When two gendarmes knocked on her door in 2019, Marie had no idea that she was about to find herself at the dark heart of one of the world’s biggest child abuse cases. The French mother of three, now 38, was shocked when the officers told her she had been the victim of Joël Le Scouarnec, a surgeon and an alleged serial paedophile accused of raping and sexually abusing hundreds of children.
She recalled asking them: “Was I touched?” “No, madame. Raped,” they replied. “I couldn’t think they were talking about me. It’s like cancer, you think it only happens to other people,” she said. “And how could I have forgotten that?”
Faced with the blank in Marie’s memory, the police showed her handwritten notes in Le Scouarnec’s “black books” from 1996, when she was 10 years old and he removed her appendix. “There was my family name, my first name, age, the address of my parents, everything he did and how he felt. It was disgusting. The word ‘raped’ was hard enough, but here were these obscene phrases of what happened.”
Le Scouarnec, now 74, will appear in court accused of the rape or sexual abuse of 299 patients – 158 male and 141 female and the majority under the age of 15 – while they were under anaesthetic or recovering from operations between 1989 and 2014. The average age of his alleged victims was 11.
The surgeon, who entitled one document “my paedophile letters”, denies penetration with his penis. Under French law, rape is an act of sexual penetration by any body part or object.
During the four-month trial, local health and hospital authorities will also face difficult questions over why the surgeon was allowed to continue practising for almost a decade after a conviction for accessing online child abuse images.
Francesca Satta, the lawyer representing Marie, the Vinet family and other alleged victims, has described Le Scouarnec as “extremely perverse” and a “monster” who used his workplace as a “hunting ground”. Satta believes there could be as many as 400 victims.
The trial comes as France is still reeling from the Mazan hearing last autumn that saw 51 men convicted of raping or sexually assaulting Gisèle Pelicot, including her husband, Dominique, who had drugged her and invited strangers to abuse her.
Frédéric Benoist, lawyer for the child protection association La Voix de l’Enfant (Child’s Voice), a civil party in the case, told the Observer there had been a “chain of structural failures” in the country’s justice and health systems that had allowed Le Scouarnec to continue.
The extent of France’s latest sexual scandal has raised the question of why those aware of Le Scouarnec’s paedophile conviction and alleged abuse – including members of his own family and colleagues – either failed to speak out or were ignored when they voiced concerns.
The scale of Le Scouarnec’s alleged abuse was uncovered in April 2017 when his neighbour’s six-year-old daughter told her parents “the man with a crown of white hair” had exposed himself and sexually touched her through a broken garden fence.
In December 2020, Le Scouarnec was sentenced to 15 years for the sexual abuse of four girls: his six-year-old neighbour, a four-year-old patient and two of his own nieces, who were just four years old when the abuse started.
At the time of this conviction, police were already investigating the further 299 counts of alleged rape and sexual abuse on young patients to be heard during the trial opening this week.
In his book Piégés (Trapped), the journalist Hugo Lemonier trawled Le Scouarnec’s notebooks, linking entries to victims’ statements to police. Lemonier also spoke to the surgeon’s colleagues and victims.
“They were often alone at the time of the visit, a few instants were enough. There were no obstacles, nobody asked him any questions,” Lemonier writes, adding that Le Scouarnec’s profession made him “untouchable”. “Nobody was able to stop him because nobody imagined he was a predator.”
