The phone reflected in Farid El Haïry’s house in north France. It was actually February 1999.
A rural police performed free throw line, talking to if he could possibly boil down to the gendarmerie for a conversation.
“I asked why and also was it important,” he claims. It’s absolutely nothing major, he don’t forgets being actually said to. Happen when you can. It won’t take lengthy.
Then a rawboned 17-year-old willing to begin an instruction in a pastry shop, Mr. El Haïry laid out for the block terminal a number of times eventually. He took hold of some discomforts au chocolat and also a Coke heading for morning meal.
He would certainly certainly not come back residence for many years.
He was actually asked for along with the sexual abuse and also statutory offense of a 15-year-old female coming from a bordering senior high school, whom he recognized simply through attraction and also had actually never ever spoken with. The cops possessed no witnesses, no corroborating documentation, simply her term versus his.
After an evening at the gendarmerie, he was actually delivered to a neighboring penitentiary that was actually well-known for overflow, substance abuse and also self-destruction. He devoted the upcoming 11 months and also 23 times in pretrial detention just before being actually discharged along with one unpleasant ailment — steer clear of coming from his residence metropolitan area of Hazebrouck, where his accuser, yet likewise his family and friends, resided.
At a test in 2003, a court located him responsible and also punished him to 5 years behind bars, yet a great deal of it was actually put on hold that he would certainly certainly not go back to prison.
Since then, there have actually been actually 2 Farid El Haïrys — the high-strung adolescent, defined through schoolmates and also loved ones as a joker that participated in activities and also didn’t take university truly, and also the clean grownup, that conceals his suspect responsible for a grinning front and also needs to consistently operate to regulate popular he refers to as a “cancer cells burning within me.”
Fuel for his craze featured nationality. Mr. El Haïry, right now 42, is actually the child of a Moroccan immigrant. He questions a white colored consumer would certainly possess been actually asked for on in a similar way thin documentation, not to mention founded guilty. A developing stack of documents and also court of law choices reveal that ethnological profiling due to the cops is actually a major, unaddressed concern in France.
For 23 years, Mr. El Haïry decreased that rage — up until one more distressing call came in, this disrupting his household’s Eid al-Fitr parties in 2015.
Again, it was actually the cops.
There had actually been actually a growth in his situation, he found out. His accuser coming from a lot of years earlier, right now a mama herself, had actually communicated. She had actually modified her tale.
‘One thing Mistook’
Sitting in the gendarmerie on that particular early morning in 1999, Mr. El Haïry supposed it was actually an error. Thus performed his household.
“It was actually inconceivable,” claimed his relative Angélique Vanhaecke. “He never ever also spoke to women.”
But with time, as the examination carried on and also Mr. El Haïry experienced bit hunts and also holding cell, he started to believe in a different way.
“One thing mistook,” he mentioned on a latest perambulate Hazebrouck to take another look at the settings of an unlawful act that never ever occurred.
“They were actually seeking a wrongdoer,” he incorporated.
As a French Arab that matured in his neighborhood’s only real estate task, he felt he created a beneficial one.
Hazebrouck is actually a middle-class metropolitan area of 21,000 folks in an area recognized for its own abundant field, job principles and also passion of draft beer. Residents illustrate it as insular and also peaceful. Just 2 per-cent of citizens were actually migrants in 2019.
Before his moms and dads leased a neighboring property, Mr. El Haïry matured in “the blocks” — a team of backed high-rises where a lot of the city’s handful of immigrant households resided.
His dad operated at a steel vegetation in Dunkirk, 28 kilometers away. His mom, that matured in Hazebrouck, was actually a chef in a hospice. Farid was actually the youngest of their 3 lads — a stringy kid whiring along with electricity that barked around the community on a bike.
“He just liked to laugh, tease and also horseplay,” Ms. Vanhaecke mentioned. Yet, she incorporated, “he wasn’t fierce in all.”
As a teen, Mr. El Haïry was actually ceased frequently for identification examinations due to the neighborhood cops. At times, he recollected, the very same police officers would certainly cease him much more than once daily.
Racial profiling due to the cops is actually a historical complaint in France. One 2017 research study located that boys “seen to become Dark or even Arab” were actually twenty opportunities as probably to become based on identification examinations compared to the remainder of the populace.
Mr. El Haïry possessed no rap sheet.
Court documents give his accuser’s original account: Mr. El Haïry had stopped her on the street one winter evening with a group of friends, described as of Northwest African origin. Together, they hauled her down an alley, pinned her down and molested her, she said.
She knew Mr. El Haïry only by sight. But he was known as “a violent individual.”
Five months later, she crossed paths with Mr. El Haïry again near the public pool. This time, a different man, again described as of Northwest African origin, held her to the ground while Farid raped her. She said she had been a virgin.
Mr. El Haïry vehemently denied all of it.
