“My father should die in prison”

It was 20:25 on a Monday evening in November 2020 when Caroline Darian received a call that changed everything.

On the other end of the phone was her mother, Giselle Bellicot.

“She announced to me that she had discovered that morning that (my father) Dominic had been drugging her for about 10 years so that different men could rape her,” Darian recalls in an exclusive interview with Emma Barnett, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“At that moment, I lost what was normal in my life,” says Darian, now 46.

“I remember screaming and crying, and even insulting him,” she says. “It was like an earthquake. A tsunami.”

Dominique Bellicot was sentenced to 20 years in prison at the end of a landmark three-and-a-half-month trial in December.

More than four years later, Darian says her father “should die in prison.”

Fifty men recruited online by Dominique Bellicot to rape and sexually assault his unconscious wife Giselle are also sent to prison.

Police arrested him after he dressed upskirt in a supermarket, prompting investigators to look at him more closely. On the seemingly innocuous retired grandfather's laptop and phones, they found thousands of videos and photos of his wife, Giselle, clearly unconscious, being raped by strangers.

As well as pushing issues of rape and sexual violence into the spotlight, the trial also highlighted the little-known issue of chemical supply – drug-facilitated assault.

Caroline Darian has made it her life's struggle to fight chemical subjugation, which is believed to be under-reported as the majority of victims do not remember any assaults and may not even realize they have been drugged.

In the days after Gisèle's fateful phone call, Darian and her two brothers, Florian and David, traveled to the south of France where their parents were living to support their mother while she absorbed the news that, as Darian now says, her husband was “one of the worst sexual predators of the last 20 or 30 years.”

Soon after, Darian herself is called by the police – and her world is shattered once again.

She was shown two pictures they found on her father's laptop. They showed an unconscious woman lying on a bed, wearing only a shirt and underwear.

At first, she couldn't tell that the woman was her. “I experienced the impact of dissociation,” she says. “I had difficulties identifying myself from the beginning.”

“Then the police officer said, 'Look, you have the same brown mark on your cheek…it's you.' “I looked at those two pictures differently then… I was lying on my left side like my mother in all her pictures.”

Darian says she is convinced her father also abused and raped her, something he has always denied, although he has given conflicting explanations for the photos.

“I know he drugged me, possibly because of the sexual assault,” she says. “But I have no proof.”

Unlike her mother's case, there is no evidence of what Bellicott did to Darian.

“And this is the case with the number of victims? They are not believed because there is no evidence. They are not listened to, and they are not supported,” she says.

Shortly after her father's crimes came to light, Darian wrote a book.

I'll Never Call Him Daddy Again explores her family's trauma.

He also delves into the issue of chemical introduction, whereby the medications used typically come “from the family medicine cabinet.”

“Painkillers and tranquilizers. They're medications,” Darian says. As is the case with nearly half of victims of chemical subjugation, she knew her attacker: the danger, she says, “comes from within.”

She says that in the shock of discovering that she had been raped more than 200 times by different people, her mother Giselle found it difficult to accept that her husband might have assaulted their daughter as well.

“For a mother, it's difficult to combine it all at once,” she says.

However, when Giselle decided to open the trial to the public and the media to expose what had happened to her at the hands of her husband and dozens of men, mother and daughter agreed: “I knew we had been through something… It was terrible, but we had to go through it with dignity and strength.”

Now, Darianne needs to understand how to live as both the daughter of the executioner and the victim, which she calls “a terrible burden.”

She is now unable to think about her childhood with the man she calls Dominic, and only occasionally falls back into the habit of referring to him as her father.

“When I look back, I don't really remember the father I thought I was. I look straight at the criminal, the sexual criminal,” she says.

“But I have his DNA, and the main reason I care so much about the invisible victims is also for me a way to put real distance with this man,” she told Emma Barnett. “I'm very different from Dominic.”

Darian adds that she does not know whether her father was a “monster” as some described him. “He knew what he did, and he's not sick,” she says.

“He's a dangerous man. There's no way out of him. There's no way out.”

It will be years before Dominic Bellicot, 72, is eligible for parole, so he will likely never see his family again.

Meanwhile, the Balikut family rebuilds itself. Darian said Giselle was exhausted from the trial, but “she's also recovering…she's doing well.”

As for Darian, the only question that matters to her now is raising awareness about chemical exposure – and better educating children about sexual assault.

She draws strength from her husband, her brothers and her 10-year-old son, “her beautiful son,” she says, smiling and with affection in her voice.

Darian says the events that happened that November day made her who she is today.

Now, this woman, whose life was destroyed by the tsunami one November night, is just trying to look forward.

You can watch the full interview 'The Bellicoot Trial – The Daughter's Story' on Monday at 7pm on BBC2 or on iPlayer. If you have been affected by some of the issues raised in this film, details of help and support are available at bbc.co.uk/actionline.