France puts surgeon on trial for sexually abusing 300 patients, most of them children

ParisTwo months after the Dominique Pelicot sentenced for drugging his wife for years so that he and dozens of other men could rape her, France is facing the largest trial for paedophilia that the country has ever seen. The accused is a 74-year-old surgeon, Joël Le Scouarnec, who for almost three decades, between 1986 and 2014, allegedly sexually abused 299 patients, the vast majority of them minors, while practising in French hospitals. The average age of the victims when they were assaulted is 11 years old.

The trial, which will last four months, began this Monday in Vannes (Brittany), and although the accused will not testify until next week, at the beginning of the process he addressed a few words to the court to acknowledge the facts. "I have committed odious acts," he admitted. "Today I am perfectly aware that these wounds are permanent and irreparable," added Le Scouarnec.

His lawyer has specified that the accused recognises his responsibility "in a great majority of the events". The surgeon faces a sentence of 20 years in prison for aggravated rape, the maximum sentence provided for by French law regardless of the number of victims and rapes committed in the case.

The doctor acted with impunity for years, during which he sexually abused his most vulnerable patients, children. According to investigators, he sometimes took advantage of the opportunity to commit fondling or rape – often penetrating the victims with his fingers – while the patients were still under the effects of anesthesia after an operation. Not all were completely unconscious. With small children, he committed sexual assaults during medical tests or during visits to the room when the patients' parents were not present. He also took photos of some victims.

The intimate diary, key

Police discovered the hundreds of rapes and abuses when they arrested Le Scouarnec in 2017 for raping a six-year-old neighbour, penetrating her with his fingers through the fence that separated her garden from the neighbours'. The girl told her parents, who reported him. During the search of the surgeon's house, police found photographs, videos and his diary, where the paedophile described each of the abuses in detail, with the date and the name and address of each victim. In the cupboard where he keeps the diary, they also found dolls and sexual objects. Given the difficulty of proving some of the assaults, photographs and his diary will be one of the central elements of the accusation.

"While smoking my morning cigarette, I thought about the fact that I am a great pervert. I am an exhibitionist, a voyeur, a sadist, a masochist, a scatologist, a fetishist, a paedophile. [...] And I am very happy about it," the accused wrote. Investigators believe that the abuse ended in 2015, when the surgeon was 65 years old and his medical activity had been reduced to a minimum. The man then allegedly satisfied his impulses with paedopornographic images that he searched for on the internet.

Previous convictions

Le Scouarnec was already sentenced in 2020 to 15 years in prison for rape and sexual assault in the case of the neighbour who helped uncover the mass rapes and for the rape of two of his nieces. But it was not the first conviction. In 2005 he had already been arrested and convicted for consulting child pornography videos and photographs.

The French press is wondering how he could act with total impunity for almost 30 years and work with minors despite having a conviction for paedophilia and various internal alerts in the hospitals where he worked. According to investigators, the sexual abuse began in 1986, the same time when Le Scouarnec sexually assaulted one of his nieces. Years later the family discovered that he had also abused another niece. But in the family, both the parents of the victims and the surgeon's wife, remained silent and preferred not to report the events.