Faustine Bollaert and her team were very moved, in September 2023, by the testimony of young Ali, whose death they had just learned of.
“Ali’s courage on the set of It starts today. She left us yesterday. I think of her. To his loved ones. To the flaws of this young girl that I will never forget,” wrote the host under a photo of the 25-year-old young woman on the set of the show, published on her Instagram Stories.
While the subject of the show was child abandonment, Ali recounted how and why she had given up the exercise of her parental rights over her daughter Nina, then aged four.
An opportunity
Ali Leonardi detailed his story in a work with an emblematic title: Bad mother (ed. Fayard). Without taboo, but with a tight throat and tears on her face, the young woman explained to Faustine Bollaert the painful process of entrusting her child a year after his birth.
While suffering from endometriosis, Ali underwent treatment that put her in artificial menopause; so she didn't have her period. Discovering in 2018 that she was pregnant, and although she did not want a child, her mother convinced her to continue her pregnancy. But Ali does not become a mother.
“I never wanted to be a mother. I was afraid of being like my mother,” writes in her book-testimony the young woman who had been mistreated as a child.
She placed little Nina “at about one year old”, she said on the set of the show. Three years later, the mother renounced her parental rights. Her daughter can be adopted. What society calls “child abandonment” is not really one for Ali. She believes, on the contrary, that she gave her daughter an “opportunity”. She prefers the term “entrust” to the “super hard” verb of abandoning.
Sure of your choice
“She carried a strong and rare message, that of maternal regret,” also wrote the team of the France 2 show in their tribute shared on X. But Ali had said it on screen: she was “ sure of her decision”, even if she missed Nina sometimes. “I know that what I did was the best thing to do,” she assured. “I miss her, but I know it was the best decision I could have made in my life.”
Since then, she has had no further news from her daughter. The causes of Ali Leonardi's death have not been revealed. TV Magazine reports that the young woman said on Instagram in July, in a post about mental health, that she was “diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, borderline personality disorder, ADHD and 'generalized anxiety'.
“Whatever happens, we must not give up, we continue and we move forward,” she wrote.
