French
Doctor Who Sexually Abused Hundreds of Children Is Sentenced
A former
surgeon had confessed to abusing at least 299 people, mostly children, in what
is considered the largest case of its kind in French history.
By Catherine
Porter and Ségolène Le Stradic
Reporting
from the courthouse in Vannes, France
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/28/joel-le-scouarnec-france-doctor-abuse-sentence.html
May 28, 2025
Updated
11:26 a.m. ET
The former
surgeon who pleaded guilty to sexually abusing 299 people, most of them
children, was sentenced to the maximum 20 years in prison by a French court on
Wednesday, in what is considered the largest pedophilia case in the country’s
history.
“It was
predation on victims the most vulnerable, when they were sick in the hospital,”
Judge Aude Buresi told the courthouse in Vannes, a coastal town in Brittany
where the majority of the abuse took place. She also barred the former surgeon,
Joël Le Scouarnec, from ever practicing medicine or having contact with minors
and said he must serve two-thirds of his sentence before being eligible for
parole.
The trial
revealed large cracks in the legal and health administrative bureaucracies that
failed to take seriously one clear warning sign: In 2005, Mr. Le Scouarnec was
convicted of downloading child abuse imagery and given a four-month suspended
sentence by a French court. Still, he was permitted to continue treating
children unsupervised until his arrest in 2017.
Three years
later, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for raping and sexually
assaulting four children. Wednesday’s terms supersede that, since there are no
consecutive prison sentences in France.
The latest
trial came amid a growing reckoning in France over sexual abuse, with the
numbers of victims reporting to the police surging, cases crowding the courts
and new #MeToo movements erupting at a dizzying pace.
Many of the
victims felt the trial of Mr. Le Scouarnec was drowned out by that chorus and
did not prompt the public outcry and political responses they had hoped for.
After the verdict, many who had gathered outside the courthouse expressed
disappointment, saying they had hoped that Mr. Le Scouarnec would receive an
exemplary sentence breaking new legal ground, given the scale of his crimes.
“What kind
of message does it send that you can rape one, 10 or in this case 300 people
and you get the maximum sentence of 20 years?” asked Gabriel Trouvé, a victim
who agreed to be identified. “I mean, this guy could have maybe raped one
person and it would have been the same.”
A former
gastric surgeon, Mr. Le Scouarnec, now 74, committed the sexual abuse from 1989
to 2014, while working in nine clinics and hospitals in western and central
France. The victims’ average age was 11. Many were sedated or recovering from
operations during the abuse, and had no memory of it.
The crimes
were discovered during a police search of Mr. Le Scouarnec’s home, after he
exposed himself to a 6-year-old girl living next door and her parents reported
him.
There, the
police found computers and more than two dozen hard drives filled with child
sexual abuse imagery, and hundreds of pages of the doctor’s personal diaries
detailing the sexual abuse he had committed against individual children. They
also found two spreadsheets that listed many of the victims’ names, ages,
addresses and synopses of the abuse they had suffered — sexual assault and
rape, mostly related to penetration with fingers.
Heading into
the trial, Mr. Le Scouarnec denied some of the charges, saying that some of his
writing had been fantasy and other acts were part of medical procedures. But a
month into the trial, he stunned the courtroom by admitting to having done
everything he wrote about, and perhaps more.
“For 30
years I acted without any qualms and with a single objective, to commit sexual
assaults as often as I could,” he said, standing in the dock where he appeared
day after day over three months, often staring blankly at the room.
After his
confession, the long-anticipated trial took a different turn, shifting its
attention to the victims, many of whom had been unaware that they were abused.
Now adults,
victims spoke about their reaction to the shattering news from the police. They
recounted feeling abandoned, left on their own to deal with an intimate crime
they did not remember. They described shock, fury, anxiety and feelings of
dissociation.
“People need
to realize that it was the police who reached out to the victims, and not the
other way around,” said Mr. Trouvé’s mother, Christine, who attended much of
the trial with her son. “It was a double shock.”
