They stand up against their daughter. She is his mother, he his stepfather. He took care of her since she was so little that she called him dad for a long time. Until she understood, as a teenager, that what she was experiencing was not family life. And that, one day in September 2022, she pushes open the door of a Côtes-d'Armor gendarmerie. She will be urgently placed in foster care after at least eight years of mistreatment. At the bar of the Saint-Brieuc criminal court, this Tuesday, November 26, 2024, the mother defends her husband. The young victim knows it: “they love each other, so she protects him”. Tooth and nail, that’s what she’s always done.
Even when, as a child, she was insulted and belittled. Even when the kicks were raining down. Even when his head was hit against the bathtub. Even when a knife was put to his throat or a fork stuck in his hand. “Since she was little, she has suffered violence,” says her lawyer, Me Katell Gourgand. The mother barely recognizes that her companion “can sometimes be angry”. She is being prosecuted for “evading a parent from their obligations”. For not having treated dental problems any more than her poor eyesight and for having bathed her daughter so poorly that she was rejected from school.
“It was often when saying goodnight”
The emotional spiral was such – “the symptoms of Stockholm syndrome are there”, the president said – that the young adult, in difficulty, ended up returning to live at the family home last summer. “We rolled out the red carpet and the gifts for him, before telling him that, all the same, it would be good to go and withdraw his complaint,” recalls Me Gourgand. Which she would have done if the procedure had not been too far advanced for that. His stepfather would then never have been prosecuted for aggravated violence and sexual assault on a minor. Because to the daily violence was added the touching.
He barely responds to all this. He recognizes the excesses of violence, since some had witnesses, but denies any accusation of a sexual nature. “I have AIDS, I can't afford it,” he tries to justify at the bar where, just afterwards, the young woman will come to detail repeated events which happened “often when saying good night “. The mother, during her daughter's testimony, lets out a few worried glances towards the defendant, aged 54.
The court sentenced him to two years in prison, including one year with a two-year probationary suspension during which he must seek treatment, compensate the victim and stay away from her. He is prohibited from engaging in any activity with minors and his name will be included in the sex offender file. The mother received an eight-month suspended prison sentence. And the young woman, who has since left the region, returned to the arms of her companion.
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