Omar Killed Me: What did the real Omar Raddad think of this film?

From the Villemin affair to the Daval mystery, from 2005 to 2022, the most high-profile news stories have already been the subject of television adaptations. More rarely at the cinema. However, this is the case with the Ghislaine Marchal-Omar Raddad affair, which hit the legal headlines in 1991 and was brought to the screen in 2011 by Roschdy Zem, under the nameOmar killed me. A title which takes up the inscription, written with the victim’s blood, and which was found at the crime scene. In this film, it is the actor Sami Bouajila who plays the Moroccan gardener accused – wrongly, for many – of the murder of Ghislaine Marchal. Denis Podalydès, for his part, plays a famous author, largely inspired by the academician Jean-Marie Rouart, who ardently and among the first defended the cause of Raddad, unjustly condemned in his eyes. Do we know, however, what Omar Raddad thought of this fiction broadcast on Wednesday September 20, 2023, at 8:55 p.m., on Arte (and visible on arte.tv) and who reconstructs its history?

A criminal case

On June 24, 1991, the body of Ghislaine Marchal, a wealthy widow, was found in the cellar of her Mougins property by gendarmes alerted to her disappearance. The latter noted five violent blows to the head on his bloodied body, delivered with a chevron, “struck to kill and not to knock out“; a wound in the throat that did not reach the large vessels of the neck or the trachea; ten wounds in the thorax and abdomen. On the left side of a corridor leading to this cellar, the inscription “OMAR M ‘TO KILL’ is written in well-formed capital letters of blood, 1 m from the ground, on a locked white door leading to a wine cellar. This blood is that of the victim. As for the only Omar known in the Madame Marchal’s entourage is her gardener, Omar Raddad, 29 years old. Who is soon suspected and arrested. Very quickly, too, disturbing elements accumulate. Does a dying man take the time and does he have the strength to denounce his assassin, with his own blood, and – a shocking detail – this lack of agreement? Is this writing that of Ghislaine Marchal? Hasn’t someone rather sought to accuse the gardener by faking the crime scene? What would have been Omar Raddad’s interest in attacking his employer, whose witnesses agree that he had good relations with her?

“The film tells the truth from A to Z”

On the other hand, the prosecution argues that Omar Raddad would have constantly needed money and that he would probably have encountered a refusal of loan or advance from Ms. Marchal, before taking revenge on her by murdering him. However, no evidence has ever come to support these allegations. Imprisoned in 1991, sentenced in 1994 to 18 years of criminal imprisonment, at the end of a contested trial, Raddad benefited from conditional release in 1998. He never stopped proclaiming his innocence and demanding the holding of a new trial fully exonerating him. When Roschdy Zem’s film, inspired by his testimony and Rouart’s writings, came out in 2011, Omar Raddad declared that he “tells the truth from A to Z.“The man, pardoned by Jacques Chirac but not exonerated, hopes that this film will serve to revise the lawsuit brought against him. Finally, he will say that coming to the filming site was a trying experience for him: “It was like reliving these events a second time”, he will admit. In 2023, despite Zem’s film and new elements, the requests for review of the trial have still not been successful…