Former surgeon who has been accused of abusing hundreds of young patients, often while under anesthetic, should be a trial in the highest trial for abuse of children in French history this month.
Joel Le Scouarnec, 73, has been charged with attack or rape of 299 children – the majority of his former patient – between 1989 and 2014, mainly in Brittany.
He admitted some accusations, but not all.
The trial in Vannes, northwestern France, follows a painstaking police investigation that lasted several years.
He is likely to ask unpleasant questions about whether Le Scouarnec is protected by his colleagues and managing the hospitals that employed him, despite the warning of the FBI authorities to consult a suspended sentence.
It seems that a stunning number of opportunities to stop the former surgeon to have contact with children missed or rejected.
Members of his own family also knew about Le Scouarnec’s pedophilia, but they failed to stop him, it claims.
“It was the Omertà family meant that his abuse was allowed to continue for decades,” said a lawyer involved in the BBC case.
Le Scouarnec, once a respected surgeon in a small town, has been in prison since 2017, when he was arrested on suspicion of raping his nephews, now in their 30s, as well as a six-year-old girl and a young patient. 2020. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
After his arrest, the police searched his home and found sex dolls of children’s size, more than 300,000 paintings of children and thousands of pages detailed diaries in which Le Scouarnec allegedly recorded the attacks that he performed on his young patients for over 25 years.
He denied the attack or rape of children, claiming that his diaries only detailed his “fantasies”.
In several cases, however, he also wrote: “I am a pedophile.”
Le Scouarnec is confronted with more than 100 rape charges and more than 150 charges of sexual abuse.
Some of his former patients, who are now grown up, said that he remembered the surgeon touched them under the guise of medical examinations, sometimes even when their parents or other doctors were in the room.
But since the huge number of his alleged victims were influenced by anesthetic when claimed that the attacks occurred, they did not remember the events and were shocked by the police and said their names – along with the graphic descriptions of abuse – he allegedly appeared in Le Scouarneca’s diaries .
Le Scouarnec felt “omnipotent” and liked the sense of “flirting with the danger of” through “calculated transgressions”, the French day of Le Monda quoted the court order against the former surgeon.
Some of the alleged casualties said that disturbing discoveries helped them understand the inexplicable symptoms of the trauma that had burdened them all their lives.
Francesca Satt’s lawyer, who represents several alleged victims, told the BBC that they were among their clients “the families of the two men who remembered and who eventually took their own lives.”
Olivia Mons of French Victimes Association spoke with many alleged victims and said that there were a few only blurred memories of events that never managed to “find words to explain.”
When the surgeon came to light, “he gave them the beginning of the explanation,” said Mrs. Msgr.
But she added that most of the alleged victims were people who had no memories of rape or attack and who lived ordinary lives before the police contacted them. “Today, many of these people are understandably very shaken,” said Mrs. Msgr.
One woman told the French media that when the police showed her entry under her name on the Le Scouarnec’s diary, memories were immediately overwhelmed. “I had a flashback for someone to go into my hospital room, lifting the bedding, saying they would check if everything went well,” she said. “He raped me.”
Margaux Castex, a lawyer of one of the alleged casualties, told the BBC that her client was “traumatized that he had ever believed a medical expert, which is hard to shake.”
“He would like to never tell him what happened,” Mrs. Castex said.
Another woman named Marie, who is now married in the mid -thirties, said the police came to her house and revealed that her name appeared in the surgeon’s diaries accused of abusing children.
“They read what he wrote about me and I wanted to read it myself, but it was impossible,” Outlet France Ble said. “Can you imagine reading hardcore pornography and you know it’s about you as a child?”
Marie said she had seen mental health experts for years because of the “problem” she had in connection with men and that doctors wondered if she had experienced a childhood trauma.
“I have to believe that the memory protected me from that. But [police] The test was returned to the surface – pictures, sensations, my memories were coming back day by day, “she said.” Today, I feel it like that just happened. “
Marie added that when she was shown a photo of Le Scouarnec, “Everything came back to me … I remembered his icy gaze.”
She wondered how the surgeon had been able to commit his alleged crimes for so long.
This is a persecuted question that will be explored for a long time during the trial.
‘Institutional and judicial wrong steps’
The first court proceedings listened to the claims that several members of the Le Scouarnec family had been conscious since the mid-1980s his disturbing behavior towards the children, but did not intervene.
His ex-wife denied that her husband’s father had done the father of their three children until he was arrested.
Le Scouarnec-medical expert and lover of opera and literature-was the pride of his middle-class family. For many years he was a respected medical doctor in a small town, which may have provided him with a significant degree of protection in the workplace.
“A huge degree of dysfunction made it to Le Scouarnec to commit his works,” lawyer Frederic Benoist told the BBC.
Mr. Benoist is a group of advocacy for the protection of children La Voix de L’enfant (a child’s voice), which pressures to highlight what he calls “key institutional and judicial wrong steps”, which allowed Le Scouarnec allegedly allegedly to continue to abuse children for decades.
In the early 2000s, the FBI warning of French authorities that Le Scouarnec had accessed the web pages for children abuse only resulted in only a four-month suspended sentence without an obligation to follow medical or psychological treatment.
Mr. Benoist said that prosecutors never shared these data with medical bodies and that there was no consequence for Le Scouarnec, who continued in his role as a surgeon, often acting on children and managing their subsequent care.
When a colleague – who had already given doubts against Le Scouarnec – read about the accusations against him in the local press in 2006, called the regional medical association to take measures.
Everyone except one doctor – who refrained – voted that Le Scouarnec did not break the code of ethics, who says that doctors “in all circumstances must be reliable and act with integrity and dedication of duty.” No sanctions were made.
“Therefore, we have proof that all these colleagues knew, and none of them did nothing,” said Mr. Benoist. “There were many circumstances that meant he could stop him; he did not, and the consequences were tragic.”
The BBC has also joined the regional medical association and prosecutors for comment.
Le Scouarnec was eventually arrested when a six -year -old victim told her parents that he had attacked her. Until then, he lived like a hermit in a large neglected home, surrounded by dolls of children’s size.
A moment of calculation
Mrs. Driguez, a nephew lawyer, was sitting opposite Le Scouarnec during the 2020 trial in the southwestern city of Saintes. “His answers were cold and calculate,” she said. “He’s extremely smart, but he didn’t show any empathy.”
The trial has revealed more accusations of abusing children in the Le Scouarnec family, Ms. Driguez said, but the former surgeon never had a special reaction and mostly looked at the floor.
At one point, the court showed the lurid videos of Le Scouarnec and his dolls. “Everyone watched the screen, but I watched it,” Mrs. Driguez said. “Until that moment, he always kept his eyes down. But at that moment he looked up, stared carefully into the video. His eyes were flashing.”
While the City of Vannes prepares for the host of the trial, three lecturers at the former university building nearby were available for the accommodation of hundreds of alleged victims, their legal representatives and families. The trial begins on February 24th and should last until June.
Whether the press and the public will be allowed will depend on all the alleged victims that have been eligible for a closed trial.
Many lawyers believe that a trial could be a moment of counting for authorities that failed to take over the 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, have no memory of what happened to them, are still victims, adding that the former surgeon has enjoyed “unpunished silence” for too long.
“The trial will be a moment to say the victims,” Mr. Benoist agreed. “It would be terrible, in my eyes, to hold behind the closed door.”
