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France may be turning less into a city of romance and more into one racked with some of the world’s most shocking sex abuse scandals.
Last year, there was what a lot of people were calling the trial of the century, involving the brave Gisele Pélicot who learned years into her marriage that her husband Dominique had encouraged over 50 men to rape her while unconscious.
Now, a former French surgeon stands accused of abusing hundreds of young patients, often while they were under anaesthetic.
The BBC reported that Joel Le Scouarnec is set to go on trial this month in the largest child abuse trial in French history. The sick 73-year-old man is accused of assaulting or raping 299 children – the majority of whom are former patients of his – between 1989 and 2014, mostly in Brittany.
The trial in Vannes, north-west France, follows a painstaking police investigation lasting several years. Once a respected small-town surgeon, Le Scouarnec has been in jail since 2017, when he was arrested on suspicion of raping his nieces, now in their 30s, as well as a six-year-old girl and a young patient. In 2020 he was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment.
After his arrest, police searched his home and found child-sized sex dolls, more than 300,000 child abuse images, and thousands of pages of meticulously compiled diaries in which Le Scouarnec is alleged to have logged assaults he carried out on his young patients over 25 years.
He denied assaulting or raping children, arguing that his diaries merely detailed his “fantasies” but, more than once, he had also written “I am a paedophile”.
Le Scouarnec is facing more than 100 rape charges and more than 150 charges of sexual assault.

The case raises deeply unsettling questions about whether Le Scouarnec was shielded by his colleagues and the hospital management that employed him, despite an FBI warning to French authorities about his visits to child abuse websites—a warning that resulted in nothing more than a suspended sentence.
It seems an astonishing number of chances to sever his access to children were either squandered or willfully ignored.
Even more disturbing are claims that members of his own family were aware of his predatory behaviour but chose silence over action.
“It was the family’s omertà which meant his abuse was allowed to continue for decades,” one lawyer involved in the case told the BBC.
His ex-wife has denied knowing what her husband – and father of their three children – allegedly did until he was arrested.
Some of his former patients, now adults, have come forward with haunting memories of the surgeon’s hands violating their trust under the guise of medical examinations—sometimes even in the presence of their parents or other doctors.
But for many of his alleged victims, the truth lay buried beneath the fog of anaesthesia. They had no memory of the assaults and were blindsided when police reached out, revealing that their names—alongside graphic descriptions of abuse—were allegedly recorded in Le Scouarnec’s perverse diaries. Shock and disbelief collided as they were forced to confront what they never knew had been stolen from them.
Le Scouarnec felt “all-powerful” and liked the feeling of “flirting with danger” through “calculated transgressions,” French daily Le Monde quoted the court order against the former surgeon as saying.
For some alleged victims, the harrowing revelations unlocked decades of unexplained trauma that had shadowed their lives.
Lawyer Francesca Satta, who represents several alleged victims, told the BBC that among her clients are “the families of two men who did remember, and who ended up taking their own lives.” Their anguish, it seems, became an unbearable burden.
While some victims had blurry recollections of something happening to them but no words to describe it, most of the alleged victims were people who had no memories of being raped or assaulted, and who were living ordinary lives before police contacted them.
One woman told French media that when police showed her an entry under her name in Le Scouarnec’s diary, memories instantly flooded in. “I had flashbacks of someone coming into my hospital room, lifting the bedsheets, saying he would check if everything had gone well,” she said. “He raped me.”
Another woman called Marie, now a married mother in her mid-thirties, said the police read out what he had written about her, which she couldn’t read herself because “Can you imagine reading hardcore pornography and knowing that it is about you, as a child?”
Margaux Castex, a lawyer for one of the alleged victims, told the BBC her client is “traumatised that he ever gave his trust to a medical professional, and that’s been hard to shake”.
Le Scouarnec was a respected small-town medical practitioner for many years, which may have afforded him a significant degree of protection in the workplace.
In the early 2000s, an FBI alert warned French authorities that Le Scouarnec had been accessing child abuse websites. Yet this grave alarm led to nothing more than a four-month suspended sentence, with no requirement for medical or psychological treatment—a consequence as hollow as it was inconsequential.
Prosecutors never informed medical authorities of the charges, and Le Scouarnec was allowed to continue practising as a surgeon, often operating on children and overseeing their aftercare.
Even when a colleague, already suspicious of his behaviour, read about the charges in the local press in 2006 and urged the regional medical association to act, justice faltered.
In a damning decision, all but one doctor—who abstained—voted that Le Scouarnec had not violated the medical code of ethics, which demands doctors be “trustworthy and act with integrity and devotion to duty.”
No sanctions were imposed. The silence was deafening, the betrayal profound.
The trial starts on 24 February and is due to last until June.
Many lawyers view the trial as a long-overdue reckoning—a chance to confront the institutional failures that allowed Le Scouarnec to continue his predatory actions unchecked. It is also a crucial moment for the victims, many of whom have carried the weight of unspoken trauma for years.
Here, at last, they may find a space to reclaim their voices, to speak the truths that were silenced for far too long, and to demand accountability from the systems that failed to protect them.
[Source: BBC]