The biggest child abuse trial in French history will open in Brittany this month amid anger that a surgeon was allegedly able to attack hundreds of young patients over decades, targeting some when they were under anaesthetic, in the post-surgery recovery room or in their hospital beds.
France is braced for serious questions over child protection amid harrowing testimony from a record number of alleged victims of Joël Le Scouarnec, 73, who worked as a digestive surgeon. He was employed in public and private hospitals across Brittany and the west of France, often operating on children with appendicitis.
Despite being flagged to the 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.
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, with some having been unconscious and under anaesthetic at the time.
In a pattern of alleged abuse that stretched from 1989 to 2014, Le Scouarnec is charged with the rape or sexual assault of 299 patients, 158 male and 141 female. A total of 256 were under 15 years old, and the average age was 11.
Stéphane Kellenberger, the public prosecutor in Lorient, said: “Numerous victims were in the hospital operating theatre, under anaesthetic, recovering after surgery, in a state of sedation or having been put to sleep, which meant those victims weren’t able to realise what was done to them.”
Announcing the trial, he said Le Scouarnec had accepted some of the charges against him. “He explained his modus operandi, his determination to act this way … and his strategies of dissimulation so he wouldn’t risk being discovered.”
Le Scouarnec has partially admitted some charges, not others.
Francesca Satta is a lawyer for 10 of the victims, including the families of two men who took their lives after they were told by gendarmes what had allegedly happened to them. “This trial is extraordinary because to my knowledge there has never been a child abuse trial with so many victims anywhere in the world,” she said. “The revelation of the details of the case impacted them enormously.”
Satta said it was devastating for many of the alleged victims, now in their 30s and 40s, to hear passages from Le Scouarnec’s diaries that allegedly concerned them as children.
In 2017, neighbours in Jonzac, in Charente-Maritime, reported Le Scouarnec to police. A police raid on his house uncovered abuse imagery, the notebooks and, hidden under floorboards, a collection of dolls.
In 2020, Le Scouarnec was sentenced to 15 years for assaulting four children, one of them a hospital patient. He is currently in prison.
Satta said the 2020 trial, which was not held in public, had revealed “a manipulator, with no empathy or comprehension of other people, who he considered as sexual objects”. That trial showed Le Scouarnec “lived in a bubble of child abuse”, she said. It was the first time Satta had seen a police officer weep because of the impact of evidence.
Satta said the second trial, in which Le Scouarnec faces 20 years in prison, would show how failings by the justice and health system had enabled him to keep offending.
She said: “In a way, this is the trial of a whole of society. At the time in France there was a type of respect for so-called notable people in society, lawyers or doctors and surgeons. These people were trusted and weren’t seen to commit crimes.”
But Le Scouarnec was “a monster who made his workplace his hunting ground”, Satta said, adding: “The trial will also open the door to a real judicial examination of child abuse in France and how it should be handled, in terms of sentencing and prevention.”
Frédéric Benoist, a lawyer for the child-protection charity La Voix de L’Enfant (The Child’s Voice), a civil party in the case, highlighted what he called a shocking “chain of failings and dysfunction” at an institutional level that had allowed Le Scouarnec to continue offending for years. Benoist has filed a separate legal complaint on behalf of the charity for failure in the duty to protect people at an institutional level.
Benoist said that when the FBI first informed the French authorities of Le Scouarnec’s online activity in 2004, he was not arrested at home in a dawn raid, but was instead invited to the police station. When his home was later searched, no evidence was found. But police did not search his hospital office, where they would have found images on his work computer and dolls locked in a cupboard. Le Scouarnec had argued that he had been at a difficult moment in his marriage and his looking at the child abuse imagery was a one-off mistake.
Benoist said that when Le Scouarnec was convicted in 2005 for accessing child abuse imagery online, the judge did not oblige him to undergo psychiatric treatment, nor prevent him from working with children. The court, contrary to rules, did not immediately inform the hospital system nor the national medical council. But a doctor at the hospital where Le Scouarnec was working alerted management in 2006 to what he felt was Le Scouarnec’s strange attitude and worrying comments and told management about his conviction, which he had read about in the media. Another emergency room doctor also alerted that Le Scouarnec had looked at child abuse imagery while on duty. Still, Le Scouarnec continued working in hospitals.
Benoist said: “The dysfunction on so many levels led to the disaster that is this case.”
Le Scouarnec’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.
The trial opens on 24 February in Vannes and will run until June.
The NSPCC offers support to children on 0800 1111, and adults concerned about a child on 0808 800 5000. The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) offers support for adult survivors on 0808 801 0331.
