A French court has handed down a 20-year prison sentence to a retired surgeon who admitted to sexually abusing hundreds of patients over more than two decades, in one of the France largest child sex abuse cases.
Joël Le Scouarnec, is already in prison after being sentenced in 2020 to 15 years for raping and sexually assaulting four children, including two of his nieces.
The 74-year old man was charged with 111 rapes and 189 sexual assaults and is set to emerge as one of the most prolific convicted sex predators in France’s history.
During a harrowing three-month trial in Vannes, Brittany, he admitted to sexually assaulting and raping 299 patients, 256 of them under 15, in hospitals across western France between 1989 and 2014, with many of the attacks happening while the victims were under anaesthesia or waking up after surgery.
The retired surgeon also said he considered himself “responsible” for the death of two of his victims, Mathis Vinet, who died after an overdose in 2021 in what his family says was suicide, and another man who was found dead in 2020.
“I am not asking the court for leniency. I was a surgeon who benefited from my status to attack children, I don’t deny that,” he said in his last statement on Wednesday.
While Le Scouarnec asked his victims for forgiveness during the trial, many of them questioned the sincerity of his apologies, which he repeated almost mechanically over the weeks of the trial, sometimes word for word.
“You are the worst mass paedophile who ever lived,” said one of the lawyers representing the victims, Thomas Delaby, describing him as the “atomic bomb of paedophilia”.
The victims “will never forgive you. Never”, Delaby told the convict.
“Who are you trying to convince that you’ve changed?” said another lawyer, Delphine Caro.
“Admitting everything is admitting nothing,” added a third lawyer, Giovanni Bertho-Briand.
Meanwhile, Le Scouarnec’s lawyer, Maxime Tessier, urged the French medical community and politicians to learn lessons from “the major dysfunction of the country’s health system,” which had failed to stop his client’s decades of abuse.
Following the ruling, victims’ groups and child protection campaigners gathered outside the court, saying the trial had exposed serious failings by the state and its institutions.
They called for a full government inquiry into how the surgeon was able to continue working and abusing patients for so many years.
