They met most of the actors in this story, still extraordinary twenty-three years later.
Producers Élodie Polo Ackermann and Jean-Paul Geronimi looked into the Outreau affair for Netflix.
They produced a detailed, meticulous and breathtaking documentary, in four episodes,
Outreau, a French nightmare
, put online on March 15.
Outreau, before being the name of a legal fiasco, is that of a suburb of Boulogne-sur-Mer.
It was there, precisely at the Tour du Renard, an HLM building, that four children were victims of rape at the hands of their parents Myriam Badaoui and Frank Delay and a couple of neighbors, Aurélie Grenon and David Delplanque .
These little boys, then aged 4 to 10, began to name, in addition to the real culprits, people around them or people they had heard about, as also being pedophiles.
Their mother, Myriam Badaoui, a certified mythomaniac, corroborated their accusations and even added new stories.
Little by little, the young judge Burgaud, then in charge of the case, began to investigate a supposed pedophile network between France and Belgium.
In total, thirteen people were imprisoned, sometimes for up to three years, before being exonerated in two trials that went down in French legal history.
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Madame Figaro
.– Why did you want to get back into the Outreau affair?
Jean-Paul Geronimi.–
The Outreau affair has a societal dimension in what it says implicitly about the French judicial system or the collection of children's words, subjects which are at the heart of today's debates. today.
So it’s interesting to look at this story twenty years later.
Élodie Polo Ackermann.–
With Jean-Paul, this is not the first time that we have dealt with major affairs which have interested and marked French society.
We notably produced the documentary series on the unsolved murder of little Grégory (
Grégory
), or the story of Florence Cassez (
Designated guilty: the Florence Cassez affair
), a French woman imprisoned in Mexico for drug trafficking.
We like to unfold these stories in their complexity in long formats that leave room for subtlety.
Twenty-three years after the affair began, have you still learned anything?
J.-PG–
It’s a very complicated story, which has impacted the collective unconscious.
However, no one remembers it precisely.
People are only able to tell bits and pieces of it.
It has been overhyped, there are many protagonists, many things to take into account.
We learned that there are fifteen stories in history.
So we try, in the documentary, to juxtapose all the points of view, those of the victims, those acquitted, the judge, the lawyers, in order to discover all of this from a new perspective.
Also read “We didn’t believe the children”: the Outreau affair or how to disentangle fact from fiction
You have managed to get people involved in the case to talk about whom we have heard very little, such as Judge Burgaud, who seems to stick to his positions. What did they bring to the documentary?
EPA–
Judge Burgaud tells things and also reveals in his unsaid words, his way of living this story.
Unlike other documentary approaches, we wish to respect everyone's perspective.
His trajectory fascinated us because it is key.
That's what the introduction to this series says, this judge found himself with millions of eyes on him to examine a unique justice case.
J.-PG–
We introduced these new “characters” like Judge Burgaud, gradually, since the documentary follows the temporal thread of the story.
We were also able to interview Judge Mondineu-Hederer, president of the Paris Court of Appeal during the second trial, who has been little or not heard since.
She retraces from the inside the reopening of the case, with the enormous stakes for the acquitted and the victims.
What precautions did you have to take to deal with this delicate subject?
EPA–
When we work on cases like Outreau or that of little Grégory, we try to convey to the authors the fact of never forgetting that for each of the protagonists, there is an intimate drama playing out.
It’s a form of risk-taking for each of them to engage.
What was your process for constructing the documentary?
EPA–
During the preparation time for the investigation, which lasted more than two years, we went, among other things, to the point of reading tens of thousands of pages of the instruction.
At the start of the work we said to ourselves that, like in a plane crash, we were going to explore the black box of Outreau.
J.-PG–
If we have reached a parliamentary commission, it is because this story has gone off the rails in many places, it is interesting to see it in its details.
In the Outreau affair, the people pointed out as monsters suddenly became the victims
Jean-Paul Geronimi, producer
Why do you think this affair is still fascinating, two decades later?
J.-PG–
There are several ingredients, the sordid side already with “the monsters”, “the tower of horror” to use these very catchy newspaper headlines dating from the time of the events.
If we look back around twenty years ago, we had just come out of the affair of the Belgian pedophile Marc Dutroux.
There was therefore fertile ground for this story in France.
What makes it a particular news item is also the excitement at the beginning and the radical change in the position of public opinion that we clearly see in the press.
All of a sudden, the people seen as monsters have become the victims, there is something dizzying.
Did you have difficulty convincing the protagonists to come and testify?
J.-PG–
Everyone was hard to convince for the simple reason that this affair is traumatic for each of them.
It’s still glaring even twenty years later.
They placed their trust in us so that we delivered their words in the way they wanted to do.
We call on the intelligence of the Netflix audience to be able to take this word, this story and think about it each on their own.