"I have always done what he told me": Valérie Bacot tells "the extreme hell" that her husband made her live

She had testified in the media of her gesture, that of having taken a weapon to kill the one who had become her husband and her pimp, after having been her stepfather.

The trial of Valérie Bacot opened on Monday at the Saône-et-Loire assizes.

Valérie Bacot, who risks life imprisonment, testified on the first day of her trial of the hold this man had over her, describing an "extreme hell".

"At first, I was happy that he came back", recalls Valérie Bacot when she is questioned about this astonishing year 1997, when her stepfather, Daniel Polette, returned to the family home after his release from prison, where he had yet was jailed for raping her then 12-year-old daughter-in-law. "He had told my mother that he would do nothing more", adds the accused. "But it started again".

By dint of rape, Valérie Bacot becomes pregnant at 17 - he is 42. Her mother chases her away.

“I wanted to keep my child.

I had no one.

Where could I go?

»She says to explain why, against all understanding, she decides to follow her rapist when he proposes to her to settle down as a couple.

"I've always wanted to have children and have them have a father," says Valérie Bacot, who herself suffered from an absent father.

“So it had to.

"

"He said to me:

next time, I won't miss you

"

" Of love ? »Asks the president of the court, Céline Therme. "I always did what he told me", can only answer the accused. “He always found something. He couldn't stand hearing the children cry or being in his paws. I did everything to make them calm, but it's complicated. "At first it was slaps, then it turned into kicking, punching and he was choking me. Over time, there have been threats with the weapon, ”continues Valérie Bacot. And to add: "He put it on my head and said to me:

"

Valérie Bacot will even go so far as to marry her executioner, because her four children "asked why they did not have the same name as me".

Two of them, and her daughter's boyfriend, have already received a six-month suspended prison sentence in 2019 for helping their mother cover up the corpse.

Obeying is also the case when her husband tells her that she, this "good-for-nothing", her only solution to "bring back money" would be to prostitute herself.

The man sets up the family minivan and offers his wife there for passes of 20 to 50 euros along the departmental road.

In a cardboard caulking the rear window, a hole was made so that “Dany” could look and, above all, check if she was doing “the right thing”.

Otherwise, he would slip "instructions" to her through the earpieces she was supposed to keep.

"Everything I had experienced came back suddenly"

But, on Sunday March 13, 2016, Dany announces to him that tonight, she will have this "raw" which even he is afraid of, and that it will be necessary to do "something special".

" I was sick.

There was blood.

Everything I had experienced came back suddenly, ”she says, explaining why she grabbed her husband's pistol, hidden in the vehicle, and fired in the back of his neck.

"But this gun, did you bring it?"

»Corrects the president.

“I was afraid of the customer,” answers Valérie Bacot.

"And possibly to use it against Daniel Polette?"

»Asks the president.

The accused then recounts "the great fear" she had, that same Sunday, when her daughter Karline, 14, confessed to her that her father had asked her how she was "sexually".