Valérie Bacot was just 12 when her stepfather began raping her. After a stint in prison for abusing her, he returned to the family home and resumed the rapes, she said. The two eventually settled together, for what Bacot said were 18 years of repeated beatings, sexual assaults and forced prostitution. “At first it was slaps, then kicks, punches and he would strangle me,” Bacot, a frail 40-year-old woman, told a French court in emotional testimony this week, recounting how she was “afraid to die every day”. Advertisement Until the day she killed Daniel Polette, her former stepfather who became her husband.