IN a hushed lecture theatre within London’s Royal Geographical Society, a quiet woman holds the audience engrossed, her soft French accent voicing truths she cannot leave unheard.

Caroline Darian is not speaking about far-flung travels or exotic discoveries. Her subject is her mother, now a feminist icon, global inspiration, and the victim of 10 years of drugged rape, by the husband she trusted and the men he invited into their home to abuse her.

Darian is the daughter of Gisele and Dominique Pelicot, and lives with a horror that most of us could not even contemplate.

She is also a campaigner, author, wife, mother — and champion for the right of all women to keep control over what happens to our bodies.

Darian is her pen-name, a composite of her brothers’ names, David and Florian. She cites them as stalwart supporters, along with her husband and son.

She did have another man in her life whom she regarded as worthy of her love and respect, “I thought he was the nicest person.”

That was destroyed forever, one day in 2020. Dominique, then a 67-year-old pensioner in the small town of Mazan, in south-east France, was found taking upskirt pictures of three women in a local supermarket.

On his arrest, police searched his home and examined his devices, discovering that for a decade, he had been drugging his wife several times a week, and raping her while she was unconscious. During those years, from July 2011 to October 2020, Dominique had also invited dozens of other men to rape her while he filmed the abuse.

There were more than 20,000 images and videos, an immense, meticulous record of these men’s abominable behaviour. That folder was titled “Abuse.”

I followed the accounts of some of the journalists who covered the 10-week trial, an experience which left me in that stage of rage when we don’t know whether to howl, weep or vomit.

There’s no point in labelling these men as “monsters”; the othering of them does not help. They were truck drivers, a journalist, firefighters, a nurse. All responded eagerly to Dominique’s rallying call for rapists.  

Darian told the London audience — almost entirely women — that the courtroom was packed, as she sat every day with her mother, looking at the men, thinking: “They raped my mum.”

Darian’s father, a retired electrician, had used a forum called a son insu (“with her unknowing”), hosted on Coco, an online chat with no moderation. That wasn’t shut down until June 2024, having been cited in more than 23,000 reports of criminal activity since its founding in 2003.

We may be familiar nowadays with “date-rape drugs” such as GHB and Rohypnol. But this fuhrer rapist used rather banal medication, prescribed for anxiety or insomnia. Dominique Pelicot weaponised the contents of many household medicine cabinets.

There are always deeply affecting details which stand out in a court case. Gisele’s favourite raspberry ice-cream contained the dose that would leave her comatose and snoring while her prey lined up to penetrate her.

Gisele and her children thought her blackouts, grogginess and memory lapses meant there was something wrong with her, perhaps dementia.

Dominque, it was reported, claimed the family were tiring her out. This horror story of abuse, gaslighting and extreme betrayal was to take a dramatic turn, as he faced the court. His wife, the ultimate victim, waived her right to anonymity and insisted on a public trial.

Not only did she stride through crowds each day of the trial, Gisele gained worldwide respect for her statement: “When you’re raped there is shame, and it’s not for us to have shame — it’s for them.”

A group of women calling themselves the Amazons of Avignon turned out to applaud her, graffiti and murals praising her started appearing, and the media clamoured for interviews.

Inside the court, 51 men were convicted for a total of 428 years, including Dominique Pelicot, jailed for the maximum term of 20 years.

So, there is some victory for the legal process, and for the extraordinary woman at the heart of the story.

Caroline Darian, however, feels forgotten. Convinced that her father drugged and raped her, she is pressing charges against him.

Some of the computer images found by police showed the convicted man’s daughters-in-law in the shower, which had been taken with a hidden camera.

Darian was shown images of herself, semi-naked on a bed, asleep or unconscious. She says she was a light sleeper, never slept on her side — and the underwear shown is not hers.

Her father has always denied her claims.

Darian has two books to her name, the first in French and English editions is I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again, with the subtitle “Turning our family trauma of chemical submission into a collective fight.”

It intersperses the discovery of her father’s abhorrent crimes with recollections of her childhood.

In the second, So That We May Remember, she expresses anger that her mother has not supported her claim that she was also raped by her father.

She told the London audience: “There is one person I would hope... I would look to... but she cannot.”

Interviewer Afua Hirsch interjected: “Well, she had such a lot to process, herself, of course.”

Darian’s response, sotto voce, was firm: “It is her choice. It is her life.”

It was a fleeting exchange, almost imperceptible. But there is clearly a deep, deep level of hurt.

In her second book, Darian quotes her mother: “Your father’s in a bad way in prison. He’s suffering so much; I must have failed him in some way over the past years.”

It’s clear that Darian is fighting both for all women, and for herself. After the devastating discoveries about her father, she said: “I stopped sleeping. I stopped eating. I had no support. Behind this story, there is a family destroyed and there are invisible victims.

“This story destroyed part of my childhood — it had been based on lies.”

In May 2023, she launched the movement Don’t Put Me Under, or MendorsPas, battling for recognition of chemical submission. That is defined by the French National Agency for the Security of Pharmaceutical Products as “the administration of psychoactive substances for criminal purposes [rape, paedophilia] or criminal offences [intentional violence, theft] without the victim’s knowledge, or under threat.”

The agency’s study in 2021 looked at a sample of 727 complaints of sexual assault filed with police: 11 per cent involved chemical submission. For more than half of the victims (typically women aged 20 to 30) their abusers used over-the-counter or prescription drugs.

So what is to be done?

There is no real deficit when it comes to the law. Consent to sex is not given when someone is unconscious, unaware of what is being done to them.

The European Convention on Human Rights guarantees freedom from torture or degrading or inhuman treatment. The Istanbul Convention mandates criminalisation of “all non-consensual sexual acts, even in cases where the victim is incapacitated.” Consent, it says, “must be active, clear and informed.”

What else do we know?

Victims of sexual abuse are all too often silenced — by shame, and by fear. In cases of chemical submission, there is often drug-induced amnesia. When victims are unable to try to defend themselves, there’ll probably be no evidence such as fingernail scrapings or scratches.

We also know that there are clues. In families, in friendship groups, in workmates’ so-called banter. What do we do?

I had Caroline Darian’s words in my head as I walked home that evening, along my street, where a serial killer brutally murdered our teenage neighbour Marsha McDonnell. I never say his name. He also killed Amelie Delagrange, and raped and murdered Millie Dowler.

They weren’t safe from that woman-hater.

And now, a softly spoken French sister tells us that; “This is coming from inside,” because these attackers are drugging and raping women they know.

We must not be afraid every day; that will only sap our energy. We must learn more, understand more. That might mean understanding the perpetrators. We must keep our eyes and ears open for clues, for red flags. And if alerted, we must blow the whistle.

In the words of the resolute Caroline Darian: “Faced with the unthinkable, the unbearable, we must fight back. Never hesitate to speak up.”

I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again by Caroline Darian is published by Leap, an imprint of Bonnier Books UK.