A new Netflix documentary finds an unconventional way into the wild true story of a woman who pretended to be pregnant and kidnapped a newborn baby from a hospital.
A Child of My Own, out Aug. 13 on Netflix, follows Eleonor Alejandra Marin Mendoza, nicknamed Ale, who served more than 13 years in prison for kidnapping a baby in 2009 at the Mexico City hospital where she worked. Before taking the baby, Ale had faked being pregnant to her family and friends.
Ale does not deny the fake pregnancy or the kidnapping, saying in the documentary, “What did I do wrong to be here? Breaking the law, lying, deceiving, causing pain.”
Her retelling of the crime is so dramatic that the first 50 minutes of A Child of My Own are produced like a feature film, with professional actors playing out Ale's version of events. Then, it’s followed by interviews with the real-life Ale, the baby’s mother, Mayra Navarro, Ale’s partner, Arturo Garmiño, and a judge who presided over Ale’s case, Taissia Cruz Parcero.
Here’s what to know about the scandal that made headlines in Mexico, why Ale felt compelled to fake a pregnancy and kidnap a baby, and how she got caught.
The dramatized first half of the film is meant to represent director Maite Alberdi’s own journey exploring this subject as a documentary filmmaker, starting with meeting Ale in prison in 2022 while working on another project and learning her side of the story. And it is meant to represent Ale’s “fairy tale” version of events, “the story that she tells herself to survive,” says Alberdi. “She’s dreaming.”
Ale doesn’t deny taking the baby, but to this day, she insists that the baby’s mother Mayra agreed to give it to her. At the same time, Ale pretended to be pregnant, doctoring medical records to make it look like she had ultrasounds and binge-eating junk food to put on weight quickly so that her belly would expand. When it came time to “give birth,” her plan was to pretend to deliver at the hospital by herself and then surprise her husband at home with Mayra's baby.
Ale says she met Mayra in a hospital waiting room five months before Mayra was due to give birth. Ale claims that Mayra said she wanted to get an abortion, but told Ale that she decided she would rather give the baby up for adoption. The movie version of her story shows the two women in a hospital waiting room, making a pact that Mayra would give her baby to Ale. When the fictional Mayra gives birth, she thrusts the baby into Ale’s hands in the hospital and says she’s off to Chihuahua.
None of that was true, says the real Mayra later in the documentary.
“There was never a deal,” she says. “If you’re going to give away a baby, you wouldn’t do it inside the hospital, right?”
Parcero, a judge in the case, notes that after considering all of the evidence, “in the end, the only thing that didn’t fit was Mayra’s alleged consent or the claims that she had consented.”
She runs through the key evidence, like scans of Mayra’s appointment card that show that Ale and Mayra could not have made a pact at the hospital months before the birth because Marya had her checkups done at a different health center.
Mayra says she met Ale for the first time right after she gave birth. Ale came by her room and said she was doing a survey for the hospital. Mayra says she could not have fled to Chihuahua—or anywhere, for that matter—because she was running a high fever. She went to the bathroom to provide a urine sample to test for an infection, and when she came back, the baby was gone. Mayra assumed a nurse was bathing or feeding the baby: “Never, never did I think my baby was kidnapped.”
Police arrested Ale about eight hours later. Parcero recounts how authorities found Ale’s sweater with her ID badge in Mayra’s room. Security camera footage showed her entering the hospital with an empty shopping bag just before noon and then walking out of the hospital around 6:30pm with the newborn in a shopping bag. Police tracked down Ale, Arturo, and the baby in a nearby hotel room.
Arturo, who believed Ale had given birth to his child, spent two years and six months in prison before he was acquitted. “There was no malicious intent on his part,” Parcero says. "He wasn't an accomplice."
