A group of alleged victims, members of women's collectives, NGOs and unions gather in front of the courthouse on the day of the verdict of ex-surgeon Joel Le Scouarnec.
Credit: Reuters Photo
The former surgeon who pleaded guilty to sexually abusing 299 people, most of them children, was sentenced to the maximum 20 years in prison by a French court Wednesday, in what is considered the largest pedophilia case in the country’s history.
“It was predation on victims the most vulnerable, when they were sick in the hospital,” Judge Aude Buresi told the courthouse in Vannes, a coastal town in Brittany where the majority of the abuse took place. She also barred the former surgeon, Joël Le Scouarnec, from ever practicing medicine or having contact with minors and said he must serve two-thirds of his sentence before being eligible for parole.
The trial revealed large cracks in the legal and health administrative bureaucracies that failed to take seriously one clear warning sign: In 2005, Le Scouarnec was convicted of downloading child abuse imagery and given a four-month suspended sentence by a French court. Still, he was permitted to continue treating children unsupervised until his arrest in 2017.
A former gastric surgeon, Le Scouarnec, now 74, committed the sexual abuse from 1989 to 2014. The victims’ average age was 11. Many were sedated or recovering from operations during the abuse, and had no memory of it.
The crimes were discovered during a police search of Le Scouarnec’s home, after he exposed himself to a 6-year-old girl living next door.
There, police found computers and more than two dozen hard drives filled with child sexual abuse imagery, and hundreds of pages of the doctor’s personal diaries detailing the sexual abuse he had committed against individual children. They also found two spreadsheets that listed many of the victims’ names, ages and synopses of the abuse they had suffered.
Heading into the trial, Le Scouarnec denied some of the charges. But a month into the trial, he stunned the courtroom by admitting to having done everything he wrote about and perhaps more.
“For 30 years I acted without any qualms and with a single objective, to commit sexual assaults as often as I could,” he said.
After his confession, the trial took a different turn, shifting its attention to the victims, many of whom had been unaware that they were abused.
Now adults, victims spoke about their reaction to the shattering news from the police. They recounted feeling abandoned, left on their own to deal with an intimate crime they did not remember.