**** out of ****
Normally, Netflix releases true crime docuseries. But its newest docuseries is not about a crime. Oh, there’s a trial. There’s a shattered community. There are lives destroyed. But no crime was committed in the Outreau affair, an infamous French court case from the late 1990s that is the latest Netflix docuseries The Outreau Case: A French Nightmare.
A typical case of mass hysteria and moral panic, the Outreau affair was the last in a long string of cases that began in the early 1980s. Beginning in Kern County, California, dozens of cases of purported child sex abuse sprang up as far north as Canada and as far south as Florida. Most of these cases, such as the famous McMartin Preschool Trial, involved overzealous police officers, attention-seeking politicians, meddlesome therapists who implanted false memories, and a group of innocent people being purged from society.
Moral panics don’t occur from nothing. They usually appear in moments of societal unease. In the particular case of McMartin, the early ‘80s saw women going to work instead of staying home with their children, leaving them in the care of daycare workers. The residual sturm und drang led to dozens of daycare workers being accused of habitually (and often ritually) abusing children. None of which ever occurred. The McMartin Trial was the longest in California history and cost millions of dollars. To learn more about how this leap transpired (and how Satan got all in the mix), I would refer you to Richard Beck’s We Believe the Children or Debbie Nathan and Michael R. Snedeker’s Satan’s Silence or the astonishing television film Indictment: The McMartin Trial, written by Abby and Myra Mann.
At any rate, moral panics are older than America itself and, I believe, are woven into our national fabric. The most obvious example is the Salem Witch Trials, which purged undesirables under the guise of a religion but with both a town and village full of grievances. Arthur Miller saw the connection to the hysteric McCarthy hearings in the 1950s and wrote America’s greatest play, The Crucible. Little did he know his allegory would become more and more prescient as this country falls into these hysterics every twenty to fifty years or so.
When the film version of The Crucible appeared in the mid- ‘90s, most saw it as a period piece about a period piece. In fact, the film spoke to the daycare scandals of the ’80s & ‘90s, including them in the story of witch hunts. An added judge character in the screenplay version is bothered that all of the evidence is coming from the mouths of children. At that time, although the movement was dying down, these cases still came from the mouths of babes—babes who had become convinced of their abuse by helicopter moms and affirming counselors. Yet not one review of the film mentions the connotation.
But while America was the place of most of these scandals, the madness went international. People, often with good intentions, thought they were doing right by indicting seventeen adults of a pedophilic sex ring. As usual, it began with one lunatic—Mariyam Badoui—who let the whole thing spiral out of control. A young magistrate trying to make a name for himself opened up the can of worms which led to thirteen acquittals and a national mea culpa.
What was refreshing about watching The Outreau Case was the footage of the French government apologizing. In America, there’s never been an apology to the lives ruined in Kern County or from McMartin or Fells Acres or Wenatchee. In fact, to this day, sadly deluded adults believe they were still parts of sex rings, Satanic Ritual Abuse, and habitual molestation as children. Every ten years or so, another digging project tries to find hidden tunnels under where McMartin Preschool used to be (according to the children, the location of some of their abuse).
The docuseries is in French, but Netflix rightfully chose to dub into English the entire series. While I usually refuse to watch a foreign-language film with dubbing, the sheer amount of talking in what is naturally a talking-head documentary was the right choice. Outreau is interesting in that it took place a year after the Kern County convictions were overturned and has no connection with anything supernatural. After all, the McMartin children were said to have participated in black masses with ritual animal slaughter. Otherwise, it is the same kind of moral panic (whether over sex or children in general) that we get caught up in every now and again.
My playwriting professor at Bennington College was Gladden Schrock, a beast of a man who, when not teaching, was a commercial herring fisherman in Maine. He became involved with the daycare scandals through his association with Dr. Elizabeth Loftus, a noted psychologist who proved false memories could be implanted in the lab (hence, nullifying a faddish trend in therapy in the 1980s called “repressed memory therapy”). Gladden was present in 1997 in Salem, Massachusetts for a “Day of Contrition” that mourned those lives ruined by mass hysteria since 1692.
He first turned me onto these phenomena as a young eighteen-year-old. I had written a play about a man falsely accused of sexual abuse and he felt I should know something about the subject. The next morning, my little mail slot was full with a ream of paper on the phenomenon. He opened my eyes to America’s weakness: its trend toward hysteria. We are living in such a time now. People are being purged for their views, their past misgivings, the stance they took as young people, etc. It is a sad fact of human life that we still, at our core, are animals who sometimes offer up their own to predators.
I urge you to watch The Outreau Case and take a course in reasonable skepticism. We live in an age where you are told to blindly believe whatever someone tells you about themselves. There is a danger in that, a grave one. Since we have not learned our lesson, it is always good to get to the nitty gritty as far as our shortfalls.
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