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A former French surgeon on trial for the sexual abuse of hundreds of patients has told the court he used his status as a doctor to attack children but still believed he was a good medical practitioner.
“I was a surgeon who benefited from my status to attack children, I don’t deny that,” Joël Le Scouarnec, 74, told a court in Vannes, Brittany, on Tuesday, in what is one of France’s largest ever child abuse cases.
“I carried out my professional activity as well as I could, but at the same time I carried out sexual assaults on little patients,” he said. “My medical treatment of patients does not erase the crimes that I carried out in the same period …I know this can seem difficult: my paedophile activity was one thing, my professional activity was another, and this paedophile activity had no impact on my professional activity.”
The digestive surgeon, who often operated on children with appendicitis, is accused of attacking 299 patients at a dozen hospitals across France between 1989 and 2014, most of them children aged under 15, with an average age of 11.
He is accused of targeting some when they were under anaesthetic, in the post-surgery recovery room or in their hospital beds.
Evidence in the four-month trial will include handwritten notebooks in which Le Scouarnec listed patients’ initials and his alleged crimes against them. Police cross-checked the notebooks with hospital records to identify potential victims – some had been unconscious and anaesthetised at the time and were told of the alleged abuse for the first time ahead of the trial.
Le Scouarnec said his doctor peers had seen him as a surgeon who was “not necessarily brilliant, but not mediocre either. Average.”
Asked about former colleagues who had thought he was a good surgeon, he said: “I betrayed them all. I lied to them to cover my activities, and I apologise to them for what I did. They thought that I was somebody, and in fact I’m the person who is before you now, who has committed crimes.”
He said: “For most people it’s totally beyond comprehension how one can be an active surgeon, correctly carrying out one’s activity [in terms of] professional technique and at the same time commit assaults.”
Despite Le Scouarnec being flagged to French authorities by the FBI in 2004 for viewing child abuse imagery on the dark web, for which he was convicted and given a four-year suspended prison sentence in France in 2005, he was never prevented from working with children and continued to gain prestigious jobs in hospitals across the country, including in Brittany and the west of France.
He was never investigated during his career despite some of his colleagues sounding the alarm over suspicious behaviour. He continued to practise until his retirement in 2017, after which a rape accusation was made against him and police discovered diary accounts of abuse against his patients stored in notebooks and on computers. He is currently in jail after he was found guilty in an earlier trial in 2020 of abusing four children.
Asked in court about doctors at one clinic, who found out about his 2005 conviction for possession of child abuse imagery and challenged him on it, Le Scouarnec said: “They asked me for clarifications. I, of course, lied about all the attacks I might have done and said nothing.” He said the doctors told him he should have another medical professional with him at all times when seeing patients, particularly in the emergency room. “I told them I would not resign … Because I wanted to keep my job and salary.”
Le Scouarnec told the court he had a vocation to become a surgeon from a young age. Asked by a panel of judges and the state prosecutor if he had moved hospital regularly to avoid his crimes being detected or to access new patients, he said that was not his reason for changing clinic or hospital.
He said his office in the hospitals always featured a cupboard with a lock and a desk with a lock. Asked by the head judge if he kept his notebooks and CD-roms of abuse imagery locked there, using the office as a “refuge for his activities”, he said he had.
Earlier this week, Le Scouarnec told the court: “I feel ready to admit to some acts of rape that I have wanted to hide, deny. I’m ready to admit to them. I’m done with lying.” He described being “invaded” by fixations on abuse and called himself a “pervert”.
The trial continues until June.