The police were never able to identify the man from the second incident. The accuser did pick out three of Mr. El Haïry’s friends from the first. Officers obtained initial statements from two that they had crossed paths with her alongside Mr. El Haïry.
Under questioning from a magistrate months later, however, the stories shifted. The two friends said they had been pressured into their statements by officers, and denied ever seeing Mr. El Haïry and the victim together. The accuser said while the friends had talked to her, only Mr. El Haïry had molested her.
The case went forward anyway.
“The police should have immediately, immediately, immediately said to themselves, ‘It’s not just one thing that is inconsistent, it’s a lot of things,’” Mr. El Haïry said.
The gendarmerie in Hazebrouck declined to comment. They had not kept records of the investigation, an official said, and none of the officers involved still worked there.
After being released from custody, Mr. El Haïry moved into an uncle’s apartment in Pantin, a Paris suburb.
His parents traveled three hours to bring him groceries regularly. “I saw how my parents suffered,” said Christian El Haïry, Farid’s eldest brother. “They lost their little boy.”
Mr. El Haïry was required to report weekly to a police station, which often took hours. He lost his first job as a shoe salesman because he couldn’t explain the absences. He struggled to keep and make friends because he worried they would find out.
“He was broken,” Ms. Vanhaecke said. “He had a joie de vivre. From one day to the next, it was gone.”
A Surprise Letter
The accuser cried continually through the trial, which lasted two days.
The prosecution relied on her story, a gynecological exam and psychiatric reports that assessed her as credible, suffering from a severe lack of self-esteem and disgust with sexuality. She was also a good student, they noted. Mr. El Haïry was deemed immature, egocentric and defensive. He had been suspended from school repeatedly.
Martin Grasset, Mr. El Haïry’s lawyer during the trial, saw the verdict as a partial victory. His client would not return to jail — a sign, he thought, that the jury had sensed holes in the case.
“It’s behind him,” Mr. Grasset recalled thinking at the time.
From the outside, it seemed that way.
Mr. El Haïry went on to manage a shoe store before switching to a mobile phone business in Lille. He married, bought a house and had two children.
But the conviction hung over him.
His name was added to the national sex offender registry.
In a brief article about the trial, which had been held behind closed doors, a local newspaper printed his name.
People looked at his family differently, said his brother Christian. “We all held a bit of hate in our heart,” he said.
Then, last year, Mr. El Haïry’s life was upended again by a call from the police. The accuser had written to the local prosecutor in 2017, admitting she had lied.
“Mr. Farid El Haïry isn’t guilty of anything and never committed any actions of sexual violence or rape against me,” her letter read. It claimed that she had been raped by her older brother from the ages of 8 to 12, and had only been released from the “grip of family secrecy” after years of therapy.
“I wish to set the record straight,” she wrote. “I feel ashamed and guilty with regard to Farid El Haïry. He didn’t deserve this.”
After the call, Mr. El Haïry rushed to tell his parents. His mother, then 69, was in palliative care with kidney failure.
“She said to me, ‘Don’t worry Farid, I won’t die,’” said Mr. El Haïry, recounting the scene. “‘I will be in the courtroom when you are exonerated.’” Soon after, she moved back home.
But she was too sick to travel to Paris last December when judges on France’s top appeals court exonerated her son.
After the ruling, Mr. El Haïry dropped his head in his hands. His lawyers patted his back, calling the case “historic.”
Since 1945, only about 15 people convicted of serious crimes, like murder or rape, have been exonerated or found not guilty in France after a retrial, experts say.
That offered little solace. Stepping out of the courtroom, Mr. El Haïry was in tears.
“I did one year of imprisonment, but the 23 years of mental imprisonment are what’s hardest,” he told reporters. “One family was destroyed to protect another.”
Just over two weeks later, Mr. El Haïry’s father died of a heart attack. His mother died a few months after that.
Julie’s Story
Farid’s accuser was a girl named Julie.
Now in her 40s, she agreed to meet at her lawyer’s office on condition that we not reveal her family name or where she now lived. At the same time she wrote the letter about Mr. El Haïry, she sent another one to prosecutors, accusing her older brother of repeated rape. That investigation continues.
She talked for more than two hours, breaking into tears a few times. The story is still raw for her, too.
Julie was born and raised in Hazebrouck, where her family used to own a textile business.
When she sent the letters in 2017, she had been carrying the lie for almost two decades. Several things pushed her to confess.
She had recently given birth to her first child, a son, and was terrified the pattern of incest would repeat itself.
That summer, a victim’s aid counselor urged her to come clean.
In the fall, the #MeToo movement erupted. It inspired her, she said, even though her experience contradicted what many other activists at the time were saying — that the police regularly dismiss rape victims as liars.
“#MeToo is about the liberation of speech,” she said. “So I spoke out, this time to tell the truth.”
