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Europe|In Mass Child Sex Abuse Case in France, Early Warnings Went Unheeded
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/05/world/europe/france-child-sex-abuse-trial-le-scouarnec.html
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Joël Le Scouarnec is charged with raping or sexually assaulting 299 people, mostly his young patients. His family’s testimony suggested a culture of silence around sexual abuse by him and others.
March 5, 2025Updated 11:38 a.m. ET
The alarms about Joël Le Scouarnec’s sexual desire for children had been ringing for years, well before he was charged with raping or sexually assaulting 299 people, most of them children under his care when he was a surgeon.
His wife’s sister said she expressed concerns to her sister after she thought she had witnessed him kissing her daughter’s bottom, according to court documents. His own sister confronted him directly after her youngest daughter told her “in children’s words” that he had touched her. And he had already been convicted in 2005 of possessing child sexual abuse imagery, and given a suspended sentence.
“Nothing, nothing, nothing,” Marie-France Lhermitte, now his former wife, said as the mass child sex abuse trial opened last week. She was responding to a question posed repeatedly about whether there were warning signs that she should have acted upon.
Mr. Le Scouarnec was a gastric surgeon who worked for more than three decades in multiple clinics and private hospitals in western and central France before he was arrested in 2017 for exposing himself to a 6-year-old neighbor. That arrest, and the police search of his home, led to the discovery of evidence — diaries and other writings — of much wider abuse over 25 years. In 2020, he was convicted of sexually assaulting or raping four little girls, including his sister’s two young daughters, and is serving time.
The latest trial — considered the country’s largest ever pedophilia case — is based mainly on those diaries and writings, which investigators used to identify the hundreds of listed victims.
Mr. Le Scouarnec, now 74, has admitted to the “vast majority” of the charges against him, his lawyer Maxime Tessier told the court in Vannes, where the trial is being held. The rape charges are mostly related to touching or penetrating children’s vaginas and anuses with his fingers. He has denied some of those charges on the grounds that those were part of medical procedures.
