PARIS – A woman is on trial for the murder of her stepfather-turned-husband who she says raped her repeatedly from the age of 12, forced her into marriage and to bear four children, and later pimped her into prostitution out of the back of the family car.
It’s a case that has horrified France and captured national media attention for the shocking levels of violence and abuse that Valérie Bacot, 40, says she endured at the hands of Daniel Polette.
Videos by VICE
This week Bacot is appearing at Chalon-sur-Saone courthouse in Burgundy, where for five days she will relive the 25 years she lived in terror as a victim of rape, physical abuse and pyschological torture – and the moment she shot Polette in the back of the head on the 13th of March, 2016.
It’s not the first time Bacot will have shared with the world the disturbing details of her private hell: Last month she published her memoir Everybody Knew, in advance of her trial.
In the book Bacot writes that when she was 12, Polette, a truck driver 25 years her senior, entered her life as her mother’s boyfriend. Soon after, he repeatedly raped her and would be convicted of sexual assault against a minor in 1996, for which he would spend two and a half years in jail. But not long after his release, Polette would return to Bacot’s mother, who was also abusive. At 17, Bacot became pregnant. Irate, her mother kicked her out of the house, Bacot says, leaving her with what she felt was no other choice but to turn towards her abuser. Over the years Bacot had four children fathered by Polette.
Bacot lived her life in fear of Polette, who regularly slapped, kicked, punched and choked her, Bacot says. He once broke her nose, hit her over the head with a hammer, and kept her as a prisoner in their home, forbidding her from speaking with anyone.
Then, one day, he decided to pimp his wife out as a prostitute to make extra money, under the alias “Adeline,” she told French newspaper Le Parisien in an interview last month before the trial began.
“Initially, he was showing me porn videos on the internet. He made me sit on his lap, like when I was little. He was like, ‘See, this is how they make money, this is how it should be done.’”
Polette took care of outfitting the family van, finding the clients and setting up appointments. He would watch in hiding and give her instructions through an earpiece. He had his name “Dany” tattooed on her genitals, which Bacot says was a grotesque act of attempting to mark his territory.
But on the night of the 13th of March five years ago, one of her clients, a regular, demanded a sex act that she didn’t want to do, Bacot says.
“I refused a particular sexual practice. The client was not happy, he forced me. When he left, I was bleeding,” she told Le Parisien.
Polette was livid and said she was going to pay. Her mind swirled, and she thought back to what her daughter, 14 at the time, had told her the day before; that her father had asked about her sexual development, and if she was menstruating yet. Bacot wrote in her book that she worried he was getting ready to pimp out their daughter as well.
So she took the revolver he kept in the car, and in point blank range, shot him in the back of the neck.
“I just remember closing my eyes, that smell and the light,” Bacot told the court on the opening day of the trial Monday, as reported by French daily Le Figaro.
With her two sons and her daughter’s then-boyfriend, Bacot buried the body, which was later recovered.
Prosecutors will try to show throughout the week that the shooting was premeditated. On the day of the shooting Bacot and her daughter’s then-boyfriend slipped a sleeping pill in Polette’s coffee, prosecutors say. Bacot and the ex-boyfriend told the court it purely was to calm him down. Bacot’s lawyers, will try to convince the court that the shooting was a matter of survival, given the extreme levels of abuse she endured. Bacot faces a life sentence if convicted.
Meanwhile more than 622,000 people have signed an online petition on Change.org, “Freedom for Valérie Bacot,” calling for charges to be dropped. A similar wave of public support helped call attention to Jacqueline Sauvage, another victim of extreme domestic violence who was given a presidential pardon in 2016 after killing her abusive husband of 47 years. Lawyers Janine Bonaggiunta and Nathalie Tomasini representing Bacot also defended Sauvage.
On Tuesday, Bacot’s children testified on behalf of their mother, describing life with their abusive father.
“For no reason we could take [a hit]. He was always violent. At first, I thought it was like that in all families. We always lived in the pain of the beatings that we suffered,” the eldest son, identified by an alias in court reports, told the court, according to live tweets from LCI reporter Thibault Malandrin.
“We often heard our mother screaming. We played in our room but we could hear the beatings. He drank regularly when he came home from work.”
The high profile case also raises questions about the role police failed to play in helping to protect Bacot and her children. Because Bacot was under constant surveillance from her abuser, her children went to police asking for help, she says, but two times were turned away and not taken seriously.
On Tuesday, when asked how he felt about having been complicit in burying his dead father, the son said: “At the time, we had only one fear. And that was that he would get up ”.
The trial is expected to conclude this week.
More
From VICE
-
Gisele Pelicot. Photo by Alain ROBERT/SIPA/Shutterstock -
-
-
