The trial of Valérie Bacot shocked France: she killed her violent husband and was released

Valerie Bacot, a 40-year-old Frenchwoman, was sentenced a few days ago to a symbolic four-year prison sentence – three of which was suspended – for killing her violent husband, who also forced her into prostitution. The woman was released because she had already served one year in prison.

The corte of Saône-et-Loire, in France, tried her for having killed her husband Daniel Polette, 61, with a bullet in the head on March 13, 2016. There, for more than two hours, the woman told in tears the hell she lived for decades.

Valérie’s tragic story began at the age of 12, when she was raped by her stepfather, Polette, who would later become her partner and father of her four children. She was beaten by him and forced into prostitution.

“I always found something … At first it was slapping, then it turned into kicking and punching and strangling me. Over time there were threats with a weapon“said the woman.

On March 13, 2016, Valérie Bacot, then aged 35, kills Daniel. With the help of two of her children, she buried her body in a forest, but was reported and arrested in October 2017. She immediately confessed and explained her act for a 25-year ordeal.

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Polette was convicted and jailed in 1995 for sexually abusing a minor, but the court allowed him to return to the family home after his release from prison. “It all started again as before,” says Bacot in a book he published last May.

“I just wanted to protect myself. Protect my life, the life of my children. In my eyes nothing else mattered “, he writes in his autobiography “Everyone Knew” (“Everyone knew”). The title refers to the fact that although everyone knows he abused her, his mother allowed him to return to the house, where the rapes continued. She even said her mother was taking her to jail to visit her attacker.

She told that killing Polette was the only way to protect herself and her children from a man who had made her life “hell” since she had been sexually assaulted by him, until the day she killed him. “I am not just a victim. I killed him; it’s normal that they punish me. But if my sentence is severe, it will mean to me that he had the right to behave like he behaved towards me, ”the published woman said. CNN.

Over twenty years of violence and abuse

At 17, the woman became pregnant, her mother kicked her out of the house, and her abuser took her to live with him. According to his account, he drank a lot of alcohol and was increasingly violent. For one Christmas, he hit her with a hammer because a garland he bought didn’t work. On another occasion, already pregnant, he strangled her until she passed out, the woman said.

To this daily physical violence, “usual”, according to Bacot, was added prostitution: her husband forced her to work in his car, while giving her “instructions” through a helmet to better satisfy the clients.

The woman assured that she wanted to “run away a thousand times”, but was afraid of constant threats from her, that he had a gun. The limit was due to the fear that the same would happen to her daughter Karline, after confessing at 14 that her father had asked her “how she was sexually”.

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This March 13, with the gun that her husband had in the car, she shot him in the neck. It was not a question of self-defense, since the man was driving and had his back turned, but his lawyers explain his act by “the extreme violence she suffered for 25 years and the fear that it will happen again against her own daughter.”

The prosecutor had requested a five-year sentence, four of which were suspended, and had called Bacot a “victim” for having been raped, beaten and prostituted for years by her husband. Along the same lines, the prosecutor said, asking for leniency for the accused.

“Valérie Bacot could not take the lives of those who terrorized her”But it is necessary “to state the sentence without imprisoning it”, he declared, and also underlined that his four children “needed their mother”.

After hearing her case, more than 700,000 people signed a petition on their behalf, demanding the woman’s release.

ag / ds