what happened to the Delay children?

More than 20 years after the Outreau affair, child victims of rape are still considerably marked by the horrors they suffered.

Chérif, Jonathan, Dimitri and Dylan, the four sons of Myriam Badaoui and Thierry Delay were the main victims of the Outreau affair. If the judicial disaster, which led to the conviction and detention of thirteen innocent people, remains in everyone’s mind, young children have indeed been victims of gang rape and psychological abuse; four people were found guilty: their mother Myriam Badaoui, her ex-husband Thierry Delay and a couple of neighbors. Eight other children were recognized as victims of rape during the trials of the case, in 2004 and 2005.

The lives of the children of Thierry Delay and Myriam have been very chaotic. In 2015, during another trial to judge Daniel Legrand, an acquitted later accused by three of the Delay children, Chérif Delay confided in his career. Aged 25 at the time, he said he was quickly marginalized and tried for domestic violence: “I ended up homeless, on my 18th birthday, drunk, smoked, provoked the police. […] I have ups and downs, continues the young man. I even became violent with my partner, that’s why I’m incarcerated … I have the impression of reproducing certain things from my past, basically violence”, he said at the bar. Chérif Delay has since made several stays in a psychiatric hospital, he has also been sentenced 14 times by the courts since 2008 and imprisoned 7 times for thefts, death threats and violence.

“This case continues to haunt us”

In March 2022, he told during a new trial for domestic violence on two former companions, before the Versailles court, his relationship to violence: “I don’t like women, I have a problem with that. ‘assume my violent side. I am not responsible for who I am, but I am responsible for what I do”, adding: “My companions toasted. I wanted to kill them, I knew what I was going to do “, he said.

Jonathan Delay, he wrote a book to tell the sufferings he endured during his childhood and these last years. He also created an association to support child victims of sexual abuse, and “struggles”, as he confided a few years ago at the Parisian.

Dimitri Delay remains more discreet, he had agreed to speak in 2013 in Le Point, on the occasion of the release of a documentary film on the Outreau affair. “I no longer believe in justice; for me, justice creates injustice”, he said, adding: “This affair, it consumes us from the inside, it continues to haunt us. Growing up, we have the impression of being hated by everyone. I try to get by, to work in my specialty: welding. I have a roof, I eat my fill. […] To evacuate, relieve myself, I write rap texts.” The Delay brothers do not have peaceful relationships. “It’s still very complicated,” Jonathan told Le Parisien again.

Jonathan Delay’s call for a boycott

France 2 broadcast, Tuesday January 17, 2023, a docu-fiction series on the infamous Outreau case, a criminal case of sexual assault on minors started at the dawn of the 2000s. If Olivier Ayache-Vidal, one of the two directors with Agnès Pizzini, assured France Télévisions that he had held “to this [que les protagonistes] feel proud to have participated” in the project, the desired feeling was certainly not shared by everyone. “Overplayed, caricatural and far-fetched. Far from the dream that was presented to me when the project was announced”, denounced one of the Delay children, Jonathan, on Twitter, calling no more and no less “for a national boycott of this series” that he did not fail to describe it as “abominable humbug”.