A few days after Gisele’s fateful phone call, Caroline Darien and her brothers, Florian and David, traveled to the south of France, where their parents lived, to support their mother when she learned the news: Darien As she says now, her husband was “one of the worst sex offenders of the last 20 to 30 years.”
Shortly after, Darian herself was called to the police, and her world came crashing down once again.
She was shown two photos she had found on her father’s laptop. They showed a woman unconscious on a bed wearing only a T-shirt and underwear.
At first, she didn’t recognize the woman. “I was living under the influence of dissociation. I had difficulty recognizing myself from the beginning,” she says.
“Then the police officer said, ‘Look, you have that same brown mark on your cheek…that’s you.’ That’s when I saw those two photos in a different way. ..In every picture of my mother, I was lying on my left side, just like her.”
Darian said she believed her father also abused and raped her. Her father has always denied the photo, although he has given contradictory explanations.
“I know he drugged me, probably for sexual abuse, but I have no proof,” she says.
Unlike the mother’s case, there is no evidence of what Pericot did to Darian.
“So how many victims do that? They don’t believe it because they don’t have evidence. They don’t get listened to, they don’t get support,” she says.
Darian wrote the book shortly after his father’s crimes were revealed.
“I Don’t Call You Dad Anymore” explores family trauma.
It also delves deeper into the issue of chemical submissions where commonly used drugs are “from the family medicine cabinet.”
“Analgesics, sedatives. It’s medicine,” Darian said. Like nearly half of all victims of chemical submission, she knew her abuser. The danger, she says, “comes from within.”
Her mother, Gisele, said that amid the trauma of learning that she had been raped more than 200 times by various people, she found it difficult to accept that her husband may have also assaulted her daughter.
“It’s hard for mothers to integrate all of these things at once,” she says.
But when Gisele decided to open the trial to the public and media to expose what her husband and dozens of men had done to her, mother and daughter agreed. “We knew we were going through something…” It was scary, but we had to get through it with dignity and strength. ”
