Caroline Darian was at home in Paris when she received a call from her mother, Gisèle Pelicot, telling her that her husband and Darian’s father, Dominique, had been arrested. The clock above the cooker had just struck 8:25 pm. Darian had been surveying the Japanese takeaway she’d brought home for dinner. It was November 20 2020.
Gisèle explained that before she and her husband set off for the police station in Mazan, Provence, that morning, they had shared an ordinary breakfast like any other. When, after a period in the waiting area, a young police officer asked Gisèle to follow him into a meeting room, she thought she would be joining her husband.
Instead, she sat alone with the officer while he showed her the first handful of the more than 20,000 photographs and videos seized from her husband’s computer. They showed Gisèle being sexually abused by Dominique and around 80 strangers while she was – to use her daughter’s words – “under chemical submission”.
