A former French surgeon, Joel Le Scouarnec, is set to stand trial on Monday for allegedly raping or sexually assaulting nearly 300 former patients, most of them children. The 74-year-old, who is already serving a prison sentence for previous child abuse convictions, faces one of France’s most extensive sexual abuse cases.
Le Scouarnec was convicted in 2020 of abusing four children, including two of his nieces. In this latest trial, which is expected to last four months, he is accused of assaulting or raping 299 patients at multiple hospitals between 1989 and 2014. Many of these assaults allegedly took place while patients were waking up from anesthesia or during post-operative checkups.
Among the victims, 256 were under the age of 15, with the youngest being just one year old and the oldest 70. The trial, held in Vannes in Brittany, will be public, though testimony from victims who were minors at the time of the alleged crimes will be heard behind closed doors over seven days.
If convicted, Le Scouarnec faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years, as French law does not permit sentences to be combined, even in cases involving multiple victims.
Decades of Abuse and Systemic Failures
Despite being sentenced in 2005 for possessing sexually abusive images of children, Le Scouarnec was allowed to continue practicing. The FBI had alerted French authorities in 2004 that he was among those in France accessing such material online. A court in Vannes handed him a suspended four-month jail sentence, but by then, he had already moved to another hospital in Quimperlé, where he was promoted despite management knowing about his conviction.
He continued working in different hospitals, eventually moving to southwestern France before retiring in 2017. His crimes were uncovered after a six-year-old girl accused him of rape, leading police to discover detailed accounts of abuse in his personal diaries.
Victims and child rights advocates argue that the case exposes systemic failures that allowed him to continue his abuse for decades. Frédéric Benoist, a lawyer for the child advocacy group La Voix de l’Enfant (The Child’s Voice), described the lack of action against Le Scouarnec as a “collective failure.”
A separate investigation has been launched into institutional failures that enabled him to keep practicing, though no individuals or institutions have yet been officially targeted.
