The crimes of the father

“Chemical submission.” Such a bland phrase, such a disingenuous label for something so diabolical. In September last year, it raced around the world as we watched one of the most shocking court cases imaginable play out in France. Dominique Pelicot, an amicable grandfather and husband of some 50 years, stood accused of drugging his wife at night and inviting strangers in to rape her comatose body. He had asked for no money in return. His only condition had been that he could film them.

This happened over a period of a decade. All in all, more than 80 men took up his invitation. Fifty-one of them, including Pelicot himself, were in court. His wife was in court, too. Gisèle Pelicot had, with incredible courage, waived her right to anonymity. She also insisted that the taped footage of each man raping her be showed in court. Watch, she said, watch what was done to me, and let the shame be on them, not on me.

The world was aghast as every sickening detail emerged. It was hard to imagine such depravity; it seemed as though the very boundary of human transgression had been breached. How could so many men, so many “normal” men — butchers and bakers and drivers and DJs — be willing to accept a casual invitation to have sex with an unknown woman as she lay unconscious in a stranger’s bedroom? And the next question is even more worrying: how could they all come from one small rural neighbourhood? Was it a freak epicentre of violent misogyny?

One can only imagine the shock rippling through hundreds of families in the area — wives, parents, children, and associates discovering that a man they thought they knew was a secret deviant. And suddenly he was locked away for decades, gone. It is as though the shame has spread like a stain across Provence, but the stain goes deeper, it seeps into the next generation and the generation after that. Caroline Darian is the Pelicots’ daughter. It is a pen name made up of her brothers’ first names, David and Florian. Her new memoir, I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again, demonstrates just how great the wreckage is.

It is now four years since her father was arrested and she and her brothers learned the details of his crime. The book tracks her for the year that followed his arrest, a bewildering time as she absorbed blow after blow. By far the biggest was when the police showed Darian a photograph her father had taken of her asleep in her underwear, in a room she knew. At first, she didn’t recognise herself — she didn’t own white panties, for a start — but when she realised it was her, she fainted.

Soon afterwards, she suffered a complete breakdown and was sent to a psychiatric hospital where she was sedated. As evidence piled up, it became clear that Pelicot had drugged his daughter but, in court, he denied raping her. He was also caught with videos of his two daughters-in-law naked and showering in the Pelicot home, taped on a secret camera. As Darian and her brothers helped Gisèle pack up and clear out of the house, they found files showing huge debts, while substantial loans had been taken out in Gisèle’s name. She had not only been betrayed and defiled by her husband but bankrupted too.

Darian began to write a diary as a way of processing the horror. “I bear a crushing double burden: I am the child of both the victim and her tormentor,” she writes in the preface. She confronts her own victimisation and describes the scars and divisions left on and in her family in the wake of the devastating discovery. Her whole life was false. Every happy or tender memory of her father was a lie.

All her life he had encouraged her to achieve, had lovingly supported her every step of the way. Her young son and his cousins miss their grandfather sorely; how are they to tell them the truth about him? In what words? She is enraged. “For four years now, I’ve been trying to find a new way to exist,” she writes.

As many victims in many circumstances do, she decided to help raise public awareness of chemical submission. She now advocates for other victims of such substances as GHB (gamma-hydroxybutyrate), the “date-rape drug”, which is believed to be underreported as most victims and survivors don’t remember it happening at all. In her diary, Darian also sets herself a mission: she “won’t let her father’s perversity become this family’s curse”. She addresses him: “Crime will not infect us, will not be transmitted from generation to generation. None of us will be like you — not my son, not my brothers. We are all stronger than you were.”