Alarms over sexual desire Joël Le Scouarnec for children for years rolled up for years, already before he was charged rape or sexual abuse of 299 peopleMost children under his care when he was a surgeon.
His wife’s sister said she expressed concern for her sister after thinking she was witnessing that he was kissing his daughter’s bottom, according to court documents. His sister faced him shortly after her youngest daughter told her “children’s words” that he touched her. And he was already convicted in 2005 for the possession of a picture of sexual abuse of children and imposed a suspended sentence.
“Nothing, nothing, nothing,” said Marie-French Lhermitte, now his ex-wife, as a trial for sexual abuse of children opened last week. She answered the question repeatedly about whether there had been a warning she had to do.
Mr. Le Scouarnec was a gastric surgeon who worked for more than three decades in several clinics and private hospitals in western and central France before being arrested in 2017 for exposing a 6-year-old neighbor. This arrest and police search for his home led to the discovery of evidence – diaries and other writings – much wider abuse for 25 years. In 2020, he was convicted of sexual abuse or rape of four girls, including two young daughters of his sister, and serves time.
The latest trial – considered the largest case of pedophilia in the country – It is based mainly on these diaries and writings, used by investigators to identify hundreds of these victims.
Mr. Le Scouarnec, who is now 74, has admitted the “huge majority” charges against him, said his lawyer Maxime Tessier in Vannes, where the trial is being held. Rape fees are generally related to touching or penetrating children’s vagina and anus fingers. He denied some of these accusations because they were part of medical procedures.
All over The first days of the trialMr. Le Scouarnec, who lost his medical license in 2017, has repeatedly expressed remorse for the destruction of not only his family’s lives, but also those of his former patients. Many of them are now adults and look at the procedure from nearby auditoriums while the support dogs are wandering through passages. Many are expected to testify.
In the first week of trials, judges, the prosecutor and lawyers of former patients, tried to discover the roots of Mr. Le Scouarnec’s desire to sexually touch children. They also tried to figure out how he escaped with abuse for a quarter of a century, without anyone in his family to move to stop him, despite some doubts at least some.
In testimony, his three sons, two brothers and sisters, a former wife, a relative and a close family friend, painted a portrait of a narrow knit family focused with sexual abuse and full of culture of silence and secret.
Mr. Le Scouarnec’s son Fabien Le Scouarnec testified that his grandfather Joseph Le Scouarnec sexually abused him. (The grandfather, who now passed away, told the people during his life that he had been abused himself, the court heard.) Sister Le Scouarnec, Annie Jobard, said that two boys were raping her when she was 14 and never told her family.
His ex -wife said two men’s relatives raped her when she was a baby. She kept a secret, she said, even from her husband.
“When you are raped, you feel dirty,” she testified. “So you don’t talk about it.”
Members of the family described Mr. Le Scouarnec as a good husband, a good brother and a good father who loved to read and opera and who worked on long hours.
His three sons said he was not often at home, but when he was, he helped them in the studio, took them to museums and ensured that they had music classes. They described their childhood as happy. Their father never abused them and were completely unaware of his pedophilia, they said.
“We had everything we needed to be happy, and the perversion exploded like an atomic bomb in the whole family,” Fabien (42) said.
“These are Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” he added later. “There is a part of my father’s personality I don’t know.”
But Mr. Le Scouarnec’s sister, Mrs. Jorard, knew about at least one case. She told the court that she faced her brother in 2000, after her younger daughter told her the reason she did not want to go to dinner with him: he sexually abused her. Smoking the chain in his car, Mr. Le Scouarnec acknowledged the abuse and said he would work the rest of his life to change, testified in court. She said she told him to be treated.
Asked why she didn’t go to the police then, Mrs. Jobard said she thought her youngest daughter was the only victim. She did not know at the time that Mr. Le Scouarnec also sacrificed his older daughter.
“I didn’t realize someone was dangerous,” said Mrs. Jobard, who is now 72, a retired English teacher. “For me, it was unthinkable that my brother was like that.”
Even when she later learned that Mr. Le Scouarnec was arrested on charges of possessing pictures of sexual abuse of children, and after Fabien told her about the abuse that suffered from her grandfather, she said she had not established a relationship that there was a much deeper problem in the family.
She said retrospectively, “I think it was a denial.”
Mrs. Lhermitte, the ex -wife of Mr. Le Scouarnec, also testified.
Sitting in a turning chair in the middle of the courtroom, she denied that her sister, whom she called a bird’s brain, or her sister, Mrs. Jobard, ever talked to her about their fears to abuse their children.
She also said she did not know that her husband was convicted of possessing a picture of sexual abuse of children, although she was at home when police arrived to search the house. During the search, she went shopping, and when she returned, her husband was relaxed and told her that everything was a big mistake.
She separated from him shortly after the police search, but only divorced in recent times and continues to visit him in prison.
When Aude Buresi, a chairman of her judge, asked her about her sessions with a psychiatrist and whether they helped her understand the root of abuse in her family, she refused to talk about it, stating that it was her private life.
Judge Buresi tried to make her confront the abuse by projecting photographs found on many husbands deprived of hard discs on screens in the courtroom. They discovered naked, intimate pictures of two nephews he was convicted of abuse.
“You destroy us,” she told the judge, adding later, “It’s so violent of you. I don’t have an intellect to catch it all. I don’t know how to survive it.”
Testifying in court this week, Mr. Le Scouarnec repeatedly defended Mrs. Lhermitte, whom he still called his wife. He claimed that he had been lying to her for 30 years, though he said he knew “some things” without giving details.
“I had two lives,” said Mr. Le Scouarnec, who was mostly assembled as he addressed the court. “Family life, social life, professional life, and in addition, the life of a pedophile, a pedophile who thought nothing else.”
But he was also unclear when he asked key questions, such as why he had destroyed some of his diaries. He most often replied that he did not remember.
Although the court spent days seeking the lighting of Mr. Le Scouarnec’s relatives, and then from him, the source of his pedophilia remained inevitable.
Mrs. Jorard texted him tearfully if his father had abused him as well.
Mr. Le Scouarnec stood up in a glass box in the courtroom to offer the accused.
“I talked to psychologists for a long time, I asked that myself, and I still don’t know,” he said. “What I am safe and repeat to: no one has ever abused me.”
The next day, addressing his older son Renana Le Scouarnec for what he said he could be the last time, he caused a crowd in the courtroom when he discovered another disturbing family secret.
“I admit that I committed acts of sexual abuse to my grandchild,” he said.
Then he asked for his son’s forgiveness.
The court suddenly delayed as the son and wife of the son were rejected in the care of two psychologists.
