Josef Fritzl, the Austrian incest father, had forced his daughter to fulfill his sexual fantasies after making her watch porn films, it was revealed on the second day of his trial.
The jurors heard the pre-recorded evidence of Elisabeth, now 42. She was spared the ordeal of coming to court, but she has recorded her torment, which had started in 1984. The recordings run over 11 hours.
She said Fritzl would bring boxes of sexually explicit videos into the cellar and then order her to re-enact certain scenes.
The rape sessions would last for hours and she eventually stopped resisting because she knew her life was in danger if she did not co-operate, the court was told.
In the tapes, Elisabeth alleged that Fritzl had ignored her ailing newborn son Michael in 1996 and then disposed of the child’s body in a stove after the boy died.
Fritzl is being asked to reply to the allegations made in each segment of the tape.
Elisabeth’s testimony is so disturbing that the tape is being played in short excerpts of around an hour at a time to prevent the jurors from being traumatised.
The other highlight of the second day’s proceedings was that the 73-year-old man briefly let his guard slip, dropping the A-4 blue folder with which he was covering his face. And thus the photographers got an opportunity to capture and splash across the world the image of the man widely reviled as a monster.