A legal disaster and a media frenzy: the Outreau affair

Between 2001 and 2004, a sordid case concerning acts of sexual assault on minors in Outreau resulted in the acquittal of 13 of the 17 accused, some of whom served up to three years in prison, calling into question a dysfunction of justice , but also the responsibility of the media. With Gilles Antonowicz, lawyer and essayist.

When Myriam Badaoui and her husband Thierry Delay entered his office on February 22, 2001, Judge Burgaud was far from imagining that a case was beginning for him that would make the headlines in the legal news for more than four years. Coming from the small town of Outreau, south of Boulogne, the couple in front of him are indicted and imprisoned, suspected of sexual abuse of their four minor children. A file like this does not surprise him: Fabrice Burgaud already has several on his desk. It barely interests the local newspaper. The voice of the North which only gave him a few lines on April 7, then nothing for seven months. Until new revelations made by the Delhaye children and their mother, Myriam Badaoui, gave this affair another dimension and the whole of France discovered it in the written press, on the radio and on television. Patrice Gélinet returns to this affair alongside Gilles Antonowicz, lawyer and essayist, author of the book Outreau, the story of a disaster (ed. Max Milo).

Patrice Gélinet: It is a legal disaster but also, you write, an excess of the media which, in contempt of the secrecy of the investigation and the presumption of innocence, took at their word what the victims said without verifying it and assert that the accused were guilty even before being tried. Then the same media declared them innocent when it was realized that what they were accused of was based on lies. By reading you, we realize, Gilles Antonowicz, that the media played a considerable role in this affair.

Gilles Antonowicz: Oh yes, absolutely. They were an extraordinary sounding board. At first, it didn’t interest them much since, at first, it was a sadly banal affair. You should still know that in the Saint-Omer criminal court, we examine files and 70% of them are stories of rape. You should know that in Judge Burgaud’s office, he has approximately 120 files in his office, around fifty of which are rape cases. So at the start, it’s true that it’s a trivial matter, it doesn’t interest many people.

The national media only spoke about it in November 2001, when the affair had begun with the indictment of Myriam Badaoui and her husband Thierry Delay, suspected of sexual abuse of their four children, surrendered takes into account, even before they are indicted, the foster families where the children were placed.

What actually happened in this story? What happens is that within the Delay family, we have children aged between 2 and 8 years old, who are raped three times a week by their parents and less frequently by two of their neighbors. That is something that is acquired. And within this family, Father Delhaye is someone who is a collector. He collects pornographic tapes and horror film tapes. When we searched his house, we found 300 cassettes, 200 cassettes on which they were porn films and a hundred were horror films and they were playing constantly. And the kids watched it all the time. I’m not saying that the children lied, I’m saying that the children were obviously traumatized by the rapes they suffered, but then, when we asked them questions, when the adults pressed them to say more and more , they responded to the adults’ request and they drew what they said from what they saw, from this kind of improbable magma that they saw for years at their home, these cassettes where in fact he there were scenes of zoophilia, since that too came out in the procedure…

With “Les infox de l’Histoire”, the third season of the Descartes Foundation podcast in partnership with franceinfo, travel through the eras at the heart of major episodes of disinformation. Patrice Gélinet and his guests expose and analyze the fake news that have hit the headlines from antiquity to the present day. Conspiracy, disinformation, rumors, slander, media hype… A third season of eight episodes to decipher the lies of History.

Producer: Patrice Gélinet
Director: Gilles Blanchard
Documentalist/Production officer: Juliette Marcaillou
Technician: Nadège Antonini