. At 11am, my husband comes home. Paul works when the rest of us sleep. He sends a text to my father: 'I've just seen the route for next year's Tour de France. How about this as a new family goal: you and your grandson, on the slopes of Mont Ventoux on 7th July cheering them on? Up for it?' He makes himself a snack and goes off for a snooze. When he wakes up, he's missed two calls, both from landlines in the south of France. Two voicemails are waiting for him. This is the tipping point. The moment when everything changed, like when a hospital calls you because your name is down as next-of-kin. As often as not, a life shattering moment has a voice, a face. You never forget the bearer of bad tidings. Pain engraves their appearance and the way they spoke deep in your memory. You always remember, down to the slightest detail, where you were and what you were doing just before. For me it came as a ricochet. My husband took the bullet first. A message from my mother: 'It's me. It's urgent. It's about Dominique. Call me. Please call me.' Dominique, my father, weighs nearly 16 stone (101kg) and has difficulty breathing. Since COVID is still raging around us, Paul immediately assumes he's in the intensive care unit, struggling to draw oxygen through a tube. But that doesn't sit with the other message, which is from a police lieutenant in Carpentras, a town not far from my parents' house. Paul calls my mother back. 'What's the matter?' 'Dominique is going to prison. He was caught in a supermarket trying to film up women's skirts. Not once, but three times. The police held him in custody for 48 hours. 'While they had him, they confiscated his phone, a bunch of SIM cards, his video camera and his PC. What they found... it's serious. Really serious.' My mother called Paul. Not me. She couldn't bring herself to tell any of her children. But she knew she could count on Paul. She knew he could take it, no matter how bad the news. They talk it through. Paul convinces her to call her three children, starting with me, knowing he would be by my side. Still not quite able to believe what's going on, Paul calls the number the police lieutenant had left. And our whole world comes tumbling down. 'We've found videos of your mother-in-law asleep, clearly drugged, with men abusing her. Sexually.' He can't believe it. The words open a gulf, an abyss. They drag Paul into another world, one of sordid crimes and lurid media coverage. A world that was foreign to us - unthinkable, even in the context of the lives we led before. The lieutenant goes on, calmly delivering the facts in his possession. They pile up, an alien presence, a crushing weight we will have to carry for the rest of our lives. The abuse of my mother has been going on for at least seven years. The first images the enquiry has dug from my father's digital hoard date from September 2013. The number of men who have abused my mum is impossible to believe: 'The current count is 73. Right now, we've managed to identify 50 or so. The youngest is 22, the oldest is 71. They range across all classes and professions: students, pensioners, even a journalist. 'Your father-in-law organised the whole thing, taking photos and filming everything that took place. I have to tell you, the images are hard to stomach, even for us. And there's a lot we haven't gone through yet.' The police have been working the case day and night for six weeks. They feared for my mother's life, being drugged so often and so deeply, given she's just short of 68. The lieutenant signs off with: 'You've got to look after her. She's going to need as much help as you can give.' Paul focuses on a single goal: take what he has been told out of the house. He is determined to give me a few more hours before I, too am wrenched into this awful new world. With all my attention focused on a computer screen, I don't even notice him as he crosses the room and goes outside. In his car, Paul calls his sister Veronique, Tom's godmother. He asks if she can come round to help that very evening. They agree on a plan that will keep me in the dark as long as possible. It's nearly 7pm when I escape the demands of my job and realise that my husband has brought my son back from school. I suggest getting a Japanese takeaway. Just as I'm heading out, the doorbell rings. It's Veronique, who slides in with her usual good-humoured smile. 'I was in the neighbourhood.' Tom rushes to her and she wraps him up in her arms. I set off to the Japanese restaurant. As I'm driving, I call my mother but she brushes me off. I get the nagging feeling something is not quite right. Back with the takeaway, I place the bags of food triumphantly on the dining table. I hear my son laughing with his godmother. Nothing out of the ordinary, provided you don't know that ordinary is running out of time. In the kitchen, Paul has a solemn, serious look. He asks me to sit down. My mobile phone rings. I see it's my mother and assume she has finally found the time to talk to me. Behind Paul, the clock on the cooker is visible. It's 8.25pm. Later on I learn that those who experience sudden trauma can often only recall a single, isolated detail - a smell, a noise, or a particular sensation - something infinitely small, which expands to take up all the available space. For me, it's the clock on the cooker. Twenty-five minutes past eight, etched in stark white. These figures symbolise the threshold I'm about to cross. My name is Caroline Darian, and in a matter of seconds, my banal, contented, normal life will come to an end. I can still hear the hesitation in my mother's voice. She asks me if I'm safely home and if Paul is there with me. She insists that I have to be sitting down in a quiet spot before she can tell me what she has to say. 