For more than ten years, the Outreau affair has been in the headlines. Away from rumors and controversy, Gilles Antonowicz takes up the case to make an objective and dispassionate analysis. After recalling the different episodes of this judicial soap opera, its twists and turns, he explores the excesses that accompanied it. Outreau, a “legal fiasco”? Certainly, but also the story of political instrumentalization and multiple media excesses, the chronicle of a human, institutional, cultural and moral disaster, where the weakness of men is expressed from top to bottom of the social ladder, in the popular classes as well as among the elites