Caroline Darian, daughter of Dominique Pelicot: ‘He is a dangerous criminal and will die in prison with his lies’

The greatest traumas are often accompanied by banal memories.

The day she realized that the first 42 years of her life had no meaning, Caroline Darian noticed a flash of white light from the clock on the kitchen oven. It read 8:25 p.m. It was Monday, November 2, 2020. Her mother’s voice on the other end of the phone split her life in two.

The police had arrested her father, Dominique Pelicot, a 68-year-old retiree. He was in prison. Officers had found tens of thousands of photographs and videos in his home, proving that, for at least 10 years, he had systematically drugged his wife so that strangers he recruited on a dating website could come to his home and rape her while he recorded it.

The worst thing of all — or the best thing, from the perspective of the investigators — was that all the criminal acts were documented.

For Caroline, there would be no possibility of linking her previous life with what was about to happen. “Only those who have had it torn from them know how precious the banal can be,” she writes, at the beginning of I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again (2024), the book in which she recounts how she processed this story in the years leading up to the trial.

Caroline Darian (her married name) shows up on a Thursday afternoon for her interview with EL PAÍS, which takes place in an elegant brasserie next to the Champs Elysées, in Paris. She’s somewhat more relaxed compared to the last four months, over the course of which she had to attend on a weekly basis one of the most important, brutal and reported-on trials in the history of sexual abuse.

For the past four months, Caroline shared a courtroom with 51 men accused of raping her mother. Among them sat her father, the man who orchestrated the horror. At the beginning of the trial, the main victim, Gisèle Pelicot, decided that the proceedings would take place in public. The press could enter the courtroom and report on what they saw and heard. This way, the shame would change sides: it would not be the victims who felt humiliated in court. Her decision caused a massive upheaval that reached well beyond France.

Gisèle, a 72-year-old woman with unshakeable dignity, is already a symbol of feminism and the fight against rape culture. But the Pelicot trial was also the chilling chronicle of a middle-class family torn apart by a discovery that hit an ordinary house like a bomb. It swept everything away. Three children, several grandchildren, friends. And, above all, it unleashed despair within Gisèle’s only daughter, who appears half-naked and apparently drugged in the photographs found by police.

Caroline will never know if her father also raped her, or if he offered her to other men. However, in reality, she has almost no doubt that this is the case.

Q. How are you managing?

A. I’m moving forward. I’m committed to all the invisible victims in France, because the trial isn’t the end, it’s only one stage. There’s still a lot to do.

Q. Were you satisfied with the verdict of the trial?

A. Not at all. Regarding the main defendant, 20 years in prison was the bare minimum… but the sentences for the other [perpetrators] were very low, far from what the prosecution had asked for. Ten years? Considering the violence of the events that my mother suffered, it’s outrageous. These people denied Gisèle’s unconscious state. It’s an aberration. And, on top of that, 17 of them have appealed.

Q. How have you dealt with all the exposure that the trial has subjected you to?

A. I don’t like that certain aspects [of my life are] being exposed in the media. I don’t agree with how some aspects of this case are presented. Sometimes, I feel that what’s allowed to take place in court only serves to further humiliate the victims.

Q. Did the trial have any healing effect for you?

A. I understood that I couldn’t expect anything from Dominique. He’s a dangerous criminal and now I know that he’ll leave this world with his lies and unconfessed truths. The trial addresses only a small part of his crimes.

Q. Do you think that his criminal activity began much earlier than the timeline that was proven?

A. Of course. You don’t wake up one day and say: “I’m going to drug my wife and have dozens of men rape her.” We know that there was a precedent, but it’s yet to be discovered.

Q. The first unanswered question is whether he also raped you.

A. It wasn’t clarified because he wasn’t on trial for that, but rather for taking photos of me and distributing them. I didn’t have as much evidence as my mother. The photos where I appear had been deleted and were recovered by the police IT specialists. Why did he delete the photos of his own daughter lying motionless and in her underwear? I don’t know. But when I look at them, I know very well that I’m not in a normal state.