'Caro, your father was charged by police this morning. They took him away and he won't be coming home. He's going to prison.' I start to tremble. What she is saying makes no sense. 'Your father has been drugging me with sleeping pills and tranquilizers.' 'Hang on, Mum. What are you saying?' 'There's more. Your father invited men to the house while I was unconscious in the bedroom. I've seen photos. I'm lying on the bed on my front and there are men doing things to me. Men I've never seen before. Different ones each time.' I lose control. I start shouting, insulting my father. I want to break something - anything I can; everything if possible. 'Caro, I'm telling you the truth. I had to look at the photos for the police. My heart almost stopped there and then. The lieutenant told me that there are videos too - lots of them - of the abuse. He asked me to look at one but I couldn't. Even a photo was far too much for me. The lieutenant understood. He said: 'I'm so sorry. What your husband has done is monstrous.' She breaks down in tears. Paul hugs me. In my mind, images appear, merging into each other, each more appalling than the next: Mum lying on her bed, her eyes closed, her body paralysed, an unknown man looming over her. 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. 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. A happy memory that has just shattered, replaced by an image of a man who conducts secret orgies and lives a constant lie. When Mum tells me about your last breakfast together, what lingers is the fact that it was so ordinary. What depths of dishonesty does it take to have maintained, all these years, the tranquil illusion that everything was normal? Mum hangs up. She has other calls to make – first David, my elder brother, and then Florian, the youngest of her three children. I collapse. Crushed by what I've heard, I cling to my husband. I can barely breathe. My father drugged my mother and served her up to strangers to be raped. It should not be possible to string such words together, for the sentence that they form to make any sense. The very idea is so steeped in violence it is almost impossible to contemplate – like a knife so sharp that the gleam of the blade blinds you, its edge so keen that you don't immediately realise how deep it cuts. What if Mum had overdosed? What if she had never woken up? Almost eight years have gone by since Mum retired and they moved to the rural backwaters of Provence. Eight years of unending horror. And I was blind to it all. I suspected nothing. Neither did she. There was not even the slightest hint of what was going on. The drugs my father slipped her – timed and dosed with precision – turned my mum into a blank slate. I think back to the phone calls when she had seemed so distracted, lost in her mind. We – her three children, all of us living 700 kilometres away – began to worry. What else could it be, but the onset of Alzheimer's? My father pooh-poohed us. He would say: 'You know your mother; she has no idea how to pace herself, she's always on the go. She manages her stress by rushing from one thing to the next.' In 2017, we talked Mum into an appointment with a neurologist in Carpentras, the nearest big town. He talked about transient global amnesia – a sort of black hole that opens up momentarily, drawing in all memories, only to vanish as mysteriously as it came. A transient state that does no lasting damage. What we didn't realise – although if we'd thought to ask, any specialist could have confirmed it – was that this kind of thing never happens several times in a row. In late 2018, my uncle, a retired GP, suggested some kind of balancing mechanism was at play: He told her: 'You're like a vacuum cleaner whose bag is full. It can't suck in any more so it stops working to avoid burning out. When you've had too much, you disconnect and that way you recover your strength, ready to bounce back.' We were all convinced he was right. Mum had a brain scan done all the same, but of course it revealed nothing. Needless to say, it never occurred to us to ask for a drug test. But Mum got more and more anxious as time went by, and the episodes of amnesia piled up. She couldn't sleep, began to lose her hair and her weight plummeted – ten kilos dropped off her in less than eight years. She was haunted by the thought that she might have a stroke out of the blue, particularly when she took the long train journey to visit me in Paris or found herself in charge of looking after her grandchildren. Worried about the potential risk she might pose, she gradually stopped driving. Little by little, she was losing her autonomy. In 2019, she tried another neurologist, this time in Cavaillon, another sizeable town in the region. He told her she was simply prone to anxiety. He prescribed melatonin to help her sleep more soundly… I have to go to her. I can't leave her isolated in a distant corner of the country, all alone in the house that was the scene of such atrocities. Paul steps up. Of course I have to go. He'll take charge, make it happen. I have to get outside. I have to call my brothers. When David picks up, I can tell by the tone of his voice that he still doesn't know. I beat Mum to him, and I instantly regret it, but I can't hold back now. David listens in silence. Afterwards, it takes him ten seconds to digest what he has heard and find his voice. 'Come on – this can't be true. Caro, is this your idea of a joke?' He interrogates me, but I don't have all the answers. I wish I was able to lead him to a calmer place, because I can sense him backing away. He hangs up, intent on calling Mum. When I finally reach Florian, the youngest of us, he has already heard from my mother. He's in shock. 'How could he do such a thing to Mum? And to us? Did he ever think about us?' Like a child, all I can do is cry.
