A 48-year-old woman will be tried in criminal court after hiding the existence of her 14-year-old child. She denies any abuse. The elements of the case.
[Updated May 21, 2023 at 3:22 p.m.] Stéphanie, 48, will be tried in criminal court next October for “evading her legal obligations” and “deprivation of care” for her 14-year-old son. Indeed, in July 2022, during a visit to the pediatric emergency room in Rennes, the doctors took care of a child who weighed only 25kg, with intellectual development delay and difficulty in expressing himself, West said. -France.
After a report to child welfare, the teenager was removed from his mother and “a provisional placement order for the child was taken by the prosecution at the beginning of July 2022”, according to the deputy public prosecutor of Rennes, Flavie Le Sueur, contacted by France Bleu.
Stéphanie, accompanied by her lawyer, has multiplied passages in the media to defend herself. Thus, she declared to RTL, this Friday, that she never hid her child, since she declared it to the embassy, ??when he was born in the Philippines. The boy would have a passport according to her. And to deny any mistreatment of his son: “My son has eaten his fill (…) I really take care of him, I do tailor-made, I am very attentive to him”, he said. she judged.
According to information from Ouest-France, this child has never been to school, and has also never been followed by a doctor or by social services. According to Me Emmanuel Ludot, one of the two lawyers for the boy’s mother contacted by BFMTV, the child was born in the Philippines, where his client told him that he had gone to give birth before returning to France. The lawyer also claims that the child was declared at birth to the French Embassy “located abroad”, indicates the news channel.
Asked by BFMTV, the mother claimed to have settled in Rennes before 2020. They had previously lived for some time in Paris, before the Covid-19 pandemic broke out. The apartment in which they lived in Ille-et-Vilaine was considered unsanitary by the police, specifies the news channel. The child is still placed with child welfare services, and the mother is currently living in an apartment hotel, according to RTL.
The 48-year-old mother implicated in this case once again denied any abuse at RTL’s microphone on Friday: “We were just a happy family before July. Me, personally, I’m just a mom trying to make her mom work best and happily. My son is usually happy.” Returning to the child’s health deficiencies and his very low weight, which are part of the first elements of the investigation, she had already said Thursday on BFMTV: “My son has never fallen asleep one night being hungry . He always had enough to eat.” Still at the microphone of the news channel, the mother then affirmed that her child is in “very good health” and that he “very rarely falls ill”.
Asked by BFMTV about the suspicions against her of having lived as a recluse with her son, the mother also denied this, explaining that he was not going to school because she gave him lessons at home. The mother also indicated that before she moved to Ille-et-Vilaine with her son, the latter took part in cultural activities: “My son was always in the library, at the museum, at the theater, in the toy libraries , in the exhibitions. We were (…) very steeped in culture, knowledge”.
Me Emmanuel Ludot, one of her two lawyers, told BFMTV that she graduated in architecture and art history. If she therefore affirms that she gave him lessons at home, the lawyer specifies however that she had not registered with the authorities as her home educator. “He is not an unhappy child, he is not a child who has been deprived. He is a child who has had an education which is not that of all children. He is not in the standard”, continued Me Emmanuel Ludot, assuring that the child was free to go out. “We do not blame this mother for having deprived this child of going out, of having imprisoned him,” he said. The lawyer also indicated that this child has “obviously a high intellectual potential”, and that he “lived in a fusional way with his mother”. “Passionate about history”, he had school “deficiencies” because he “learned what he wanted to learn”, he justified. In any case, there is no doubt that this case will still cause a lot of ink to flow in the coming days.
