"You were the devil and he sometimes is dressed in a white coat.”
That is what prosecutor Stephane Kellenberger told Joel Le Scouarnec at the end of France’s largest-ever child abuse trial, a horrific case that rocked a country already reeling from other high-profile sex crimes.
The trial of the former surgeon dubbed “France's worst-ever paedophile” has been shocking for the sheer scale alone. Le Scouarnec abused 299 victims over 25 years, with an average age of just 11.
Now victims, their families and lawmakers in the country are grappling with a legal system that only allowed the abuser to be sentenced to a maximum of 20 years in prison.
But at least two of those he abused were not able to see justice served, having taken their own lives some time before the trial.
“Unfortunately today, the verdict isn’t protecting our kids and grandkids in France,” the mother of one of the victims who died said outside court following Wednesday’s sentencing.
Le Scouarnec has now been convicted of raping or sexually assaulting 158 boys and 141 girls from 1989 to 2014, triggering questions over how he was able to get away with such crimes for so long.
The French prosecutor has opened a separate probe into the possible criminal liability of other public bodies or individuals who could have prevented the abuse.
"There is no way that somebody can rape and assault children for all those years without the knowledge of people around," said Homayra Sellier, head of Innocence in Danger, which is supporting 40 alleged victims and is a plaintiff in the case.
Presiding Judge Aude Buresi also called this out while reading out Le Scouarec’s sentence.
"Your acts were a blind spot in the medical world, to the extent that your colleagues, the medical authorities, were incapable of stopping your actions," she said.
Echoes of the Dominique Pelicot trial
Le Scouarnec attacked some of his victims when they were unconscious, in a chilling echo of Gisèle Pelicot’s case heard in France just months before.
Ms Pelicot’s now-ex-husband, Dominique Pelicot, and 50 other men were convicted of raping or sexually assaulting her in December following a three-month trial in Avignon that the world watched in horror.
The case triggered a conversation around sexual violence across the world and forced France to examine the prevalence of rape culture in its society – but less than two months later, the country’s worst child abuse trial opened, raising more concerns as damning details emerged.
Le Scouarnec had already been convicted of sex crimes on two previous occasions. He was handed a suspended four-month jail sentence for possessing child pornography in 2005, but managed to secure a job as a surgeon at a public hospital in Quimperle, western France, the following year.
He continued to work in public hospitals until his re-arrest in 2017 on suspicion of raping his 6-year-old neighbour. Police discovered diaries that appeared to detail his sexual assaults on scores of patients in hospitals across the region.
Notebooks and ‘my paedophile letters’ detailed years of graphic abuse
In 2020, Le Scouarnec was convicted of the rape and sexual assault of his child neighbour, as well as two of his nieces and a four-year-old patient, and sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Further investigations into Le Scouarnec’s notebooks, which detailed the abuse in graphic language, led prosecutors to later charge the former surgeon with the aggravated rape and sexual assault of 299 people. One such document was titled “my paedophile letters”, The Guardian reports.
Many of Le Scouarnec’s victims only learned they had been assaulted when they were contacted by police.
One victim had her appendix removed by the surgeon when she was 10. More than 20 years later in 2019, police knocked on her door to tell her she had been raped.
Now 38 years-old, she told The Guardian she was disgusted to read Le Scouarnec’s notes about her. “There was my family name, my first name, age, the address of my parents, everything he did and how he felt,” she said. “It was disgusting. The word ‘raped’ was hard enough, but here were these obscene phrases of what happened.”
Le Scouarnec told the court during the trial that he did not see his victims as people.
"They were the destination of my fantasies. As the trial went on, I began to see them as individuals, with emotions, anger, suffering and distress,” he said.
A guilty plea and hundreds of victims, but potential freedom in years
The trial started on 24 February and was due to last four months but Le Scouarnec pleaded guilty partway through proceedings.
Despite the scale of his crimes, Le Scouarnec could only be sentenced to a maximum of 20 years, which would run concurrently to his previous sentence.
Le Scouarnec's lawyer Maxime Hessier said his client did not intend to appeal, and hoped to make amends with the victims. "Today, justice has been served," Hessier said.
In France, it does not matter if a criminal is convicted of one charge or hundreds, they only face the maximum penalty for one count of the most serious offence, which in Le Scouarnec’s case is aggravated rape.
Following the sentencing, French lawyer Myriam Guedj Benayoun said it was unjust that Le Scourarnec faced the same sentence as someone who is convicted of raping one person.
“He will definitely act again if he is released, and as it stands now, given the current sentencing, the truth of it is that in 2030 Mr Le Scouarnec could be released,” she said. A new trial is expected in the coming years, after new allegations emerged in the most recent trial.
One woman who was 10 when she was abused by Le Scouarnec said France needed to change its laws so offenders like him could never walk free again.
"He only got 20 years," she told Reuters after the ruling. "In the United States, he would have got thousands of years. It's unbearable that someone like that can get out."
As Marie Grimaud, a lawyer representing some of Le Scouarnec’s alleged victims, told reporters before the hearing began on the first day of the trial: “My clients don’t expect anything from Le Scouarnec. In France, whether you rape one child or 300, it’s the same sentence.”
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