France court jails woman for drugging daughter to death

A French court on Wednesday jailed a mother for 30 years for overmedicating her two children, killing one of them.

Maylis Daubon, 53, had claimed her daughter Enea, an 18-year-old who was struggling with her mental health and had dropped out of school, committed suicide in 2019.

Daubon called first responders after Enea suffered convulsions at the family home, but they arrived to find her brain-dead and she died several days later in hospital.

The investigation showed she had taken 10 times the recommended dose of a drug to reduce heart rate or anxiety.

Tests a few years later showed Enea's younger sister Luan had also consumed unusually high doses of sleeping pills.

Reading the guilty verdict, presiding judge Emmanuelle Adoul told Daubon: "Luan's life was saved due to your arrest."

Prosecutors argued that Daubon was a liar and a manipulator who had been drugging her daughter into a submissive state since early 2018, after an acrimonious divorce almost a decade earlier from her children's father, Yannick Reverdy, a former national handball player.

Police found the heart drug, also used to reduce anxiety, hidden in suppositories in the mother's room and in a dresser in the living room.

But the younger sibling, now aged 22, defended her mother at the trial in the southwestern town of Mont-de-Marsan, saying she was not guilty.

She said she had had a happy childhood, even if it was complicated by her parents divorcing after her mother accused her father of physical abuse.

Daubon and Reverdy divorced in 2009.

A co-detainee during the trial accused Daubon of trying to seek her ex-husband's murder from behind bars, allegations the defendant dismissed as "prison gossip".

The defence argued that Daubon was innocent and that her eldest daughter was known to have suffered from "severe and chronic psychiatric disorders".