The portrait
Article reserved for subscribers
Since discovering that her father drugged and raped her mother for years, this communications executive has been leading a campaign to combat “chemical submission.”
She describes her father as “the biggest sexual predator of the last twenty years.” Caroline Darian believed until the age of 42 that her family was “without history” et “Union”. The switch happened during a phone conversation on November 2, 2020, when her mother called to tell her, in a quavering voice, that her father had just been taken into custody after being caught filming up skirts in a supermarket near Carpentras. When the police searched their home, they seized computers and digital media, containing dozens of videos of strangers raping her mother, who was unconscious in her bed. “Your father drugged me with sleeping pills and anti-anxiety drugs,” she explains. Her parents left the Paris region a decade ago, officially to enjoy a retirement in sunny Vaucluse. In retrospect, their daughter thinks, this move mostly facilitated such a horror scenario. As she hangs up, she thinks back to all the times she was alarmed by her mother’s absences, her insomnia, her weight loss and hair loss, to the point of suspecting she had Alzheimer’s. So that was it.
“It’s like a bomb went off in my living room,” says this executive in the communications department of a CAC 40 group, when she receives us at her home. Her single-storey house is nestled on the edge of the forest, in the Yvelines. Caroline Darian tells you