Valérie Bacot, in 2019.
On March 13, 2016, Valérie Bacot said enough to the loop of violence, sexual and psychological abuse to which the first her stepfather and then her husband, as well as a pimp and always an abuser, had subjected her. That night, at some point on a road in Saône-et-Loire, in central France, after a new threat for not having submitted to the demands of one of the clients with whom he forced her to prostitute herself, and fearing that soon began to abuse her 14-year-old daughter as well, took her husband's gun and shot him. Five years and three months later, the murder trial against her begins this Monday, amid a renewed debate in France about the state's failures to protect women from sexist violence after a new wave of brutal femicides.
Bacot, 40, is facing life in prison.
A national campaign, with more than half a million signatures, demands that he not have to go back to jail.
Her case has been compared to that of Jacqueline Sauvage, the woman sentenced to 10 years in prison for killing her husband after 47 years of conjugal violence and who was pardoned in 2016 by the then Socialist President François Hollande.
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"Everybody knew. Many people had an idea of what could happen to me in the privacy of home. The blows, the violence, the daily humiliations ... All the invariables of this life that is not truly a life. One day, so that he wouldn't kill us, I killed him, ”writes Bacot in
Everybody Knew It
, published on the eve of the trial. A book that tells the terrible personal story of Bacot, but that also exposes the failure of some institutions that did not know how to protect a minor from mistreatment and sexual abuse first, and then, as an adult woman, from the sexist violence that she suffered day yes and day too.
“It is not only conjugal violence, we talk about incest, rapes, we talk about failures of justice, of all institutions.
Since she was little, huge mistakes were made against a minor (...) and then against a woman, ”says her lawyer, Janine Bonaggiunta, who specializes in marital violence and family law and who hopes to obtain a lesser sentence.
Scared all the time
Valérie grew up in a dysfunctional family - at the age of five, her older brother abused her without her mother, an alcoholic, doing anything - but the real nightmare begins when Daniel Polette enters her life. The truck driver, 25 years older than Valérie, is his mother's new partner, although he soon begins to notice the daughter. At 12, he rapes her for the first time. "I was scared all the time," writes Bacot. According to her defense, from that moment on, the young woman is totally under the influence of Polette. "We can talk about kidnapping, it was almost an imprisonment since I was little," says Bonaggiunta by phone, who also defended Jacqueline Sauvage.
In 1995, relatives denounced the abuse against Valérie. From the sentence to four years in prison, Polette only serves two and a half, during which time Valérie's mother forces her to visit her stepfather and rapist in jail, another example of institutional failures, says her lawyer. "That man slipped through all the cracks in the system," he denounces. After serving the sentence, he returns to Bacot's house, without any institution, again, doing any follow-up. The pattern does not take long to repeat itself. “Everything started again quickly. Every day, when I came back from school, after lunch, he would say to me: 'Come on, go up. I knew what he meant. And I knew that it was better for me to obey, "Bacot said in an interview with
Le Parisien
newspaper
.
At 17, Valérie becomes pregnant with her stepfather. Her mother kicks her out of the house. Without support, he sees no other way out than to go live with his until then stepfather. His "executioner", corrects his lawyer. The couple, who married in 2008, have four children. The beatings, threats and psychological violence are constant. Up to two occasions, their children go to the police to report the abuse. Nobody listens to them. "You end up living with the idea that you deserve it because you do not do things properly," says Bacot, who according to her lawyers and the committee created to support her defense, was not aware of the power that her husband exercised over her until some time. later. It was during the year he spent in prison after Polette's body was found, which he had buried with the help of two of his children.
In addition to beatings and rapes, beginning in 2004, Bacot was forced to prostitute herself in the rest areas of a highway. Her husband is a pimp. "If it had been a Netflix series, people would have said they had passed," says Florian Maïly, spokesperson for the Valérie Bacot support committee created by half a dozen of the woman's acquaintances - friends and neighbors such as Maïly, owner of the the bowling alley that Bacot attended in recent years with his children — so he doesn't have to go back to jail. His petition on the change.org platform has already achieved more than half a million signatures.
"We are not asking that she be acquitted," Maïly says.
“There has been a man who, despite everything, has died.
And there has to be a conviction ”.
But she considers that the judges could sentence her to a year in firm prison, which she already served before obtaining probation, and the rest a suspended sentence.
The main thing "is that I never have to go to jail again," he stresses.
“She has already served her sentence, she has lived in a prison for 24 years, a prison created in part with the complicity of the State, because social services did not help her, because the justice did not sentence her stepfather to a higher sentence, because both adults and institutions failed when this 17-year-old girl became pregnant.
It is the entire French state that has failed, ”he insists.
Wave of femicides
The Bacot trial is held in the same year that France broke the taboo on incest against minors following the publication
of Camille Kouchner's
La Familia Grande
, where the daughter of the former minister and co-founder of Doctors Without Borders Bernard Kouchner reveals the abuses to the that their stepfather, the also well-known political scientist Olivier Duhamel, subjected his adolescent twin brother. The five days of hearings also take place after a new wave of brutal femicides - such as the one in May in Mérignac, where an abuser several times convicted murdered his ex-wife in the middle of the street by burning her with gasoline after shooting her in the legs so that she could not flee. that have once again exposed the failures of the system.
A sensitization of the society that the lawyer Bonaggiunta hopes will help Bacot and, above all, that it promotes a profound change in the institutions.
Because “everyone criticizes, talks and talks, but at the same time we continue with the (legal) texts of before, in anchored and ancestral positions.
We cannot continue like this ”, he warns.
Meanwhile, Bacot, who is not asking for his acquittal either - "I have taken someone's life, it is normal for him to go to jail," he declared - he says he is anxious to face a process that, he hopes, is also a trial. against the man who destroyed her life.
“I see it a bit like a fight against him.
I hope to be stronger than him, to be able to beat him for once in my life ”.
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