Fabienne Kabou (born 14 June 1977) is a Senegalese–French woman who was convicted of murder for the death of her 15-month-old daughter, Adélaïde, on 19 November 2013. She gave birth to the child in secret and raised her alone in Paris. She traveled to Berck-sur-Mer with the intention of drowning her and left her on the shore, where she was found dead the next day. Kabou was quickly apprehended and sentenced to 20 years in prison after a trial in June 2016. The trial inspired the film Saint Omer (2022). Events Fabienne Kabou was born into a wealthy Catholic family in Dakar on 14 June 1977. Her father worked as a translator for the United Nations, her mother as a secretary. Kabou was a good student and apparently scored 130 on IQ tests. In 1995, she moved to France to study architecture and then philosophy, and was writing a thesis on Wittgenstein. She met a sculptor 30 years her senior named Michel Lafon with whom she became romantically involved, and she terminated two pregnancies while they were together. When she became pregnant a third time, she hid the fact from Lafon before giving birth to the child alone in their shared apartment in August 2012; the birth of the child, named Adélaïde ("Ada"), was not legally registered and unknown outside of the household, even to Kabou's mother. Kabou retreated from her academic and social life to raise Adélaïde; Lafon was apparently not interested in the child. Experiencing hallucinations and other conditions, Kabou spent €40,000 euros seeking help from "witchdoctors and healers" before the murder. On 19 November 2013, Kabou took Adélaïde by train to the coastal town of Berck-sur-Mer, where she checked into a hotel room. She had told Lafon that she was bringing the child to Senegal to live with her mother. After dusk she walked on the beach with Adélaïde in a stroller and breastfed her, and later claimed to feel an unexplainable urge to abandon the child. She recalled, "I put an end to her life because it was easier that way. It was as if I felt carried along, I just couldn't say stop". She laid her almost asleep daughter down in the tide, hugged her for some minutes while asking for forgiveness, and then ran from the scene. Fishermen discovered the child's drowned body on the shore the next morning. Kabou returned to Paris that