Frenchwoman who killed abusive husband walks out free after sentencing

A French woman who admitted to killing her husband after nearly two decades of abuse left court a free woman on Friday evening to loud applause from well-wishers — concluding her ordeal that has appalled many in France.

Valérie Bacot was sentenced to four years in prison, with three of those years suspended. She was released because she had already spent a year in prison, Bacot’s lawyer, Nathalie Tomasini, said outside the Chalon-sur-Saone court in France.

“I would like to thank the court and all the support that I’ve had from everyone. Now is the time for a new fight for all the other woman and all the mistreatments,” Bacot told journalists outside the courtroom.

Bacot said she was “not relieved, but rather emptied mentally and physically.”

Bacot’s lawyer said that “justice has been administered, we are particularly moved.”

“This woman will go back to her children tonight, for me that is a huge victory,” Tomasini added.

Valérie Bacot had admitted to shooting Daniel Polette in 2016. Polette had started raping her when she was only 12 or 13, according to court documents.

At that time he was her mother’s boyfriend; he later became Bacot’s husband and father of their four children. She previously referred to him as her stepfather before they married.

Earlier in court on Friday, Bacot fainted with apparent shock and relief after hearing the sentence sought against her by prosecutors would mean she would walk free. Bacot was potentially facing a life sentence for shooting Polette dead.

The prosecution has asked for a sentence of five years in prison, with four years of the term suspended, a lawyer for the accused said.

In her bestselling book “Tout Le Monde Savait” (“Everyone Knew”), published in May, Bacot, 40, said Polette, 25 years her senior, first raped her when she was 12 years old, impregnated her at 17 and went on to abuse her over the course of 18 years.

“I simply wanted to protect myself. Protect my life, the life of my children. In my eyes, nothing else ever mattered,” she wrote in her autobiography.

In her book, Bacot ​said she should be punished. But she argued that killing Polette was the only way to protect herself and her children from a man who had made her life “hell” from the time he first raped her until she shot him dead in 2016.