Translated with AI
The trial of doctor Joel Le Scouarnec, accused of raping nearly 300 children, has ended in France. The average age of the victims was 11. The court sentenced 74-year-old Le Scouarnec to 20 years in prison, the BBC reports.
Le Scouarnec was accused of raping 299 children, mostly his former patients, between 1989 and 2014, mostly in Brittany, often while they were under the influence of anaesthetics.
Le Scouarnec has been charged with more than 100 counts of rape and more than 150 counts of sexual assault.
He pleaded guilty to all charges.
According to the prosecution, a significant number of his alleged victims were under the influence of anaesthetics and had no memory of the incident. They were shocked when police contacted them and told them that their names – along with graphic descriptions of violence – appeared in Le Scouarnec's diaries.
The prosecution also alleged that Le Scouarnec's family knew of his proclivities but failed to stop him. "It was because of the omerta (mutual cover-up) within the family that his violence continued for decades," one of the lawyers involved in the case told the BBC.
"I am a pedophile" Le Scouarnec, a once respected small-town surgeon, has been in prison since 2017, after being arrested on suspicion of raping his nieces, now in their 30s, as well as a six-year-old girl and a young patient. He was sentenced in 2020 to 15 years in prison.
After his arrest, police raided his home and found child-sized sex dolls, more than 300,000 images of child abuse and thousands of pages of meticulously written diaries in which Le Scouarnec, according to prosecutors, documented details of the abuse he committed against his young female patients over 25 years.
During the trial, he denied assaulting or raping children, claiming his diaries simply detailed his "fantasies."
However, in some places he wrote in his diary: “I am a pedophile.”
In the early 2000s, the FBI reported to French authorities that Le Scouarnec had visited child abuse websites. However, he was ultimately given a four-month suspended sentence and was not referred for medical or psychological treatment.
Prosecutors did not pass this information on to medical authorities, and Le Scouarnec suffered no consequences, and he continued to work as a surgeon, often operating on children and providing subsequent treatment.
When a colleague, already suspicious of Le Scouarnec, read about the charges against him in the local press in 2006, he called on the regional medical association to take action.
All but one doctor, who abstained from voting, believed that Le Scouarnec had not violated the medical code of ethics, and no sanctions were imposed on him.
Le Scouarnec was eventually arrested when a six-year-old victim told her parents that he had attacked her. By then, he was living as a recluse in a large, abandoned house, surrounded by children's dolls.