Yahoo
14-04-2025
- Yahoo
Commentary: Her father drugged and facilitated her mother Gisèle Pelicot's rape by dozens. Caroline Darian recounts how she survived
At 8:24 p.m. on Nov. 2, 2020, Caroline Darian was a happily married 42-year-old working mother, close to her parents and two brothers, David and Florian, content with a life so ordinary that she would later characterize it as 'banal.' Then, one minute later, she became someone very different. The phone rang and her life was split in two. From that moment, Darian's personal timeline would exist on two opposing planes: The years before she learned that for more than a decade, her father, Dominique Pelicot, had systematically drugged, raped and enabled more than 70 men to rape her mother, Gisèle Pelicot, and the days, weeks and months that followed. Days, weeks and months that Darian chronicles with powerful precision and detail in 'I'll Never Call Him Dad Again: Turning Our Family Trauma of Sexual Assault and Chemical Submission Into a Collective Fight,' published in the United States in March. (Caroline Darian is a pen name for Caroline Peyronnet.) Read more: Ex-husband and 50 men he recruited online found guilty of drugged wife's rape in France 'Later on, I learned that those who experience sudden trauma can often only recall a single isolated detail — a smell, a noise, a particular sensation; something infinitely small, which expands to take up all the available space, ' Darian writes. 'For me it's the clock on the cooker. Twenty-five minutes past eight, etched in stark white.' In 2020, Dominique Pelicot was arrested for 'upskirting' — attempting to take photos underneath the skirts of three women. During the subsequent search of his phone and computer, police found an enormous cache of photos and videos of Dominique and men he solicited on the internet raping a drugged Gisèle. Last year, the world watched the Pelicot trial with a mixture of horror and awe — horror at the enormity of the crime, which led to the conviction of 51 men, including Dominique, and awe inspired by Gisèle's courage. The tiny woman with the red bob became a feminist icon for her decision to waive her right to anonymity and allow the trial to be made public in order to shift the shame that often surrounds rape, from the victims to the perpetrators. But Gisèle was not the only victim as 'I'll Never Call Him Dad Again' makes clear. The international bestseller, which was published in France in 2022, is drawn from Darian's journals of the living nightmare that followed Dominique's arrest. Day after day, Darian and her brothers attempted to care for their mother as they grappled with a cascade of proof that the loving father and husband they thought they knew was, in reality, a cold, conniving and manipulative monster. The various concerns they had after Dominique and Gisèle moved from Paris to Mazan, a small town in the south of France, now filled them with guilt. Darian and other family members were worried enough about her mother's episodes of mind-numbing fatigue, bouts of memory loss and other physical symptoms to take her to various doctors. But, having no reason to demand a toxicology report and with their father ascribing the symptoms to Gisèle's tendency to 'overdo,' they were forced to accept vague diagnoses associated with aging. Read more: Gisèle Pelicot's ex-husband, convicted of drugging and raping her, now caught up in other cases After the shocking revelations, memories of their mother falling dead asleep at the dinner table, being unable to remember past conversations and, in one instance, experiencing vaginal bleeding, took on new and agonizing meaning. Then, still reeling from the crimes committed against her mother, Darian was called back to the Mazan police station to be shown two photos of herself, asleep in an unusual position, her buttocks exposed to reveal panties that were not hers. Photos she had absolutely no memory of. Confronted with these images, and the possibility that she too had been drugged and raped, Darian experienced a mental breakdown and required hospitalization. The passages recounting her shattered emotional state and her understandable fear of the sedatives that were administered to calm her, are terrifying in their battered simplicity and clarity of purpose. It was after this breakdown, Darian says, that she became determined to write a near-journalistic account of her experience. 'I started writing two weeks after I was released from a psychiatric hospital,' she says over Zoom from France. 