'My father should die in prison'

Warning: This story contains depictions of sexual abuse

It was 20:25 on a Monday evening in November 2020 when Caroline Darian got the call that changed everything.

On the other end of the phone was his mother, Giselle Pellicott.

“He announced to me that he had discovered that morning [my father] Dominic had been drugging her for almost 10 years so that different men could rape her,” Darian recalled in an exclusive interview with BBC Radio 4's Today programme's Emma Barnett.

“At that moment, I lost my normal life,” says Darian, now 46.

“I remember I screamed, I cried, I even insulted him,” she says. “It was like an earthquake. A tsunami.”

After a historic three-and-a-half-month trial in December, Dominic Pellicott was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

More than four years later, Darian says his father “should die in prison”.

Giselle, the unwitting wife of Dominique Pellicott, who recruited fifty men online, was also jailed for raping and sexually assaulting her.

He was caught by police after he got into a supermarket, leading investigators to take a closer look at him. On the laptop and phone of this seemingly innocent retired grandfather, they found thousands of videos and photos of his wife Giselle, apparently unconscious, being raped by strangers.

On top of pushing the issues of rape and gender violence into the spotlight, the trial also highlighted a lesser-known problem of chemical submission – drug-facilitated assault.

Carolyn Darian has made it her life's struggle to fight chemical addiction, which is believed to be underreported because most victims have no memory of the assault and don't realize they were drugged.

In the days following Giselle's fateful phone call, Darian and his brothers, Florian and David, traveled to the south of France where their parents were living to support their mother as she absorbed the news that – Darian now says – her husband had been “for the last 20 or “One of the worst sex predators of 30 years.”

Soon after, Darian called the police himself – and his world came crashing down again.

He was shown two photos found on his father's laptop. They show an unconscious woman lying in bed, wearing only a T-shirt and underwear.

At first he couldn't tell the woman was his. “I lived under the influence of isolation. I had difficulty recognizing myself from the beginning,” she says.

“Then the police officer said: 'Look, you have the same brown mark on your cheek… it's you.' I looked at those two pictures differently then… I was lying on my left side like my mother, in all her pictures.”

Darian says she's convinced her father also abused and raped her – something she's always denied, though she's given conflicting explanations for the photos.

“I know he drugged me, maybe for sexual abuse. But I don't have any proof,” she says.

Unlike in his mother's case, there is no evidence of what Pellicott did to Darian.

“And how many victims is that? They're not believed because there's no evidence. They're not heard, they're not supported,” she says.

Soon after his father's crimes came to light, Darian wrote a book.

I'll Never Call Him Dad explores his family's trauma.

It delves deeper into chemical submissions, where drugs commonly used “come from the family medicine cabinet.”

“Painkillers, sedatives. It's medicine,” Darian said. As is the case with about half of chemical submission victims, she knew her abuser: the danger, she says, “comes from within.”

She says that amid the trauma of learning that she had been raped more than 200 times by different people, it was difficult for her mother Giselle to accept that her husband had also assaulted their daughter.

“It's hard for a mom to pull it all together,” she says

Yet when Gisele decided to open the trial to the public and the media to reveal what her husband and dozens of men had done to her, mother and daughter agreed: “I knew we went through something … terrible, but our dignity And had to go through it with strength.”

Now, Darian must figure out how to survive knowing that she is the daughter of both victimizer and victimizer — what she calls a “terrible burden.”

She can no longer think of her childhood friend whom she calls Dominic, reverting to the habit of occasionally referring to him as her father.

“When I look back I don't really think of the father that I thought he was. I look straight at the perpetrator, the sex offender he is,” she says.

“But I have his DNA and the main reason why I'm so engaged in invisible hunting is as a way to put a real distance with this man,” she tells Emma Burnett. “I'm completely different from Dominic.”

Darian added that he doesn't know if his father was a “monster,” as some have called him. “He knew perfectly well what he had done and he was not sick,” she says.

“He's a dangerous man. There's no way he's out. There's no way.”

Dominique Pellicott, 72, has a few years left before he's eligible for parole, so it's possible he'll never see his family again.

Meanwhile, the Pelicans are rebuilding themselves. Gisele, Darian said, was exhausted from the trial, but “is recovering… she's doing well”.

For Darian, the only question she's interested in now is raising awareness of chemical submissions — and better educating children about sexual abuse.

She draws strength from her husband, her brother and her 10-year-old — her “beautiful son,” she says with a smile, her voice full of affection.

The events that unfolded on that November day made him who he is today, Darian said.

Now, this woman whose life was destroyed by the tsunami that November night is just trying to look forward.

You can watch the full interview on 'Pellicott Trial – The Daughter's Story' – Monday at 7pm on BBC 2 or iPlayer. If you are affected by some of the issues raised in this film, details of help and support are available at bbc.co.uk/actionline'.