“My father must die in prison”

It was 8:25 p.m. on a Monday in November 2020 when Caroline Darian called and everything changed.

Her mother, Giselle Pellicot, was on the other end of the phone.

“She announced to me that she had discovered that morning that (my father) Dominic had been drugging her for about 10 years so that various men could rape her,” Darian recalled in an exclusive interview with BBC Radio’s Emma Barnett on the Today programme. 4.

“At that moment, I lost what was a normal life,” says Darian, now 46.

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

Dominic Pellico was sentenced to 20 years in prison at the end of a historic three-and-a-half-month trial in December.

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

Fifty men recruited by Dominique Pellico over the internet to rape and sexually assault his unconscious wife Giselle have also been jailed.

He was caught by the police after being found up his skirt in a supermarket, prompting investigators to take a closer look at him. On the laptop and phones of this seemingly harmless retired grandfather, they found thousands of videos and photos of his wife Giselle, apparently unconscious, being raped by strangers.

In addition to bringing the issues of rape and gender-based violence into the spotlight, the trial also highlighted the little-known issue of chemical exposure — an assault fueled by drug use.

Caroline Darian has struggled throughout her life with chemical addiction, which is believed to go unreported because most victims have no memory of the attacks and may not even know they were drugged.

In the days following the fateful phone call, Giselle Darian and her brothers, Florian and David, traveled to the south of France, where their parents lived, to support their mother as she accepted the news that – as Darian now says – her husband was “one of the worst sexual predators of the last 20-30 years.”

Shortly after that, Darian herself was called by the police – and her world came crashing down again.

She was shown two photos they found on her father’s laptop. They showed an unconscious woman lying on a bed wearing only a T-shirt and underwear.

At first she couldn’t tell it was her. “I lived with the dissociation effect. It was difficult for me to recognize 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 photos differently then… I was lying on my left side, like my mother, in all her photos.”

Darian says she is convinced her father also abused and raped her – something he has always denied, although he has offered conflicting explanations for the photos.

“I know he drugged me, probably to sexually assault me. But I don’t have any evidence,” she says.

Unlike her mother’s case, there is no evidence that Pellicote may have done to Darian.

“And how many victims are there? They are not believed because there is no evidence. They are not listened to, they are not supported,” she says.

Shortly after her father’s crimes became known, Darian wrote a book.

I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again explores her family’s trauma.

He also delves into the problem of chemical supply, in which commonly used drugs “come from the family medicine cabinet.”

“Painkillers, sedatives. This is medicine,” says Darian. Like almost half of those affected by chemicals, she knew her abuser: the danger, she says, “comes from within.”

She says that in the midst of the trauma of discovering that she had been raped more than 200 times by different people, her mother Giselle found it difficult to accept that her husband may have also assaulted their daughter.

“It’s hard for a mom to integrate it all at once,” she says.

Still, when Gisele decided to open the court 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…horrible, but that , that we had to go through it with dignity and strength.”

Now Darian must figure out how to live knowing that she is the daughter of both a cat and a victim – what she calls a “terrible burden”.

Now she can’t remember her childhood with the man she calls Dominic, and only occasionally reverts to the habit of calling him her father.

“When I look back, I don’t really remember the father that I thought he was. I just see the criminal, the sex offender that he is,” she says.

“But I have his DNA, and the main reason I’m so interested in Invisible Victims, for me too, is a way to really distance myself from this guy,” she tells Emma Barnett. “I’m totally different from Dominic.”

Darian adds that she doesn’t know if her father was a “monster” as some have called him. “He knew exactly what he was doing and he wasn’t sick,” she says.

“He is a dangerous man. He can’t get out. In no case.”

It will be years before Dominic Pellico, 72, is eligible for parole, so it’s possible he’ll never see his family again.

Meanwhile, the Pelicots are rebuilding themselves. Giselle, according to Darian, was exhausted by the trial, but also “on the mend… She’s fine.”

As for Darian, the only issue she cares about right now is raising awareness about chemical subjugation — and better educating children about sexual abuse.

She draws strength from her husband, her brothers and her 10-year-old child – her “sweet son,” she says with a smile, her voice full of affection.

The events that unfolded that November day made her who she is today, Darian says.

Now this woman, whose life was cut short by a tsunami on a November night, tries to look only forward.

“You can watch the full Pellicote Court – A Daughter’s Story interview – Monday at 7pm on BBC 2 or on iPlayer. If you are affected by some of the issues raised in this film, details of help and support can be found at bbc.co.uk/actionline’.