Some
separated from their partners over the revelations. Some experienced depression
and stopped working. Two died by suicide.
About 100
did not participate in the trial at all. Most of those who did gave their
testimony from behind closed doors or sat silently in the courtroom as their
cases were examined. Some sent lawyers in their stead.
“I am
getting worse, I have been on sick leave since 2024 and I am currently in a
psychiatric hospital,” one victim, now a young woman living in Belgium, wrote
in a letter that was read aloud by her lawyer. “I feel very helpless, like I
don’t have access to what happened to me.”
She said she
still struggled to identify as a victim. “I feel like I should take an interest
in the trial but I can’t,” she wrote. “Coming here would make it too real.”
Few of those
who testified agreed to be publicly identified. Large support dogs lumbered
between them in an overflow room near the courthouse, where they watched the
proceedings on a screen.
As the trial
went on, several who had been reluctant to attend began to come forward,
forming what Ms. Trouvé called a “family of struggle.”
While many
talked about the trauma of the discovery, some said it offered a
long-sought-after explanation for their broken childhoods and troubled
adolescence that bled into their adult lives.
“Learning
about the rape allowed me to understand a lot of things,” a nurse, now 36, told
the court. “Why I felt different. Why I ran away from home when I was 10. Why I
was bullied at school. Why I stuttered.”
Some victims
said the revelations had rocked them just as they were becoming parents,
themselves. “Two months after learning the news from the police, I found out
that I was going to be a father for the first time,” said the nurse, his voice
breaking. “I became very afraid of passing it on.”
Most victims
said they now had a hard time trusting doctors. One refused to be sedated for
foot surgery, she told the court.
And they
spoke of the collateral damage to their families, particularly their parents,
who often carried their own guilt for not having protected their children from
the surgeon, or having ignored the warning signs and even dismissed their
children’s reports of being touched.
“Our life
became a nightmare,” said the father of a soldier, now 22, who was among Mr. Le
Scouarnec’s last victims. His wife, who has since died of cancer, never got
over the news, he said, tearing up.
“In the
evenings she would cry, she repeated the same thing over and over again — that
she had been waiting just outside, just a few doors from where it happened,” he
told the courtroom. “That she had told her son, as they took him to the
operating room, that everything would be OK.”
The few
victims who remembered the abuse spoke about not being believed by their
parents and internalizing self-doubt.
“I remember
a person with glasses and a white coat entering the room in a strange way,” one
man told the court. The doctor then asked him to lift his legs, penetrated him
with his fingers, and touched his genitals.
At the time,
he raised the issue with his father, who suggested that it was part of the
medical procedure. “So then I lived with it, telling myself it was normal,” he
said, “but it always stayed in a corner of my head.”
He struggled
with trust and intimacy, he told the court, chuckling awkwardly. “Laughter
replaced the stutter,” he explained. “It’s a way to go through difficult
conversations more easily.”
Less than
two weeks before the verdict, about 60 of the victims created a collective to
draw attention to the case and demand political responses so that children are
better protected from predatory medical practitioners.
Though Judge
Buresi said Mr. Le Scouarnec had been receiving treatment since 2017 and
understood the gravity of his crimes, few victims felt the same way.
From the
glass dock, Mr. Le Scouarnec delivered the same responses about each case in a
flat, emotionless tone. He acknowledged the abuse. But he remembered very few
of his victims.
“I ask for
your forgiveness,” he repeated mechanically.
When one
26-year-old victim confronted Mr. Le Scouarnec from the stand during the
trial,her words captured the feelings of many victims in the room.
“You ruined
my life,” she shouted, trembling with anger. “Allow me to doubt the sincerity
of your apologies for things you don’t even remember.”
Catherine
Porter is an international reporter for The Times, covering France. She is
based in Paris.
Ségolène Le
Stradic is a reporter and researcher covering France.
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