He raped 300 children under anesthesia: the terrible case of the surgeon who had 300 thousand photographs and videos of minors
Accusations rained down on him. The accusations were part of his daily life. He was already sentenced to 15 years in prison since 2020 for abusing a six-year-old neighbor, a four-year-old patient, and two of his nieces. But that, far from being the worst, was only the tip of the iceberg in the hidden, criminal and perverse career of Joel Le Scouarnec , the 74-year-old French surgeon. Because, from the trial that began on February 24, it was revealed that the man raped 300 minors , many of them under medical anesthesia .
His simple and discreet clothes when he left the cell where he was being held to go to the court in the city of Vannes, Brittany, did not attract anyone's attention: a beige sweater and a black T-shirt. Once there, Judge Aude Buresi opened the hearing, consulted his name and asked what his profession was before he was imprisoned. " Surgeon ," replied Le Scouarnec, succinctly.
The accusations against the man are, to say the least, extremely disturbing: that he abused 300 children over three decades, many of whom were under anesthesia after surgical procedures in hospitals across France where he worked.
As if the seriousness of the matter was not already enough, the magnitude of his alleged crimes was fully and evident only in 2017 , when one of the victims, then six years old, told her parents that "the man with the white hair crown" had sexually abused her over the fence of her garden. They automatically called the police to catch the aggressor. And that was when the true horror was revealed.
As part of routine procedures related to such cases, authorities raided Le Scouarnec's property in the town of Jonzac in southwestern France. What they found chilled their blood: 300,000 photographs and videos depicting child abuse. But that was not all. There were also diaries with specific, detailed accounts of each of the abuses of boys and girls, including their names, descriptions of the attacks and the dates on which the aberrations had been committed.
Officers also found under the parquet of the house a collection of life-size dolls to which the surgeon had given names. As part of his diary accounts of abuse, his writings showed he had " killed " some of them after panicking when a paedophile ring in Burgundy was uncovered.
Joel Le Scouarnec: “I am a pedophile and I always will be”This was the message in a note found during police searches at Le Scouarnec's house. Along with it, many of the most shocking details were published openly in newspapers. This information was used by police to track down hundreds of alleged victims, many of whom did not remember being assaulted because they were sedated.
In fact, according to the authorities, some of the people who suffered the surgeon's outrage were "pushed to suicide , to alcohol and drug addiction or had difficulties in establishing relationships ". In addition, it was discovered that Le Scouarnec's crimes could have been stopped when he was convicted in 2005 for possession of child pornography following an undercover operation launched by the American FBI.
However, he was given a four-month suspended sentence and took a full-time position at a hospital in Jonzac, where he continued to practise (and allegedly abuse patients) until 2017. In 2006, the surgeon was reported to the Order of Physicians, France's professional body, when a colleague discovered his criminal conviction, but no action was taken.
Before the opening of the trial at the Morbihan Criminal Court in Vannes today, French doctors and his victims described an " omerta " (the Sicilian mafia code of honour that prohibits snitching on criminal activities) in denouncing the medical professionals that allowed the doctor continuing to abuse large numbers of children even after his conviction. During the demonstration, signs were held up reading: " Stop the code of silence ." There, a retired GP said the lack of action by the authorities was "shameful."
Ariel Ladebourg, a 21-year-old medical student, said the trial was just "the tip of the iceberg," suggesting that many such attacks on children go unpunished.
The accusation against Le Scouarnec is not only serious, but incredibly extensive: it is detailed in 745 pages. He is accused of assaulting 158 men and 141 women between 1989 and 2014. The average age of the alleged victims was 11 years old.
The surgeon faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. French law does not allow for the accumulation of sentences, even when more than one victim is involved. The trial, it was anticipated, could last until June.
This is the second major sexual abuse case to hit France in a matter of months, after 51 men were convicted in December of raping and assaulting Gisele Pelicot at the behest of her husband, Dominique.
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