|
MEAUX (FRANCE) - WHEN the horror story of Austria's monster dad broke early this week, a Frenchwoman knew exactly what Ms Elisabeth Fritzl went through.
Ms Lydia Gouardo, 45, also had a monster dad. She was beaten, raped and burned with acid by her legal father, Raymond Gouardo, for 28 years. She bore him six children.
Worse for her, her stepmother knew about her ordeal but did nothing about it.
From the time she was eight years old, Ms Gouardo was tortured and repeatedly raped by her legal, but not biological, father.
She said her ordeal, which went on until she was 36, did not set off alarm bells in the village of Crecy-la-Chapelle, east of Paris, where she lived.
The abuse, which came to light after her father's death in 1999, started the day her stepmother plunged her into a bath with scalding water, inflicting third-degree burns that forced her to be taken out of school.
In an interview broadcast yesterday on French radio RTL, Ms Gouardo said she was raped 'in the morning, in the evening and the night' in full knowledge of her stepmother Lucienne Ulpat, who simply asked her husband to 'get on with it'.
Years later, when she tried to run away from her abusive family, she said her father started to burn her with hydrochloric acid on the legs, arms and stomach as punishment.
Yet, as in the case of Austrian monster dad Josef Fritzl, neither neighbours, teachers nor social services thought to raise the alarm despite the young woman's pregnancies and repeated stays in hospital for injuries.
During her first pregnancy, at the age of 19, she said she was tied down to prevent her from seeking an abortion.
For each pregnancy, she was taken to hospital by her father to give birth 'at the very last moment'.
'One day, the midwife asked who the father was, and he said, 'I am'. No one said a word,' Ms Gouardo told RTL.
This month, an appeal court toughened the sentence handed down to Ulpat, 67, during the original trial in March last year. She was given a four-year suspended prison sentence for failing to prevent decades of abuse.
Today, Ms Gouardo lives in a tumble-down farmhouse in the town of Coulommes, east of Paris, with her children.
Barely literate and unemployed, she hides her burn scars under long-sleeved clothes - but says she is happy to have survived.
'When I think of what I have been through, I wonder how it is possible. Every day, when I open the front door, I take a deep breath.
'I live from day to day. But I love life. When people complain, I say life is beautiful,' she told RTL.
'I am fighting back now. When a bill comes through the door, I am happy. I am here, I exist.'
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
| 
