Gisèle Pelicot was in her sixties when her children started to suspect she was exhibiting early signs of Alzheimer’s. At times, she seemed distracted, unable to remember details from the night before. She developed trouble sleeping and lost weight. One night, eating dinner with her husband, son and grandchildren, she slumped over in her chair. It was, her son said, “like her strings had been cut… She just sagged where she sat. Her eyes were empty.” Her husband carried her to bed. She became too scared to drive: what if she passed out at the wheel? She booked brain scans, and one neurologist suggested she might be experiencing “transient global amnesia – a sort of black hole that opens up momentarily, drawing in all memories, only to vanish as mysteriously as it came”. But that didn’t explain the blackouts, or the heavy bleeding that occurred years after menopause.
We now know that Gisèle Pelicot was not unwell, nor in decline. In a trial that has captured the horrified attention of both France and the world, her ex-husband Dominique Pelicot admitted to regularly drugging and raping his wife and orchestrating her rape by at least 72 male strangers over a decade: he and 50 other defendants were all found guilty of rape, sexual assault and attempted rape. Pelicot refused her right to anonymity at trial, ensuring her attackers were exposed in public. That the majority of her rapists – sourced through an anonymous forum, since shut down, called à son insu (“without her knowledge”) – lived within a 50-kilometre radius of her home in rural France is just one of the case’s many disquieting revelations. Was Pelicot’s village of Mazan in southern France a freak epicentre of violent misogyny? Or is such abuse more widespread than most of us would like to believe? In this unsettling context, “transient global amnesia” begins to sound less like an individual diagnosis and more like a precondition of patriarchy: a collective suspension of belief; a shared, willed ignorance; the regular forgetting of what we fear we know about men.
If the antidote to amnesia is knowing, naming, recording and remembering, then memoir might become a weapon against doubt, shame and silence. Caroline, the daughter of Gisèle and Dominique Pelicot, hopes that her book I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again will raise awareness of chemical submission – a type of rape still frequently understood in stranger-danger terms, but often carried out by someone known to the victim. Written under the name Caroline Darian, a portmanteau of the names of her brothers David and Florian, the book was published in French in 2022, and is now in English, with a preface written just before the 2024 trial. It takes the form of diary-style entries in the present tense, spanning 13 months from 1 November 2020. “At 42 I had a job I loved, a husband, a child and a house. All normal things I took for granted, like the feel of solid ground under my feet,” she writes. The next day, the family learned the truth about Dominique.
It isn’t clear when Dominique Pelicot began drugging and raping his wife, but the earliest known instance is summer 2011. On each occasion, he used large doses of sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication mixed into her morning coffee or evening ice cream to sedate her for up to eight hours. He had a repeat prescription, and hid the pills in a hiking boot in the garage. After administering the drugs, he undressed her, photographed her and assaulted her. Online, he boasted of his precise dosages and posted photos of his wife in sexual poses in which she is visibly unconscious. He approached other men, telling them “I’m looking for a pervert accomplice to abuse my wife who’s been put to sleep” and “you’re like me, you like ‘rape mode’”. He gave them hand-drawn directions to the house and asked them to park at a nearby sports centre. He told them not to smoke or wear aftershave and to leave their phones in their cars. He asked them to undress in the kitchen, deposit their clothes outside, and warm up their hands with hot water. He did not ask them to wear condoms. He filmed the assaults while making demeaning comments about his wife in the background, or wrote obscene slurs onto her body. Some men gave the camera a thumbs-up. In court, Gisèle Pelicot said of the footage: “We see this drugged, mistreated woman, who is dead on her bed. The body is not cold, the body is warm. But I am as if I am dead… They see me as a rag doll, a garbage bag.”
[See also: Why Gisèle Pelicot is a hero]
Dominique Pelicot did not ask the men for money, despite financial troubles: just to video it. (This is, for Darian, “a final, perverse twist”.) He kept the footage in a folder titled “Abuse”. Police found over 20,000 photos and videos on his devices, including secret recordings of his daughters-in-law, and, in an album called “my daughter naked”, photos of Darian, posed unnaturally in her bed, in unfamiliar underwear. He posted naked composites of Darian and her mother online, captioned “the slut’s daughter”, words Darian cannot bring herself to repeat in her book. He confessed to the assaults on his wife but denied drugging or touching his daughter. (He has also since been linked through DNA to a 1999 attempted rape at knifepoint, which he admitted, and is under investigation for an unsolved murder of 1991.)
