The following is an edited extract from I'll Never Call Him Dad Again by Caroline Darian, published by Allen and Unwin 

In November 2020, Caroline Darian received a call from the police. Her father was in police custody. The seizure of his computer equipment revealed the unthinkable: since 2013, he had drugged his wife before handing her over, in a state of unconsciousness, to men, from all ages and stages of life.

Here, with exceptional courage, Darian recounts the earth-shattering discovery that a loved one, her own father, was capable of the worst.

I drop Tom off at school, just in time. I give him a kiss and rush back home, make myself a coffee and log into work.

One meeting, then another. The faces change but there is no escaping the screen.

At 11am, my husband comes home. Paul works when the rest of us sleep. He sends a text to my father: 'I've just seen the route for next year's Tour de France. How about this as a new family goal: you and your grandson, on the slopes of Mont Ventoux on 7th July cheering them on? Up for it?' He makes himself a snack and goes off for a snooze.  

When he wakes up, he's missed two calls, both from landlines in the south of France. Two voicemails are waiting for him.

This is the tipping point. The moment when everything changed, like when a hospital calls you because your name is down as next-of-kin. As often as not, a life shattering moment has a voice, a face. You never forget the bearer of bad tidings. Pain engraves their appearance and the way they spoke deep in your memory. 

'This is the tipping point. The moment when everything changed, like when a hospital calls you because your name is down as next-of-kin,' Caroline Darian recounts

You always remember, down to the slightest detail, where you were and what you were doing just before. 

For me it came as a ricochet. My husband took the bullet first. A message from my mother: 'It's me. It's urgent. It's about Dominique. Call me. Please call me.'

Dominique, my father, weighs nearly 16 stone (101kg) and has difficulty breathing. Since COVID is still raging around us, Paul immediately assumes he's in the intensive care unit, struggling to draw oxygen through a tube. But that doesn't sit with the other message, which is from a police lieutenant in Carpentras, a town not far from my parents' house. 

Paul calls my mother back.

'What's the matter?'

'Dominique is going to prison. He was caught in a supermarket trying to film up women's skirts. Not once, but three times. The police held him in custody for 48 hours. 

'While they had him, they confiscated his phone, a bunch of SIM cards, his video camera and his PC. What they found... it's serious. Really serious.'

My mother called Paul. Not me. She couldn't bring herself to tell any of her children. But she knew she could count on Paul. She knew he could take it, no matter how bad the news. 

'The abuse of my mother has been going on for at least seven years,' Caroline writes. Her mother, Gisèle Pelicot, is pictured

They talk it through. Paul convinces her to call her three children, starting with me, knowing he would be by my side. 

Still not quite able to believe what's going on, Paul calls the number the police lieutenant had left. And our whole world comes tumbling down.

'We've found videos of your mother-in-law asleep, clearly drugged, with men abusing her. Sexually.'

He can't believe it. The words open a gulf, an abyss.

They drag Paul into another world, one of sordid crimes and lurid media coverage. A world that was foreign to us - unthinkable, even in the context of the lives we led before.

The lieutenant goes on, calmly delivering the facts in his possession. They pile up, an alien presence, a crushing weight we will have to carry for the rest of our lives. 

The abuse of my mother has been going on for at least seven years. The first images the enquiry has dug from my father's digital hoard date from September 2013. The number of men who have abused my mum is impossible to believe:

'The current count is 73. Right now, we've managed to identify 50 or so. The youngest is 22, the oldest is 71. They range across all classes and professions: students, pensioners, even a journalist.

'Your father-in-law organised the whole thing, taking photos and filming everything that took place. I have to tell you, the images are hard to stomach, even for us. And there's a lot we haven't gone through yet.'

Caroline's dad Dominique Pelicot was arrested after filming up girls' skirts in a supermarket. But the extent of his crimes were far worse 

The police have been working the case day and night for six weeks. They feared for my mother's life, being drugged so often and so deeply, given she's just short of 68. The lieutenant signs off with: 'You've got to look after her. She's going to need as much help as you can give.'

Paul focuses on a single goal: take what he has been told out of the house. He is determined to give me a few more hours before I, too am wrenched into this awful new world. With all my attention focused on a computer screen, I don't even notice him as he crosses the room and goes outside.

In his car, Paul calls his sister Veronique, Tom's godmother. He asks if she can come round to help that very evening. They agree on a plan that will keep me in the dark as long as possible. 

It's nearly 7pm when I escape the demands of my job and realise that my husband has brought my son back from school. I suggest getting a Japanese takeaway. Just as I'm heading out, the doorbell rings. It's Veronique, who slides in with her usual good-humoured smile. 

'I was in the neighbourhood.'

Tom rushes to her and she wraps him up in her arms.

I set off to the Japanese restaurant. As I'm driving, I call my mother but she brushes me off. I get the nagging feeling something is not quite right. 

Back with the takeaway, I place the bags of food triumphantly on the dining table. I hear my son laughing with his godmother. Nothing out of the ordinary, provided you don't know that ordinary is running out of time. 

In the kitchen, Paul has a solemn, serious look. He asks me to sit down.

My mobile phone rings. I see it's my mother and assume she has finally found the time to talk to me. Behind Paul,  the clock on the cooker is visible. It's 8.25pm.

Later on I learn that those who experience sudden trauma can often only recall a single, isolated detail - a smell, a noise, or a particular sensation - something infinitely small, which expands to take up all the available space.

