Father's assaults shatter family, spur action
That began to change in 2020, when French police arrested pensioner Dominique Pelicot for 'trying to film up womens' skirts.' After confiscating Pelicot's phone and other electronic devices, officers found he had been drugging and raping his wife Gisèle Pelicot for years, filming and photographing all the while. What's more, he had 'served her up to strangers to be raped,' again and again.
As their daughter and first-time author Caroline Darian writes of receiving this news, 'It should not be possible to string such words together, for the sentence that they form to make any sense. The very idea is so steeped in violence it is almost impossible to contemplate — like a knife so sharp that the gleam of the blade blinds you, its edge so keen that you don't immediately realise how deep it cuts.'
I'll Never Call Him Dad Again
With the force of a cleaver, the discovery of Dominique's brutality severs his family's life in two: before, when 'life was so simple… even… banal,' is lopped off and replaced by, after, 'a crushing weight we will have to carry for the rest of our lives.'
This catastrophe compels Dominique's family members to re-evaluate the past and to wrestle with challenging questions including, writes Darian, 'How can I reconcile the anger and shame I feel with the stubborn empathy that comes with being someone's child?'
Noting that her mother had often 'seemed… lost in her mind,' Darian, her husband and her two brothers suspected Alzheimer's. Gisèle consulted a neurologist in 2017, followed by having a brain scan, but neither proved helpful.
Gisèle grew anxious and experienced 'episodes of amnesia… She couldn't sleep, began to lose her hair, and her weight plummeted.' Sometimes she 'collapsed like a rag doll.'
In 2019 another neurologist proclaimed Gisèle 'simply prone to anxiety (and) prescribed melatonin to help her sleep more soundly.'
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The revelation of Dominique's crimes explains Gisèle's symptoms and the reason he always dismissed their children's concerns, blamed his wife for 'burn(ing) the candle at both ends,' or even rebuked family members for wearing her out before sending her home so that he and the rapists he recruited online could further assault the woman he persists in calling 'the love of my life.' Their horrific acts are inconceivable, yet Darian berates herself for being 'blind to it all.'
As police unearth more details, Darian and her family learn that the sordid nightmare they now live in contains many rooms. One of the hardest for Darian to enter contains evidence that her father preyed upon her too: 'I start to shiver, my vision is disturbed by a host of tiny starbursts, my ears start ringing, and I jerk back. How did he manage to take my photo in the middle of the night without waking me up? Where did the underwear come from, as I'm sure it's not mine? Did he drug me?… Did he — I can't keep the unthinkable at bay — abuse me?'
To paraphrase writer Kenji Miyazawa, Caroline Darian uses pain to fuel her journey. Joining forces with others working to end violence against women, she advocates for vastly improved and expanded supports for victims, helps create a safe house, shuts down the coco.fr website her father used to recruit rapists, launches the 'Stop Chemical Submission (#MendorsPas): Don't Put Me Under' movement and writes her book 'to sound the alarm about the prevalence of chemical submission in France and around the world.'
It's a pity the copy editing is inconsistent throughout the text and startlingly poor in the preface's first sentence, where the word 'also' has no business being, yet the flaws do not detract from the power of this gripping, heartrending, consciousness-raising 'chronicle of horror and survival.'
Jess Woolford is a writer and sexual assault survivor in perpetual recovery from misogyny.
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