Woman spared jail for killing abuser
Raped and brutalised for 25 years, this woman has been set free after murdering her husband in cold blood
SHE described it as a living hell, trapped in a nightmare with a man who tormented her every day, controlling and abusing her until she could take no more.
After 25 years of being beaten, pimped out and terrified for her life, she shot her husband in the back of the neck in front of two of her children – and then buried him with the kids’ help.
In the five years since Daniel Polette’s death, Valérie Bacot has become well known in France. She wrote a bestselling book, Tout le Monde Savait (“everyone knew”), about her trauma and has become a poster child for abused women.
But her suffering wasn’t enough to save her from going on trial for murder and her case made headlines day after day, sparking fierce debate about how the French legal system treats abused women. Nearly a million people signed a petition for the charges to be dropped against Valérie (40), but prosecutors said she’d planned her husband’s murder because she admitted to trying to poison him earlier that day by crushing pills into his coffee.
After days of harrowing testimony, Valérie was found guilty and sentenced to four years in jail, three of them suspended.
But she was given clemency because of her long history of abuse and won’t spend a day in jail.
For Valérie, the verdict is bittersweet. She didn’t want to be incarcerated of course, but her life is so full of complexity and cruelty that she lives in her own private prison, haunted by memories of abuse and degradation.
And making it worse is the fact her own mother has always been more on Daniel’s side than hers.
TRUCK driver Daniel (61) wasn’t just Valérie’s husband and the father of her four children ranging in age from 14 to 22 – he was also her stepfather. He started dating her mother, Joëlle Aubague, an alcoholic, when Valérie was 12 and the abuse started almost straight away.
“Every night he’d say to me, ‘Go upstairs’,” she writes in her book.
“Once, I struggled a lot more and ended up with burns because it was on the living-room carpet. Over time, I understood I had to let go.”
Joëlle (now 65) turned a blind eye to the abuse, but Daniel was arrested in 1996 when one of his sisters reported him to police. He was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment, yet Joëlle continued to visit him in jail – often forcing her
daughter to accompany her.
When Daniel was released after serving half his sentence, Joëlle allowed him to return to her home, where he carried on abusing Valérie.
“Nobody seemed to find it bizarre that Daniel came back to live with us as if nothing had happened,” Valérie says.
“Everyone knew but nobody said anything.”
When she was 17 she fell pregnant with Daniel’s child and Joëlle evicted them. With nowhere to go and no one to turn to, Valérie moved in with Daniel.
The beatings started shortly after their baby was born, she says. “The first time it was because he thought I hadn’t put the baby’s toys away properly – but quickly it became commonplace. If the coffee took too long to arrive, if it was too hot or too cold, he’d get angry.
“You live with the idea that you deserve it because you’re not doing things right.”
Valérie was so dominated by him she agreed to marry him at age 27 and things grew steadily worse. He became more and more controlling, choosing her clothes, her hairstyles and the names of the three children that followed.
Beatings became commonplace – he broke her nose, hit her with a hammer and pointed a gun at her.
TWhen Daniel quit his job, he started pimping her out to other truck drivers, setting up shop in the back of the family’s Peugeot minivan. He fitted it with a mattress and curtains, and distributed calling cards advertising her as an “escort girl” named Adeline who’d meet customers off major roads.
He’d often watch her liaisons with clients through a peephole he’d made in a cardboard screen he’d erected for privacy and gave her instructions through an earpiece.
“Daniel wasn’t motivated by money but instead by a desire to watch me being humiliated,” she says.
HINGS came to a head on the night of 13 March 2016 after Valérie had been beaten by a violent client. “There was blood everywhere,” she testified in court. “Everything I’d experienced came back all of a sudden.”
By that time Daniel had started asking about their then 14-year-old daughter, Karline, and whether she was sexually
‘I KNEW THAT THE MORE OUR DAUGHTER GREW UP THE MORE HE’D HURT HER’
active. Valérie became terrified for her child’s safety.
“I was afraid – afraid he’d pimp her out,” Valérie said. “I knew that the more she’d grow up, the more he’d hurt her. And I didn’t know what to do.”
She decided killing Daniel was the only way out. She shot him, then dug a hole in a forest with the help of her sons Vincent (now 22) and Romain Bacot (21) and dragged his body into it. Her daughter’s boyfriend, Lucas Granet (19), helped too. Valerie was arrested in 2017 after Lucas confessed to his mother about covering up the crime.
Valérie’s sons and Lucas served six months in jail for concealing a corpse while she was charged with murder.
During her recent week-long trial, family members painted a shocking picture of Daniel. One of his sisters, Monique, told the court how he’d raped her from the age of 12, threatening to kill her and their mother if she told anyone. His brother, Alain, said he was a despicable man who terrorised their family.
“I can’t say anything positive about him. What he did to Valérie . . . He’s not the victim – it’s her,” Alain said. “He was the devil, he was vile. The term monster is too kind for him.”
But Joëlle testified that Daniel and Valérie wanted to be together and that if she’d wanted out, there were other ways she could’ve done it.
In her book, Valérie wrote she should be punished because taking a life was wrong, but she argued killing Daniel was the only way to protect herself and her children.
“I’m not only a victim. I killed him; it’s only normal that I should be punished. But if my sentence is heavy, that will mean to me that he had the right to behave the way he behaved with me,” she said.
When Valérie heard she wouldn’t spend a day in jail despite being found guilty, she fainted with relief. Her lawyers, Janine Bonaggiunta and Nathalie Tomasini, are now taking legal action against authorities for failing to act on reports she was being abused.
“I want to say sorry to my children,” she says. “And thank you to everyone for listening to me.”