It is a story both incredible and tragic, that of Sophie Serrano and, consequently, that of her daughter and another family. Ten years after giving birth to a child, Sophie Serrano learned that we had exchanged her baby with another at birth. The beginning of a fight for the truth, as she tells the microphone of Christophe Hondelatte Tuesday.
The jaundice of Manon. Sophie Serrano gives birth to a little girl, Manon, on July 4, 1994, in a clinic in Cannes. The baby has jaundice. The child must be regularly assigned to nurses, who place Manon under lamps to heal. A routine device.
One day, after a session, Sophie finds Manon different, especially her hair. "It's stupid," she told herself, "but they look longer than they were earlier." She worries about the nurse who sweeps his doubts: the rays of lights can grow hair faster. Sophie Serrano feels silly to have asked the question. Life resumes, Sophie and Manon eventually leave the clinic to reach the family home where Davy, the father of Manon and Sophie's husband is waiting for them.
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The couple breaks up. The days pass, then the months and Manon grows up. His hair buckles, his complexion becomes duller. In the village of Sophie and Davy, we begin to talk: "the girl does not look like her father, she is not his." The rumor runs the streets, until reaching the ears of Sophie, who does not return. She knows that Davy is the father of Manon, she never deceived! At the same time, his entourage tries to send him a message: Davy would have mistresses. Other rumors! Decidedly, Sophie ends up believing that we want to his family.
One day, Davy finally learns that the whole village is brewing that he is not the father of Manon. He is angry with Sophie, mad with rage. The couple, slowly but surely, disintegrates. And it even ends up breaking definitively when Sophie gets to the evidence: Davy cheats on her. He admits. The couple separates and Sophie leaves to live with a friend.
"I immediately thought back to that hair scene". Over the years, Davy has lost interest in Manon. With the separation, he was less and less present for her. One day, Sophie receives a letter from the court. Davy challenges the paternity of Manon, then aged 7 years and a half. He wants to know if he pays a pension to his real biological daughter. Sophie is scandalized but she has no choice. She bends to two blood tests. Will follow a year of waiting and anguish before a terrible verdict, announced by his lawyer: Davy is not the father of Manon and Sophie is not his mother either.
When his lawyer tells him the news, Sophie makes a sudden return. "I immediately thought back to that hair scene, where I felt ridiculous when I was right," recalls Sophie Serrano at the microphone of Europe 1. For her, we exchanged her baby with another, It's a certainty. It will take three weeks to announce the news to Manon, who is then ten years old.
"It's a psychological torture." Sophie files a complaint to the gendarmerie, against the clinic. She wants the truth to be established. "I gave birth to a baby and I do not know where he is, it's a psychological torture: once I know that, it can not get out of my head," says Sophie Serrano.
Shortly after, it is announced that we have probably found the other family. A new battery of tests commits itself. The results are falling quickly this time. It is confirmed, the babies have been interchanged at birth. The investigation will show later that the exchange of the time probably comes from a child helper, who had problems and drank. She placed two babies under a single lamp for lack of space, then made a mistake in bringing the children back to their mothers.
The difficult truth. The two families will meet, the two little girls to see each other. Obviously, there is no question that Manon and Mathilde (the name of the biological daughter of Sophie) are exchanged and find their biological parents. The truth, however cruel it may be, does not replace years of love. But while everything is going well between the two families at the beginning, Mathilde's parents will be more and more distant. A distance that hangs over Sophie Serrano and plunge her into depression. As time passes, the media coverage of the case and a book will allow him to climb the slope. "It gave me the support I missed," she says.
Twenty years after the fact, a trial is taking place in 2014. In total, the two families will be compensated up to 900,000 euros each. Would Sophie have liked never to know the truth? That these tests never took place? "It's a complicated question. (...) In the end, I might have preferred not to know, because I would not have seen my daughter suffer, nor Mathilde suffer, nor the other parents suffer, ( ...) and at the same time I would never have known Mathilde ", concludes Sophie Serrano," we have for all our life with this story. "