Coulommes

For 28 years a young female, Lydia Gouardo, was tortured and repeatedly raped by her adoptive father while his wife let him do. She got pregnant six times. She was held in captivity from 1971 to 1999 and the horror ended first with her fathers sudden death in 1999. Neither the inhabitants nor the authorities did anything to help her. The man died without having been convicted. The whole thing started when Lydia was nine years old when her stepmother plunged her in a tub filled with boiling water. Sometimes she was raped three times a day by the father(adoptive). The stepmother sometimes helped him. She was not locked away, but knowing no other life she thought this was normal. Only when she was beaten did she try to run away. But the villagers of Coulommes always brought her back to the father. On the six occations she was in the hospital to give birth,health officials asked here who the father of her children were, she told hospital workers that her father was their father. No one reacted. She was also at the local hospital for acid burns, made by her father when she tried to escape. Her stepmother was convicted (suspended sentence)by a Paris court in april 2008 of four years in prison for not reporting a crime and for sexually abusing one of Gouardo's sons. A journalis from the french newspaper Libération visited Coulommes, and the majorof the town told her: "Yes,I knew about it,in fact the whole village knew about it! But do not talk badly of Coulommes. What the people do among themselves, should be kept privat!"