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STV News
28-05-2025
- STV News
'A systematic problem': Victims of French paedophile surgeon demand answers
The final verdict in the trial of former surgeon Joel Le Scouarnec, who has admitted raping and sexually assaulting hundreds of child patients, is expected on Wednesday. His victims want to know why he wasn't stopped sooner, as ITV News Reporter Sam Holder explains Twenty years ago, Joël Le Scouarnec received a four-month suspended prison sentence for possessing child pornography. Despite his conviction, the surgeon was allowed to continue treating children for more than a decade without any safeguarding measures put in place. That conviction in 2005 should have been seen as a warning, but multiple French hospitals and medical centres continued to allow the convicted paedophile to have unrestricted access to children, including those under anaesthetic. Now, after decades of abusing children, the trial of Le Scouarnec in northern France is nearing its end. The 74-year-old has admitted to sexually assaulting 299 people, the vast majority of whom were children, during a 25 year period. His victims expected this trial to be a watershed moment in France. They expected it to dominate the headlines and lead to a national – even international reckoning – much like the recent case of Gisèle Pelicot, who was drugged and raped by her husband and dozens of other men. But it has hardly had any impact at all. 'I'm not angry because rage doesn't really help but I'm disappointed,' says Manon Lemoine, who has become a leader amongst the victims. For years she had recurring nightmares following a hospital stay, but it was only when police knocked on her door in 2019 that she understood she had been sexually abused by Le Scouarnec. 'I'm disappointed with the media and with the politicians, who haven't given a political response to this trial', she told ITV News. Manon Lemoine has become a leader among Le Scouranec's victims / Credit: ITV News Manon and other victims wanted a special government commission – featuring the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Justice – to be set up in order to establish how Le Scouarnec was able to carry out assaults for so long and to work out why nobody stopped him. They also want psychological and financial support offered to the victims, who were essentially left to fend for themselves after police turned up at their doors to inform them they had been assaulted as children. Gabriel Trouvé, who was attacked when he went into hospital for hernia surgery as a five year-old, believes that the hospitals which employed Le Scouarnec bear responsibility, as does the justice system for not ensuring children were protected after his conviction. 'It's a systemic problem,' he told me. 'It's a cultural problem too.' Protestors outside the court in Vannes where Le Scouarnec is on trial / Credit: AP Le Scouarnec seems to have been able to get jobs in hospitals and medical centres across hundreds of miles of northern France, in part, due to a shortage of surgeons in rural areas. Hospitals, like the one he worked at in Jonzac, appeared grateful to have anyone filling the much-needed role and turned a blind eye to his criminal record. At another hospital, a psychiatrist was tipped off about Le Scouarnec's conviction and raised the alarm to hospital bosses, warning that he posed a threat to young patients, but they failed to take any meaningful action. 'What parent would ever imagine their child being abused when they go in for a surgical procedure,' said Regine, whose daughter was assaulted. '[When I found out] the first thing I said to my daughter was sorry. Sorry for putting you into the hands of this predator. Sorry for trusting the doctors'. She believes there has been an omèrta – a term for the code of silence used by the mafia – within medical institutions in France, in response to Le Scouarnec's abuse, which is preventing lessons from being learnt and enables abusers. Le Scouarnec kept detailed notes of all the assaults he carried out, which is how police identified many of the victims. This courtroom sketch by Valentin Pasquier shows Joel Le Scouarnec, now 74, in the dock during his trail / Credit: AP/Courtroom Sketch The notes, which form the backbone of the trial, were recovered during the investigation into a separate child sexual abuse case, for which he was convicted of assaulting four children. Police found the files hidden under a mattress, along with hard disks containing 300,000 files of child abuse images. Despite the number of victims in this case, the maximum sentence he can receive is 20 years in prison. For many of those he assaulted, even more important than the sentence, is establishing how he was able to abuse for so long, at so many different hospitals and clinics, without ever being stopped. Get all the latest news from around the country Follow STV News Scan the QR code on your mobile device for all the latest news from around the country
BBC News
24-05-2025
- Politics
