« The facts have highlighted that I have troubles to take into account that I wanted to ignore. » Penauded and a little lost at the bar of the Bordeaux criminal court, a fifty-year-old came to plead his case and ask to be able to speak to his wife again.
On April 10, 2024, the gendarmes were called for help to his home in South Gironde. He had just grabbed his wife by the neck, spat on her and slapped her. In the presence of their son, a minor. This former soldier will be judged at the end of September for violence without incapacity by a person who is or has been a spouse, common-law partner or partner linked to the victim by a civil solidarity pact.
While awaiting trial, this former soldier has an obligation to seek treatment and is prohibited from having contact with the victim. He has returned to live with his parents outside the Gironde – “a delicate situation at my age” – and has seen his son a few times.
But the situation weighs on him. He suffers from the lack of contact with his wife
“A Lost Man”
But the situation weighs on him. He suffers from the lack of contact with his wife for thirty years. This is why he is requesting a modification of his judicial supervision. “I want to renew contact with her. To talk together, consider future prospects and get closer to my son.”
The fifty-year-old began therapy and followed an internship. “Since I spoke, I feel better, open,” he confided to the audience. “It’s a slow process,” he knows. He is now aware that what he saw in different theaters of operations when he was sent to combat, particularly in Afghanistan, has left its mark, and that he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. An invisible psychological injury that often has repercussions on social, family or professional life.
However, he has already had decompression airlocks after returning from combat. “But, like many, we keep it to ourselves rather than exposing it. » His criminal record is clean. This is the first slip, the first explosion. Its positioning has changed. If he opposed the arrival of the gendarmes, he now recognizes the facts. But he needs his people to move forward.
Unlike another case brought up at the same hearing, in which a defendant in domestic violence, also a soldier, victimised himself, reversed responsibility for the facts and did not respect the ban on appearing at the home by coming to print documents, collect his mail and pick up his children, the fifty-year-old scrupulously complied with his judicial supervision.
The prosecution does not oppose the lifting of the ban on contact with the victim who, herself, has suffered from the absence of her husband for thirty years. “He took stock of the facts, grasped his obligations. » “When I met him in police custody, he was a lost man”, testifies his lawyer, Me Geraldine Rodriguez: “There are all these events that he has to deal with.”
The court agreed that the couple should resume contact without delay.