“My father drugged my mother and served her up to strangers to be raped,” Darian writes. “It should not be possible to string such words together, for the sentence that they form to make any sense.” She relates the facts of the case plainly and gradually, letting details unfold as the family discovered them, in the same factual, legalistic tone. She intersperses them with memories of her father barbecuing, driving, hugging his grandson, cuddling the dog. The emotional impact of the family’s discovery is beyond ordinary language: to capture it, Darian reaches for metaphor. Finding out about the abuse is like being hit by a bus, getting blown up by a mine, peering down a well, stumbling through a maze. The new knowledge is a crushing weight, a shadow, an abyss. She expresses the inexpressible physically – she screams, cries, collapses. In a moment of hysteria she hits her husband, an ambulance is called, and she is hospitalised. She feels detached from reality – she hears herself telling a nurse, “It’s the kind of thing that only happens in films.” At a meeting with a magistrate, she finds herself “in an ugly, jaundiced corridor. I feel like I’ve been cast in a low-budget police procedural.”
Her mother is composed. (“The two of us are very different,” Darian writes. “I’m an open book… She is like a mediaeval queen.”) We see how Gisèle Pelicot slowly cultivated her steely pursuit of justice – at first, she could not stop caring for her husband. She cannot accept that Darian also suffered his abuse. But Darian is angry, and her book is written in hot rage. She is angry at her father for dehumanising her mother, for leaving the family in ruins, for refusing to admit what Darian believes must be true – that she is also a victim. (In court, Darian shouted at her father’s continued denials: “You lie, you don’t have the courage to tell the truth! You will die alone in lies Dominique Pelicot!”) She is angry with herself for not spotting the signs. She is angry with her mother for not believing she too was abused. She is angry with the journalists who “dip into the trough with their speculations, extrapolations, and hunger for salacious detail, before stepping back, wiping their chins and congratulating themselves on their table manners. I had no idea a press card absolved its bearers from such a multitude of sins. These obscene scribblings have nothing in common with the writing that has kept me afloat.” Writing, she says, is a form of therapy, a way of processing incomprehensible events. Her memoir’s epigraph reads: “Once something has been written down there’s no escaping it.”
Darian’s memoir and the Pelicot trial draw our attention to the role of language – the names of individuals, the words we use to describe ourselves, the phrases that constitute a collective psychosexual vocabulary – in enacting and subverting male power over women. The Pelicot family discovered his dark side in transcripts and videos. “His vocabulary is crude, humiliating, demeaning… [his accomplices] speak in the same vulgar, offensive way,” Darian writes. “Who is this man who proclaimed a boundless admiration for his wife and yet talked about her in such degrading terms?” Media coverage is tainted by the same griminess. “The headlines, the photos, the captions, the choice of vocabulary [reveal] a sleazy curiosity and lewd delight, rendering any claim to professional ethics simply absurd.”
Names are an important means of resistance: Caroline Darian gave herself a new one, and took the name “Dad” away from her father. Gisèle Pelicot used her husband’s name to make his crimes public, and lives privately under her maiden name. The baldness of the words Dominique Pelicot and his accomplices used to describe their acts became useful, too: who can convincingly claim to believe Gisèle Pelicot knew of and consented to her own assaults, when her assailants met on the chatroom “without her knowledge”? What could her husband reasonably deny, when he kept the evidence in a folder called “abuse”?
But violence has little respect for language. At trial, a frequent refrain from defendants was “I am not a rapist”, even from those who accepted the facts: they had sex with an unconscious woman, who was incapable of agreeing to it. In these circumstances, what can such a declaration mean? One defendant, 43-year-old Simone Mekenese, insisted: “I’m not a rapist! People say that I’m a rapist, just because there is this word: ‘non-consent’.” After the media coverage, the hours in court, the unflinching testimony of Gisèle Pelicot, his entitlement remained unchanged. Her “non-consent” – her humanity, her autonomy – nothing more than just a word.
I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again
Caroline Darian
Bonnier Books, 224pp, £16.99
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[See also: Lessons from the afterlife]
This article appears in the 15 Jan 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Disruptors