Off-norms of a serial rapist surgeon in France: 299 victims, an accused

In France, 299 victims in front of a single accused: Joël Le Scouarnec, a former 74 -year -old surgeon, will be tried from February 24 for a long series of rapes and sexual assaults committed on former patients, mostly minors at the time facts.

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This trial of one of the largest pedocrime cases ever tried in France will be held before the Criminal Court of Morbihan, in the west of France, for a planned period of four months.

The victims identified by justice were often asleep or in the awakening phase when they suffered these criminal acts, the investigation revealed.

“Rather overall, Mr. Le Scouarnec recognized his involvement in many of the facts in question”, as well as his “concealment strategies,” said Lorient prosecutor, Stéphane Kellenberger, who will conduct the accusation at Vannes trial.

The average age of the victims is 11 years but among the multitude of facts awarded to the former surgeon are the rape of a one-year-old baby and a sexual assault on a 70-year-old patient.

The accused will have to answer for sexual violence committed between 1989 and 2014, during which he worked in a dozen establishments in western France, distributed in eight departments.

In total, Joël Le Scouarnec will be tried for 111 rapes and 189 sexual assaults, aggravated by the fact that he abused his function as a doctor and that they often aimed at under 15 (256 victims out of 299).

The law does not allow the cumulation of sentences, Joël Le Scouarnec, already incarcerated for facts of the same nature, faces a maximum sentence of 20 years of imprisonment.

Children wigs and dolls

The man, who puts himself in his writings among the “pedophiles” persecuted by the company, documents all his practices, also including scatophilia, zoophilia, wearing wig, a layer and the regular use of childish dolls as sex toys. No psychiatric pathology was however detected at home by experts.

The surgeon also scrupulously recorded in notebooks the names of his victims associated with the stories of the abuse he surreptitiously inflicted on them, sometimes even on the operating table.

And it is certainly this mania that earned him to answer for his crimes in Vannes in the coming months, the investigators who were able to retrace his pedocriminal route by scrutinizing this mass of documents.

It took the complaint in 2017 of a young neighbor, a six -year -old girl whom he had attacked and raped, to uncover the misdeeds of the surgeon.

In his house in Jonzac, where Joël Le Scouarnec lived as a hermit with his dozens of dolls, the gendarmes had grasped more than 300,000 pedocriminal images. Eberlved, they also discovered thousands of pages of listings and diaries on his computer.

The investigation opened after the rape of his little neighbor will also highlight rape on one of her nieces as well as sexual violence on another niece and a young patient in the 1990s.

The fallen doctor was sentenced for these facts to 15 years’ imprisonment in December 2020.

Radored too late?

It was only after this 2017 complaint and his placement in pre -trial detention that Joël Le Scouarnec was canceled by the order of doctors.

The practitioner had however been sentenced at the end of 2005 by the Vannes Criminal Court for downloading from child pornographic files on the internet. The sentence of four months suspended prison suspended was not accompanied by any obligation to care or prohibition to exercise.

In August 2006, he was established at the Quimperlé hospital in the west of France, without its director or the departmental council of the Order of Physicians, however informed of his conviction, found it to complain about .

A separate investigation was opened in Lorient, against X, for “non-crime or offense against the integrity of people”.

As for the association La Voix de l’Enfant, a civil party at the trial, she filed a complaint in April 2023 against the judicial authorities and the Ministry of Health for “endangering the life of others”.

Over the four months scheduled for the trial, seven days have already been scheduled behind closed doors, of law for minor victims at the time of the facts if they ask for it.

Many victims were traumatized by learning the facts, sometimes decades later. Not all will be present but many say to expect the explanations of the violence on the violence that the practitioner has inflicted on them.

Mr. Le Scouarnec’s lawyer, Thibaut Kurzawa, told AFP that “his state of mind has not changed. He wants to defend himself and he wants to explain himself ”. “He needs to express himself,” he says.