'It was a real deep need — I work in communications and this book became a means of survival. First putting down the words, then sharing as a form of therapy.' She wanted to recount her story as matter-of-factly as she could so people might understand how a crime like this could be committed, and the widespread damage it had done. 'It isn't just the Pelicot family that was destroyed,' she says. 'All the other rapists had families too, families who had no idea what they were doing.' As she worked through her own anger, shock and grief, Darian realized that society's ignorance of the prevalent use of drugs in sexual abuse was one reason Dominique had been able to get away with his crimes for so long. 'I'd heard of GHB, the date rape drug, but had no idea how widespread it had become,' she writes. 'Nor did I know that rapists were turning more and more to sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medicine … my ignorance strikes me as almost culpable.' With the French publication of 'I'll Never Call Him Dad Again' in 2022, Darian began a campaign to raise awareness about the role drugs play in rape and sexual abuse. 'I've received so many testimonials from other women but also teenagers because of incest, when drugs are often used.' With the #MendorsPas (Don't Put Me Under) movement, Darian hopes to help create medical and law enforcement protocol for investigations into potential cases of chemical submission. Read more: Jury awards $1.68 billion to 40 women in James Toback sexual misconduct lawsuit 'The [general practitioners] my mother saw, the neurologists, they couldn't help,' she says. 'They couldn't analyze her symptoms properly because there were no trends available. We thought she had brain cancer. We thought she had Alzheimer's.' Once the truth was discovered, the small Mazan police force was not equipped to deal with the nature of the crimes or the emotional impact on the victims. 'We were given this information, shown these images and then just left alone,' she says. 'We were offered no support, we were totally alone.' The bulk of the evidence police found involved Dominique's abuse of Gisèle, but Darian points out that there were also photos of her and both her sisters-in-law — 'no woman in our family was spared' — as well as connections to cold-case rapes. Last month, Darian filed new charges against her father, who is also being investigated in connection with several cold cases. Dominique has denied ever touching his daughter. 'The original investigation lasted two and a half years, but the south of France is a very small place. They were overwhelmed. That is why the investigation focused on Gisèle.' A second book, recently published in France, is Darian's account of the trial, during which she openly challenged her father's denial of harming her, and her work battling chemical submission. She has been working with a politician on a government report that she hopes will offer concrete solutions. Read more: Sum 41's Deryck Whibley alleges sexual abuse by former manager in new memoir 'Walking Disaster' 'I knew I needed to make this useful,' she says. 'I am a mum, I have a job, but I want to add my own experience to help identify victims in France and the world. I'm an activist and I knew that if I had to go through this, it's not by chance. I have the strength to carry it.' Speaking about her experiences, including those early days when her life cracked apart, hasn't become easier with time — during a 45-minute interview, Darian's voice chokes with emotion on more than one occasion, particularly when speaking about her mother. In 'I'll Never Call Him Dad Again,' Darian discusses Gisèle's refusal to even consider that Dominique would abuse Darian and the wedge that drove between her and her mother. Darian is proud of her mother's decision to make the trial public. 'I told her from the beginning that it could not be closed door,' she says. 'I told her that would be a gift to only one person.' Gisèle is also working on a memoir, 'A Hymn to Life,' set to be published early next year, but the mother and daughter have limited communication. 'We are each on a different path,' Darian says. 'It's too heavy; she needs to recover. She needs to rebuild herself — she's almost 73 — and me, I'm on another journey. Dominique was judged for her and that's right. The way she's handling this belongs to her, but it's too painful for me. She is well-supported and is dealing with her life the way she decided to do. But we are not a family anymore." 'Dominique succeeded,' she adds sadly. 'He split our family in two.' Get the latest book news, events and more in your inbox every Saturday. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
