A couple held a 45-year-old woman captive and tortured her for five years in a case that has shocked the French public. A woman has “disappeared” in France and prosecutors announced Wednesday that an 82-year-old man and a 60-year-old woman who had held her in solitary confinement for years have been charged. “by torture or cruel acts”.

The victim, a 45-year-old woman who is “mentally fragile”, is being treated for hypothermia, Nantes city prosecutor Antoine Leroy said, confirming the Ouest-France newspaper. The woman was forced to live on five years in the garden or in the garage of the house where the two accused lived.

The 82-year-old is under judicial supervision, while the woman he lived with was remanded in custody.

Today, the old man was locked in this house, in the commune of Saint-Molph, with the shutters closed. He half-opened his door for a few seconds and immediately closed it again when he saw the reporters outside.

On October 14, taking advantage of a moment when the man was watching TV, the 45-year-old came out of the outer enclosure of the house where she was locked and appeared at the neighbors’ house. She was half-naked, knocked on the window and told them that she had been locked up for about five years.

The victim explained that she lived in the house with another woman until the day the elderly man showed up. Then they asked her to leave the house and live either in the garden – that is, in the open – or in a tent, or in the garage, Leroy continued.

A search of the home corroborated her account.

The 45-year-old was locked in the garage most of the time. “She slept on a deckchair, defecated in a container or plastic bags. He was eating porridge mixed with dishwashing detergent. They were preventing her from going out” said the prosecutor characteristically.

Officers found that the garage door was blocked from the outside with large rocks.

According to the prosecution, the 45-year-old woman disappeared for the authorities from April 2022,when her divorce was granted. “Her bank accounts were only used to send substantial sums of money” to the defendants who “admitted part of the facts” but they tried to downplay their importance, the prosecutor said. They are accused of “restriction of a person, by torture or barbaric actions”, an offense punishable by life imprisonment. They were also prosecuted for fraud and exploitation of a “vulnerable person”.