A 36-year-old woman was sentenced Thursday in Toulouse to 17 years’ imprisonment for kidnapping, rape, torture and acts of barbarity against her brother’s 30-year-old girlfriend, between 2017 and 2019. Judged since Monday, she has also been found guilty of extortion and violence against her own children by the Assize Court of the Upper 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 public prosecutor had requested twenty years of criminal imprisonment for this 36-year-old woman and five years in prison for her brother.
“A real ordeal”
Advocate General Pierre Aurignac referred to what the victim had suffered, under the influence of the accused: “beatings on the sex, stabbing, strangulation, head held in water or thrown against furniture, bites and burns in the oven”.
The victim was thus put “in a situation of dependence, isolated, deprived of all 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, ”explained the victim.
“Justice must offer a horizon of humanity to our client”
One of the lawyers for this 30-year-old woman, Jean-François Renaudie, said he was not “with a view to revenge”, while believing that “justice must offer a horizon of humanity to our client”.
For the defense, Me Katy Mira had asked the court “not to confuse control and sequestration”.
“The scale of the sentences does not matter, it is above all essential that a court recognize the ordeal and the status of victim”, declared Me Renaudie again, after the statement of the verdict.