A 74-year-old former French surgeon was sentenced to 20 years in jail after he confessed to raping hundreds of his patients over two decades between 1989 and 2014.
Shocking Victims: Children and Family Members Among Those Abused
Most of the victims, including boys and girls, were children. During trial, the surgeon confessed to raping his granddaughter and committed the same crime on a 5-year-old niece in 1985.
The perpetrator, Joël Le Scouarnec, is already imprisoned for 15 years for rape and indecent assault of four children, two of them nieces. The most recent trial was in 2017 when a 6-year-old neighbour’s parent had reported Le Scouarnec to the police for indecent exposure and physical contact with their daughter over the fence that separated their properties.
Disturbing Evidence: Photos, Videos, and Notebooks Found in His Possession
Officials searched the surgeon’s residence and detected over 300,000 images, 650 pedophilic, zoophilic, and scatological video files, and notebooks where Le Scouarnec had referred to himself as a pedophile and had justified the gruesome details of his acts up to that point.
Le Scouarnec had outlined his actions in vivid detail, as well as the identities of his victims, in his notebooks, which were to prove the final piece of damning evidence at the trial.
Masquerading Abuse as Medical Treatment
The exploitative method of the surgeon was to masquerade sexual abuse as medical treatment and prey on his young patients in moments when they were alone in their hospital rooms or when they would not remember the abuse after ‘medical treatment’.
Throughout the trial, Le Scouarnec provided apologies for the offenses but was calm, composed, and unaffected, according to AP. “I didn’t see them as people. They were the destination of my fantasies. As the trial went on, I began to see them as individuals, with emotions, anger, suffering, and distress,” he told the court.
The trial in Brittany closes France’s one of the biggest ever child sex abuse cases but also posed questions regarding how a pedophile surgeon managed to carry out such crimes for so long, AP said. During the trial last Friday, prosecutors described Le Scouarnec as “a devil in a white coat.” Prosecutor Stéphane Kellenberger partly blamed the French bureaucracy for the crime. The surgeon was allowed to continue his profession until his arrest in 2017, despite a conviction in 2005 for possessing and importing child sexual abuse material.
299 Victims: The Scale of Le Scouarnec’s Abuse
Among the 299 victims of the surgeon, 158 were boys and 141 were girls. Victims, who were identified from Le Scouarnec’s notebook, complained of a perceived lack of attention during the trial. Two of them died before the verdict.
“This trial, which could have served as an open-air laboratory to expose the serious failings of our institutions, seems to leave no mark on the government, the medical community, or society at large,” a group of victims said in a statement.
Following four months of incarceration in 2005, Le Scouarnec was commissioned as a hospital practitioner the next year. Human rights organizations have criticized the government for inaction and stated that nothing was done to withdraw the convict’s medical license or restrict his access to children after he was found guilty.
