Former Surgeon Accused of Child Abuse to Stand Trial for Allegedly Assaulting 299 Patients in France

A former surgeon who is accused of abusing hundreds of young patients, often while they were under anaesthetic, is set to go on trial this month in the largest child abuse trial in French history.

Joel Le Scouarnec, 73, is accused of assaulting or raping 299 children – the majority former patients of his – between 1989 and 2014, mostly in Brittany.

He has admitted to some charges, but not all.

The trial in Vannes, north- west France, follows a painstaking police investigation lasting several years.

It is likely to raise uncomfortable questions over whether Le Scouarnec was protected by his colleagues and the management of the hospitals that employed him, despite an FBI warning to the French authorities that he had been consulting child abuse websites, after which he was given only a suspended sentence.

A staggering number of opportunities to stop the former surgeon from having contact with children appear to have been missed or rejected.

Members of his own family also knew of Le Scouarnec’s paedophilia but failed to stop him, it is claimed.

“It was the family’s omertà which meant his abuse was allowed to continue for decades,” one lawyer involved in the case told the BBC.

Le Scouarnec, once a respected small-town surgeon, has been in jail since 2017, when he was arrested on suspicion of raping his nieces, now in their 30s, as well as a six-year-old girl and a young patient. In 2020 he was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment.

After his arrest, police searched his home and found child-sized sex dolls, more than 300,000 child abuse images, and thousands of pages of meticulously compiled diaries in which Le Scouarnec is alleged to have logged assaults he carried out on his young patients over 25 years.

He has denied assaulting or raping children, arguing that his diaries merely detailed his “fantasies”.

In several instances, however, he had also written: “I am a paedophile”.

Le Scouarnec is facing more than 100 rape charges and more than 150 charges of sexual assault.

Some of his former patients, who are all now adults, have said they remember the surgeon touching them under the guise of medical examinations, sometimes even when their parents or other doctors were in the room.

But because a huge number of his alleged victims were under the effect of anaesthetics when it is claimed the assaults took place, they had no recollection of the events and were shocked to be contacted by police and told their names – alongside graphic descriptions of abuse – allegedly appeared in Le Scouarnec’s diaries.