An Australian influencer has been charged with poisoning her baby girl to elicit donations and boost online followers.
The Queensland woman claimed she was chronicling her child’s battle with a terminal illness on social media, but detectives allege she was drugging the one-year-old and then filming her in “immense distress and pain”.
Doctors had raised the alarm in October, when the baby was admitted to hospital suffering a serious medical episode.
After months of investigation, the 34-year-old woman was charged with torture, administering poison, making child exploitation material and fraud.
Kinda sounds like Munchhausens by proxy, but it’s also very possible she’s just a disturbingly shitty human being in a normal way. Normal being a relative term.
I have a hard time assigning guilt to people who commit truly heinous crimes like this. Like, your brain is obviously completely fucked if you’re poisoning your baby for internet points.
Do not make the mistake of denying clear evil when you see it
To be clear, I’m not saying she should go free! She’s clearly a danger to others. I just don’t see any value in further punishment — if anything, she needs therapy and rehabilitation, if that’s even possible.
If you meant evil in a spiritual sense, then I’d be very curious to hear your thoughts on why classifying people or actions as evil is necessary.
She hasn’t received any bloody punishment yet. She hasn’t even gone to court.
It’s what money and power does to a person
I deeply disagree. I think most healthy parents would probably die for their kids. There’s no price that would make me consider poisoning a baby. Ultimately, the payoff was A$60k which is about $37k USD — not exactly a life changing amount.
She probably expected to get much more than $60k. But anyway a sociopath would totally poison a baby for $0.
Munchausen Syndrome by Internet Proxy
That’s simultaneously very clever and extremely disturbing
Munchausen syndrome by proxy is a mental health disorder in which a caregiver creates the appearance of health problems in another person - typically their child.
