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A former French surgeon is expected to be sentenced to 20 years in prison on Wednesday for the sexual abuse of hundreds of patients mostly aged under 15, as the biggest child abuse trial in French history ends.
Joël Le Scouarnec, 74, worked as a digestive surgeon in public and private hospitals across Brittany and the west of France, often operating on children with appendicitis.
During the harrowing three-month trial in Vannes, Brittany, he was accused of 111 rapes and 189 sexual assaults between 1989 and 2014 at a dozen hospitals. Many of the children he assaulted were under anaesthesic or waking up after operations. Some were assaulted in their hospital beds. The average age of the child victims was 11.
Le Scouarnec eventually admitted all the assaults in court, saying in his final statement: “I am not asking the court for leniency.” During the trial he said: “I was a surgeon who benefited from my status to attack children, I don’t deny that.” Psychological assessments found that he remained extremely dangerous.
Le Scouarnec’s lawyer, Maxime Tessier, told the court: “He is utterly guilty.” Tessier said the French medical world and politicians must now learn lessons from “the major disfunction of our health system”, which had not stopped Le Scouarnec’s decades of abuse.
Le Scouarnac was flagged to the French authorities by the FBI in 2004 for viewing child abuse imagery on the dark web. In 2005, he was convicted in a French court of owning child abuse imagery and given a four-year suspended prison sentence, but the court did not rule that the surgeon should never work with children.
He continued to gain prestigious jobs in hospitals across the country until his retirement in 2017, systematically abusing children who had undergone surgery.
Victims’ groups and child protection campaigners said the trial had raised the issue of serious failings by the state and officials. They said there should be a full government assessment of how the surgeon had been able to continue working and abusing for so long.
The 20-year prison sentence is the maximum Le Scouarnec can receive for aggravated rape. In France, sentences are not added together, unlike in the US where Le Scouarnec would have been jailed for 2,000 years, according to the state prosecutor, Stéphane Kellenberger.
Le Scouarnec is already in prison after being sentenced in December 2020 to 15 years for raping and sexually assaulting four children.
Kellenberger said there was likely to be a further trial after the prosecutor’s office opened an investigation to find more victims whose abuse is not part of the current case.
“You were the devil and sometimes the devil is dressed in a white coat,” Kellenberger told Le Scouarnec.
Le Scouarnec, whose 2005 conviction was not automatically flagged to hospitals where he worked, was employed at a series of regional hospitals that depended on having surgeons of his expertise in order to stay open.
In one instance, Le Scouarnec had told Michèle Cals, the then-director of the Jonzac hospital in western France, about his 2005 conviction, saying he had only viewed child abuse imagery because he was upset about separating from his wife. Cals received no word from her medical hierarchy not to hire him, so she appointed him in 2008. “We were in need of surgeons,” Cals told the court.
Cals said Le Scouarnec’s 2005 sentencing had not prohibited him from being around minors. She told the court she “didn’t dig deep enough” and recognised there had been a “disfunction” on her part, and her superiors.
Thierry Bonvalot, a hospital psychiatrist who had tried to raise the alarm about Le Scouarnec’s 2005 conviction at one hospital where the surgeon later worked, said there had been a medical “fiasco”.
Joël Belloc, the head of the Order of Physicians in Charente-Maritime, where Le Scouarnec finished his career, was asked if he could have done things differently. He said: “With hindsight, it’s obvious we could have.” He added that “perceptions were different” at the time.
About 20 victims of Le Scouarnec and their relatives staged a protest outside the court earlier this month over what they called the “silence of the political world”. They said a government committee should be set up to address the lessons from the Le Scouarnec case and prevent anything similar happening again.
“We are appalled to see that this trial of the century is not a watershed event in the eyes of the government and, more broadly, the general public,” the group said.
Manon Lemoine, now 36, one of the victims who Le Scouarnec admitted to raping when she was 11, said: “They’re trying to make him out to be a monster, but this monster is the society that created him and allowed him to continue.”
