Eleven years. It was the average age of the 299 children that today 73-year-old physician Joël Le Scouarnec subjected to rape and sexual abuse between 1989 and 2014, according to the indictment that is now taken up in court in northwestern France.
Some of the plaintiffs remember the abuses. Others do not remember at all what happened, partly because they were sedated when it happened. Several of them did not know what they were exposed to until they were told by police that they are mentioned in detailed notes in the doctor’s diaries.
A woman was ten years old when she got Joël Le Scouarnec as a doctor in Vannes, due to appendicitis. She says the memories came back after she found out by police that she is one of the victims.
– I was operated on in the afternoon. He raped me the next morning, she has told France 3.
Suspended sentence
Of the 299 children who must have been exposed by the doctor, just over half were boys, according to Brittany-Tidningen Le Télégramme. The majority were under 15 years old. Most were his patients.
The doctor, who according to French media has spent most of his time at work or alone at home, naked with a bottle of whiskey and dolls, has acknowledged some of the charges.
Already in 2004, Joël Le Scouarnec was arrested in his home after the FBI alerted the French intelligence service that he used his bank card on a Russian child pornography site. The following year, he was sentenced to a conditional prison sentence for four months for possession of child pornography, but was allowed to continue as a doctor.
Imprisoned since 2017
In 2017, a neighboring doctor reported to have assaulted her daughter, which led to him being arrested and has been imprisoned since then. In the home, more than 300,000 child pornographic images, videos and detailed diaries were found where he describes rape and abuse of children who have been his patients. Among other things, he has written several times “I am a pedophile”.
He himself claims that the diary notes are fantasies.
In December 2020, Le Scouarnec was sentenced to 15 years in prison for sexual abuse against four little girls. Two were relatives, the third a four -year -old patient and the fourth six -year -old neighbor girl.
In the new trial, which is expected to last for four months, Le Scouarnec can be sentenced to 20 years in prison.