French woman kills husband because he wanted to make her daughter prostitute
By Lokmat English Desk | Published: July 1, 2021 02:41 PM2021-07-01T14:41:44+5:302021-07-01T14:41:44+5:30
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A French mother of four was sentenced to one year in prison on Friday for killing her husband after decades of sexual, physical and psychological abuse starting when she was an adolescent.
The verdict allows her to walk free, as she has already served time in preventive detention. The case had drawn broad attention and support for the defendant amid a national reckoning with long-held taboos around domestic abuse.
Valerie Bacot, 40, has admitted to shooting Daniel Polette dead in 2016. Polette was her stepfather, who later married her and forced her into prostitution.
A jury in Chalon-sur-Saone, central France, found Bacot guilty of the murder. She was sentenced to one year in prison and a three-year suspended sentence.
The prosecutor had earlier requested that Bacot should not be sent to prison, saying he did not consider her a danger to society.Her story has moved campaigners against domestic violence, with more than 710,000 signing a petition for her release.
“I had to put an end to it,” Bacot wrote in a book published last month called Everybody Knew, adding: “I was afraid, all the time.”
Bacot was 12 when Polette, who was 25 years her senior, raped her for the first time. He was sent to prison, but after his release returned and resumed the serial rapes.
“He told my mother that he wouldn’t start again. But he did,” she told the court. At 17, Bacot became pregnant, was thrown out of the house by her alcoholic mother, and went to live with Polette.
“I wanted to keep my child. I had nobody. Where could I go?” she told the court.Polette, also a heavy drinker, became increasingly violent, attacking her with a hammer at one point.“At first he would slap me, later that became kicking, then punches and then choking,” she said, describing her life as an “extreme hell”.He did not allow her to work or use contraception. She had three other children
.Polette ordered her to work as a prostitute for truck drivers, using the back of a Peugeot people carrier, and gave her instructions through an earpiece he forced her to wear to make sure she complied with the demands of clients whom he charged between 20-50 euros ($24 – $59).
In March 2016, after Polette ordered Bacot to undergo yet another sexual humiliation by a client, she used the pistol that he kept in the car to kill him with a single bullet to the back of the neck while he was in the driver’s seat. Bacot hid Polette’s body in a forest with the help of two of her four children. In October 2017 she was arrested, confessed and one year later released on bail.