A French woman who was tortured and raped by her adoptive father for 28 years and has six children by him wants to be friends with an Austrian held captive for decades by her father.

Lydia Gouardo, 45, spoke out about her case yesterday after the Austrian woman's plight became public this week with the arrest of her father.

"I would like her to be my friend. I (would) feel less alone," Ms Gouardo said of Elisabeth Fritzl in an interview with Le Parisien newspaper.

"Maybe there are others like that, in villages, where people close their shutters."

Ms Gouardo, who lives in a village 60km east of Paris, began a rebirth with the death of her adoptive father in 1999.

Raymond Gouardo was not her biological father but her legal father since she was three years old, her lawyer said.

He began raping her when she was 10, according to her lawyer, Alain Mikowski.

Her stepmother was aware of his crimes.

She was convicted in a closed-door trial before an appeals court this month for non-denunciation of a crime, and given a four-year suspended prison sentence, Mr Mikowski said.

He said there'd been a total breakdown of judicial, police and social services systems.

Ms Gouardo, who never attended school and is illiterate, says she was tortured by her father but not locked up.

She says she fled the family home several times while she was a minor, but police kept bringing her back. "I was afraid of contact with the outside. What my father did, I thought it was normal," she told Le Parisien. "I only ran away when he hit too hard."

Her children were born between 1982 and 1993. She still lives in the family house and has a companion with whom she had two other children.

"It's a real scandal. If there had been no Austrian affair, no one would be talking," Mr Mikowski said.

Yesterday Austrian woman Natascha Kampusch, who was held captive by a kidnapper for more than eight years, donated 25,000 ($42,000) to the woman and children at the centre of the latest Austrian case.