“I bear a crushing burden,” writes Caroline Darian in the opening pages of her searing memoir, I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again. “I am the child of both the victim and the tormenter.”
Darian is the daughter of seventy-two-year-old Gisèle Pélicot, who in 2024 became the world’s most high-profile rape survivor, as well as a hero to feminists in France and beyond. Darian lovingly describes her as the “strongest, most admirable woman I know.” Her mother “is like a medieval queen — chin up, head high, never the slightest complaint.”
It’s a portrait that fits with what the public has come to know of Gisèle Pélicot. During a sixteen-week trial more than fifty men stood accused of raping her, many times over, while she was unconscious, across more than a decade, led by the man who had been her husband for fifty years. Determined that “shame must change sides,” the trail was, at Gisèle’s request, a public one, held in the provincial French city of Avignon. Waiving the right to anonymity, she displayed extraordinary courage, dignity and generosity throughout, in the face of a seemingly bottomless pit of alleged and documented abuses against her.
With media coverage ranging from the predictably sensationalist to long-form essays about the trial’s wider implications, the facts as they were laid out remained shocking in every iteration. From the bracing purview of Darian, they are even more so: “My father not only drugged and raped his wife for almost ten years without her knowledge, but he also served her up — for sheer voyeuristic pleasure, with no money changing hands — to more than eighty random strangers, most of whom he recruited via the hookup site Coco.gg.”
These words, their affecting precision, have come with time. At first exposure, the “facts” delivered by police to Darian and her family were an “alien presence, a crushing weight we will have to carry for the rest of our lives.”
Darian’s is not a book about the trial, which ended in December with Dominique Pélicot convicted of aggravated rape, among other charges, and sentenced to twenty years in prison. A further forty-seven men were convicted of rape, two of attempted rape and two of sexual assault. Seventeen of them have since appealed their convictions and sentences, setting the stage for another trial in late 2025.
The book opens on the eve of what Darian knows will be an unprecedented trial. First published in France in 2022, while investigations were still ongoing, I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again has now been updated and translated into English. We learn that between the first edition and this one, Darian helped launch a French movement called “Stop Chemical Submission (#Mendorspas): Don’t Put Me Under” to “create awareness of the problem and help prevent it.” Like sexual violence more broadly, chemical submission is more likely to be perpetrated by someone already known to the victim than not. “Date rape” drugs like GHB (often known as GBH) may grab the headlines, but as her mother’s case shows, perpetrators are more likely to use the tranquilisers and sleeping pills found in the typical medicine cabinet.
With a job in communications, Darian conveys the key points about chemical submission effectively. There’s no doubt her advocacy has been useful to the cause, and will continue to be. But despite her book’s new subtitle, Turning our Family Trauma of Chemical Submission into a Collective Flight, there is no escaping that hers is primarily an account of family trauma, or what she describes late in the book as her “chronicle of horror and survival.”
Without tipping over into melodrama or clichés — easy to do, given the circumstances and the challenge of putting them into words — Darian evocatively captures the “cataclysmic” impact of her father’s crimes on those closest to him. Theirs was a close family, taking in her parents, her two brothers and their wives and children, and Darian’s husband Paul and young son Tom. With her father expelled, it remains so, albeit radically altered, and not without temporary divisions as Dominique makes pleas for help from prison.
Mother and daughter have different “ways to cope with extraordinary circumstances.” At first, Gisèle disassociates, retreating into cleaning; Darian has a panic attack and is temporarily admitted to a psychiatric ward. As the investigation unfolds, Darian wants to know the details; for Gisèle, the primary victim, they can be too much to bear. While her mother expresses the thought that she “must have failed” her husband “in some way over the years,” Darian stays firm in her resolution never to speak to him again. Instead, she reappraises their relationship and his character, his weaknesses and duplicities freshly and starkly apparent.
As indicated by the book’s title and the surname she has chosen for publication — an amalgamation of the names of her elder and younger brothers, David and Florian — Caroline Darian no longer wishes to identify as the daughter of Dominique Pélicot. She is tormented by two photographs the police found in her father’s digital files. They show Darian in bed, partly clothed, deep in sleep (she’s usually a light sleeper), possibly drugged. Now, “everywhere I look,” writes Darian, “I see shadows of my father’s dark side.” (Since the trial, where evidence also included photographs Dominique had taken of his daughters-in-law without their knowledge, Darian has been firm in her conviction that her father drugged and assault her too — an accusation he has continued to deny.)
Still, in the first year, Darian confesses that she misses the father, the one “who looked after me for forty-two years,” the one from before, the man she loved “so much.” She directly addresses passages to him throughout the book until they no longer serve a purpose.
Marked by dates, some chapters are as brief as her original notebook entries while others are more recognisably in memoir form as Darian revisits earlier episodes in her life for signs and clues. Her ignorance of her father’s actions — which now explain her mother’s health problems and odd behaviour over the years — makes her feel “almost culpable.”
Darian’s tone veers from no-nonsense to piercing, the pages flooded with both emotional turmoil and hard-won clarity. Whenever her burden is somehow eased, whether by her staunch husband, caring friends or access to proper psychiatric care, she wishes the same for other victims not so privileged. As more men are arrested she thinks of what awaits their young children “as they grow up — the same abyss; the same ruptured, tainted bonds; the same need to cut themselves free, whatever it costs.”
There will be other books about the Pélicot case — or rather the Mazan case, to name the village where Dominque had no trouble recruiting local men to rape his unconscious wife. Some will be as lurid and voyeuristic as the worst press coverage. It’s to be hoped that others will shift some of the media glare from Gisèle towards “ordinary” men like Dominique Pélicot and the other convicted defendants — some of whom continue to insist that what they did was not rape — and the wider culture, technologies and pharmaceuticals that enabled them. But there will be no other books like Darian’s arresting account of the aftermath of her father’s “destruction,” alerting readers to the ripple effects of sexual violence on its direct and indirect victims.
At the conclusion of the trial, Gisèle Pélicot delivered a short statement. While the hearings were a “very difficult ordeal,” she has “never regretted the decision” to “open the doors” for “all of society to be a witness to the debates which took place here.” Thanking all who supported her, she made special mention of “all the other families affected by this tragedy” and of the “unrecognised victims whose stories often remain in the shadows. I want you to know we share the same fight.” Darian’s memoir is offered in the same spirit: mother and daughter turn out to be not so different after all. •
I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again: Turning our Family Trauma of Chemical Submission into a Collective Flight
By Caroline Darian | Bonnier | $32.99 | 224 pages
