On June 17, 2009, 26-year-old Eleonor Alejandra Marín Mendoza left a hospital in Mexico City carrying a gift bag. Inside was a newborn baby girl.
But the baby girl was not her daughter.
Hours later, Marín Mendoza and her husband were arrested at a motel, and the little girl, Katya Valentina, was returned safely to her parents. She was ultimately sentenced to 13 years in prison for kidnapping.
The most surprising aspect of the case is that, for months, Marín Mendoza had managed to convince her husband, relatives, and even doctors that she was pregnant.
After suffering several miscarriages, she began faking another pregnancy. She even gained a considerable amount of weight to simulate a belly and, because she worked in the hospital’s obstetrics and gynecology department, manipulated her own medical records.
According to her version of events, she had agreed with another pregnant woman that she would receive her baby after the birth. However, the girl’s mother completely denied that story and said that no agreement had ever existed.
On the day of the kidnapping, Marín Mendoza allegedly entered the mother’s room posing as a social worker. Shortly afterward, the newborn disappeared.
The story is now being retold in “A Child of One’s Own”, the new docudrama directed by Chilean filmmaker Maite Alberdi, which combines reenactments of the events with interviews with Marín Mendoza herself, the baby’s mother, the judge, and specialists who analyzed her case.
More than a decade later, Marín Mendoza says that her obsession with becoming a mother was linked to the enormous pressure she felt from her family and surroundings.
But a lie that began with a fake pregnancy ended with a newborn baby girl inside a bag and a woman sentenced to prison.