One accused, 299 victims: French surgeon on trial for sex assaults – World


A former surgeon goes on trial later this month charged with raping or sexually assaulting almost 300 former patients, most of them children and many of them unconscious at the time, over a quarter of a century across western France.

The sheer scale and horror of the allegations against Joel Le Scouarnec, 74, means his four-month trial, due to start on February 24, is likely to have an immense impact at home and abroad.

And it will have added resonance coming two months after Frenchman Dominique Pelicot was convicted of enlisting dozens of strangers to rape his heavily sedated then-wife Gisele Pelicot, a case that made her a feminist hero worldwide.

In this case, Le Scouarnec is the sole defendant accused of crimes against hundreds of victims.

The trial in the city of Vannes in Brittany will be held in public but seven days of testimony from victims who were targeted while minors will be behind closed doors.

“Le Scouarnec has generally acknowledged his involvement in many of the events in question” as well as his “concealment strategies”, said regional prosecutor Stephane Kellenberger.

The average age of the victims is 11 but the former surgeon is also accused of raping a one-year-old and sexually assaulting a 70-year-old.

20 years in prison — French law does not allow sentences to be added together even when there are multiple victims.

The former doctor is already in prison after being sentenced in December 2020 to 15 years for raping and sexually assaulting four children, including two of his nieces.

Many victims were traumatised when they learnt of the events, sometimes decades later. Not all of them will take part in the trial but many say they expect the proceedings to provide explanations.

The authorities began investigating Le Scouarnec in 2017 after a six-year-old girl who lived in the same neighbourhood in the southwestern town of Jonzac alleged he had raped her.

The initial inquiry uncovered the assaults on his nieces and a four-year-old patient all committed in the 1990s and he was handed 15 years in prison for these crimes in December 2020.

When investigators searched Le Scouarnec’s house in Jonzac, where he lived as a recluse, they found dozens of dolls that he used as sex toys along with 300,000 pornographic images.

In another parallel with the trial of Dominique Pelicot — who filmed the male visitors to the family home — Le Scouarnec carefully wrote down the names of his victims, some of whom he abused on the operating table.

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