A former surgeon goes on trial later this month charged with raping or sexually assaulting almost 300 former patients, most of them children and many of them unconscious at the time, over a quarter of a century across western France.
The sheer scale and horror of the allegations against Joel Le Scouarnec, 74, means his four-month trial, due to start on February 24, is likely to have an immense impact at home and abroad.
In this case, Le Scouarnec is the sole defendant accused of crimes against hundreds of victims.
The trial in the city of Vannes in Brittany will be held in public but seven days of testimony from victims who were targeted while minors will be behind closed doors.
The average age of the victims is 11 but the former surgeon is also accused of raping a one-year-old and sexually assaulting a 70-year-old.
He allegedly committed sexual violence between 1989 and 2014 when he worked at a dozen medical institutions in western France.
Le Scouarnec is being tried for 111 rapes and 189 sexual assaults, aggravated by the fact that he abused his position as a doctor and mostly targeted children.
In total, 256 victims out of the 299 were younger than 15.
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.
The former doctor is already in prison after being sentenced in December 2020 to 15 years for raping and sexually assaulting four children, including two of his nieces.
The authorities began investigating Le Scouarnec in 2017 after a six-year-old girl who lived in the same neighborhood in the southwestern town of Jonzac alleged he had raped her.
The initial inquiry uncovered the assaults on his nieces and a four-year-old patient all committed in the 1990s and he was handed 15 years in prison for these crimes in December 2020.
When investigators searched Le Scouarnec’s house in Jonzac, where he lived as a recluse, they found dozens of dolls that he used as sex toys along with 300,000 pornographic images.
A separate investigation has been opened by regional prosecutors for “failure to prevent a crime or offense against the integrity of persons”, though it is not yet targeting any individual or institution.
