The girlfriend of a man she abusively enslaved for a year in a Paris apartment the two shared in 2008 has been sentenced to almost the same length of time in a French prison.
The court also ordered Zakia Medkour to pay a damage award of 200,000 euros to her boyfriend Maxime Gaget for crimes between “a female torturer and a male victim” that went “beyond violence.”
Those offenses reportedly included beatings, burnings, and bondage which prevented his normal mobility and access to the bathroom and food.
The curious revelations regarding the 43-year-old Frenchwoman’s imprisonment, torture, and domestic enslavement of her younger lover were first made in a biography he published once “liberated.”
In it, Gaget says the abuse he endured began with the seizure of his identity papers and, from there, evolved into an outright unlawful detention, perpetuated in part through Medkour’s threats to accuse him of molesting her two children.
The 37-year-old explained he wanted the world to know that “such atrocities exist” for men as well as for women, and “are unfortunately not isolated issues.”
Indeed, according to official reports some 7000 Frenchmen per year file complaints of domestic abuse at the hands of their female partners, and many experts believe others are just too “ashamed” to come forward.
At sentencing for her similarly grievous acts, convicted French dominatrix Medkour apologized to her battered ex beau-turned-author, adding she “isn’t heartless.”
Lawyers for the troubled defendant succeeded in getting a portion of her incarceration deferred for psychiatric counseling and rehab, on assertions their client suffered from bipolar disease, alcoholism, and was herself severely neglected and mistreated as a child.
Ultimately, because Zakia Medkour’s sentence is “convertible” under French law, the remaining balance of prison time can also be deferred, in lieu of community service and, of course, an electronic bracelet.