On the second day of the trial of Rose Filippazzo, tried before the Assizes of the Rhône for having killed her husband with a bullet in the head in September 2018, the daughters of the couple and the sister of the accused came to give powerful testimonies, accrediting the argument supported by the defence. That of an abused wife. At great length, each in their own way, they described the marital hell in which the applicant says she lived for 28 years. A life under the influence made up of fears, threats of reprisals, insults, violent disputes.
“I think that if mom did that, it’s because she was exhausted,” said Sandrine, 29, the eldest. “It could have happened the other way, too,” she says, a bit fatalistic. In a hoarse voice, the frail young woman recounts the daily life of her parents, chaining the sentences almost without breathing. As if to exorcise a painful past. Talk again and again.
At home, it was “only shouting and arguing” and it had “almost become normal”. The husband constantly watches his wife, sometimes hastily quitting her job to make sure she hasn’t lied to him. He also checks his receipts. When Lisa, the couple’s second daughter, was born, the “situation got worse”. “My father’s seizures were worse. He insulted my mother, he hit her, he put her on the ground, pulling her by the hair, in front of me, ”testifies Sandrine.
“Your mother refuses to obey, I will kill her”
“He forced her to say that she was dirty, that she was trash. She had to get on her knees, abounds Lisa. Every day there were scenes. Most of the time, my mother obeyed until he stopped. She said nothing, suffered in silence. But in the end, she didn’t let herself go, she answered in the same vein. »
Jovial in society, Michel Zirafa presents a completely different face at home. He chains glasses of Ricard and cigarettes, explodes for nothing. Everything is a pretext for dispute, according to witnesses interviewed Thursday. “At the start, he didn’t want my mother to work and then when he agreed, he refused to allow her to serve certain customers. He was very jealous if she ever gave them a kiss, ”argues Sandrine. In the pizzeria that the couple bought, Rose Filippazzo spends most of her evenings locked in the kitchen, forbidden to leave.
“Once, when I was 8 years old, he went to pick her up in the car with me to bring her home. I was waiting and then I heard screams a few minutes later. Outside, he was screaming: “Your mother refuses to obey, I’m going to kill her”, says Sandrine again. Another day, the father of the family “destroyed, smashed” the establishment’s bar. “I asked him, ‘Daddy what’s going on?’ He replied, “your mother is a whore”. I didn’t see what happened but she was crying a lot and she had marks on her face. »
“An Eternal Beginning”
“I have never seen her happy”, abounds Joséphine Jones, the sister of the accused who describes a “manipulative” husband, a “toxic couple”. “Michel often said to him in my presence, ‘you, I’m going to put a cartridge in your head'”. “Cartridge” was “his expression”, supports the witness. “I would say, ‘don’t touch my sister’. So he apologized but he started again. It was an eternal restart…”
“It never stopped,” sighs Sandrine. At 18, the eldest left home “to escape all that”. Her younger sister, Lisa, now 20, remained. Last July, she chose to take her mother’s last name. A choice proudly assumed because her father terrified her. “He was very violent, I was stressed in his presence, I was always afraid of him,” she confesses. Like this time, when he refused to let her go on a school trip to England. “He took the bar stool and threw it at me. I was terrified, I couldn’t stop crying,” she recalls.
The same fear when his father “took a dagger to run after the dog all over the house” or when he “went on purpose to drive too fast in the car”. “One morning, I screamed, I told him to stop. It made him angry. He turned around and decided that I will not go to school, ”continues Lisa. And to add “understand” the fatal gesture of his mother: “She surely did it for her own survival or even to protect us. »
The impossibility of divorce
At the bar, the accused gazes tenderly at her daughters, her long locks of black hair framing her face. “I would have liked to spare them all that,” she said. “What should have been done? “, asks him then the president of the court. “Divorce. “But in this family which” lives recluse “, “we do not divorce”, attests Josephine, Rose’s sister, confirming that violence was already present in their own family. “We suffer from living this situation, despite everything we stay, it’s like that, we were brought up like that, and so on,” she says.
“I wanted to get rid of it, divorce, but I couldn’t do it, rebounds the accused who had however inquired to take the steps. When you have spent a whole life hearing that you are a “bitch”, a “tramp”, you end up believing it, ”she laments. The verdict is expected Friday. Rose Filippazzo faces life imprisonment.