Pt 1
For 80 days, 12-year-old Sabine Dardenne was kept captive in the cellar of Marc Dutroux, the psychopathic paedophile known as the 'Monster of Belgium'. Nine years on, she talks to Susannah Herbert about her ordeal
Sabine Dardenne was abducted when she was 12
It's the word 'victim'," says Sabine Dardenne, drawing an ashtray towards her before lighting the first of many Marlboros. "I hate it. People tend to say of me, 'Ah yes, the victim of ' And I want to reply: 'No I'm not just the victim of ' I have a name. I am Sabine Dardenne and, OK, I'm not like everyone else, because we each have our own past. But I am not a circus animal." She laughs at the ridiculousness of it all but her exasperation is clear.
Sabine Dardenne's laughter is her most unsettling feature. She laughs so frequently, leaning forward over the coffee table in the hotel lobby where we meet, that occasionally it is hard to make out her words. She is pretty - blonde, delicate, girlish in jeans and tight v-neck pullover - and when she starts laughing it is easy to forget that she has been through one of the cruelest campaigns of physical and psychological torture that the human mind could devise.
At the age of 12, Sabine was cycling to school in rural Belgium when she was abducted by Marc Dutroux, a serial rapist. From May to August 1996, for 80 days, she was incarcerated behind a false wall in his cellar. The space was big enough for a mattress and a chamber pot. From time to time, the kidnapper would take her upstairs, where he would rape her before returning her to her underground cell.
He posed as her "saviour", claiming that he was protecting her from an evil Mr Big who wanted to revenge himself on her father, a former policeman. He convinced her that her family didn't care what happened to her. She expected to die among the vermin in the cellar. But - as the world knows - she didn't. Dutroux made a mistake and was caught. He was later sentenced to life in prison for a spree of abductions that left four young girls dead. Sabine survived. And now, nine years later, at the age of 21, she wants more. She wants, she says, to live.
I Choose to Live is the title of the remarkable book she has written about her ordeal. In France, where it is published under the title I was 12 years old and I took my bike and went off to school the book has spent as long in the bestseller lists as its author spent in what she calls her "hidey-hole".
In Belgium, where fascination with the Dutroux case knows no bounds, she has grown used to being recognised by perfect strangers who ask for her autograph. "It's a nightmare," she says. "It's so stupid. I'm not a singer, I'm not married to Brad Pitt. And yet everywhere I go I get questions and funny looks. People ask me for my autograph. Or they say they know what I feel, how much I've gone through when they can't possibly know. It's idiotic."
The book was "necessary", she writes, in order to put a stop to the "questions". Does her strategy show any signs of working? "Not just yet. But I live in hope," she snaps. This time, her laugh is so dry that it turns into a cough.
The prickliness is characteristic. Indeed, some reckon it is this defiance that enabled her to survive. She concedes the point: "It's true that my stroppy character did save me. If I had been different, weaker, maybe I would have been dragged down further. But my little acts of resistance, even if they didn't get me anywhere, at least I did my best to defend myself. I think someone weaker would have been worse off than me at the end. I've always been one to express my views. Even if I'm proved wrong, I always feel it's worth trying."
From the start she tried, in her own childish way, to make life difficult for her tormentor. Her incessant grizzling culminated in a sustained whine about her loneliness. She was bored, she said, she wanted a friend. Dutroux eventually kidnapped another girl, Laetitia Delhez - prompted, he said in court, by Sabine's grumbling. This time, he was spotted, traced and arrested. He led the police to the girls. When they crawled out of their hole, they thanked him, their "protector". Sabine even gave him a kiss on the cheek, a memory which still makes her flinch.
Although the book reflects her Catholic upbringing - the room in which Dutroux did his worst is the "Calvary" room - she is not a believer. "Because if God exists, why did I endure all that? Terrible things happen in life, to many people. But it's not for God to save us, it's for us to save ourselves, to come through, to make a new life."
