11:08 am, May 14, 2019. On Twitter, a series of messages from an account, hitherto dormant and with very few subscribers, will overwhelm the social network with absolute distress.
This account is that of @LauraetAlice.
Alice was then three years old.
Laura, her mother, is a young thirty-something who has found, as a last resort, this bottle in the sea 2.0 to beg for help.
Her ex-husband, after a year of pre-trial detention for trying to kill her in front of their daughter, was released pending trial at the Assizes.
He had warned her, before that night of April 16 to 17, 2018 when she owes her salvation only to the intervention of neighbors: "If I put one foot in prison because of you, you're dead."
That night, only their repeated knocking on the door will make him release his hands from Laura's dying throat.
"I was ready for anything for my daughter"
From the deadly kiss of the meeting with Frédéric to the poison of the grip, through years of physical and psychological violence, Laura Rapp tells all about her descent into hell in a book that has just been released: "Tweet or die" (Editions Michalon).
Because for her, it is a certainty: “Twitter saved me.
It could have been a double-edged sword but I had already tried everything to get by and I was ready for anything for my daughter, ”explains Laura simply, in her apartment in Val-de-Marne, almost three years old. after the fact.
When she is released, her ex-husband knows where she lives, he challenges her while driving by, the threat comes again to look her in the face.
He doesn't have an anti-reconciliation bracelet, she couldn't get a phone in serious danger.
She will find out later: her request went unheeded on a pile of files cluttering up an association room.
She is terrified.
“With this decision not to keep him in detention, the courts sentenced me to death.
She abandoned us, my daughter and I, ”Laura says without hesitation.
11:08 am, May 14, 2019, she tries a game of poker.
HELP !
[THREAD to unfold]
Survivor of an assassination attempt, in the presence of my 2-year-old daughter, justice turns its back on me.
Arrested and remanded in custody since April 2018, my torturer, made several requests for release which were all refused.
pic.twitter.com/qycpB8e7Nk
- Laura (@LauraetAlice) May 14, 2019
The words of the young woman appear on Twitter, go viral and make Internet users pass from the status of passive scrollers to witnesses of a cry for help: “I just want to be heard.
Protect me!
Protect my daughter until the trial.
Judicial review is not enough!
I am a victim, I do not want to extend the long list of 2019 feminicides. Deaf justice gives me food to this man.
Help me !
".
Result: over a million views.
Laura Rapp is one of the first to use social networks to signify isolation, even abandonment, of victims of domestic violence.
She won't be the last.
[THREAD] PROTECT
ME!
PROTECT THEM!
RT 🙏🏻
Executive, my ex-husband earns a good living, and that has often served me well.
I am going to tell my story, and I have the proof for everything I say.
Today I know perfectly well the realities of a police station, and of justice pic.twitter.com/sKDyzZNpyk
- Charlene guerriére (@ CharlneBonneti1) September 30, 2019
“I never expected such a shock wave,” she admits today.
TV shows galore, press articles, invitation to the Grenelle against violence against women… Laura speaks and speaks again.
All the dysfunctions, at all levels, go through it: police, associations, justice, politics.
The more she tells, the more protected she feels.
"You, the press, you were a bit like my bodyguards," she breathes with a smile.
Eight years in prison and the deprivation of parental rights against his ex-spouse
But make no mistake: to speak, she had done well before.
She even scrupulously followed everything that is asked to do to a victim of domestic violence: the complaint, pay a bailiff to see that her ex-spouse does not respect his judicial control, advance from his pocket the psychiatric expertise, hold during the confrontations, accept the plan of the examining magistrate to see the reclassification of the facts of "attempted homicide" as aggravated violence, solicit associations which forget her, treat her daughter seriously affected by a post-traumatic syndrome ...
After the physical and psychological violence that she has to heal, there is also the economic violence "which does not speak enough", warns Laura whose parents had to spend the savings of a life to help her.
Claiming justice at a cost, and it is astronomical.
Not to mention that the hearing for his damages is long overdue.
Then this observation: “Nothing is done for the children who are the other victims of domestic violence.
“Besides better protection for abused women, this is his other fight and he has the features of Alice, five and a half years old today.
Has she become an activist?
"Engaged, I prefer," she continues.
Soon a TV movie inspired by his life
“An abusive partner cannot be a good father, that's obvious.
From her sofa, she repeats this sentence with a force one can hardly imagine coming out of such a small body.
“I must admit that this nightmare made me discover that I had unsuspected resources.
This must surprise my ex-spouse, ”Laura says ironically.
He who constantly denigrated her ... During the trial, she asked for the deprivation of parental rights against the father of her daughter and obtained it with a hard fight, on September 21, 2020. A rare decision.
“In the event of violence, and for all crimes, it should be effective.
Today, a man who has committed a feminicide is suspended from exercising his parental authority for a period of only six months, ”says Laura indignantly.
In the meantime, Frédéric is found guilty of attempted homicide on his person and sentenced to eight years in prison.
“It's not expensive to pay.
And then with the remissions of sentence and his repeated requests for release, it will never stop.
Moreover, he has just made another and I will soon go to the court of Nanterre (Hauts-de-Seine, Editor's note) with my lawyer.
We will obviously oppose it, she sweeps away with a wave of the hand.
I start to wonder if I will not go abroad to have peace ... as other victims have done.
"It is a cold, terrible assessment of" the hell of legal proceedings "that she draws up.
Especially since she once again lodged a complaint, but for cyberstalking this time.
Mister is indeed loose on social networks where he designates Laura as "a false victim".
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What will she do with her life from now on?
Laura doesn't like the term “reconstruction”.
For her, when it's broken, we live with its cracks.
Before embarking on entrepreneurship, she participated in the script for a TV movie inspired by her life.
Filming has just ended in Belgium and actress Juliette Roudet lends her features to Laura.
Soon to be broadcast on M 6, the TV movie will be followed by a documentary in which she was accompanied for a year, until the trial which did not make her a completely free woman.