Q. Do you need an answer?

A. I would have liked him to say it. But I know what he did. I just wanted him to admit it, but he was a liar. Just as we don’t know the whole truth about Gisèle, or how many people raped her.

Q. There are two other cases of assault that he may have participated in. He’s also being investigated for a case of rape and murder. Does that make sense to you?

A. Yes, I have no doubt. In one of the cases, his DNA was found. And the modus operandi is the same. The question is: how many more [victims] have there been since the 1990s?

Q. In the book, you write about things that you gradually discover about your father, which paint a new portrait of him. How do you juxtapose the memories that you have of him with the conscience of a rapist?

A. He was an impostor. He had two faces: that of a family man and that of a sexual predator. He made sure that those two facets never crossed paths.

Q. But now, looking back, do you think there were signs that could have indicated that something was wrong?

A. Now, I see everything differently. And I think that many things escaped us. But how could we imagine something like that? We didn’t have a dysfunctional family or a violent father. Quite the opposite. He made sure that nothing was noticed. Everything he did, he did knowingly, with premeditation. And he knew that it was crucial that no one should suspect him.

Q. To the point that, if it hadn’t been for the security guard who caught him in the supermarket filming under the skirts of female customers in 2020, it could have taken years to discover his crimes.

A. Ten years before that, the same scenario occurred: he was caught by the security cameras, but he only received a fine. Nobody was informed. How does the judicial system work? How is it possible that this incident wasn’t, at least, communicated to his ex-wife? Why? Well, because, at the time, the police didn’t consider it to be serious. But actions like these cannot be treated as isolated incidents. The proof is that they ignored one of the biggest sexual predators of the last 20 years.

Q. Perhaps if it hadn’t been for the security guard in that supermarket, Dominique would have continued with his actions until today.

A. If he hadn’t been arrested in 2020, he would have killed my mother. Look, in October alone, before being arrested, he reoffended four times in a row. At that rate, it’s a miracle that she didn’t fall into a coma.

Q. You write at the beginning of the book that you sometimes missed your father.

A. The image I had of him didn’t disappear overnight. But things are different today. The trial allowed me to realize that the man I saw during those four months wasn’t the one I knew. In reality, I never met him: I understood that in the court. Discovering his true face, that of an impostor, helped me [grieve]. The person I thought I knew never existed. Today, his face is that of a usurper.

Q. Life broke into two pieces when you discovered that true face. Can any of the 42 years of the life that you had with your father — the time that preceded his arrest — be preserved?

A. There’s a part of you that dies. It no longer exists, because the individual I thought I knew never existed. For me, the Dominique of before is dead, if he ever existed.

Q. How did you explain everything to your son, Dominique’s grandson, without causing him unbearable pain?

A. It was my responsibility to be honest with him. I told him very early on that his grandfather was in prison for very serious things. I wanted him to know the truth, because it’s part of his story. The man he thought he knew wasn’t who he appeared to be. I think that also lays the foundation for the values he’ll have when he grows up. If we had kept it from him, it would have been even more difficult. He was six years old [when his grandfather was arrested]. He’s now 10. Family secrets can derail your life path. Today, despite everything, I think he’s handling it well. But it’s still a wound, a huge betrayal.

Q. And your husband? Your brothers?

A. My husband considers him to be dead. For my brothers, it’s different… although they’ve learned to distinguish between him and who they are as men. That’s essential: we’re not our parents. But it’s true that we, unlike Gisèle, carry Dominique’s DNA. She got divorced. We can’t.

Q. You’ve all changed your surname.

A. I use my married name, but I was born Pelicot.

Q. At the trial, your mother said that she would keep that surname, so that her grandchildren could be proud to bear it.

A. It’s still a difficult legacy, because it’s difficult to tell your classmates, or the parents of your classmates, that your grandfather is a sexual predator. The idealized image of my mother that’s held up will never erase the fact that we’re Dominique’s children. My commitment to the cause helped me, but my two brothers experienced it in a completely different way. I have a younger brother who moved away, left the Paris region. Each of us dealt with it as best we could.

