The verdict allows her to walk free, as she has already served time in preventive detention. The case had drawn broad attention and support for the defendant amid a national reckoning with long-held taboos around domestic abuse.
Valerie Bacot, 40, has admitted to shooting Daniel Polette dead in Polette was her stepfather, who later married her and forced her into prostitution. A jury in Chalon-sur-Saone, central France, found Bacot guilty of the murder. She was sentenced to one year in prison and a three-year suspended sentence.
A few months later, she said, the sexual abuse started. She was 12 when he began raping her, Bacot said. My mother had forgiven him. But it started again. She was 17 at the time. Her mother threw her out of the house and she started living with Polette, whom she described as having total control over her life.
In March , following a violent prostitution-related situation, she shot Polette with the gun. Her children helped her bury the body, an act for which they were given suspended prison sentences.
Bacot was arrested by police the following year and imprisoned, before being released under judicial supervision in pending trial. In , she feared Polette would assault her year old daughter and force her into prostitution. She said he raped her when she was Denis Prieur, a psychiatrist, said that at the time of the domestic abuse, Bacot no longer had free will.
