The family room of horrors, as Caroline Darian calls it, was unexpectedly exposed on Monday, November 2, 2020. It was the height of the Covid crisis in France and Darian had just taken her six-year-old son to school, wearing a mandatory face mask. Her father, Dominique Pélicot, sent his grandson a reassuring message online: “My poor boy. Be brave. Love, Grandpa.” But then, just a few hours later, the phone rang. It was Darian’s mother: “Your father is going to jail.”
And just like that, what Darian had called her boring but successful world—“husband, son, home, job I loved”—was turned upside down. Her father was accused of drugging Darian’s mother and his wife of 50 years—the woman he had met as lovers when they were both 18—and inviting dozens of men to rape her over the course of at least a decade. Suddenly, the Pélicot family was at the epicenter of a deeply disturbing case that, now that it has come to court, is sending France—and the world—into turmoil. As Darian would later write, “You don’t know what boring is until you’ve lost it.” Instead, she was left with a “family catastrophe.”
The details of that 2020 phone call that changed everything were, as Darian explained in her memoir, And I stopped calling you daddyalmost too grim to comprehend. The book changes a number of names [Dominique becomes Louis for example] but explains how the case unfolded, how her mother – in real life Gisèle Pélicot – called from her home in the small town of Mazan, 20 miles northeast of Avignon, in the south of France, that day in 2020 to reveal that her husband, then 67, had been caught red-handed filming up the skirts of three women in a supermarket and had been locked up for 48 hours. In the meantime, police had seized his phone, camcorder and computer. There they found footage that allegedly showed Gisèle, also 67 at the time, asleep, on drugs and being raped. After combing through some 20,000 digital images, police counted 92 rapes committed by 72 men, 51 of whom were formally identified.
“Caro, it’s true,” Gisèle had told her stunned daughter. “I had to look at some of the photos at the police station. I thought my heart would stop beating.” Up until then, neither woman had had the faintest idea. It turned out that Dominique had been administering date rape drugs to incapacitate his wife. And reportedly not just her. Yesterday, Caroline Darian burst into tears when the court heard that among her father’s trove of photos were pictures of his daughter as an adult woman, from the front and from behind, in her underwear, which he had compared with similar photos of his wife and shared with others.
When Caroline called her two brothers, they were both stunned for a moment. But then one of them remembered the last dinner he had spent with his parents during the summer holidays of 2018. “Just a few minutes after sitting down, Maman was already fidgeting in her chair as if she was drunk,” he is quoted as saying. “Suddenly, her whole body was drained of energy, like a rag doll.”
“It happens. It’s better if I take her to bed,” his father had said at the time. But Darian added: “In reality, the cocktail of drugs that was poured into her glass of rosé started to take effect.”
Immediately after learning of their father’s actions four years ago, the three siblings rushed south to help their mother. In Avignon, they met the police team leading the investigation. Officers explained that their father had not only allowed it to happen, but had recruited dozens of men on web forums to rape their mother “for no financial gain.”
“Ultimate perversity,” Caroline writes. “Father, who always had money problems, did not profit from Maman. He did it purely for his pleasure.” The drugs were hidden – in the garage, in his walking shoes, in a sports sock. Had he shown remorse after his confession? “No. Your father simply thanked me for relieving him of a burden,” the officer replied.
Photographs revealed the extent of the horror. Caroline’s father had apparently been living a double life, taking Viagra and testing himself for HIV; she writes that he sometimes forbade those he invited to rape his wife to use condoms. In one photo, Caroline’s mother is naked on her stomach, with a man behind her. “The other photos are all similar – except with different men,” she says. As Caroline and her brothers left the police station, she turned to the officer in charge. “Tell my father I will never forgive him and that he has ruined our lives.”
But there was more to come. Shortly after she left the police station, she was called back. The police had to check two photos of her. They were photos of a young woman sleeping on her left side, in beige underwear, in bed. “Zoomed in on her buttocks.” Only when the police pointed out a birthmark could Caroline identify herself. “I’m normally a light sleeper. So I was also drugged.” It turned out that the second photo had been taken in her own home. “I was his second prey.”
That night in November 2020, the three siblings had to go back to their parents’ house with their mother to clean it out. “Coming back to the house, with his smell, was unbearable.” On her father’s desk, the empty space where his confiscated computer had been was visible.
By the end of the week, her mother had gone to live with one of her brothers, and Caroline, having a breakdown, was briefly admitted to psychiatric care. According to her book, her mother had last been raped two weeks earlier, on October 22. Back home, knowing that the details of the case were already emerging, she was forced to explain the sordid situation to her young son as best she could.
The family began to fall apart. An unconscious victim, with no memory of the abuse, Caroline’s mother, the book tells us, felt instinctive sympathy for her husband. “He’s not happy where he is, you know. He’s suffering,” she told her stunned daughter. It left Caroline in despair: “Because of my father, I’m losing my mother too…”
From prison, Caroline says, her father managed to send a letter to her mother. “I know I’m here because of what I did to the love of my life, my family, my friends,” it read. Caroline describes it as a letter from an arch-manipulator. “I’m not surprised. He’s trying to divide us.”
As the family attorney began to receive evidence in the months that followed, alleged details emerged of how her father had bragged online about the potency of the drugs and how he had mastered the dosage. He quoted one message as saying, “Last time I didn’t do enough; this time it’s no big deal, we can go for it.” His approach, according to his daughter, was always the same: first contacting potential abusers in an Internet chat room, then asking those selected if they, like him, were into “the rape method,” before posting photos of his wife on a private forum that was described as “without their knowledge.”
“He dressed her like a low-income prostitute,” his shocked daughter noted. He didn’t have to look far to find willing participants. Most of those who responded lived nearby. Finally, he drew a map of how to get to the house, photographed it, and sent it to the people he had selected, guiding them via text message on their final approach. In order not to alarm neighbors, cars had to be parked at a nearby gym. Every detail was considered. No one was allowed to wear perfume or smoke, so as not to leave a trace of their presence. Cell phones had to be left in cars, to avoid the risk of them ringing and waking the victim. They even had to wash their hands with warm water so as not to shock his sleeping wife with cold fingers. After undressing in the kitchen, the abusers were advised to keep their clothes handy in case they had to leave quickly. The defendants in the trial were between 21 and 68 years old at the time of the alleged rapes. Among them are a firefighter, a truck driver, a city councilor, a bank IT worker, a prison guard, a nurse and a journalist.
When asked if he was sexually attracted to his daughter, he said no. “She’s not my type. She’s much younger than I’m used to.” Finally, “I’ve never touched my daughter.”
As the months passed and the current trial approached, Caroline tried to rationalize what had happened to her family and how each member was coping. “My mother is sunny, funny, and dynamic,” she notes. And strong. “Even the day she learned that one of her rapists had HIV, she didn’t break down.” A subsequent HIV test came back negative. In September 2022, Caroline founded an action group to raise awareness about drug use in rape and sexual violence. That campaign is one of the reasons they have given up their anonymity during the trial today. “There’s still so much to do,” she notes.
But she struggled to escape her father’s shadow. “As we approach the trial date, whenever I can sleep, I dream of him,” she writes. “I have tried in vain to understand the true identity of the man who raised me. My father is a criminal and I must learn to live with this grotesque reality, to accept that I am torn by the need for justice, truth and the love I once felt for him. I fear that I will never be able to hate him.”
And I Stopped Calling You Daddy by Caroline Darian is published in French by HarperCollins