During that time, a girl named Djena Diallo lived alongside them. Like them, she was Guinean. She traveled to weddings, graduations and the Toure children’s sporting events. To the outside world, she appeared to be a member of the family.

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But at home, according to federal prosecutors, the family dynamics were far different.

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Diallo was brought to the United States at age 5, according to authorities. She said she knew no one and spoke no English. The Toures, she said, forced her to cook, clean and nanny their children without paying her. She did not attend school. Diallo told authorities that she was beaten, called “dog” and “worthless,” and banished to a nearby park as punishment, where she slept on a bench.

After 16 years under their control — in 2016 — Diallo finally fled, and she eventually reported her experience to police. Toure and Cros-Toure were arrested, indicted and convicted on federal charges of forced labor, conspiracy to commit alien harboring and alien harboring.

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Now they are going to prison.

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor sentenced Toure and Cros-Toure, both 58, to seven years in prison and ordered them to pay $288,620.24 in restitution. They will be deported to Guinea after they are released from prison.

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“Forced labor trafficking cases are notoriously difficult to prosecute — in part because victims are often afraid to speak out,” U.S. Attorney Erin Nealy Cox said in a Justice Department statement. “It took tremendous courage for this young woman to share her story at trial. She was brought to this country at a young age, pressured to stay quiet, and forced to work for this family without pay for 16 years.”

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When the case went to trial in January, attorneys for the couple painted them as benevolent and charitable. They argued that Diallo’s father sent the girl to the Toures so she might have “a better life in the United States,” the Dallas Morning News reported. The defense said Diallo had concocted a false narrative around her upbringing to “destroy the family that took her in.”

The girl’s household chores, they said, were no different from those expected of the Toure children.

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“This is one of the hardest things we’ve been through,” Cros-Toure told the federal judge Monday before she was sentenced, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “We opened our home to everyone, and our hearts.”

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Toure said his wife loved Diallo like a daughter. “We thought the truth would come out,” Toure said.

The couple’s supporters at the sentencing hearing echoed the sentiment, the Star-Telegram reported. The Toure children testified on behalf of their parents, as did neighbors and friends. They described the family as loving and generous.

The couple’s attorneys argued that Diallo lived in freedom, had social media accounts, attended family vacations and could leave the house when she wanted.

But prosecutors and Diallo offered a drastically different version of events.

They said the girl was sent to the United States alone as a child, against her mother’s wishes, to be the Toures’ servant. Her mother tried to hide her and prevent her from being taken, prosecutors said, because she “didn’t want her [daughter] to be someone’s slave.”

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Diallo testified that the couple physically, emotionally and verbally abused her. They hit her on multiple occasions, she said, including with a belt and an electrical cord, and called her “slave.” They shaved her head and washed her outside with a hose.

Once, as punishment, Cros-Toure allegedly expelled Diallo from the house. She slept in a park and kept warm using a public-restroom hand dryer, officials said. “They isolated her from her family and society and prevented her from receiving any education, while their own children attended school and college,” the Justice Department statement said.

After a couple of particularly bad years, Diallo testified, she planned her escape with the help of friends and neighbors, according to the Dallas Morning News. In August 2016, she managed to flee the home and eventually relocated to the house of a former neighbor in a suburb of Houston.

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