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The defendant Valérie Bacot accompanied by family members on the way to the courtroom
Photo: JEFF PACHOUD / AFP
The 40-year-old French woman Valérie Bacot is on trial for killing her tormentor.
Her former stepfather and later husband had raped, beaten and forced her into prostitution for years.
Bacot writes about her act in her recently published book "Tout le monde savait" (Everyone knew it): "I had to end it."
At the start of the trial before the jury court of Chalon-sur-Saône in eastern France, Bacot reported on the "extreme hell" she had suffered since she was twelve.
It was then that her mother's partner started raping her.
Even after a prison sentence for the abuse, he continued.
At 17, Bacot became pregnant for the first time by the 25-year-old man and married him after her mother had thrown her out of the house.
Today she has four children from him.
"I always did what he told me," replied the defendant when the presiding judge Celine Therme asked whether she had felt love for her husband.
The alcoholic hit, kicked and choked Bacot and finally offered her to truck drivers in the family car for prostitution in order to earn money with her.
On a Sunday in March 2016, she said she couldn't take it anymore.
She took his pistol, with which he had threatened her many times, and killed him with a single shot in the neck.
As a justification, she said that she wanted to spare her 14-year-old daughter Karline the same fate.
Bacot faces life imprisonment and her lawyers are demanding acquittal.
Bacot had "experienced extreme violence for 25 years," said her lawyer Janine Bonaggiunta.
"That can drive a desperate woman to kill in order to survive." Almost 600,000 people have signed an online petition.
The title is "Freedom for Valérie Bacot!"
zob / AFP
