‘This has to stop’: woman’s life of hell at hands of rapist

A FRENCH woman went on trial yesterday for killing the man who raped her for years as her stepfather before becoming her husband and pimp.

The story of Valerie Bacot has moved campaigners against domestic violence, with hundreds of thousands of people signing a petition for her release.

“I had to put an end to it,” Bacot, 40, wrote in a book published last month called “Everybody Knew”, adding: “I was afraid, all the time.”

The trial, which opened in Chalonsur-Saone in France’s central Burgundy region, is due to run through Friday.

Bacot was 12 when her mother’s partner, Daniel Polette, who was 25 years her senior, raped her for the first time.

He was sent to prison, but after his release returned and resumed the serial rapes.

“He told my mother that he wouldn’t start again. But he did,” she told the court.

At 17, Bacot became pregnant, was thrown out of the house by her alcoholic mother, and went to live with Polette.

“I wanted to keep my child. I had nobody. Where could I go?,” she told the court.

“At first he would slap me, later that became kicking, then punches and then choking,” she said, describing her life as an “extreme hell”.

Polette ordered her to work as a prostitute for truck drivers, using the back of a Peugeot people carrier, and gave her instructions through an earpiece

Investigators established that Polette threatened to kill her if she refused, pointing a gun at her many times.

When Polette started questioning their 14-year old daughter Karline about her budding sexuality, Bacot said she decided that “this has to stop”.

On March 2016, after Polette ordered his wife to undergo yet another sexual humiliation by a client, she used the pistol that he kept in the car to kill him with a single bullet to the back of the neck while he was in the driver’s seat.

Bacot said she wanted to make sure her daughter wouldn’t suffer the same fate