The French demand to acquit the woman who killed the stepfather-rapist

The trial of 40-year-old Valérie Bacot took place in Chalon-sur-Seine in central France.

Bucko was 12 when her alcoholic mother's partner, Daniel Paulette, 37, also a drinker, first raped her.

Paulette was sent to prison, but when he was released three years later, he resumed his former life.

At the age of 17, Valerie became pregnant. Her mother kicked her and Paulette out of the house, and they began to live together.

Paulette forced his wife to provide sexual services to truck drivers in his Peugeot minibus, threatening to kill her if she refused. He also forced her into lesbian relationships and filmed it.

As the investigation established, Paulette repeatedly beat her, broke her nose, pointed a gun at her, and once hit her in the head with a hammer.

According to Bako, she lived like in a prison. Her husband forbade her to communicate with anyone when leaving the house and sent friends to keep an eye on her.

Bako gave birth to four children from Paulette. According to her, they twice complained about their father to the gendarmes, but they refused to talk to the minors and asked the mother to come to them herself.

One of the children once saw a business card ordered by his father and asked his mother what an “escort girl” was.

When Paulette started talking about sex with their daughter, 14-year-old Carlene, Valerie Bako decided she'd had enough.

On March 13, 2016, after a “session” with another client, she killed Daniel Paulette with one shot in the back of the head from his own pistol, which was stored in the car.

Valerie Bako (in yellow scarf) at trial

With the help of her two older children, she hid the body, but in October 2017 the case came to light. Bako confessed to the murder, and after a year in pre-trial detention, she was released on bail pending trial.

During this time, she wrote a 198-page book called Everyone Knew, recently published by Fayard.

“I had to end it,” Bako writes, adding, “I was scared the whole time.”

Bako believes that she deserves to be punished, but as a mitigating circumstance, she says that she had nowhere to go, since she had no means of her own and believed that Paulette was capable of killing their children.

“She killed, but she is not a murderer,” lawyer Janine Bonagunta told the British Guardian newspaper. “She was driven to do this by the abuse she suffered for 25 years and the fear that her daughter would be next.”

"Such women are defenseless. The judicial system is too slow and lenient towards criminals," she told AFP.

The same lawyers, Jeanine Bonagunta and Nathalie Tomasini, defended another woman, Jacqueline Sauvage, in 2013, who has become a national symbol of the fight against domestic violence. Her alcoholic husband regularly beat her and her children. After their son hanged himself, Jacqueline killed the family tyrant. She received 10 years, of which she served three, and was pardoned by President Hollande.

The Guardian recalls that France has one of the highest rates of femicide (the killing of a woman by her current or former partner) in Europe.

Since the beginning of the year, 55 women have become victims of femicide in the country, three of them in the last week.