French surgeon on trial for abusing 300 patients

A former French surgeon was to go on trial Monday charged with raping or sexually assaulting almost 300 patients, most of them children and some of them unconscious at the time.

Joel Le Scouarnec, 74, is already in jail after being found guilty in 2020 of abusing four children, including two of his nieces.

In the latest trial, he faces allegations that he assaulted or raped 299 patients, many while waking up from anaesthetic or during post-op checkups, at a dozen hospitals between 1989 and 2014.

Some 256 of the victims were under 15, with the youngest aged one and the oldest 70.

It was not known whether Le Scouarnec would admit the charges at the trial in the western city of Vannes that is likely to be a new shock for France.

The proceedings come just two months after Dominique Pelicot was convicted of enlisting dozens of strangers to rape his heavily sedated wife Gisele Pelicot, who has since divorced him and become a feminist hero for refusing to be ashamed.

Like Pelicot, Le Scouarnec documented his crimes, noting his victims' names, ages and addresses and the nature of the abuse.

In his notes, the doctor described himself as a "major pervert" and a "paedophile."

"And I am very happy about it," he recorded.

The trial will be held in public, but seven days of testimony from victims who were targeted while minors will be held behind closed doors.

If convicted, Le Scouarnec faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. French law does not allow sentences to be added together even when there are multiple victims.

"This is undoubtedly the biggest case of child sex crime in France, or at least the case involving the most victims sexually assaulted or raped by a single man," French daily Le Figaro cited a person familiar with the matter as saying.

Victims and child rights advocates say the case highlights systemic shortcomings that allowed Le Scouarnec to repeatedly commit sexual crimes.

The surgeon practised for decades until his retirement despite a 2005 sentence for owning sexually abusive images of children and colleagues raising their concerns.

Le Scouarnec was practising in the western town of Lorient in Brittany in 2004 when the US FBI alerted French authorities that he was among hundreds in France who had been consulting sex abuse images of children online.

A court in nearby Vannes handed him a suspended four-month jail sentence the following year.

But by that time the doctor had already moved on to work in another Brittany town, Quimperle, where he was promoted despite the management being made aware of his conviction.

He then moved to southwestern France, where he worked until his retirement in 2017.

Investigators uncovered his alleged crimes after he retired in 2017, when a six-year-old girl accused him of abuse and police found accounts of assaults in his diaries.

Frederic Benoist, a lawyer for French advocacy group La Voix de l'Enfant (The Child's Voice), said the fact Le Scouarnec was never barred from practising was the result of "collective failure".

A separate investigation has been opened by regional prosecutors over these failures, though it is not yet targeting any individual or institution.

More than 260 journalists from over 60 media outlets have been accredited to cover the trial. The verdict is expected in early June.