“It looked like a whole different person,” Ms. Schweinhart said. “It was a reality check. Some people have different rock bottoms in their life and they get to the point where they just can’t do it anymore — that was it for me.”

She had been hiding her heroin use from her family and friends — even from people at her addiction-support group, who believed she was only abusing prescription painkillers.

Nobody had known. And suddenly, everybody knew.

People on Facebook sent her messages calling her an abusive mother for jeopardizing the life of her month-old daughter. They told her to just die. They asked: How could you do something like that?

Remembering the video, recalling the babies’ cries and watching the responding officer slip a pacifier into one of their mouths, Ms. Schweinhart did not have an answer.

“It made me sick to my stomach,” she said. “It still does.”

She said that every day was a battle with herself — the good June against the bad June — and she came to think of the video, with all its shame and humiliation, as a divine intervention to force her to get treatment and confront her addiction.

It didn’t proceed like a movie. She repeatedly struggled with the demands of drug court, failed a drug test and spent one night in jail. Last month, Ms. Schweinhart left the program.

She said she had been making progress and believed she could beat the child-neglect charge if she could tell a jury the story about what happened after the one that millions had already seen. Or she could plead out.

Either way, she felt she had nothing left to hide.