When she was 14, Julie’s first consensual sex with her boyfriend resurfaced traumatic memories of her brother’s incest, she said, triggering a gnawing anxiety.
“I fell asleep with the fear of rape,” she said.
Around the same time, her boyfriend clashed with Mr. El Haïry and became so scared of him that he refused to go downtown, just to avoid him. As Julie describes it, her fear of rape meshed with her boyfriend’s fear of Mr. El Haïry, and her decision to lie emerged from a teenager’s confusing jumble of feelings.
“I think it was a survival instinct,” she said. “I needed to speak out.”
While Mr. El Haïry is convinced that race and class influenced the police investigation and court case, Julie is less sure.
“From my adolescent perspective, it was not at all something that I saw or perceived,” she said. “Did it play a role? I don’t know.”
She did say, however, that every time she went to the “blocks” for dance classes, she was scared.
Once cast, the lie shielded her: She was recognized as a victim within her family without tearing it apart. The incest never reoccurred afterward, she said.
The story she told the police matched a common rape myth — that most rapists are strangers lurking in street shadows. In fact, “perpetrators are predominantly close relatives,” said Audrey Darsonville, a criminal law professor at the University of Nanterre.
Malicious or fictitious accusations of rape are extremely rare, Ms. Darsonville noted, but it is not uncommon for minors — especially incest victims — to initially accuse the wrong perpetrator.
“It’s a kind of cry for help,” she said, from victims who cannot bring themselves to name the family member abusing them.
Julie initially told a handful of friends that she had been raped by Mr. El Haïry. One evening, her two brothers overheard and told their parents. She did not want to file a complaint, she insisted, but her parents took her to see a psychologist, who alerted the authorities.
The investigation was a blur, she said. The psychologist and her mother sat in for her police interview. She barely interacted with her lawyer. She felt an “extreme solitude” and later became bulimic.
She was trapped in her lie. But Julie also acknowledged she did nothing to defuse it, even after it put an innocent teenager in prison for nearly a year.
In 2003, when she received a letter summoning her to court for the trial, she recalls thinking: “Either I kill myself, or I denounce my brother, or I go.”
So she went.
Now, as an adult and as a mother, she is coming to terms with her decisions. Her life was also cleaved in halves that she is now trying to restitch — the girl who was the victim of abuse, and the teenager who told a harmful lie to save her.
“One protected the other,” she said. “I had the right words, but not for the right person.”
No Vindication
For over two decades, Mr. El Haïry imagined the moment when the lie would be exposed, his reputation redeemed and his lives welded.
But that is not what happened.
“I didn’t feel what I thought I would feel,” he said over lunch in a Hazebrouck tavern. “I was screwed over for 24 years, and it took 30 seconds to exonerate me.”
Stories about the case ran on the national 8 o’clock news and in local and national newspapers. But true to the city’s tight-lipped reputation, the revelation caused little stir in Hazebrouck. Walking around the main square on market day, few locals knew about it. A former classmate running a bakery said he hadn’t known about Mr. El Haïry’s conviction in the first place.
The city’s current mayor, who was 6 at time of Mr. El Haïry’s arrest, said he considered the case a personal affair and not a reflection of Hazebrouck, which he pointed out has no history of serious crime or police abuse.
But in the blocks where Mr. El Haïry’s family is still known, the exposed injustice stings.
“No one believed it,” said Moustapha Zidane, 47, a youth worker at the neighborhood’s small community center. “We were stigmatized by the police.”
Mr. El Haïry’s North African heritage and his connection to the impoverished neighborhood made him an “easy target,” Mr. Zidane said.
“If you aren’t the same color as others, it’s not OK,” concurred Évelyne Lazoore, 63, outside the local primary school, where she had just dropped off her niece. “He was put in prison for nothing.”
Mr. El Haïry has filed a complaint against Julie, accusing her of wrongfully accusing him. An investigation is continuing.
He stews with anger at the justice system.
He learned about Julie’s first letter nearly five years after she sent it. Courtroom summons for Mr. El Haïry were sent to the wrong address. The pandemic further delayed things. But even for France, a country where the wheels of the overburdened judiciary often move slowly, his exoneration process was particularly long, experts say.
“I could have enjoyed five years of that liberty and innocence with my parents,” he said bitterly.
Mr. El Haïry is also seeking damages from the state to compensate for the hardship of his imprisonment and conviction.
It is unclear how much he might be entitled to. In 2012, a man who had actually spent over seven years in prison on false rape charges received nearly 800,000 euros, or over $840,000, but Mr. El Haïry had far less jail time.
For him, the main loss is immaterial — the life he might have lived, the person he might have been.
Since he learned of Julie’s confession, Mr. El Haïry’s nights are sleepless again. He spends them turning over every detail of the case, asking questions that might never be satisfactorily answered. Just when he should be released from the lie, he is consumed by it.
“It’s my lullaby,” he mentioned.
