France mass rape case: New charges expected as former doctor Joel Le Scouarnec admits assaulting granddaughter

Paris — There was shock in the courtroom in western France on Friday as former doctor Joel Le Scouarnec admitted without any solicitation that he had sexually abused his own granddaughter. Le Scouarnec, 74, had been on trial for about a week by Friday, accused of raping or sexually assaulting 299 children, but his granddaughter is not among the alleged victims in the case — all of whom were his patients at the time.

The former surgeon stood up and addressed the court just after his eldest son, whose name has not been used in the trial, gave evidence.

“This is possibly, almost certainly, the last time I will see my son, because I heard his anger and his distress,” Le Scouarnec told the court in the town of Vannes, Brittany. “I respect that anger, it is well-founded. Yes, I admit to having abused my granddaughter, his daughter.”

He then turned to his son and said, “forgive me.”

The trial was adjourned immediately after he made the statement. Later Friday evening, regional prosecutors confirmed that new charges would be brought against Le Scouarnec in relation to his courtroom confession.

It was the latest in a series of emotional moments at the trial, which opened on February 24.

Le Scouarnec is accused of raping or sexually assaulting 299 people, almost all of whom were children under his treatment at the time of the alleged assaults. By number of purported victims, it’s the single largest trial related to alleged child sexual abuse in France and one of the biggest ever in the world. It has shocked France, coming on the heels of another mass rape trial involving a man who drugged his wife and brought strangers into their home to assault her for years.

The public prosecutor handling Le Scouarnec’s case has said the alleged assaults took place over 25 years between 1989 and 2014, in several hospitals in France’s western Brittany region, where the doctor worked. The prosecutor said the average age of the victims — who are both male and female — was 11 at the time of the alleged abuse.

During the first week’s proceedings, members of Le Scouarnec’s immediate family testified about what they knew regarding the allegations.

His ex-wife, Marie-France Le Scouarnec, took the stand Wednesday and denied having had any knowledge of her husband’s purported actions. 

“There was nothing that could have made me think that. Nothing,” she told the court. “I never had an inkling. It’s so huge, so unthinkable, inconceivable that my husband could have done all that.”

The alleged assaults came to light in 2017 after Le Scouarnec’s neighbors’ then-6-year-old daughter told her parents he had exposed himself and touched her through the fence that separated their yards.

During a search of his home as part of that investigation, police said they discovered hard drives containing more than 300,000 photos and videos of child sex abuse. They also said they found notebooks with meticulous records of the alleged abuse of child patients.

The doctor was convicted in December 2020 of sexually abusing four young girls — the young neighbor as well as a 4-year-old patient and two of his nieces. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

In court on Friday, his eldest son spoke of how his world had fallen apart, and how he turned to alcohol for a while after those initial revelations. He said he and his father had been very close when he was growing up and he had only good memories of his childhood.

Questioned last week about her husband’s conviction for abusing his two nieces, Marie-France Le Scouarnec said she had known nothing about that, either. The next day, the former surgeon’s sister — the mother of the two nieces — took the stand and accused the perpetrator’s ex-wife of “cruelty” and “lies” in her testimony.

The woman, Annie, whose last name was not made public at the trial, claimed Marie-France Le Scouarnec had known that her husband abused his nieces. Annie said the youngest of her two daughters confided in her in October 2000 that Le Scouarnec had sexually abused her. She told the court that her brother admitted the assault to her and said that his wife was aware of what had happened.

The 2017 investigation was not Le Scouarnec’s first brush with the law. In 2005, he was convicted of possession of child sexual abuse images after an FBI investigation into an international network. He was given a four-year suspended sentence for those crimes. The court did not order any psychological followup, however, or any restrictions on his work.

During his career, Le Scouarnec worked in several hospitals across the Brittany region. Victims’ associations have asked how he could have carried out so many alleged assaults without any alarms being raised.

Investigators have said few of the children had any memory of the alleged assaults. For many of them, it came as a complete shock when police contacted them with evidence of what had allegedly happened, as recounted in the surgeon’s journals.

As the trial got underway on February 24, Le Scouarnec told the court he had “committed heinous acts,” and his lawyer said he admitted to carrying out “the vast majority” of the assaults of which he’s been accused.

“I owe it to all these people and their loved ones to take responsibility for my actions and the consequences they may have had,” Le Scouarnec told the court.

Outside the courthouse that first day, a small group of protesters brandished placards denouncing “more than 20 years of silence” about the surgeon’s past.

The trial is expected to last four months. During that time, the 299 alleged victims — who are now men and women — will be called on to recount what they can remember of their interactions with Le Scouarnec, who faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.