This flat refusal to assume a passive role, whether in relation to God, Dutroux or received wisdom about "victims" and "monsters", runs through her book. It is peppered with "little acts of resistance", not aimed at Dutroux alone, but at all those whose reports gave him an unmerited status. Her abductor is seldom named. Instead he is the "scumbag", the "greasy creep", the "stupid idiot", the "****", the "arsehole".
Why the childish vocabulary? "When I was writing the book, the publisher and I were looking for a word for him, but we couldn't agree. So we settled on lots of playground words. It's a book I want to be read widely, so I didn't use anything too gross, but I wanted to write him down, not build him up. The trouble with the word 'monster', which the press use all the time, is that it gives him a grandeur he doesn't deserve. It was the same at the trial: I really resented the fact that he was Monsieur Dutroux. Monsieur implies deserving of respect. He's not a Monsieur, he's an arsehole."
She has taken pains to avoid using the word rape in her account. Instead, she writes of his demands elliptically, he "put himself through his paces", or forced her to join in his "circus". "I hate the word, rape. It upsets me, although it is the right word for what happened. And it's not a word which people tend to use much around me because they are worried about my reaction." Again she laughs; it is thin, nervous. "I wanted to write it in such a way as to make clear that these things were being experienced by a child. I think that a child, reading the book, would understand it the way I did." Surely no child would read this book? "Oh, yes, I know several who have."
On her liberation, the press camped outside the house where she lived with her parents and two elder sisters, and where "la petite Sabine" wanted to continue as if nothing had happened. She demanded a new bike to replace the one that Dutroux had pulled into his filthy white van and insisted on cycling to school. She passed twice daily the spot which marked the end of her childhood. Some, including her own traumatised mother, found her defiance incomprehensible. Sabine, plainly, could imagine no other way of living. "I'd have to be really unlucky, wouldn't I, to be snatched twice, in the same way?"
In the same spirit, she resisted psychoanalysis. "The shrinks used to put so much pressure on me. I couldn't see where they wanted to go with all their questions. They would hold up cards with little pictures on them and ask me what I saw. And then I started to ask my own questions, like: 'What I am doing here?' "
Sabine was no more cooperative when her family wanted her to open up to them about her ordeal. She refused and, in an irony which she acknowledges with more laughter, her parents and sisters ended up having psychotherapy instead.
Sabine stayed silent for eight years. Then in the autumn of 2004, at the Dutroux trial, she spoke in public about her ordeal for the first time. She was in the box for only an hour but her presence dominated the courtroom, which just one day earlier had fallen mute as the prosecution's most shattering evidence - the desperate letters to her parents she had written from her cell - were read out.
The letters, which Dutroux found but did not destroy, are partly reprinted in the book. They have lost none of their power. The physical pain which the child outlines - the sores, the infection and the haemorrhages brought on by his sexual assaults - is vile enough, but the emotional torment is, if anything, worse. Dutroux's mind-games, particularly his lies about her parents' tacit connivance, left Sabine blaming herself for her plight. In her letters to her mother she pleads for forgiveness.
Sabine's mother, who died earlier this year, never read the letters, although she asked to do so many times. "I didn't think it was right to show them to her. She'd just got over cancer, she had enough to bear already," is Sabine's explanation. The family had never been in the habit of sharing confidences and relations between Sabine and her mother soured after her release. "Did it take my disappearance to make her notice me?" she writes. By the time Sabine was 18, the family had fractured beyond repair. Her parents divorced and Sabine moved out.
What did her mother make of those pages in the book? Sabine's voice shakes and she lights another cigarette. "My biggest disappointment in all this is that Mummy never read it. She died at just about the same time as it came out, so we parted on bad terms. Not easy. It's been hard."
Maybe, I suggest, if Sabine were herself to become a mother " She finishes the sentence: " then I would finally understand what she went through? Maybe." When, a few minutes later, we speak of religion, she bursts out, close to tears: "If there is a God and he's meant to be looking after us, then why have I lost my mother?"
