Nearly 300 victims: Massive trial of pedophile surgeon begins

Following the horrific story of Gisèle Pélicot and her husband, an even more horrific court case has emerged in France. The trial of retired gastroenterologist Joël Le Scouarnec began on Monday. The case alleges that Le Scouarnec sexually abused hospital patients aged between two and early adulthood from 1986 to 2014. The entire French region of Brittany was in fear of the doctor’s actions.

The number of people involved in France's biggest child abuse trial is staggering and mind-boggling: 299 alleged victims were sexually abused in 10 hospitals and clinics over 25 years - all by one doctor, prosecutors say.

Other details are equally shocking. From 1986 to 2014, the former surgeon, now 74 and serving a 15-year prison sentence for a previous conviction for rape and child abuse, sexually abused hospital patients aged two years old to young adulthood, including rape, across the Brittany region of France.

Le Scouarnec worked in private and public institutions despite being convicted in 2005 of possessing images of child abuse. Le Scouarnec had registered on a paedophile image-sharing website, which attracted the attention of the security services. The man's four-month prison sentence was suspended.

In 2020, he was found guilty of child abuse and raping his neighbors’ daughter in their backyard. That’s when he received a 15-year prison sentence. More than a dozen of his patients tried to join the ongoing case against the horrific pedophile, but French law prevented them from doing so because their claims exceeded the 30-year statute of limitations.

Court documents state Le Scouarnec told investigators that "he did not remember the alleged attacks individually" but "he could have committed similar acts."

The trial, expected to last four months, has already captured national attention and comes just weeks after the horrific, multi-part trial of Dominic Pelico, who allowed multiple men to rape his wife, Gisele.

The oldest alleged victims in the current case are now nearly 50 years old, while the youngest is 17.

The scale of the trial is so large that an entire university lecture hall next to the courthouse has been taken over to accommodate 400 people, including the alleged victims, their families, lawyers and media.

Searches of his property and hospital office turned up his diaries and about 70 child-sized dolls, which investigators believe he "shared his daily life" with before his arrest, naming them, dressing them and using them for sexual pleasure.

As Francesca Satta, a lawyer for several of the accusers, told CNN, Le Scouarnec "had no sympathy, no emotion, no feelings for the little man, whom he literally viewed as a sexual object."

Other lawyers also confirm that he is a very cold man, without any sympathy. Le Scouarnec's status as a middle-class surgeon probably helped him to avoid suspicion for so long. His colleagues, however, were suspicious of the gastroenterologist surgeon. Psychiatrist Thierry Bonvalot even confronted Le Scouarnec and pressured him to resign.

The evidence at the centre of the latest case will be Le Scouarnec's own diaries, which describe real events in which children were abused. His lawyer argues that they describe fantasies he never acted on.

They are so comprehensive that a journal discovered during the 2020 trial, which often noted the time and location of the rapes, the identity of the victims and even their address, helped investigators identify a staggering number of alleged rapes.

The defendant himself admitted that he began keeping a journal in 1990 and filled it out regularly until 2016, a year before his retirement, filling out between 40 and 100 pages of entries per year.

The vile entries also revealed that abuse occurred during medical examinations. In numerous diary entries included in the court documents, Le Scouarnec admits to being a pedophile.