Eleven years. That was the average age of the 299 children whom the now 73-year-old doctor Joël Le Scouarnec subjected to rapes and sexual assaults between 1989 and 2014, according to the indictment being heard in court in northwestern France.
Already on the first day of the trial, the man admits to having committed the majority of the crimes he is charged with, according to his lawyer.
Some of the plaintiffs remember the assaults. Others do not remember at all what happened, partly because they were sedated when it happened. Several of them did not know what they had been subjected to until they were informed by the police that they are mentioned in detailed notes in the doctor's diaries.
A woman was ten years old when she got Joël Le Scouarnec as her doctor in Vannes, due to appendicitis. She says that the memories came back after she was informed by the police that she is one of the victims.
I was operated on in the afternoon. He raped me the morning after, she has said to France 3.
Conditional sentence
Of the 299 children who were allegedly subjected by the doctor, more than half were boys, according to the Bretagne newspaper Le Télégramme. Most were under 15 years old. The majority were his patients.
The doctor has spent most of his time at work or alone at home, naked with a bottle of whiskey and dolls, according to French media.
Already in 2004, Joël Le Scouarnec was arrested at his home after the FBI alerted the French intelligence service that he had used his credit card on a Russian child pornography site. The year after, he was sentenced to a conditional prison sentence of four months for possession of child pornography, but was allowed to continue working as a doctor.
Imprisoned since 2017
In 2017, a neighbor reported the doctor for having molested her daughter, which led to his arrest and imprisonment since then. At his home, more than 300,000 child pornographic images, videos, and detailed diaries were found, where he describes rapes and assaults on children who were his patients. Among other things, he has written "I am a pedophile" several times.
He himself claims that the diary notes are fantasies.
In December 2020, Le Scouarnec was sentenced to 15 years in prison for sexual assaults on four small girls. Two were relatives, the third a four-year-old patient, and the fourth the six-year-old neighbor girl.
In the new trial, which is expected to last four months, Le Scouarnec can be sentenced to 20 years in prison.
