Outreau, it’s next to the sea, except that you never see it. In this suburb of Boulogne-sur-Mer (Pas-de-Calais), on the fifth floor of number 20 of the Renard HLM tower, porn films are constantly playing on the TV in the living room, where a collection of human skulls sits. Here, the father tears out the slats of the bed to hit his four children, bursts in at night with a mask to terrorize them. But it’s not the worst, by far.
Outreau, a French nightmare, a documentary series broadcast on Netflix since March 15, sets the scene: the building (destroyed in 2023) has been reconstructed as a model, like a doll’s house where children are played to torture. Around the yellow mini-balconies gravitates Fabrice Burgaud, known as “the little judge”, famous for having triggered, between 2001 and 2005, the biggest legal fiasco of the beginning of the century. This is the first time that the magistrate, now general advocate general at the Court of Cassation, testifies on this case, which, for twenty years, has been the subject of numerous documentaries, several books, and even a movie (Presumed guilty, 2011). A media story that has shaped the unconscious.
We know the story, at least in broad terms. Twelve child victims of sexual violence and barbaric acts committed in 1997 and 2000, four defendants found guilty out of seventeen, thirteen people acquitted after spending three years in prison. From “floor incest” to the “pedocriminal network”, from the “destitute” of the city to the “notables” of the city, this French Dutroux affair collapsed like a house of cards. What we learned from it: innocent adults with broken lives. And a lesson: you shouldn’t believe everything the children say.
Steamroller
In 2023, another documentary, The Outreau Affair, broadcast on France Télévisions, had chosen to return to these thirteen accused whom the courts had acquitted after three trials at the assizes. Four of them recounted the legal and media steamroller. The only victim to testify on camera: Jonathan Delay, son of the two main accused, Myriam Badaoui and Thierry Delay, sentenced to fifteen and twenty years’ imprisonment. His parents had confessed to raping him and his brothers, “two or three times a week”. A couple of neighbors, who also admitted the facts, sometimes participated. Jonathan was 6 years old.
As my colleague Henri Seckel wrote, “television cannot comprehensively address a story as dense as that of Outreau”. The Netflix documentary is no exception to this rule, but its international vocation nevertheless provides an instructive perspective, by mixing archive images with the testimonies of the main players in the case: Judge Burgaud, the defense lawyers – Eric Dupond-Moretti, Hubert Delarue, Frank Berton… –, those of the civil parties, the psychological expert, the magistrates of the investigating chamber, the journalists who covered the event, etc. Jonathan Delay once again delivers his story, far from the judicial truth. But, here again, the main stakeholders are missing, namely these eleven other children recognized as victims of rape. What happens to them, what do they have to say? We won’t know. They remain the invisibles of history.
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