For 80 days, 12-year-old Sabine Dardenne was kept captive in the cellar of Marc Dutroux, the psychopathic paedophile known as the 'Monster of Belgium'. Nine years on, she talks to Susannah Herbert about her ordeal
It's the word 'victim'," says Sabine Dardenne, drawing an ashtray towards her before lighting the first of many Marlboros. "I hate it. People tend to say of me, 'Ah yes, the victim of ' And I want to reply: 'No I'm not just the victim of ' I have a name. I am Sabine Dardenne and, OK, I'm not like everyone else, because we each have our own past. But I am not a circus animal." She laughs at the ridiculousness of it all but her exasperation is clear.
Sabine Dardenne's laughter is her most unsettling feature. She laughs so frequently, leaning forward over the coffee table in the hotel lobby where we meet, that occasionally it is hard to make out her words. She is pretty - blonde, delicate, girlish in jeans and tight v-neck pullover - and when she starts laughing it is easy to forget that she has been through one of the cruelest campaigns of physical and psychological torture that the human mind could devise.
At the age of 12, Sabine was cycling to school in rural Belgium when she was abducted by Marc Dutroux, a serial rapist. From May to August 1996, for 80 days, she was incarcerated behind a false wall in his cellar. The space was big enough for a mattress and a chamber pot. From time to time, the kidnapper would take her upstairs, where he would rape her before returning her to her underground cell.
He posed as her "saviour", claiming that he was protecting her from an evil Mr Big who wanted to revenge himself on her father, a former policeman. He convinced her that her family didn't care what happened to her. She expected to die among the vermin in the cellar. But - as the world knows - she didn't. Dutroux made a mistake and was caught. He was later sentenced to life in prison for a spree of abductions that left four young girls dead. Sabine survived. And now, nine years later, at the age of 21, she wants more. She wants, she says, to live.
I Choose to Live is the title of the remarkable book she has written about her ordeal. In France, where it is published under the title I was 12 years old and I took my bike and went off to school the book has spent as long in the bestseller lists as its author spent in what she calls her "hidey-hole".
In Belgium, where fascination with the Dutroux case knows no bounds, she has grown used to being recognised by perfect strangers who ask for her autograph. "It's a nightmare," she says. "It's so stupid. I'm not a singer, I'm not married to Brad Pitt. And yet everywhere I go I get questions and funny looks. People ask me for my autograph. Or they say they know what I feel, how much I've gone through when they can't possibly know. It's idiotic."
The book was "necessary", she writes, in order to put a stop to the "questions". Does her strategy show any signs of working? "Not just yet. But I live in hope," she snaps. This time, her laugh is so dry that it turns into a cough.
The prickliness is characteristic. Indeed, some reckon it is this defiance that enabled her to survive. She concedes the point: "It's true that my stroppy character did save me. If I had been different, weaker, maybe I would have been dragged down further. But my little acts of resistance, even if they didn't get me anywhere, at least I did my best to defend myself. I think someone weaker would have been worse off than me at the end. I've always been one to express my views. Even if I'm proved wrong, I always feel it's worth trying."
From the start she tried, in her own childish way, to make life difficult for her tormentor. Her incessant grizzling culminated in a sustained whine about her loneliness. She was bored, she said, she wanted a friend. Dutroux eventually kidnapped another girl, Laetitia Delhez - prompted, he said in court, by Sabine's grumbling. This time, he was spotted, traced and arrested. He led the police to the girls. When they crawled out of their hole, they thanked him, their "protector". Sabine even gave him a kiss on the cheek, a memory which still makes her flinch.
Although the book reflects her Catholic upbringing - the room in which Dutroux did his worst is the "Calvary" room - she is not a believer. "Because if God exists, why did I endure all that? Terrible things happen in life, to many people. But it's not for God to save us, it's for us to save ourselves, to come through, to make a new life."