- BBC News
Victims in French Le Scouarnec child abuse trial shocked at public indifference
It was supposed to be a defining, catalytic moment for French but unmissable. seaside town of Vannes, in southern Brittany, had carefully prepared a special venue and a separate overflow amphitheatre for the occasion. Hundreds of journalists were accredited for a process that would, surely, dominate headlines in France throughout its three-month duration and force a queasy public to confront a crime too often shunted to the Some of the details of this story are disturbingComparisons were quickly made with - and expectations tied to - last year's Pelicot mass rape trial in southern France and the massive global attention it the trial of France's most prolific known paedophile, Joel Le Scouarnec - a retired surgeon who has admitted in court to raping or sexually assaulting 299 people, almost all of them children - is coming to an end this Wednesday amid widespread frustration."I'm exhausted. I'm angry. Right now, I don't have much hope. Society seems totally indifferent. It's frightening to think [the rapes] could happen again," one of Le Scouarnec's victims, Manon Lemoine, 36, told the BBC. Ms Lemoine and some 50 other victims, stung by an apparent lack of public interest in the trial, have formed their own campaign group to pressure the French authorities, accusing the government of ignoring a "landmark" case which exposed a "true laboratory of institutional failures".The group has questioned why a parliamentary commission has not been set up, as in other high-profile abuse cases, and spoken of being made to feel "invisible", as if "the sheer number of victims prevented us from being recognised."Some of the victims, most of whom had initially chosen to testify anonymously, have now decided to reveal their identities in public – even posing for photos on the courthouse steps – in the hope of jolting France into paying more attention and, perhaps, learning lessons about a culture of deference that helped a prestigious surgeon to rape with impunity for decades. The crimes for which Le Scouarnec is on trial all occurred between 1998 and 2014."It's not normal that I should have to show my face. [But] I hope that what we're doing now will change things. That's why we decided to rise up, to make our voices heard," said Ms what has gone wrong?Were the horrors too extreme, the subject matter too unremittingly grim or simply too uncomfortable to contemplate? Why, when the whole world knows the name of Dominique and Gisèle Pelicot, has a trial with significantly more victims - child victims abused under the noses of the French medical establishment - passed by with what feels like little more than a collective shudder? Why does the world not know the name Joel Le Scouarnec?"The Le Scouarnec case is not mobilising a lot of people. Perhaps because of the number of victims. We hear the disappointment, the lack of wide mobilisation, which is a pity," said Maëlle Nori, from feminist NGO Nous Toutes (All of Us). Some observers have reflected on the absence in this case of a single, totemic figure like Gisèle Pelicot, whose public courage caught the public imagination and enabled people to find some light in an otherwise bleak have reached more devastating conclusions."The issue is that this trial is about sexual abuse of children. There's a virtual omertà on this topic globally, but particularly in France. "We simply don't want to acknowledge it," Myriam Guedj-Benayoun, a lawyer representing several of Le Scouarnec's victims, told her closing arguments to the court, Ms Guedj-Benayoun condemned what she called France's "systemic, organised silence" regarding child abuse. She spoke of a patriarchal society in which men in respected positions like medicine remained almost beyond reproach and pointed to "the silence of those who knew, those who looked the other way, and those who could have – should have – raised the alarm". The depravity exposed during the trial has been astonishing – too much for many to court in Vannes has heard in excruciating detail how Le Scouarnec, 74, wallowed in his paedophilia, carefully detailing each child rape in a succession of black notebooks, often preying on his vulnerable young patients while they were under anaesthetic or recovering from surgery. The court has also been told of the retired surgeon's growing isolation, and of what his own lawyer described as "your descent into hell", in the final decade before he was caught, in 2017, after abusing a neighbour's six-year-old the end, alone in a filthy house, drinking heavily and ostracised by many of his relatives, Le Scouarnec was spending much of his time watching violent images of child rape online, and obsessing over a collection of lifelike child-sized dolls."I was emotionally attached to them... They did what I wanted," Le Scouarnec told the court in his quiet monotone. A few blocks from the courthouse, in an adapted civic hall, journalists have watched the proceedings unfold on a television screen. In recent