Eleven years. That was the average age of the 299 children who were subjected to violence and sexual abuse by the now 73-year-old doctor Joël Le Scouarnec between 1989 and 2014, according to the indictment now being heard in court in northwestern France.
Some of the plaintiffs remember the abuse. Others do not remember at all what happened, partly because they were sedated when it happened. Several of them did not know they had been victims until they were informed by the police that they were 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 was 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 abused 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, who according to French media has spent most of his time at work or alone at home, naked with a bottle of whiskey and dolls, has admitted to some of the charges.
As early as 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 following year, he was sentenced to a conditional prison sentence of four months for possession of child pornography, but was allowed to continue as a doctor.
Imprisoned since 2017
In 2017, a neighbor reported the doctor for molesting 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 abuse of children who were his patients. Among other things, he has written "I am a pedophile" several times.
He himself claims that the diary entries are fantasies.
In December 2020, Le Scouarnec was sentenced to 15 years in prison for sexual abuse of 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.
