France prepares for the trial for child abuse of the former surgeon

A former surgeon accused of abusing hundreds of young patients, often while they were under anesthesia, will be scheduled to judge this month in the greatest child abuse trial in the history of France.

Joel Le Scouarnec, 73, is accused of assaulting or violating 299 children, the former patients of the most majority of their, between 1989 and 2014, mainly in Brittany.

He has admitted some positions, but not all.

The trial in Vannes, northwest of France, follows a thorough police investigation that lasts several years.

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

An amazing number of opportunities to prevent the former surgeon from having contact with children seems to have been lost or rejected.

The members of their own family also knew about the pedophilia of Le Scouarnec, but failed to stop it, it is affirmed.

“It was the omertà of the family that meant that its abuse was allowed to continue for decades,” said a lawyer involved in the case of the BBC.

Le Scouarnec, once a respected surgeon from the small city, has been in jail since 2017, when he was arrested suspected of raping his nieces, now in his 30 years, as well as a six -year -old girl and a young patient. In 2020 he was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

After his arrest, the police registered his house and found sexual dolls of the size of a child, more than 300,000 images of child abuse and thousands of pages of meticulously compiled newspapers in which he alleges that Le Scouarnec had registered aggressions that led his Young patients over 25 years.

He has denied attacking or raping children, arguing that their newspapers simply detailed their “fantasies.”

In several cases, however, I had also written: “I am a pedophile.”

Le Scouarnec faces more than 100 rape positions and more than 150 positions of sexual aggression.

Some of their old patients, who are now all adults, have said that they remember the surgeon touching them under the appearance of medical exams, sometimes even when their parents or other doctors were in the room.

But because a large number of their alleged victims were under the effect of anesthetics when it is claimed that the assaults took place, did not remember the events and were surprised to be contacted by the police and told them their names, together with graphic descriptions Of abuse, it allegedly appeared in the newspapers of Le Scouarnec.

Le Scouarnec felt “almighty” and liked the feeling of “flirting with danger” through “calculated transgressions”, the French newspaper Le Monde cited the court order against the former surgeon as he said.

Some of the alleged victims have said that disturbing revelations helped them make sense to the inexplicable symptoms of trauma that had overwhelmed their lives.

The lawyer Francesca Satta, who represents several alleged victims, told the BBC that among her clients are “the families of two men who remembered him and ended up taking their lives.”

Olivia Mons, of the Association of Victims of France, spoke with many of the alleged victims and said that several only had blurred memories that could never “find the words to explain.”

When the surgeon’s case came to light, “he provided them with the beginning of an explanation,” said Mons Mons.

But he added that most of the alleged victims were people who had no memories of being raped or attacked, and who lived ordinary lives before the police contacted them. “Today, many of these people are understandably very shocked,” said Mons Mons.

A woman told the French media that when the police showed her an entry under her name in the newspaper of Le Scouarnec, the memories instantly flooded. “She said.” He raped me. “

Margaux Castex, a lawyer for one of the alleged victims, told the BBC that his client is “traumatized who once gave his confidence to a medical professional, and that has been difficult to shake.”

“I wish they would never have told him what happened,” said Castex.

Another woman named Marie, now a married mother of about thirty years, said that the police arrived at her house and revealed that her name appeared in the newspapers of a surgeon accused of child abuse.

“They read what he had written about me and I wanted to read it myself, but it was impossible,” France Bleu told outlet. “Do you imagine reading Hardcore pornography and knowing what it’s about you, as a child?”

Marie said she had seen mental health specialists for years due to the “problems” with respect to men, and that doctors had wondered if he had experienced children’s trauma.

“I have to believe that my memory protected me from that. But the exam (police) returned it to the surface: images, sensations, memories returned to my day to day,” he said. “Today, I feel this as if it had happened.”

Marie added that when they showed him a photo of Le Scouarnec, “everything returned to me … I remembered his frozen look.”

She wondered how the surgeon had been able to commit her alleged inadvertent crimes for so long.

It is a disturbing question that is destined to be explored extensively during the trial.

The first judicial procedure heard that several members of the Le Scouarnec family had been aware since the mid -1980s of their disturbing behavior towards the children, but did not intervene.

His ex -wife has denied knowing what her husband, and her father of her three children, supposedly did until she was arrested.

Le Scouarnec, a medical professional and a lover of opera and literature, had long been the pride of his middle class family. He was a medical practitioner of the small city respected for many years, which may have provided a significant degree of protection in the workplace.

“A great degree of dysfunction allowed Le Scouarnec to commit his works,” said lawyer Frederic Benoist to the BBC.

Mr. Benoist represents the La Voix de L’E Enfant Child Protection Defense Group (La Voz del Niño), who is pressing to highlight what he calls the “institutional and judicial errors crucial” that allowed Le Scouarnec to continue allegedly abusing abusing of children for decades.

At the beginning of the 2000s, an FBI alert to the French authorities that Le Scouarnec had been accessing child abuse websites only resulted in a suspended sentence of four months without the obligation to follow medical or psychological treatment.

Benoist said prosecutors never shared this information with medical authorities and that there were no consequences for Le Scouarnec, who continued in his role as surgeon, often operating in children and administering his subsequent care.

When a colleague, who already housed suspicions against Le Scouarnec, read about the charges against him in the local press in 2006, urged the Regional Medical Association to take action.

All but a doctor, who abstained, voted that Le Scouarnec had not violated the medical code of ethics, which states that doctors “must, in all circumstances, be reliable and act with integrity and devotion to duty.” No sanctions were imposed.

“Therefore, we have evidence that all these colleagues knew, and none of them did anything,” said Benoist. “There were many circumstances that meant that it could have stopped; it was not, and the consequences are tragic.”

The BBC has approached both the Regional Medical Association and the prosecutors to comment.

Le Scouarnec was finally arrested when the six -year -old victim told her parents that she had assaulted her. By then, I lived as an inmate in a large abandoned house, surrounded by dolls the size of a child.

Mrs. Driguez, lawyer of the nieces, sat in front of Le Scouarnec during the 2020 trial in the southwest city of Saintes. “His answers were cold and calculated,” he said. “It’s extremely intelligent, but he showed no empathy.”

The trial discovered more accusations of child abuse within the family of Le Scouarnec, Driguez said, but the former surgeon never had any reaction in particular and mostly looked at the floor.

At one point, the court showed creepy videos of Le Scouarnec and his wrists. “Everyone was watching the screen but I was seeing it,” Driguez said. “Until that moment he had always kept his gaze. But at that time, he looked up, watching the video carefully. His eyes shone.”

While the city of Vannes prepares to organize the trial, three conference rooms in a old nearby university building have been made available to the hundreds of alleged victims, their legal representatives and families. The trial begins on February 24 and must last until June.

If the press and the public are allowed, they will depend on all the alleged victims to renounce their right to a closed trial.

Many lawyers believe that the trial could be a moment of calculation for the authorities that did not take provisions against Le Scouarnec, as well as an important moment for the victims to express their trauma.

Mrs. Satta said that although many people involved in this case do not remember what happened to them, they were still victims, and added that the former surgeon had enjoyed the “impunity of silence” for too long.

“The trial will be a time for the victims to speak,” Benoist agreed. “It would be terrible, in my eyes, if it stayed behind closed doors.”