Gisèle Pelicot’s daughter has written a memoir. Here is why everyone should read it

BIOGRAPHY
I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again: By Caroline Darian, the daughter of Gisèle Pelicot,
Bonnier, $32.99

Her name is Caroline Darian. At least that’s her pen name, her surname a combination of the names of her brothers. I urge you to buy her book, I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again. Darian is the daughter of extraordinary human being Gisèle Pelicot, the woman who rejected anonymity to bring light into the violent corners of our existence as women. Her former husband, Dominique Pelicot, will spend a maximum 20 years of imprisonment after he was found guilty of drugging and raping his then-wife, Gisèle, and allowing other men to rape her while she was knocked out in a phase of abuse that lasted nearly a decade.

Darian herself is also a survivor of two of her father’s weapons in his arsenal of abuse. I’ve read a thousand stories of survivors and written about them myself. And yes, it’s crucial we understand the experience of those with lived experience. But too many fall into the category of what’s called trauma porn, or as Alisa Zipursky describes it: “The exploitative sharing of the darkest, creepiest, most jarring parts of our trauma specifically for the purpose of shocking others.”

Not this book by Darian, 45, a marketing executive for an international insurance company. This book is not about the trial, which only ended last year. This is about the drip drip drip of information from the police and prosecutors revealing the abuse her father meted out to Gisèle and others and the spiralling impact on the family.

Yes, there is a lot of frightening detail about what happened to Darian’s mother, to Darian herself, to others. But is there a single soul who has avoided reading those horrific specifics about this trial? There are accounts in this book which never appeared in Australian media reports but which are terrifying. They will make your heart stop and want to hold your daughters and granddaughters tighter than you imagine possible, safe from threats in every shadow. They will also, I hope, make you want to reimagine how we defeat rape and sexual assault in our own country.

Darian is perfectly clear about the ludicrous stereotype of rapists – they are not unusual in any way, not the monsters of our imagination. These are ordinary men, men who appear to be loving husbands, fathers, grandfathers, who are rapists and abusers. She writes: “I have tried, without success, to unearth and understand the true identity of the man who raised me. To this day, I reproach myself with having neither seen nor suspected anything ... I’m still haunted by the image of the father I thought I knew. It lingers on, deeply rooted inside me.”

But Darian has some solutions for change to protect and restore victims. I love this so much. Yes, it’s important for us to read and know the stories of horror, but it’s also important for us to have hope. She has set about raising the profile of what she calls “chemical submission”, which she says is the preferred weapon of sexual predators, and founded a charity M’endors Pas (Stop Chemical Submission: Don’t Put Me Under) to campaign for better overall support for victims and systematic training for all professionals concerned.

“No reliable statistics exist concerning its use. In 2020, the year my father was arrested, nobody was talking about it,” Darian writes. “Chemical submission is present at all levels of society and is deployed against a wide range of victims: women, sometimes men, and even children, babies and the elderly … but who is aware of the risk of being chemically subjugated by a spouse, lover, relative or friend [who is familiar] ... with the contents of the family medicine cabinet?”

As I was reading this, taking notes furiously, I asked myself how much I knew about this “preferred weapon”. Sure, I’m familiar with the concept of drink-spiking but not much more. I asked Siobhan O’Dean, a research fellow at the University of Sydney’s Matilda Centre, what she knew. Australia knows very little, O’Dean tells me, except that in the early 2000s, police data suggested about one-third of drink-spiking cases involved sexual assaults, and these assaults commonly happened in private places such as the home of the victim or the offender. O’Dean says these crimes are not only frequent, but also happening where we should feel safest. And that’s a theme Darian brings up time and time again. How she imagined her life, the life of her mother, was not as it seemed. Not safe. Never safe.

In Australia, leaders in the field don’t call it “chemical submission” but “drug-facilitated sexual assault” to identify the role of the perpetrator and the criminal nature of the acts. But as Darian writes, the crime is poorly understood internationally, barely visible in official statistics, rarely diagnosed and neglected by professionals and support systems supposed to help victims of abuse.

Through the days I read this book, I pretty much talked about nothing else to anyone who would listen. All were shocked – but so many asked how it was possible that Gisèle Pelicot herself had no idea.

Here’s the thing. She was knocked out for hours at a time. That had an impact on her health – but when she sought medical help, the doctors could find nothing. They were investigating for causes in the range of normal, and the rape by scores and scores of men is unimaginable. Darian says she and her brothers were concerned about their mother’s sleepiness, her vagueness, her forgetfulness (all symptoms of the use of the drugs Dominique Pelicot used to force his wife into unconsciousness).

And, like all children, they wanted to know what was wrong with their beloved mother. “Mum had a brain scan done all the same, but of course it revealed nothing. Needless to say, it never occurred to us to ask for a drug test,” Darian writes. Later, she advises: “Regular memory lapses should set alarm bells ringing. If it happens to you, tell your doctor and ask for toxicology screening.”

Darian’s book is set before the trial as day by day, from November 2020, she discovers the reality of her father and his multiple crimes against multiple women. Every day brings new fear and new information. It also sets in train a resetting of family relationships and the impact this case had on Gisèle, Caroline, her brothers, Florian and David, their wives, grandchildren, cousins – and the way they all related to each other. There is anger and fear and understanding, patience, impatience, and so much struggle. Heartbreaking.

“On the mornings when anger or despair refused to let me out of bed, Mum was always there to encourage me to get up, get out, to interact with others, to keep life going,” writes Darian. She and her brothers tried to do the same for their mother.

Darian herself is committed to change in France: “My reasoning was simple: success will come from transforming individual trauma into collective action.”

That’s a good lesson, and I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again should be a textbook for us all.

National Sexual Assault, Domestic Family Violence Counselling Service 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732).

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