A woman who pretended she was pregnant – then staged her own abduction on the day she was supposed to give birth before claiming a gang had cut the baby from her womb, has apologized and asked for forgiveness.
Antonela Milena Padilla, 37, used a cushion to fool her boyfriend, Victor, into believing she was pregnant in a bid to convince him not to leave her.
‘It was false. I made it all up and I did it because of love, because of the fear of losing him,’ she told El Heraldo on Thursday, her face obscured in the footage.
‘I feared he would not stay with me. That’s why I did it and I own up to that big error.’
Antonela Milena Padilla told El Heraldo that she faked her pregnancy because she was in love with her new boyfriend, who made her feel loved for the first time since 2014
Padilla (center) was taken to the hospital by her family, after they grew increasingly concerned for her health. She says she regrets faking her pregnancy
Padilla, who already has a son, 13, and daughter, 14, from a previous relationship, became romantically involved with Victor in December 2017.
She said she felt loved for the first time since her 2014 separation from the father of her two children and drew up, what she thought would be the perfect plan, to keep Victor by her side.
‘I told him one day in January that I was pregnant and he innocently believed me,’ Padilla recalled.
As the months went by she increased the size of her belly by filling the cushion with rags, and printed off an ultrasound scan from the internet to show to family and friends, according to reports.
Padilla claimed she started to gain weight during the staged pregnancy and Victor, who was excited at the prospect of being a first-time dad, would even exclaim, ‘babe, the baby girl is moving’.
‘It sincerely was a psychological pregnancy, and when it’s like that, your belly grows, you sense movements,’ Padilla recalled.
‘I experienced nausea, the urge to vomit, dizziness. I had cravings. At times I wanted to eat bream [fish] and he would buy it for me. It was all psychological.’
Incredibly, her boyfriend never suspected anything was wrong and as the day of the birth neared, became increasingly excited at being a father for the first time.
But the elaborate scam spectacularly unraveled Saturday, the day she was due to give birth by C-section at a local hospital.
Padilla, from Barranquilla, northern Colombia, initially claimed she was kidnapped and drugged.
She told El Heraldo she had agreed to meet up with Victor at 11am and left an hour earlier at the Plaza del Sol where she was to pick up $500,000 pesos [$169] to buy a few item she needed to get for Mariangel, the imaginary child’s chosen name.
As she was on her way to the town of Hipodromo, the ‘soon-to-be-mother-of three’ said she was indeed mugged.
‘A dark skinned man approaches me. He told me, ‘stay normal, keep walking normal and go inside the car’. When I get near the red car, the guy pushes me and I went inside,’ Padilla explained.
‘They then started to drive me in circles and dropped me off at the Cordialidad Bridge.’
Padilla wandered around trying to figure out the next chapter in her outrageous story.
At one point she borrowed money from a stranger and boarded a bus to visit an old co-worker and spent a few hours there until she left at about 7pm local time.
Padilla found another stranger that would assist her with bus fare to make it to a nearby church.
She broke down in tears as she figured ‘what to say, what to do’.
Almost 12 hours had already passed between the time she had left her home to meet Victor before calling her boyfriend and frantically begging him to rescue her.
Victor, who would arrive with his brother and another friend, repeatedly asked about the baby before she claimed that an organ trafficking gang had cut the baby from her belly in order to sell the baby’s body parts.
Padilla’s boyfriend called police declaring what had just happened to his girlfriend.
‘He insisted that I needed to go to the hospital, but I told him no. I didn’t want to go because I knew what was coming,’ she revealed.
‘At the moment I decided not to tell the truth due to fear,’ she added.
Worried about her health, her family took her against her will to the local Nino Jesus de Soledad hospital, where shocked medics called police, who launched a massive operation to track down the alleged kidnappers.
But officers quickly began to doubt the woman’s story, especially after a hospital evaluation found she had suffered no knife injuries consistent with a ‘back street caesarean’.
A further blood test found she had never been pregnant, and found no traces of any sedatives in her body.
‘They discovered there wasn’t a pregnancy,’ Padilla said.
The house in Barranquilla, northern Colombia, which Ms Padilla shared with her boyfriend
Victor’s mother told Colombia’s Al Dia newspaper that the woman continued to insist she had been pregnant.
She said: ‘They did the tests, and she still tried to convince them she had been expecting. But the gynaecologist confirmed she had never been pregnant.’
She added that her son never went with her for her pre-natal check-ups and preferred to wait for her at the entrance to the hospital.
She said: ‘We never suspected anything because although her belly was small, some pregnant women don’t have big bellies so we didn’t think anything was strange.
‘I have to speak with my son so he can tell me what was going on. He has had various relationships but never had children. There is no need, no reason for her to do this.’
Police commander Mariano Cotero Coy said yesterday that an investigation had been launched and Padilla had been called to provide a declaration.
He said she could be charged with wasting public resources.
He said: ‘In the hospital, we see people lying down in queues, from 5am waiting for an appointment, and this lady feigning her pregnancy meant that she was attended to before others who really needed it.’
The couple has now split but she says she wants him back.
‘He’s hurt,’ Padilla said. ‘This is necessary for the wounds to heal, to be able to turn the page.
‘He told me, ‘disconnect yourself from everything. I want you to recuperate so that you can be the Antonela from before. You made an error and you hit me where it hurts the most. I want you to give me space so that I can heal.’