For me, it's the clock on the cooker. Twenty-five minutes past eight, etched in stark white. These figures symbolise the threshold I'm about to cross. My name is Caroline Darian, and in a matter of seconds, my banal, contented, normal life will come to an end. 

I can still hear the hesitation in my mother's voice. She asks me if I'm safely home and if Paul is there with me. She insists that I have to be sitting down in a quiet spot before she can tell me what she has to say.

'Caro, your father was charged by police this morning. They took him away and he won't be coming home. He's going to prison.'

I start to tremble. What she is saying makes no sense.

'Your father has been drugging me with sleeping pills and tranquilizers.'

'Hang on, Mum. What are you saying?'

'There's more. Your father invited men to the house while I was unconscious in the bedroom. I've seen photos. I'm lying on the bed on my front and there are men doing things to me. Men I've never seen before. Different ones each time.'

I lose control. I start shouting, insulting my father. I want to break something - anything I can; everything if possible. 

'Caro, I'm telling you the truth. I had to look at the photos for the police. My heart almost stopped there and then. The lieutenant told me that there are videos too - lots of them - of the abuse. He asked me to look at one but I couldn't. Even a photo was far too much for me. The lieutenant understood. He said: 'I'm so sorry. What your husband has done is monstrous.'

She breaks down in tears. 

Paul hugs me. 

In my mind, images appear, merging into each other, each more appalling than the next: Mum lying on her bed, her eyes closed, her body paralysed, an unknown man looming over her. 

I can still see you behind the steering wheel of your black Renault 25, stuffed with bags and cases as we set off on holiday. You told jokes, put on Barry White and sung along, your head swaying along with the beat, just as excited as us, the kids in the back seat. A happy memory that has just shattered, replaced by an image of a man who conducts secret orgies and lives a constant lie. When Mum tells me about your last breakfast together, what lingers is the fact that it was so ordinary. What depths of dishonesty does it take to have maintained, all these years, the tranquil illusion that everything was normal? 

Mum hangs up. She has other calls to make – first David, my elder brother, and then Florian, the youngest of her three children.

I collapse. Crushed by what I’ve heard, I cling to my husband. I can barely breathe.

My father drugged my mother and served her up to strangers to be raped. It should not be possible to string such words together, for the sentence that they form to make any sense. The very idea is so steeped in violence it is almost impossible to contemplate – like a knife so sharp that the gleam of the blade blinds you, its edge so keen that you don’t immediately realise how deep it cuts. 

What if Mum had overdosed? What if she had never woken up? Almost eight years have gone by since Mum retired and they moved to the rural backwaters of Provence. Eight years of unending horror.

And I was blind to it all. I suspected nothing. Neither did she. There was not even the slightest hint of what was going on.

The drugs my father slipped her – timed and dosed with precision – turned my mum into a blank slate. I think back to the phone calls when she had seemed so distracted, lost in her mind. We – her three children, all of us living 700 kilometres away – began to worry. What else could it be, but the onset of Alzheimer’s? My father pooh-poohed us. He would say: ‘You know your mother; she has no idea how to pace herself, she’s always on the go. She manages her stress by rushing from one thing to the next.’

In 2017, we talked Mum into an appointment with a neurologist in Carpentras, the nearest big town. He talked about transient global amnesia – a sort of black hole that opens up momentarily, drawing in all memories, only to vanish as mysteriously as it came. A transient state that does no lasting damage. What we didn’t realise – although if we’d thought to ask, any specialist could have confirmed it – was that this kind of thing never happens several times in a row.

In late 2018, my uncle, a retired GP, suggested some kind of balancing mechanism was at play: He told her: ‘You’re like a vacuum cleaner whose bag is full. It can’t suck in any more so it stops working to avoid burning out. When you’ve had too much, you disconnect and that way you recover your strength, ready to bounce back.’ We were all convinced he was right. Mum had a brain scan done all the same, but of course it revealed nothing. Needless to say, it never occurred to us to ask for a drug test.

But Mum got more and more anxious as time went by, and the episodes of amnesia piled up. She couldn’t sleep, began to lose her hair and her weight plummeted – ten kilos dropped off her in less than eight years. She was haunted by the thought that she might have a stroke out of the blue, particularly when she took the long train journey to visit me in Paris or found herself in charge of looking after her grandchildren.

Worried about the potential risk she might pose, she gradually stopped driving. Little by little, she was losing her autonomy.

In 2019, she tried another neurologist, this time in Cavaillon, another sizeable town in the region. He told her she was simply prone to anxiety. He prescribed melatonin to help her sleep more soundly…

I have to go to her. I can’t leave her isolated in a distant corner of the country, all alone in the house that was the scene of such atrocities.

Paul steps up. Of course I have to go. He’ll take charge, make it happen.

I have to get outside. I have to call my brothers. When David picks up, I can tell by the tone of his voice that he still doesn’t know. I beat Mum to him, and I instantly regret it, but I can’t hold back now.

David listens in silence. Afterwards, it takes him ten seconds to digest what he has heard and find his voice.

‘Come on – this can’t be true. Caro, is this your idea of a joke?’

He interrogates me, but I don’t have all the answers. I wish I was able to lead him to a calmer place, because I can sense him backing away. He hangs up, intent on calling Mum.

When I finally reach Florian, the youngest of us, he has already heard from my mother. He’s in shock.

‘How could he do such a thing to Mum? And to us? Did he ever think about us?’

Like a child, all I can do is cry.