A French former surgeon has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for the sexual abuse of hundreds of patients, mostly under the age of 15, after the biggest child abuse trial in France’s history – a ruling that adds to pressure on the government to address failings in the health and justice system.
Joël Le Scouarnec, 74, whose guilty verdict confirmed him as one of the most prolific convicted sexual predators in France, worked as a digestive surgeon in public and private hospitals across Brittany and the west of France, often operating on children with appendicitis.
During the harrowing three-month trial in Vannes, Brittany, he stood accused of 111 rapes and 189 sexual assaults between 1989 and 2014 at a dozen hospitals. Many of the children he assaulted were under anaesthetic or waking up after operations. Some were assaulted in their hospital beds. The average age of the victims was 11.
The French health minister, Yannick Neuder, said he would work with the justice minister to ensure that “never again will we find ourselves in a situation where patients and vulnerable children” were exposed to predators.
Le Scouarnec eventually admitted all the assaults in court, saying in his final statement: “I am not asking the court for leniency.” During the trial, he said: “I was a surgeon who benefited from my status to attack children, I don’t deny that.” Psychological assessments found that he remained extremely dangerous.
Le Scouarnec’s lawyer, Maxime Tessier, said the French medical world and politicians must learn lessons from “the major dysfunction of our health system”, which had not stopped Le Scouarnec’s decades of abuse.
Le Scouarnec was flagged to the French authorities by the FBI in 2004 for viewing child abuse imagery on the dark web. In 2005 he was convicted in a French court of owning child abuse imagery and given a four-year suspended prison sentence, but the court did not rule that the surgeon should never work with children.
He continued to gain prestigious jobs in hospitals across France until his retirement in 2017, systematically abusing children who had undergone surgery.
Victims’ groups and child protection campaigners said the trial had raised the issue of serious failings by the state and officials. They said there should be a full government assessment of how the surgeon had been able to continue working and abusing for so long.
The 20-year prison sentence is the maximum Le Scouarnec could have received for aggravated rape. In France, sentences are not added together, unlike in the US, where Le Scouarnec would have been jailed for 2,000 years, according to the state prosecutor, Stéphane Kellenberger.
Victims expressed anger at his sentence, with cries of “shame on the justice system” as they watched the proceedings.
Le Scouarnec will not be able to ask for parole until two-thirds of his sentence is served. The court rejected a rare demand from prosecutors that he should be held in a centre for treatment and supervision even after any release. The court cited his age and his “desire to make amends”.
One victim, Amélie Lévêque, said she felt “humiliated by this verdict”.
Le Scouarnec is already in prison after being sentenced in December 2020 to 15 years for raping and sexually assaulting four children. Kellenberger said there was likely to be a further trial after the prosecutor’s office opened an investigation to find more victims whose abuse was not part of the latest case.
“You were the devil and sometimes the devil is dressed in a white coat,” Kellenberger told Le Scouarnec.
Le Scouarnec, whose 2005 conviction was not automatically flagged to hospitals where he worked, was employed at a series of regional hospitals that depended on having surgeons of his expertise in order to stay open.
In one instance, Le Scouarnec had told Michèle Cals, the then director of the Jonzac hospital in western France, about his 2005 conviction, saying he had viewed child abuse imagery only because he had been upset about separating from his wife. Cals received no word from her medical hierarchy not to hire him, so she appointed him in 2008. “We were in need of surgeons,” Cals told the court.
Cals said Le Scouarnec’s 2005 sentencing had not prohibited him from being around minors. She told the court she “didn’t dig deep enough” and recognised there had been a “dysfunction” on her part and that of her superiors.
Thierry Bonvalot, a hospital psychiatrist who tried to raise the alarm about Le Scouarnec’s 2005 conviction at one hospital where the surgeon later worked, said there had been a medical “fiasco”.
Joël Belloc, the head of the Order of Physicians in Charente-Maritime, where Le Scouarnec finished his career, was asked if he could have done things differently. He said: “With hindsight, it’s obvious we could have.” He added that “perceptions were different” at the time.
Victims complained of the “silence of the political world”, saying the government must address lessons from the case to prevent future abuse.
They said: “We are appalled to see that this trial of the century is not a watershed event in the eyes of the government and, more broadly, the general public.”
Manon Lemoine, now 36, whom Le Scouarnec admitted to raping when she was 11, said: “They’re trying to make him out to be a monster but this monster is the society that created him and allowed him to continue.”
