Several questions about the Outreau Affair are raised by the documentary film, and the numerous serious people who intervene in it:
- the substance of the case does not rest solely on the testimonies of Myriam Badaoui and her children, several of the accused having denounced each other during the investigation, and other children having spoken of numerous abuses,
- the placement of children in the accused's box during the Saint-Omer trial, the room being too cramped to place the accused there,
- the imbalance in the legal representation of children (2 court-appointed lawyers) compared to that of the accused (17 lawyers including senior lawyers),
- the proximity between the journalists present at the trials and the defense lawyers, sharing the court benches and sometimes having lunch together,
- the defense media monopoly, the civil party not having wished to take part in the media coverage of the case,
- the impossibility for the children who testified in court to do so in good conditions, the defense lawyers cutting them off and insulting them, the same for the experts who testified,
- the pressure exerted on the jurors so that the deliberations of the appeal trial did not last more than three hours, so that the verdict could be presented on the 1 p.m. news by the Minister of Justice (which could finally be done on the 8 p.m. news ),
- during the appeal trial, the prosecutor general of Paris, Yves Bot, apologized to the accused in front of the media, even before the verdict was rendered,
- the 12 children having been recognized as victims of pimping, questions arise regarding the consumers of this prostitution,
- the existence among the 12 children recognized as victims of five children from 3 families of acquitted persons,
- the denunciations by Daniel Legrand concerning the murder of a little girl, corroborated by other witnesses (Myriam Badaoui, Cherif and Jonathan Delay, Lavier's girl), would make it credible testimony,
- Judge Burgaud, who was the target of numerous attacks, was only very lightly reprimanded, and subsequently had a good career
much higher compensation for those acquitted than for children recognized as victims, on a scale of 1 to 10, - an IGAS report released in the press in 2007 revealed that 5 children of acquitted people had evidence of sexual abuse in their medical files.
Here's the first English website for Outreau case investigation :