Who is Joel Le Scouarnec, a paedophile surgeon who has been sentenced to 20 years in prison?

Time of India

28-05-2025

Image credits: X/@nexta_tv
Not all doctors are forms of god, some are the devil reincarnated when they use a profession as revered as theirs to prey on innocent victims just to pacify their psychotic urges. Joel Le Scouarnec, a 74-year-old former surgeon has been sentenced to 20 years in prison after he confessed to raping hundreds of his patients.
Who is Joel Le Scouarnec?
Joel Le Scouarnec, born on December 3, 1950, is a former French surgeon who is now a convicted child rapist and paedophile. He studied medicine at Nantes University, graduating in 1981 and then specialised in gastrointestinal surgery.
He married Marie-France Lhermitte, a healthcare assistant in 1974 with whom he had three sons. The couple began living apart in 2005 and got divorced in 2023.
However, Scouarnec is not the only abuser in his family.
One of his sons testified in his father's trial that his grandfather has raped and sexually abused him between the age of 5 and 10.
The former surgeon has a history of sexual abuse with him being convicted in 2005 of downloading images of child sexual abuse and in 2017 for exposing and molesting his neighbour's daughter. It was in this year that he was convicted of the rape and sexual assault of four children and sentenced to 15 years in prison.
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What's shocking is that two of these were his own nieces.
Why has Joel Le Scouarnec been jailed?
Image credits: X/@SnapMediaLive
After his arrest in 2017, Scouarnec's property was searched and officials found evidence of extensive criminal activity in his journals where he recorded the instances of rape and sexual assault. He sexually abused his patients, mostly children between 1989 and 2014 and thus, was sentenced to 20 years in prison. He had 299 victims out of which 158 were boys and 141 were girls.
He has been dubbed as France's most prolific paedophile, considering he abused all his victims when they were under anaesthesia or waking up after operations. Additionally, he kept diaries where he described the assaults in graphic detail.
Scouarnec was dressed in black in the court as he listened to Judge Aude Buresi deliver the verdict. "I can no longer look at myself the same way because I am a paedophile and a child rapist," Le Scouarnec said during his last statements to the court last week.
"Many things have been said. I don't necessarily remember everything now. It will no doubt come back to me when I'm in my cell, but what I've witnessed [in court] is the suffering for which I am responsible," he said. He added he neither wanted nor expected to be given any leniency.
How many years will Joel Le Scouarnec be imprisoned?
The sentence has a mandatory minimum term of two-thirds as he has already served seven years in prison, meaning he could be eligible for parole by 2030, a fact that has upset many of his victims.
"To think one day he could walk down the street, see people - that upsets me. We [the victims] no longer have a normal life while they're giving him back that life, and that disgusts me," said Amélie Lévêque one of Scouarnec's victims.
"I never saw tears running down his cheeks," said another victim named Manon Lemoine.
However, according to AP Scouarnec offered his apologies during the trial. 'I didn't see them as people. They were the destination of my fantasies. As the trial went on, I began to see them as individuals, with emotions, anger, suffering and distress,' he told the court.
'I don't show emotion, that's just how I am. That doesn't mean I don't feel it, but I don't express it,' he added.