A 36-year-old woman was sentenced Thursday, May 25 in Toulouse to 17 years in prison for kidnapping, rape, torture and barbaric acts against the girlfriend of her brother, aged 30, between 2017 and 2019. Tried since Monday, she was also found guilty of extortion and violence against her own children by the Assize Court of Haute-Garonne. During the trial, this woman from Tarn-et-Garonne and already convicted in the past for kidnapping, admitted to being responsible for acts of violence of which she was accused but denied the rape. The court also sentenced his brother to three years in prison for complicity. The prosecution had requested 20 years in prison for the 36-year-old woman and five years in prison for her brother.
Advocate General Pierre Aurignac referred to what the victim had suffered, under the influence of the accused: "blows on the sex, stab wounds, strangulation, head held in the water or thrown against the furniture, bites and burns in the oven". The victim was thus put "in a situation of dependence, isolated, deprived of any dignity," he continued, pointing to "the limitless brutality, the sadistic cruelty" of the accused. "I lived a real ordeal, a real nightmare. I almost died," the victim said. One of the lawyers of this 30-year-old woman, Jean-François Renaudie, said he was not "in a perspective of revenge", while considering that "justice must offer a horizon of humanity to our client".
For the defense, Me Katy Mira had asked the court "not to confuse custody and sequestration". "The scale of sentences does not matter, it is especially essential that a court recognizes the ordeal and the status of victim," said Renaudie, after the verdict.