A former surgeon was yesterday to stand trial in France for the alleged rape or sexual abuse of 299 victims, most of them children who were his patients, in what investigators and his own notebooks describe as a pattern of violence spanning more than three decades.
Joel Le Scouarnec, now 74, is to face hundreds of victims during a four-month trial in Vannes, France. He faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted, on top of 15 years he has been serving after being found guilty in 2020 of rape and sexual assault of children.
He does not deny the allegations, although he says that he does not remember everything. Some survivors have no memory of the assaults, having been unconscious at the time.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Le Scouarnec’s trial comes as activists are pushing to lift taboos surrounding sexual abuse in France. The most prominent case was that of Gisele Pelicot, who was drugged and raped by her ex-husband and dozens of other men who were convicted and sentenced in December last year to prison terms ranging from three to 20 years.
Child protection and women’s rights groups, and medical community associations called for a rally yesterday in front of the courthouse where Le Scouarnec is being tried.
The case began in 2017, when a six-year-old neighbor said Le Scouarnec had touched her over the fence separating their properties.
A subsequent search of his home uncovered more than 300,000 photographs, 650 pedophilic, zoophilic and scatological video files, as well as notebooks where he described himself as a pedophile and detailed his actions, according to investigation documents.
Le Scouarnec in 2020 was convicted of rape and sexual assault of four children, including two nieces, and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
He had admitted to child abuse dating to 1985 and 1986, but some cases could not be prosecuted because the statute of limitations had expired.
The Vannes trial is to examine alleged rapes and other abuses committed between 1989 and 2014 against 158 men and 141 women who were on average aged 11 at the time.
The doctor sexually abused both boys and girls when they were alone in their hospital rooms, according to investigation documents.
“I didn’t really remember the operation. I remembered the post-operation, a surgeon who was quite mean,” one of the victims, Amelie Leveque, said of her time in hospital when she was nine years old in 1991. “I cried a lot.”
Years later, she described feeling overwhelmed when she learned that her name appeared in Le Scouarnec’s notebooks.
“That was the beginning of the answers to a lifetime of questions, and then it was the beginning of the descent into hell,” she told public broadcaster France 3. “I felt like I had lost control of everything. I wasn’t crazy, but now I had to face the truth of what had happened. I fell into a deep depression... My family tried to help, but I felt completely alone.”
Le Scouarnec had already been convicted in 2005 for possessing and importing child sexual abuse material and sentenced to four months of suspended prison time. Despite that, he was appointed as a hospital practitioner the following year.
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