Pelicot daughter launches campaign to help drugged assault victims come forward

Caroline Darian, 47, switched on the television across France on a Monday morning in late September and launched a campaign that would reach millions. Her mother's face appeared in the spots—Gisèle Pelicot, 73, the woman who had become a symbol of defiance when she refused to hide her own assault. The message was simple but radical: if you think you were drugged and sexually assaulted, come forward. Even if you remember nothing.

This was not abstract advocacy. Darian herself believed she had been drugged and assaulted by her father, Dominique Pelicot, the same man who had spent nearly a decade systematically drugging her mother, raping her while she lay unconscious, and inviting strangers into their home in the village of Mazan—twenty miles from Avignon—to do the same. The trial two years earlier had shocked the world. Dominique Pelicot and fifty other men were convicted. Gisèle Pelicot had chosen to waive her anonymity, to sit in open court, to refuse the shame that society had tried to place on her shoulders. "Shame sticks to you, it sticks to your skin," she would later write. "And that shame is a double sentence, it's a suffering you inflict on yourself."

The campaign Darian launched on Monday reached across television networks, social media, newspapers, and posters. It carried a single crucial fact: in seventy-five percent of drug-facilitated sexual assault cases, the perpetrator is someone the victim knows—a relative, a friend, someone trusted. The spots directed people to the Centre of Excellence on Substance-Facilitated Assaults, or CRAFS, attached to the Paris university hospital service. There, specialists could explain what evidence might exist, how it could be found, what traces might remain even when memory had been stolen.

Darian had founded an organization called Mendorspas—Don't Put Me to Sleep—years earlier, when almost no one was listening. She had watched the Mazan trial unfold and understood that her mother's courage had opened a door. "When you launch a campaign of this scale, having my mother's backing sends a really powerful message," Darian said. "It's also a message of hope for victims, showing that it is possible to get back on your feet." She spoke to the practical reality that haunted so many survivors: the fear that without memory, without the ability to recount what happened, no one would believe them, no police would listen, no court would act. "It's not because someone doesn't remember that there aren't traces or tests possible," she told Le Parisien. "Our aim is that these women can take back their own stories, so they no longer feel ashamed or afraid of not being heard by the police, not believed by the legal system and not supported by their family or those close to them."

The scale of what Darian had organized was itself unprecedented. Five years earlier, drug-facilitated sexual assault was not recognized as a public health concern at all. Only a small circle of doctors knew the term. The Mazan trial had changed that calculus entirely, drawing global attention to a crime that had been happening in silence for decades. After Gisèle Pelicot published her book, A Hymn to Life: Shame Has to Change Sides, earlier that year, she had become not just a survivor but a voice for transformation. The campaign now carried her message forward into homes across France.

The timing was significant. Just weeks before the campaign launched, another case had come to light: a man in his sixties had pleaded guilty to drugging and raping his wife over two decades, inviting strangers to abuse her as well. It was the latest in a string of similar crimes that had begun surfacing after the Mazan verdict—cases that might have remained hidden forever had Gisèle Pelicot not insisted on her right to be seen, to be heard, to refuse the role of silent victim. Darian understood the work ahead. "We're getting somewhere but the fight is far from over," she said. "The message we want to send is that if you have a doubt, you need to look into it. Just because you cannot remember something, doesn't mean there are no traces of it." The campaign was an invitation to survivors to reclaim their own stories, to understand that forgetting was not the same as it never happening, and that help existed.