A French court last week convicted a 42-year-old Algerian woman of poisoning her Jewish employers but cleared her of the aggravating circumstance of racist hatred, prompting protests from Jewish jurists.
The nanny, identified in French media only as “Leila Y.,” was sentenced to three years in prison—six months of which were suspended—for actions committed in January 2024. She deliberately contaminated the food of the Jewish family that employed her, including that of the three children, aged two to seven, in her care.
Prosecutors earlier this month charged her with causing deliberate harm by poisoning, citing an aggravating circumstance of racist hatred. The Correctional Tribunal of Nanterre later dismissed the aggravating circumstance, which could have doubled her sentence.
The family’s lawyers said they will seek to have the antisemitic motive recognized in a civil lawsuit they are filing against the nanny.
During her arrest, the woman told police she was motivated “because they have money and power. I should’ve never worked for a Jew; she gave me only problems,” according to Patrick Klugman, a prominent French-Jewish lawyer who represented the family.
The judge dismissed the aggravating circumstance, reasoning that the nanny’s admission came weeks after the actions for which she was convicted.
Klugman protested, saying in a statement: “In this affair, there is one constant: Antisemitism.”
Sacha Ghozlan, another lawyer representing the family, told Radio J that the sentence was relatively severe for the crime. But the decision not to recognize the antisemitic motive is “incomprehensible, because there were so many antisemitic elements in this story, including an employee of the Jewish school of the children, who witnessed her use antisemitic rhetoric while dropping off the kids,” Ghozlan added.
The nanny worked for the family in Paris for two months under a false Belgian identity. She was ordered to leave France, a measure commonly applied to those found to have overstayed their visa.
The woman who employed her noticed abnormalities in various products—including wine, juice, bread and a makeup kit that caused skin irritation, the court heard.
According to court papers, the woman’s 5-year-old daughter told her she had seen the nanny pour a soap-like liquid into a wine bottle, prompting the mother to confront Leila Y.
Police analyzed the products the nanny allegedly tampered with and confirmed they had been poisoned, though the substances introduced were not lethal.
The nanny was arrested in February 2024, several weeks after her employment ended.
Gilles-William Goldnadel, a former member of the CRIF executive board of French Jewry and a prominent lawyer who has represented many victims of antisemitic hate crimes, discussed the case on Radio J earlier this month: “Unfortunately, I can’t say I’m astonished. Hate had been worked up to a fever pitch, notably by the France Unbowed [far-left] party, tied to the Islamist movement, until it has been infused, and this is the infusion.”
Goldnadel recalled the 2012 murder of four Jews in Toulouse and the 2015 killing of four others taken hostage in a kosher market in Paris by Islamist terrorists. “We live in a country where Jews, Jewish children, have been murdered, butchered. This case is a reminder of that reality, perpetrated by foreigners or Islamists,” he said.
