Caroline Darian remembers the day and time she received the call from her mother, Gisèle Pelicot, that changed everything: 8:25 pm on a Monday in November 2020.
“She told me that she found out that morning that (my father) Dominique had been giving her drugs for about 10 years so that different men could forced,” Darian told CBS News partner network BBC News in an exclusive interview. “It was like an earthquake. tsunami.”
Just over four years later, a judge in France Dominique Pelicot, along with dozens of men he invited to attack Gisèle, was found, guilty of aggravated rape. He received the longest sentence allowed under French law for his crimes, 20 years in prison.
BBC
Gisèle Pelicot gave up her privacy and walked into court every day with her head held high, becoming a symbol of courage in the fight against sexual violence.
In 2020, after Gisèle's phone call, Darian and her two brothers traveled to support their mother where she had been living with their father in the south of France.
Then, Darian got another call, this time from the police.
Officers showed her two photos they found on her father's computer. In the images, a woman was unconscious in a bed wearing only a T-shirt and underwear.
“The police officer said: 'Look, you have the same brown mark on your cheek … it's you.'” Darian said. “I looked at those two pictures differently then … I was lying on my left side like my mother, in all her pictures.”
Darian is sure that her father gave her drugs and attacked her like he did her mother, Gisèle, although he has denied it.
“I know he drugged me, maybe for sexual abuse. But I have no evidence,” she said.
There is no evidence of what could have been done to Darian, “and that is the case for the number of victims? It is not believed that there is no evidence. They are not listened to, that support,” she said.
Darian said that amid the trauma of learning that she had been drugged and raped by a man she trusted up to 200 times, Gisèle struggled with the idea that it could have happened to her daughter.
“For a mother, it's hard to integrate all of that into one trip,” Darian said.
She is now advocating for other victims of so-called chemical demand, which is believed to be underreported because most victims do not remember and those who survived that it happened at all.
“When I look back, I don't remember the father I thought he was. I just look at the criminal, the sex offender he is,” said Darian. “But he has the DNA, and the main reason I'm so involved for invisible victims is also, for me, a way to put a real distance with this guy … I'm completely between -different from Dominique.
Darian says that being a child is a “tremendous responsibility” for the victim and torturer.
“He should die in prison,” she said. “He is a dangerous man.”
