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 molested 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 we had to go through it with dignity and strength.”
