Nathalie Huygens, a 50-year-old mother who was a rape victim in 2016, received clearance to be euthanized. His psychological distress was recognized by a medical board.
“The Nathalie I was, a epicure, died on the morning of September 3, 2016.” Nearly seven years after her rape, Nathalie Huygens, a 50-year-old Belgian mother, received approval from a panel of experts to be euthanized. The two psychiatrists and a doctor recognized the deep mental suffering into which the fifty-year-old had fallen since her violent attack.
In an interview with the Belgian daily Het Laatste Nieuws, translated by the news site 7sur7, Nathalie Huygens agreed to come back to this Saturday in 2016 and its aftermath.
“The first few days I really thought I would get over it”
This Saturday, September 3, 2016, the mother will walk “very early” and take the same route along the railway line from Vilvorde, a town in the Flemish region, “like every day”. On the way, a man with a “black face of anger” who “grabs” her and “throws her into the ditch with enormous force”.
The man hits her, insisting on breaking her jaw. “I know if he hits me again, I’m dead. So I keep quiet. I don’t scream anymore, I don’t defend myself anymore, I don’t move anymore,” she testified. The attacker drags her a few meters away and rapes her with a knife before leaving Nathalie Huygens “for dead”.
“If I had known at that moment what kind of existence awaited me from this moment on, I would have run after him and said to him: ‘Kill me,'” she explains today.
“The first few days after the fact, I really thought I’d get over it,” recalls the mother of two children, 25 and 22 years old. But when Nathalie Huygens returns home after a week in hospital, “the fact is that[elle] will not be[t] never again the one[elle] have[t] the summer has made itself felt”.
“A part of me seemed dead”
“Nothing was right. Everyone told me I was still the same, but I didn’t feel like it. Part of me seemed dead (…) I couldn’t be more. with my family. I couldn’t take it no longer that my husband sleeps with me, I couldn’t bear to eat at the table with them anymore,” she explains.
“I had panic and anxiety attacks, I ended up having suicidal thoughts and I actually tried to kill myself,” she says.
Four months after her rape, she was admitted to a psychiatric ward, “the beginning of a long line of admissions over the years, forced or not.”
Despite the years, Nathalie’s mental stress does not diminish. “I’m so, so tired. Aside from sleeping, not a half hour goes by that I don’t think about what happened to me.”
“I’ve been fighting day after day all this time to keep myself alive, it’s not sustainable,” admits the mother of the family, who, with the support of her family, applied for euthanasia in 2021 because she “only wants peace “I want the suffering to stop, stop. Knowing now that I can die is kind of comforting.”
In 2022, his eldest son Wout published an open letter in support of his election, writing that “no child deserves to see their parents suffer like this”. “I wrote this letter so that people realize the consequences of rape (…) The judiciary still has a lot to do, the aggressors get away with penalties that are too low compared to the suffering of the victims,” he confides young man to BFMTV.
A very structured approach
Euthanasia has since been decriminalized in Belgium Law of May 28, 2002, came into force on September 20, 2003. Since then, around 2,700 euthanasia measures have been carried out annually. As BFMTV Me Tom Michel, lawyer in the Paris office and specialist in Belgian law, recalled, “80% of cases concern people over 70, people “at the end of life”.
The procedure, “extremely long”, is very supervised and requires the patient to repeat their request. It “involves several doctors, it’s a real diagnosis,” the council recalled.
Nathalie Huygens wants to “try to hold out” until the civil trial against her attacker, for whom she has been waiting “so long”. Arrested 14 months after the events, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Two years ago, the Belgian visited him in prison: “I confronted him for three hours. At the end he said to me: ‘You are such a beautiful woman, so gentle, so noble, that should never have happened.’ I said to him, ‘This should never have happened to anyone’”.
Edouard Bonnamour with Fanny Rocher