This flat refusal to assume a passive role, whether in relation to God, Dutroux or received wisdom about "victims" and "monsters", runs through her book. It is peppered with "little acts of resistance", not aimed at Dutroux alone, but at all those whose reports gave him an unmerited status. Her abductor is seldom named. Instead he is the "scumbag", the "greasy creep", the "stupid idiot", the "****", the "arsehole".
Why the childish vocabulary? "When I was writing the book, the publisher and I were looking for a word for him, but we couldn't agree. So we settled on lots of playground words. It's a book I want to be read widely, so I didn't use anything too gross, but I wanted to write him down, not build him up. The trouble with the word 'monster', which the press use all the time, is that it gives him a grandeur he doesn't deserve. It was the same at the trial: I really resented the fact that he was Monsieur Dutroux. Monsieur implies deserving of respect. He's not a Monsieur, he's an arsehole."
She has taken pains to avoid using the word rape in her account. Instead, she writes of his demands elliptically, he "put himself through his paces", or forced her to join in his "circus". "I hate the word, rape. It upsets me, although it is the right word for what happened. And it's not a word which people tend to use much around me because they are worried about my reaction." Again she laughs; it is thin, nervous. "I wanted to write it in such a way as to make clear that these things were being experienced by a child. I think that a child, reading the book, would understand it the way I did." Surely no child would read this book? "Oh, yes, I know several who have."
On her liberation, the press camped outside the house where she lived with her parents and two elder sisters, and where "la petite Sabine" wanted to continue as if nothing had happened. She demanded a new bike to replace the one that Dutroux had pulled into his filthy white van and insisted on cycling to school. She passed twice daily the spot which marked the end of her childhood. Some, including her own traumatised mother, found her defiance incomprehensible. Sabine, plainly, could imagine no other way of living. "I'd have to be really unlucky, wouldn't I, to be snatched twice, in the same way?"
In the same spirit, she resisted psychoanalysis. "The shrinks used to put so much pressure on me. I couldn't see where they wanted to go with all their questions. They would hold up cards with little pictures on them and ask me what I saw. And then I started to ask my own questions, like: 'What I am doing here?' "
Sabine was no more cooperative when her family wanted her to open up to them about her ordeal. She refused and, in an irony which she acknowledges with more laughter, her parents and sisters ended up having psychotherapy instead.
Sabine stayed silent for eight years. Then in the autumn of 2004, at the Dutroux trial, she spoke in public about her ordeal for the first time. She was in the box for only an hour but her presence dominated the courtroom, which just one day earlier had fallen mute as the prosecution's most shattering evidence - the desperate letters to her parents she had written from her cell - were read out.
The letters, which Dutroux found but did not destroy, are partly reprinted in the book. They have lost none of their power. The physical pain which the child outlines - the sores, the infection and the haemorrhages brought on by his sexual assaults - is vile enough, but the emotional torment is, if anything, worse. Dutroux's mind-games, particularly his lies about her parents' tacit connivance, left Sabine blaming herself for her plight. In her letters to her mother she pleads for forgiveness.
Sabine's mother, who died earlier this year, never read the letters, although she asked to do so many times. "I didn't think it was right to show them to her. She'd just got over cancer, she had enough to bear already," is Sabine's explanation. The family had never been in the habit of sharing confidences and relations between Sabine and her mother soured after her release. "Did it take my disappearance to make her notice me?" she writes. By the time Sabine was 18, the family had fractured beyond repair. Her parents divorced and Sabine moved out.
What did her mother make of those pages in the book? Sabine's voice shakes and she lights another cigarette. "My biggest disappointment in all this is that Mummy never read it. She died at just about the same time as it came out, so we parted on bad terms. Not easy. It's been hard."
Maybe, I suggest, if Sabine were herself to become a mother " She finishes the sentence: " then I would finally understand what she went through? Maybe." When, a few minutes later, we speak of religion, she bursts out, close to tears: "If there is a God and he's meant to be looking after us, then why have I lost my mother?"
