Retired surgeon admits ‘despicable acts’ in France’s largest child abuse trial

Joel Le Scouarnec was convicted in 2020 of abusing his nieces and a neighbour outside a hospital. (Alain Paillou/Reuters via CNN Newsource)

PARIS — Editor’s note: This article contains distressing details from the outset.

The numbers involved in France’s largest child abuse trial are staggering: 299 alleged victims, sexually abused in 10 hospitals and clinics over 25 years – all by one doctor, prosecutors say.

Joel Le Scouarnec, a retired gastrointestinal surgeon accused of decades of abuse, told the opening of his trial in Morbihan, Brittany, that the harm he has caused is “beyond repair.”

“I have committed despicable acts,” Le Scouarnec told the court Monday, Reuters reported, in a trial many hoped would mark a turning point in France’s reckoning with child abuse.

“I owe it to all these people and their loved ones to admit my actions and their consequences,” said Le Scouarnec, who has not yet submitted a formal plea.

From 1986 to 2014, the former surgeon, now 74 and serving a 15-year prison sentence for a prior conviction for the rape and abuse of children, subjected hospital patients as young as two to early adulthood to sexual abuse including rape across the Brittany region of France, court documents allege. Le Scouarnec was employed in private and public institutions despite being convicted of possession of child abuse imagery in 2005.

The documents alleged that Le Scouarnec told investigators that “he did not remember (the alleged assaults) individually,” but “he had been able to commit sexual touching as well as penetrations on some of his patients, and in particular children.”

Beyond the trial, he was convicted in 2020 of abusing his nieces and a neighbor outside a hospital. More than a dozen of his patients sought to join the current case against him, but were barred by French law as their claims exceeded the 30-year statute of limitations.

The trial, expected to last four months, has already captured national attention, just weeks after a horrifying, monthslong mass rape and drugging trial rocked France. Victim Gisele Pelicot became a potent symbol in the struggle to shift the shame around sexual abuse back onto the perpetrators.

Many hope that this child abuse trial will serve a similar purpose, helping to bring about a painful reckoning with the issue in France and the institutions and culture that may have helped such crimes go unchecked for so long.

“Why are some of my victims speaking out in the press?” lawyer Francesca Satta, who is representing several of the alleged victims, told CNN, “It’s because they’re part of this movement that silence is no longer an option.”

The oldest alleged victims are now nearly 50 while the youngest is 17.

Child-sized dolls

Such is the scale of the trial, a university lecture hall near the courthouse has been requisitioned to accommodate 400 people, including alleged victims, their families, lawyers and media.

It’s not the first time Le Scouarnec has been before a court on child abuse-related charges.

In 2005, he was convicted of possession of child abuse imagery, following a tip off from the FBI when he signed up to a pedophilia-sharing website. His four-month prison sentence was suspended.

Le Scouarnec was convicted in 2020 in west France of rape of a minor and possession of child abuse imagery, receiving a 15-year sentence, after sexually abusing his neighbors’ daughter through their backyard fence. He has been imprisoned since that trial.

Searches of his property and hospital office turned up his diaries and some 70 child-sized dolls, with which investigators believe he “shared his daily life” before his arrest, naming, dressing and using them for his sexual pleasure.

In contrast, Le Scouarnec “had no empathy, no emotion, no feeling towards a little human being, that he considered literally as a sexual object,” Francesca Satta, lawyer for several of the accusers at his latest abuse trial, told CNN.

Delphine Driguez, a lawyer who represented survivors of his abuse at his 2020 trial, agreed with this assessment of Le Scouarnec. “He’s an extremely cold man, without any empathy, very deliberate,” she said.

Satta said that Le Scouarnec’s status as a middle-class surgeon had likely helped him to evade suspicion for so long, adding that in court, the true nature of the accused would be on show for all.

During the 2020 trial, she watched him as the courtroom was shown images taken from his computer.

“That’s when you discover the real Joël Le Scouarnec. Because the gaze changes,” she said.

At least three doctors alerted authorities to concerns about Le Scouarnec, according to court documents and one of the doctors interviewed by CNN.

Following Le Scouarnec’s 2005 conviction, Thierry Bonvalot, a psychiatrist also working at Quimperlé hospital in Brittany with Le Scouarnec, said he confronted him.

“I told him that he was dangerous and that his place wasn’t at the hospital. I asked him to resign,” he told CNN.

After a long silence, his head in his hands, Le Scouarnec responded, “You can’t make me.”

A diary of horrors

The evidence at the center of the latest case will be Le Scouarnec’s own diaries, prosecutors say depict actual events in which children were abused. His attorney says they detail fantasies that he did not act on.

So comprehensive are they, that a journal discovered during the 2020 trial – often noting the time and place of the rapes, the victim’s identity and even their address – helped investigators to identify the dizzying number of his alleged rapes.

Court documents submitted by the prosecution note that he admitted he started the journal in 1990, writing regularly right up until 2016, a year before his retirement, with 40 to more than 100 pages of entries per year.

The entries describe abuse, typically during a supposed medical exam, playing on false medical pretexts to not alarm his patients, the documents show.

The intimate tone of his writings is especially chilling, addressing entries to the children by name, “Little Marie, you were once again alone in your room” begins one account, speaking directly to them and ending many entries – descriptions of sexual acts on a child - with, “I love you.”

Le Scouarnec’s lawyers told CNN that he was not commenting to the press before the trial. However, his lawyers have in the past described the journals as fantasies. According to the court documents, the defendant maintained that he didn’t recall individual events noted in his diaries, although he did not deny writing them.

In multiple diary entries included in the court documents, Le Scouarnec admits to being a pedophile.

Hidden crimes, real trauma

For the survivors of Le Scouarnec’s alleged abuse, the years since have been traumatic.

Although many of the children were under sedation during the alleged abuse, the effect on their lives has been all too tangible, per court documents. The documents describe psychological analyses of the alleged victims often showing persistent troubles, notably in their later sexual relations and on their self-confidence, following their hospitalizations under Le Scouarnec.

“We have victims in real, genuine suffering. We have people who are anorexic, who are depressed, who can’t have children, who can’t have sex with their partner. It’s all these anomalies in quotation marks, unexplained by their doctors, who say to themselves, “How is this possible?” lawyer Satta said. Among those she represents are two families of men who had allegedly been abused by Le Scouarnec and died by suicide years later.

Given the lifetime of abusing that Le Scouarnec stands accused of, some of the survivors’ testimony is no longer admissible in court. France’s statute of limitations restricts rape prosecutions to 30 years after the victim reaches adulthood, meaning about 80 people were not included in the case, Satta said.

As justice runs its course, one question swirls around the case: How was this man allegedly able to prey on so many young people for so long?

CNN has reached out to the hospitals where the crimes were allegedly committed and the French health authorities for comment.

By Joseph Ataman and Serène Nourrisson, CNN