A French surgeon is on trial accused of raping or abusing 299 people, mostly child patients

A former surgeon went on trial in France on Monday for the alleged rape or sexual abuse of 299 victims, most of them children who were his patients, in what investigators and his own notebooks describe as a pattern of violence spanning over three decades.

“I committed odious acts,” Joël Le Scouarnec told the court in Vannes. “They were only children.”

The 74-year-old faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted, on top of 15 years he has been serving after being found guilty in 2020 of rape and sexual assault of children.

Le Scouarnec told the court he acknowledges committing rapes and sexual assaults. But he said he regards himself as not guilty of those crimes in some of the cases.

“I am aware that these injuries are irreparable,” he said. “I cannot go back in time but I owe it to all of these people and their loved ones to take responsibility for my actions.”

Some survivors have no memory of the assaults, being unconscious at the time. One man now in his thirties testified he was assaulted during a consultation in 1995, when he was a young boy. “I remember certain things in the recovery room. I was in total panic. I called my dad,” he told the court.

Trial builds on Gisèle Pélicot’s momentum

Le Scouarnec’s trial comes as activists are pushing to dismantle taboos that have long surrounded sexual abuse in France. The most prominent case was that of Gisèle Pélicot, who was drugged and raped by her now ex-husband and dozens of other men who were convicted and sentenced in December to three to 20 years in prison.

Campaigners for the rights of women and children protested outside the courthouse before Le Scouarnec’s trial. Their placards read: “Impunity is over,” “We believe you” and “Silence = Violence.”

The Le Scouarnec case began in 2017, when a 6-year-old neighbor said the doctor had touched her over the fence separating their properties.

A search of his home uncovered more than 300,000 photos, 650 pedophilic, zoophilic and scatological video files, as well as notebooks where he described himself as a pedophile and detailed his actions, according to investigation documents.

In 2020, Le Scouarnec was convicted of rape and sexual assault of four children, including two nieces, and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

He has admitted to child abuse dating to 1985-1986, but some cases could not be prosecuted because the statute of limitations has expired.

Trial focuses on 25-year span

The four-month trial in Vannes will examine alleged rapes and other abuses committed between 1989 and 2014 against 158 men and 141 women who were aged 11 on average at the time.

The doctor sexually abused both boys and girls when they were alone in their hospital rooms, according to investigation documents.

“I didn’t really remember the operation. I remembered the post-operation, a surgeon who was quite mean,” one of the victims, Amélie Lévêque, recalled of her time in the hospital when she was 9 years old in 1991. “I cried a lot.”

Years later, she described feeling overwhelmed when she learned that her name appeared in Le Scouarnec’s notebooks.

“That was the beginning of the answers to a lifetime of questions, and then it was the beginning of the descent into hell,” she told public broadcaster France 3. “I felt like I had lost control of everything. I wasn’t crazy, but now I had to face the truth of what had happened.”

“I fell into a deep depression. … My family tried to help, but I felt completely alone.”

The Associated Press does not name people who say they were sexually assaulted unless they consent to being identified or decide to tell their stories publicly.

Le Scouarnec had been convicted in 2005 for possessing and importing child sexual abuse material and sentenced to four months of suspended prison time. Despite that conviction, he was appointed as a hospital practitioner the following year.

Some child protection groups joined the proceedings as civil parties, saying they hope to toughen the legal framework to prevent such abuse.

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Vaux-Montagny reported from Lyon, France. Associated Press writers Sylvie Corbet in Paris and John Leicester in Le Pecq, France, contributed to this report.