ינהאַלט
“I liked a manipulator”
It is Julian who has שנייַדן די אַמביליקאַל שנור. He then often boasted of having brought Gwendolyn into the world. That day he sobbed like a sensitive and harmless being. Yet thereafter he made us scared. My daughter is 11 today, but it took a judicial marathon to access our freedom. At the beginning of our history, I can’t say everything was pink between Julian and me. I found him frankly strange when he took himself without any modesty for a singer-prophet or compared himself to Bob Dylan, when he performed rarely and without much success. Corn איך בין פֿאַרליבט of this devastatingly charming singer, and I even financed his musical passion by paying for our apartment and working for two, then I got pregnant. I then found it more and more shifted, but I refused to believe him completely nuts. I will remember all my life that day when, eight months pregnant, I threw a woolen cap over his shoulder as he listened to a song he had just recorded through headphones … His anger, his insults, his violence at that moment, against me, who took refuge in our room, my blood still freezes. I threw that beanie too hard at him and he was in terrible pain! He demanded an apology! Terrified, I still had the guts to tell her that he was crazy and that he had to seek treatment. I would have done better to run away.
He couldn’t stand that I was with my daughter
When our daughter was born, things have dramatically worsened. Julian wanted to be his daughter’s sole object of fascination, and he did not support the natural bond extremely that united her and me, which resulted in fits of jealousy. Breastfeeding, for example, was unbearable to him. He happened to take Gwendolyn away from me and keep her in her recording studio, despite her howls of hunger. And since he couldn’t feed her himself, he preferred to deprive her. He also regularly kicked me out of the bath to take my place with the little one. The quarrels became more and more numerous and particularly violent.
So I have decided to separate me from him. One evening, he pushed me, my head hitting hard against the wall. I filed a complaint for דינער גוואַלד. Julian was taken into custody but just before he had time to ransack our apartment and to put there some frightening clues for me who knew that his custody would not last a lifetime. “You’ll regret it,” announced a handwritten note. The separation was terrible: if living without him was a relief for me, entrust our daughter to him when he had custody of it was torture.
When Gwendolyn was 3 years old, I read in her terrified eyes that the one she called “Bad daddy” had, as she told me, touched her. I filed a complaint and Julian’s lawyer immediately reversed the situation, accusing me of PAS (Parental Alienation Syndrome). I was judged guilty of pitting my child against his father, to manipulate it. It is the fashion for fathers in the United States, and more and more in France, to defend themselves in this way when a mother denounces paternal violence. This bogus syndrome, not recognized by the WHO, is the weapon of the perverts. My daughter screamed every time she had a date with her father, she hid under her bed, refused to let me dress her.
Turning the situation around, sanctioning our delays, Julian accused me of breaking his brain, and of being the obstacle to their relationship. Then he met Alicha. I hoped that the presence of this woman would distract him from this fascination he had for his child. The more I tried to protect Gwendolyn, the more I risked losing custody. It must be said that Julian was gifted with the charisma of narcissistic perverts. He could express himself, explain himself with an Olympian calm, without letting anything show the angers that characterized him as soon as we were face to face.
I felt my daughter’s life was in danger
דערווייַל, Gwendolyn was wasting away, hated by this new mother-in-law who saw her as my portrait, therefore a rival from the past. As twisted as Julian, Alicha wanted take power over my daughter, cut her hair without asking my opinion, and washed her as soon as she arrived at their place to rid her of my imaginary perfume. One day, I suggested to the mediator that Gwendolyn have a cell phone to reassure her. Her father screamed that at 7 years old it could damage her genitals! The mediator found nothing to complain about. My daughter would come home sometimes clawed, still in tears, desperate. And then one day Gwendolyn told me she was ready to jump out the window not to return to his father. I went to France with Gwendolyn during the summer holidays, where I took her to consult a psychologist who, alerted by Gwendolyn’s statements, made a report to the prosecutor from Quimper. The latter asked us to stay on French territory during the time of the investigation. Julian accused me of kidnapping international under the Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. I ended up צו מצליח זיין thanks to the help of a wonderful lawyer. Gwendolyn is saved and Julian no longer scares us. We live together גליקלעך און פרידלעך, in Brittany where we often listen to the reassuring lapping of the waves. But it is a merciless fight that had to be delivered so that we could finally hear the cries of my child. ”
Interview by Jessica Bussaume
Find the testimony of Caroline Bréhat in “Mauvais Père”, éd. The arenas.