Trial of Surgeon who keeps diary of sexual abuse of over 300 children begins Monday

Joel Le Scouarnec, a surgeon, is accused of committing acts of such unimaginable horror against children in France.

His trial, one of the biggest sex abuse cases in French legal history, begins on Monday, Feb. 24, in Vannes, Brittany.

At the terraced property he called home for 11 years, the surgeon – then in his 60s – kept more than 30 years of meticulous confessional logs, in which he described, in graphic detail, the sexual abuse of at least 299 boys and girls.

Le Scouarnec has denied at least some of the assaults and rapes outlined there, claiming his writings were just “fantasies”.

Many victims are said to have been molested while still under anaesthetic after surgery at hospitals across France where Le Scouarnec worked. The average age of his alleged victims was 11. The youngest victim was four.

In the diary entries – in the form of both handwritten journals and computer files – Le Scouarnec regularly described himself as a “paedophile”, kept a graphic record of exactly how he had abused each child, including their name, the date on which the abuse occurred, and the location.

 

He indicated in his journal that some of the abuse happened “in the office”, “in my room”.

 

Some of the entries were even addressed to the victims, with phrases such as “Dear little one”.

Every year, on his birthday, he would record his age and write: “I am a paedophile and I am proud of it.”

The double life of the doctor only came to light when eight years ago he brazenly assaulted the six-year-old daughter of his next-door neighbours and they contacted police.

 

During the subsequent raid on his Jonzac home, officers found up to 70 life-size child dolls which the surgeon was using for his own sexual gratification hidden underneath the floorboards.

 

They also discovered videos of Le Scouarnec wearing wigs or dresses, playing with the dolls, which he wrote about lovingly in his journal, as well as the diaries.

When the hundreds named in his records were contacted by police, they were appalled to learn that Le Scouarnec could have been stopped in 2005, when he was convicted of possessing child pornography. It followed a sting organised by America’s FBI.

But investigators failed to discover his diaries, so he got off with a four-month suspended sentence, moved to a different part of France and landed another job as a surgeon.

 

Now aged 74, Le Scouarnec is languishing in jail, having been sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment in 2020 for the assault of his two nieces, a patient and his neighbour’s daughter.

 

New alleged victims have now been identified after the discovery of the doctor’s journals.

 

Le Scouarnec’s actions are said to have driven some patients to suicide, sparked drug and alcohol dependency in others and destroyed relationships.

The victims and their families want the authorities, who they say should have stopped him earlier, to answer for their shortcomings.

Le Scouarnec, one of three children, was born in a Paris suburb to a cabinet-maker father who moved into banking, and a mother who was a concierge before quitting to bring up the children.

He is said to have shown an interest in medicine at the age of ten, qualifying as a doctor in 1981. He later specialised in gynaecological and abdominal surgery.

While studying medicine, he met his wife, Marie-France, then a nursing assistant, and they had three sons. The family moved house regularly as Le Scouarnec took up posts in different hospitals from Brittany to Nantes and later to the south-west of France.

He began keeping his diary in the late 1980s and his alleged victims now have questions about how much his wife knew of his activities.

In one diary entry, from 1997, he wrote that “it has been nine months since she discovered that I am a paedophile”.

Le Scouarnec then writes that his wife’s discovery has prompted him to “start smoking again”. He adds that he had stopped cigarettes to concentrate “all my free time and money on my paedophile activities.”

In another entry, from around the same period, he writes that his wife “k!lled my little Breton girl”. Court documents suggest that this was her destroying one of his life-size dolls.

In 2004, Le Scouarnec’s diaries could have been found when an FBI operation identified men who had paid for extreme child pornography from a website.

The doctor was one of three arrested in France. He was handed a four-month suspended prison sentence but soon got a job as a surgeon in Quimperle.

Following his conviction, Marie-France moved out of the family home but was reportedly being paid thousands of pounds a month by her husband “for her silence.”

When a hospital colleague read about his conviction in the local press and raised concerns with the regional medical association, it was decided he had not violated the medical code of ethics and no sanctions were imposed.

In 2008, Le Scouarnec secured a full-time surgical post in Jonzac. The director of the hospital was reportedly aware of his conviction but hired him anyway because there had been “no physical assault”, according to documents obtained by Radio France.

In the sleepy town of Jonzac, Le Scouarnec lived alone, hoarding his dolls, compiling his horrifying diaries and continuing to act with impunity until 2017, when, naked in his garden, he reached over the fence and molested the six-year-old girl next door.

Due to his conviction for that attack and his long jail term, there is little chance of Le Scouarnec ever being released from jail.

At the court in Vannes on Monday, Feb. 24, 299 other victims will seek justice at a trial that will cost three million euros. The indictment is 745 pages long, showing the extent of the surgeon’s depravity.

Hundreds will deliver harrowing testimony of the abuse they claim to have suffered at the hands of the surgeon, once thought a pillar of his community.