‘My father should die in prison’ – Dominique Pellicote’s daughter in exclusive interview

Warning: This story contains descriptions of sexual exploitation

It was 20:25 on a Monday evening in November 2020 when Caroline Derian got the phone call that changed everything.

On the other end of the phone was his mother, Giselle Pellicotte.

Darian recalled in an exclusive interview with Emma Barnett of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, “She told me she found out that morning that (my father) Dominic had been drugging her for about 10 years so that was different. -Different men can rape her.”

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

“I remember yelling, crying, I even insulted him,” she says. “It was like an earthquake. A tsunami.”

At the end of an historic three-and-a-half-month trial in December, Dominic Pellicote was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

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

Fifty men whom Dominique Pellicott recruited online to rape and sexually assault his unconscious wife Gisele have also been jailed.

Police caught her after wearing a skirt in a supermarket, causing investigators to keep a close eye on her. On the laptop and phone of this seemingly unharmed retired grandfather, they found thousands of videos and photos of his wife Gisele, apparently unconscious, being raped by strangers.

In addition to spotlighting the issues of rape and gender-based violence, the trial also shed light on the little-known issue of chemical decapitation – drug assault.

Caroline Derian has made it her life’s struggle to fight chemical poisoning, which is believed to be underreported because most victims have no memory of the attacks and may not even realize they Intoxicants were given.

In the days following Gisele’s fateful phone call, Darian and his brothers, Florian and David, traveled to the south of France, where their parents were living, to support their mother as she received the news. That – as Darian now says – her husband was “one of the worst sexual predators of the last 20 or 30 years”.

Soon after, Darian himself is called by the police – and his world is shattered again.

He was shown two photographs that he had found on his father’s laptop. They showed an unconscious woman lying on a bed, wearing only a T-shirt and underwear.

At first she could not tell that the woman was the same. She says, “I was living under the influence of dissociation. I was having difficulty identifying myself from the beginning.”

“Then the police officer said: ‘Look, you have the same brown mark on your cheek… it’s you.’ I looked at those two photographs differently…I was lying on my left side, like my mother in all her photographs.”

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

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

Unlike his mother’s case, there is no evidence as to what Pellicote may have done to Darien.

She says, “How many other victims are in the same situation? They are not believed because there is no evidence. They are not listened to, they are not supported.”

Soon after his father’s crimes came to light, Darian wrote a book.

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

It also sheds light on the issue of chemical mistreatment, in which commonly used drugs “come from the family medicine cabinet”.

“Painkillers, sedatives. It’s medicine,” says Derian. As is the case with about half of the victims of chemical abuse, she knew her abuser: the danger, she says, “is coming from within.”

She says that amid the trauma of having been raped more than 200 times by different people, her mother Gisele found it difficult to accept that her husband might also have assaulted her daughter.

“It’s difficult for a mother to integrate all this at once,” she says.

Yet when Giselle decided to open the trial to the public and media to expose what her husband and dozens of men had done to her, mother and daughter were unanimous: “I knew we went through something “It’s… terrible, but we had to go through it with dignity and strength.”

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

She is now unable to think about her childhood with the man she calls Dominic, only occasionally falling back into the habit of referring to him as her father.

She says, “When I look back I don’t really remember the father I thought I had. I look straight back at the criminal, the sex offender.”

She tells Emma Barnett, “But I have his DNA and the main reason I’m so preoccupied with invisible victims is also a way for me to create real distance from this man.” “I’m completely different from Dominic.”

Darian says she doesn’t know whether her father was a “monster”, as some people call him. “He knew very well what he had done and he was not ill,” she says.

“He’s a dangerous man. There’s no way he’s getting out. No way.”

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

Meanwhile, Pellicote is rebuilding himself. Gisele was exhausted from the test, but “is also recovering…she’s doing great,” Darian said.

As far as Darian is concerned, the only question she’s interested in now is raising awareness about chemical decapitation – and better educating children about sexual abuse.

She draws strength from her husband, her brothers and her 10-year-old “beloved son,” she says smiling, her voice full of affection.

Darian says the events that happened that November day made him who he is today.

Now, this woman whose life was ruined by the tsunami that November night is just trying to look forward.

‘You can watch the full interview on ‘Pellicott Trial – The Daughters Story’ on Monday at 7pm on BBC 2 or iPlayer. If you have been affected by some of the issues raised in this film, details of help and support are available at bbc.co.uk/actionline.