I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again: Turning Our Family Trauma of Sexual Assault and Chemical Submission into a Collective Fight

The daughter of Dominique Pelicot, whose 2024 trial in France made international news, debuts with a chilling memoir. Darian documents the year following the 2020 discovery by police that for a decade her father had drugged her mother Gisèle and raped her while she was unconscious, and invited more than 70 men from an online sex forum to also sexually assault her. Organized like a diary, the book’s earliest entry recounts Darian’s final communication from her father—an innocuous Facebook comment—the day before his arrest for “trying to film up women’s skirts.” The horrific extent of her father’s crime unfolds in Darian’s day-by-day account like a waking nightmare: the “over twenty-thousand pornographic photos and videos,” many of her mother, found on his hard drive; the grotesque new explanation for her mother’s “episodes of amnesia”; and the unearthing of naked photographs of Darian herself. Darian makes visceral her “crushing double burden” as child of both “victim” and “tormenter,” which strains her relationship with Gisèle, who struggles to accept that Darian might also have been drugged and raped by Pelicot. Writing that such “chemical submission” in the “familial sphere” is more widespread than many realize, Darian advocates for better care for survivors. This is a courageous effort to bring “unsayable” abuses to light. (Mar.)