Valérie Bacot, “very clearly a victim” according to the public prosecutor, came out free on Friday from the Assize Court of Saône-et-Loire, after having been sentenced to a symbolic sentence for the murder of her pimp husband. The 40-year-old mother of four was sentenced to four years in prison, three of which were suspended, which allowed her not to be reincarcerated upon leaving the Chalon-sur-Saône court, considering the year that she has already spent in pre-trial detention.
The members of the Assize Court thus went further in leniency than the public prosecutor who had already requested a moderate sentence of five years in prison, four of which were suspended, by qualifying as a “victim” the one who was raped, beaten and prostituted for years by her tyrannical husband.
“Fix the ban without reincarceration”
A thunderous applause erupted as the verdict was read, some relatives of the accused bursting into tears. Reading the motivations of the court and the jury, President Céline Therme underlined that they had retained “the terror” in which Valérie Bacot lived and the “multiple traumas of her childhood”. “Valérie Bacot could not take the life of the one who terrorized her” but we must “fix the ban without reincarceration”, had estimated in his requisitions the Advocate General Eric Jallet, stressing that his four children “needed” their mother.
The accused killed with a bullet in the neck, at the age of 35, Daniel Polette, 61, on March 13, 2016, after nearly 25 years of rape and violence, then forced prostitution. She faced life imprisonment. “A society that does justice to itself is war against each other,” said the Advocate General. But “Valérie Bacot is a victim, very clearly,” he admitted.
Threats from a “tyrant”
The defense considered that a conviction, however lenient, would still be too much for Valérie Bacot. “How could society seek redress from Valérie Bacot when it did not know how to protect her?” “Asked Nathalie Tomasini who, with Janine Bonaggiunta, defends Valérie Bacot. The two lawyers were the advice of Jacqueline Sauvage, who became the symbol of domestic violence after being convicted of killing her husband, then pardoned in 2016.
“It was her or him”, for her part, estimated her colleague, Me Bonaggiunta, recalling that Valérie Bacot’s husband had pointed a gun at her head, promising her that he would kill her and her children, if she was leaving him. “Puppet” in the hands of a “tyrant”, Valérie Bacot was “caught in a spider’s web, without any possible recourse to the law”, she added, also asking for an acquittal or a “penalty symbolic ”.
Prostitute by her husband for 14 years
The trial, which opened on Monday, depicted the extreme violence suffered by Valérie Bacot and her fear of seeing it continue against her own daughter, Karline, who was 14 years old at the time of the facts. Psychiatrist and psychologist experts underlined that the accused had no other “escape” than to “make disappear” her husband, so much she suffered from his “permanent grip” and his very tight “surveillance”, which prevented her. to go and file a complaint.
The husband of Valérie Bacot, alcoholic and violent, prostituted her for 14 years. He started raping her when she was only 12 years old and still her mother’s lover. Sentenced and imprisoned in 1996, the man was nevertheless authorized, upon his release from prison in 1997, to return to the family home, where “everything started again as before”, according to Valérie Bacot.
She becomes pregnant at 17 and leaves to settle with “Dany”, explaining this surprising decision by the need to offer a “father” to this child she wanted to keep. “I would like to say sorry to my children for what I made them endure,” she said before the jurors retired to deliberate, in a reference to the burying of the body of Daniel Polette, in which two children of Valérie Bacot. “I only think of one thing: to be with my children”, she added in a trickle of voice, shortly after a discomfort arose just after the requisitions.