In 1904 Frieda Keller, a young seamstress, kills her son Ernstli, a child of rape. She buries the body of the five-year-old in a nearby forest. Shortly afterwards, the body is found and the distraught mother, victim and perpetrator at the same time, confesses to her crime.
In addition to the authorities and her own family, the misogynist law of the time is also directed against Frieda: "A female person", according to the wording of the verdict, "must bear the consequences of her immorality herself". Despite fierce protests from the population, Frieda Keller is first sentenced to death at the end of a public trial in the St. Gallen Grossratssaal in front of hundreds of onlookers and subsequently 'pardoned' with a life sentence in solitary confinement. Not only was the bigoted pardon was a disgrace, but also the fact that her rapist, the married Carl Zimmerli, was never brought to justice. The law at the time protected married men who assaulted women. It is the adaption of a stirring fate and a cause célèbre about questions of shame, misery, ethics, morality and emancipation.