Q. Your mother and you saw some things very differently. I believe you also had differing opinions on opening the trial to the public.

A. I couldn’t decide for her, because she was the one at the center of that trial. Since we knew the truth, we thought that we shouldn’t allow the trial to be held behind closed doors, because that would have been a gift to the 51 defendants, including Dominique. They had to accept what they did. If you don’t open the doors of the court, [they’re able to] tell whatever they want to their families, to their close circle. And it’s the victim who has to endure the double suffering of having been a victim and, additionally, having to defend herself in court and prove that what happened really happened.

Q. I imagine that having opened the trial to the media was positive from the point of view of the battle, but negative when it came to your family’s privacy.

A. We don’t regret it. But still, a part of our life, of our family history, was torn away from us. And the pain also affects the children. That is to say, there isn’t just one victim in this family.

Q. During the trial, there was a lot of talk about the banality of evil, about how your neighbor can be a rapist.

A. The character profiles [on display] were more or less ordinary. And Dominique, after four years of imprisonment, may have lost his strength, his charisma, that normal appearance. But he was still a man who could be given the benefit of the doubt, he could be trusted. And I think that most of the individuals who were in that court have the same profile: charismatic, trustworthy. You only have to look at the number of people who testified in favor of him or his entourage, to explain how harmless they seemed. [They don’t look like monsters]. A rapist, unfortunately, can appear to be someone clean, polite, a good father. Someone beyond reproach.

Q. Maybe the trial challenged all men in some way.

A. I saw many women at the trial, but not many men. That raises the question about their place in our society, about their position on this issue.

Q. Do you think it challenged the patriarchal system?

A. I think it helps open our eyes to what rape culture is and shows how much progress needs to be made [to correct] certain mentalities. Just look at the average age of the perpetrators in that court: many were under 40. We’re talking about today’s generations. This raises a lot of questions.

Q. Those 50 men lived relatively close to Dominique’s home. Their crimes were also based on a question of convenience for them.

A. If you have that many rapists in the Vaucluse department (region) alone, you have them all over the country, in huge numbers.

Q. You approved of the way in which your lawyers represented you.

A. Let’s say that they defended Gisèle very well.

Q. Your lawyers were men, while Dominique was defended by a woman.

A. In his case, I’m not surprised. Knowing how he is, I don’t see him being defended by a man. But my question, I insist, is: what do men think about consent, rape culture? Are there men who are involved in these issues now?

Q. Sometimes, the law is ahead of society, which is reluctant to accept certain changes.

A. Yes, but you have to apply the existing law. Today, there are 17 guys who continue to say they’re innocent in an appeal trial. And we know that most of them won’t serve out their sentences, starting with Dominique, whose sentence is 310 years. I bet anything that, in a few years, he’ll be out.

Q. Would you like to say something to him?

A. What I want is for him to confess the facts that he hasn’t acknowledged. But he’ll never tell the whole truth.

Q. Is forgiveness possible?

A. Time does its work. After four years, the grieving process is already underway. Life goes on. The recognition of the acts he committed is fundamental for me. But I have no interest in forgiving him, I’ve never considered it. My goal is to remain totally indifferent to him.

Q. What kind of support system, if any, did you find when the case broke out? I’m referring to judges, police officers, psychiatrists…

A. Nobody helps you when you leave the police station. The system isn’t prepared to deal with these situations. There’s still a lot to do, especially regarding institutional support and support for victims. We have to take care of everything.

Q. Do you still require psychological support?

A. Yes, I see someone. But above all, I write.

Q. I have the feeling that, after this whole painful and exposed process, this monumental ordeal, broadcast live all over the world, you don’t have the answers you were looking for.

A. That’s right. And I don’t think I will. If there was any hope, it vanished in the court. But I won’t go see Dominique in prison, I won’t start a dialogue with him. I will be left with my doubts, my questions, without really knowing what happened. Only he will know how far he was willing to go.

Translated by Avik Jain Chatlani.

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