The shame migrated from victims to the perpetrators, made visible before families and children.
En el sur de Francia, una familia fue destruida desde adentro durante más de ocho años por quien debía protegerla: un padre que drogó sistemáticamente a su esposa para que decenas de hombres la agredieran, mientras filmaba y distribuía las imágenes. El juicio de 2024 produjo cincuenta condenas, pero fue la hija, Caroline Darian, quien convirtió ese horror en testimonio literario, reclamando para las víctimas la autoridad narrativa que les fue arrebatada. Su libro no es solo una memoria personal, sino un acto de resistencia pública contra el silencio que rodea la sumisión química y la violencia sexual.
- Durante más de ocho años, Gisèle fue drogada en su propio hogar y agredida por aproximadamente setenta hombres, sin que pudiera recordar ni resistir lo que le hacían.
- El esquema solo se descubrió por casualidad en 2024, cuando Dominique fue sorprendido filmando bajo la falda de una desconocida, lo que desató una investigación que reveló el horror sistemático.
- Gisèle exigió que el juicio fuera público y transmitido a los medios, convirtiendo la sala del tribunal en un espacio donde la vergüenza migrara de las víctimas a los perpetradores.
- El juicio concluyó con cincuenta condenas y veinte años de prisión para Dominique, pero críticos y observadores cuestionan si esa cifra puede siquiera aproximarse a la magnitud del daño causado.
- Caroline Darian publicó su testimonio en 2025 para educar sobre la sumisión química, una forma de violencia que opera en la sombra y deja a las víctimas sin recuerdos ni palabras para nombrarse a sí mismas como tales.
Un padre francés llamado Dominique pasó más de ocho años drogando a su esposa Gisèle hasta dejarla inconsciente, permitiendo que decenas de hombres la agredieran sexualmente mientras él filmaba y distribuía el material en línea. El esquema no fue descubierto por una denuncia directa, sino por un incidente aparentemente menor: Dominique fue sorprendido filmando bajo la falda de una mujer desconocida. La investigación que siguió reveló no solo la victimización sistemática de Gisèle, sino también la fotografía no consentida de su hija Caroline y sus nueras.
El juicio, celebrado en Francia a finales de 2024, se convirtió en un acontecimiento público por decisión de la propia Gisèle, quien pidió que los medios tuvieran acceso a las audiencias. Quería que los agresores fueran visibles ante sus familias y ante la sociedad. El resultado fueron cincuenta condenas, con penas de entre tres y quince años para los participantes, y veinte años de prisión para Dominique. Aun así, muchos observadores señalaron que ninguna cifra puede cuantificar el daño infligido durante casi una década a múltiples mujeres.
Caroline Peyronnet, bajo el seudónimo Caroline Darian, publicó en 2025 el libro Y dejé de llamarte papá, editado por Seix Barral con traducción de Lola Bermúdez y Lydia Vázquez. La obra combina crónica, diario y reportaje, y funciona simultáneamente como duelo personal y denuncia pública. Caroline escribe sobre el padre que conoció —discreto, aparentemente amoroso— y sobre la imposibilidad de reconciliar esa imagen con lo que hizo.
El libro tiene también una dimensión pedagógica: visibilizar la sumisión química como táctica de violencia que elimina la voluntad de las víctimas y les impide incluso reconocerse como tales. Caroline concluye su testimonio con incertidumbre sobre el futuro, pero con una certeza: su compromiso con la causa de las mujeres apenas comienza. Al escribir, transforma el trauma familiar en conocimiento colectivo, y devuelve a las víctimas la única cosa que nadie pudo drogar ni filmar: su propia voz.
A French father, Dominique, spent more than eight years methodically drugging his wife, Gisèle, into unconsciousness so that dozens of men could assault her while he filmed the attacks and distributed them online. The scheme unraveled in 2024 when he was caught filming under a woman's skirt—a discovery that triggered an investigation revealing not just his wife's systematic victimization, but also the non-consensual photographing of his daughter Caroline and his daughters-in-law. The case shocked France and became the subject of a trial that concluded in December 2024 with fifty convictions. Dominique himself received twenty years in prison, though observers have questioned whether even that sentence adequately reflects the calculated psychological perversion required to orchestrate such sustained abuse.
