Judge Fabrice Burgaud investigated the Outreau case. It was to him that the case was entrusted when the social services of Boulogne-sur-Mer reported, in December 2000, suspicions of sexual abuse of minors in the Outreau district. Seventeen people were indicted in May 2004. But after the appeal trial, which took place in December 2005, the majority of the accused were acquitted. After the scandal of the Outreau affair, Judge Burgaud was heard by parliamentarians. They analyzed, live on TF1 and France 2, and for 6 long hours on February 8, 2006, the choices he had made during his investigation.
The Superior Council of the Judiciary requested, following the disciplinary proceedings which ended in 2009, the lowest sanction: a reprimand. Judge Burgaud has since been relocated to the Court of Cassation: he first worked there as an auditor (responsible for preparing the cases submitted) and has served there, since 2017, as referendum general advocate. A post that had been much criticized at the time. Maître Patrick Maisonneuve, however, made a point of clarifying RTL Tuesday 23 February 2021: "This is not a promotion, we were wrong to write it. His name remains and will forever be attached to this Outreau case. It is somewhat hidden today at the Court of Cassation, it is as it should be interpreted ".
What does Judge Burgaud think?
Fabrice Burgaud is now 49 years old and his outlook on the famous affair is still the same: "He has always denied having committed a fault in the sense in which we understand, a fault which would have consisted in deliberately cheating to implicate people. There was no regret in the sense that, no, he did not. would not have failed in its mission in terms of professional rules ", made his advice known twenty years later. The native of Niort, however, has no intention of raising this fiasco in the media: as reported RTL "Judge Burgaud does not want to reopen the wounds of Outreau under any circumstances".
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