days, the seats have begun to fill up and coverage of the trial has increased as it moves towards a commentators have noted how the Le Scouarnec trial, like the Pelicot case, has exposed the deep institutional failings which enabled the surgeon to continue his rapes long after they could have been detected and Pelicot had been caught "upskirting" in a supermarket in 2010 and his DNA quickly linked to an attempted rape in 1999 – a fact that, astonishingly, wasn't followed up for a whole Le Scouarnec's trial a succession of medical officials have explained – some ashamedly, others self-servingly – how an overstretched rural healthcare system chose, for years, to ignore the fact that the surgeon had been reported by America's FBI in 2004 after using a credit card to pay to download videos of child rapes on his computer."I was advised not to talk about such and such a person," said one doctor who'd tried to sound the alarm."There is a shortage of surgeons, and those who show up are welcomed like the messiah," explained a hospital director."I messed up, I admit it, like the whole hierarchy," a different administrator finally conceded. Another connection between the Pelicot and Le Scouarnec cases is what they've both revealed about our understanding – or lack of understanding – of warning or support, Gisèle Pelicot had been abruptly confronted by police with the video evidence of her own drugging and rapes. Later, during the trial, some defence lawyers and other commentators sought to minimise her suffering by pointing to the fact that she'd been unconscious during the rapes – as if trauma only exists, like a wound, when its scar is visible to the naked the Le Scouarnec case, French police appear to have gone about searching for the paedophile's many victims in a similarly brusque manner, summoning people for an unexplained interview and then informing them, out of the blue, that they'd been listed in the surgeon's reactions of Le Scouarnec's many victims have varied widely. Some have simply chosen not to engage with the trial, or with a childhood experience of which they have no others, news of the abuse has affected them profoundly."You've entered my head, it's destroying me. I've become a different person – one I don't recognise," said a victim, addressing Le Scouarnec in court."I have no memories and I'm already damaged," said another."It turned me upside down," a policeman admitted. And then there is a different group of people who – not unlike Gisèle Pelicot – have found that knowledge of their abuse has been revelatory, enabling them to make sense of things they had not previously understood about themselves or their have connected their childhood abuse to a general sense of unhappiness, or poor behaviour, or failure in life. For others, the links have been much more specific, helping to explain a litany of mysterious symptoms and behaviours, from a fear of intimacy to repeated genital infections and eating disorders."With my boyfriend, every time we have sex, I vomit," one woman revealed in court. "I had so many after-effects from my operation. But no-one could explain why I had this irrational fear of hospitals," said another victim, Amé have described the trial itself as being like a group therapy session, with victims bonding over shared traumas which they'd previously believed they were suffering alone."This trial is like a clinical laboratory involving 300 victims. I sincerely hope it will change France. In any case it will change the victims' perception of trauma and traumatic memory," said the lawyer, Ms her concerns about the lack of public interest, Manon Lemoine said the trial had helped the victims "to rebuild ourselves, to turn a page. We lay out our pain and our experiences and we leave it behind [in the courtroom]. So, for me, really, it was liberating."Having confessed to his crimes, Le Scouarnec will inevitably receive a guilty verdict and will almost certainly remain in prison for the rest of his life. Two of his victims took their own lives some years before the trial - a fact which he acknowledged in court with the same penitent but formulaic apology that he's offered to everyone some activists remain hopeful that the case will prove to be a turning point in French society."Compared to the Pelicot trial... we can see we don't talk very much about the Le Scouarnec case. We need to unite. We have to do this, otherwise nothing will happen, and the Le Scouarnec trial will have served no purpose. I was also a victim as a child. We're obliged to react and to organise ourselves," said Arnaud Gallais, a child rights campaigner and founder of the Mouv'Enfants NGO.A more wary assessment came from the lawyer, Ms Guedj-Benayoun."Now, there is a very important standoff between those who want to denounce child sexual violence and those who want to cover it up, and this standoff is taking place today in this trial. Who will win?" she you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this story, information and support can be found at the BBC's Action Line.