Caroline Peyronnet, writing under the pseudonym Caroline Darian, has now published a testimony called Y dejé de llamarte papá (I Stopped Calling You Father), released by Seix Barral in 2025 with a translation by Lola Bermúdez and Lydia Vázquez. The book is not a conventional memoir. Instead, it weaves together elements of chronicle, diary, and investigative reporting—a formal hybridity that gives the work its particular power. What emerges is both a personal reckoning and a public indictment, a daughter's attempt to reclaim narrative authority over a family story that was never hers to control.
The mechanics of what happened are almost clinical in their deliberation. Chemical submission—the practice of drugging victims to alter their consciousness, diminish their resistance, or eliminate their will entirely—rendered Gisèle unable to consent or refuse. Over those eight years, she was assaulted by approximately seventy men, each act documented and shared. The violation was total: not only of her body, but of her image, her privacy, her very capacity to say no. When the trial began in early September 2024, Gisèle made an unusual request: that the proceedings be open to the media. She wanted the shame to migrate from the victims to the perpetrators, to make the men who had assaulted her face their families, their partners, their children as the criminals they were.
The trial delivered fifty guilty verdicts. Sentences ranged from three to fifteen years for the men who participated in the assaults. Dominique, as the architect of the scheme, received twenty years. Yet there is something inadequate about even that number when one considers what psychologists might diagnose as a profound dissociation of personality coupled with voyeuristic disorder—a pathology so severe that it drove him to transgress every boundary of morality and family trust. The sentence feels like an attempt to quantify something that may be fundamentally unquantifiable: the damage done to multiple women over nearly a decade.
Caroline's testimony serves a dual purpose. On one level, it is deeply personal—a daughter processing the betrayal of a father who was, by all appearances, gentle, discreet, and loving. On another level, it is a public education. The book aims to raise awareness about chemical submission in France, a tactic that strips victims of agency and leaves them with no memory of what was done to them. It is a form of violence that operates in shadow, that leaves no visible mark, that makes it nearly impossible for victims to even understand themselves as victims.
The act of writing itself becomes therapeutic and political. Caroline writes near the end of her testimony: she is using words as a form of healing, trying to chart a path forward from the wreckage. She acknowledges uncertainty about what will come from publishing her story, but she is clear that her commitment to the cause of women has only begun. In this, she echoes what theorists like Paul Ricœur have argued—that identity is constructed through narrative, that the stories we tell about ourselves are how we come to understand who we are. And as Leonor Arfuch has noted, autobiography is never purely private; it is always also a social practice, a way of turning individual trauma into collective knowledge.
The trial's decision to open its proceedings to the public was itself an act of resistance against the silence that typically surrounds sexual violence. By making the perpetrators visible, by forcing them to answer in front of cameras and journalists, the court created space for a different kind of reckoning. Caroline's book extends that work into the realm of literature and testimony, transforming a family's devastation into a document that might help others recognize the signs of chemical submission, might help shift how society understands consent, might help ensure that shame lands where it belongs.
Citas Notables
The therapy through words is also a way to heal my wounds and see the best path forward. I don't yet know what awaits me by publishing this story, but I am convinced my commitment to the cause of women has only just begun.— Caroline Peyronnet, in her testimony
The shame should stop falling on the victims and instead fall on the aggressors.— Gisèle, requesting the trial be open to media
La Conversación del Hearth Otra perspectiva de la historia
Why does it matter that this trial was public, that the media was allowed in?
Because sexual violence thrives in silence. When perpetrators can hide, when victims carry the shame alone, the cycle continues. By making the men face their families, their employers, their communities as criminals, the trial said: this is not a private family matter. This is a crime. This is everyone's problem.
The father seems almost incomprehensibly cruel. How does a daughter process that?
She doesn't, not fully. But she writes. Writing becomes a way to reclaim the narrative—to say, I am not defined by what was done to me or my family. I am the one telling this story now. That's not healing, exactly. It's survival.
Chemical submission is less visible than other forms of assault. Why is that dangerous?
Because victims often have no memory of what happened. They can't testify to their own experience. They're left with gaps, with confusion, with a body that was violated but a mind that has no record of it. It's a perfect crime in that sense—except it's not perfect, because the perpetrator documents it.
Fifty men were convicted. Does that number surprise you?
It confirms something we often don't want to admit: that sexual violence requires participation. It's not one man acting alone. It's a network of men who chose to show up, who chose to participate. That's the real horror—not the exception, but the willingness of so many to participate.
What does Caroline's book do that the trial couldn't?
The trial establishes guilt and assigns punishment. The book establishes meaning. It asks: what does this tell us about power, about family, about the ways we fail to protect each other? It turns a case into a mirror.