“I promise you, we couldn’t have been more normal,” says Darian, a senior communications manager who uses the pen name – a composite of her brothers’ names – to honour the familial bond that has sustained her.
“There we were, a middle-class family who had never wanted for anything, who lived in a nice big house [on the outskirts of Paris] and went away on holiday every summer.” Her mother was a logistics manager, her father an electrician. She and her brothers, Florian, 38, a musician and David, 50, a sales manager “were very close, and we grew up and studied and were very sociable and went on to get good jobs…”. Darian breaks off, looking out of the window onto the streets of the Latin Quarter for a moment. “And we didn’t see a thing. We didn’t suspect a thing. We had no idea who our father was.”
He wasn’t just an “upskirter”, but a serial rapist who had repeatedly drugged and raped his wife over a period of at least nine years. He was a depraved monster who had invited over 50 strangers, found online, to come and rape Gisèle at home, at night, after having rendered her unconscious with a potent blend of sleeping pills and tranquillisers, mixed into her food and drinks. All this not for money, but his own sick pleasure. Hundreds of these rapes were filmed and catalogued on a hard disk.
Then there were the deleted photographs of Darian the police recovered from Pelicot’s hard drive: photographs in which she too appeared to be unconscious and wearing underwear that was not her own; photographs kept in a deleted file called “My Daughter Naked”.
Realising that she was her father’s “second victim” but not having any knowledge of what had been done to her was too much for Darian – who had suffered from mysterious gynaecological issues over the years, such as a vaginal tear that refused to heal – and she had to be admitted to an emergency psychiatric hospital for 72 hours.
Writing the book did, in the first instance, help Darian “reappropriate the story”. “It was definitely a kind of therapy,” she says. But when, five months into her family’s waking nightmare, she began to understand that “chemical submission” (the use of drugs to perpetuate rape and sexual assaults) was happening across the world, almost always in a domestic setting, it gave her a larger purpose. “I wanted our story to be useful. I wanted to inject some sense into something that was… senseless.”
To say that Darian and her mother have made something “useful” out of their tragedy would be an understatement. While Gisèle was last month awarded France’s highest civic order, the Légion d’honneur, for her bravery and continued fight against sexual violence, Darian has become a forceful campaigner for the rights of sexual assault survivors the world over, founding a movement, #MendorsPas [Don’t Put Me Under] in 2023, to raise awareness for chemical submission.
Yet her father maintained that he had no knowledge of the photographs, condemning Darian to “mental torture”, in the words of one court psychiatrist. At the end of the trial, when Dominique was only charged with taking indecent images of his daughter, she told the judge: “I’m a forgotten victim in this case.”
For Gisèle, justice – of a kind – was served. Her (now) ex-husband was sentenced to 20 years in prison and all 50 of his co-defendants were found guilty of rape, attempted rape or sexual assault. But at least 20 of the perpetrators could not be identified and are still presumed to be at large today – and anyone thinking the ordeal had brought mother and daughter closer was mistaken.
The truth, Darian tells me, is that she and her mother no longer speak. “My mother let go of my hand in that courtroom,” she explains. “She abandoned me.” For the first time since we sat down together, her voice wavers. “For four years I accompanied my mum everywhere. I supported her without ever judging her. And it wasn’t always easy because she didn’t want to hear what I was telling her about Dominique. But in that courtroom, she was supposed to help me,” she says, adding that her mother was the only person who could convince her husband to confess. “And that,” Darian says heavily, “I can never forgive her for. Never.”
There is no suggestion that Gisèle knew about any of her husband’s activities, but from the start, Darian writes in the book, her mother found it impossible to believe that her husband had preyed on his own daughter, assuring her: “Your father is incapable of such a thing.”
“Listen,” Darian exhales deeply, “it’s great for my mum to preach the good word.” She remembers something, smiles: “You know that she got a letter from the Queen? Saying how wonderful she’d been? Yes, she was very touched by that.” She nods, pauses. “But I hope that one day she’ll look in the rear-view mirror and think: ‘S—. You know, I wasn’t where I should have been.’”
Her eyes lose focus, and again she looks close to tears. “The difference between us is this: she chose to have Dominique Pelicot as a husband, but I didn’t choose to have him as a father. Do you see? So, for me the pain is two-fold.”
Source: Gisèle Pelicot’s daughter: I don’t speak to my mother. She won’t believe I was a victim of my father