Lawyers get ready before the trial of Joël Le Scouarnec, a former surgeon, in Vannes, France, last month. It is considered to be the country’s largest ever paedophilia case. Photo / Philippe Lopez / AFP
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.
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.
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 neighbour. 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 paedophilia case – is based mainly on those diaries and writings, which investigators used to identify the hundreds of listed victims.
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.
Throughout the first days of the trial, Le Scouarnec, who lost his medical licence in 2017, has repeatedly voiced remorse for ruining not just his family’s lives, but also those of his former patients. Many of them are now adults and watch the proceedings from a nearby auditorium as support dogs wander the aisles. Many are expected to testify.
In the trial’s first week, the judges, the main prosecutor and lawyers for the former patients tried to uncover the roots of Le Scouarnec’s desire to sexually touch children. They also were trying to understand how he got away with abuses for a quarter-century without anyone in his family moving to stop him, despite at least some of them having suspicions.
In testimony, his three sons, two siblings, former wife, a cousin and a close family friend painted a portrait of a tight-knit family riven with sexual abuse and infused with a culture of silence and secrecy.
Le Scouarnec’s son Fabien Le Scouarnec testified that his grandfather Joseph Le Scouarnec had sexually abused him. (The grandfather, now deceased, had told people during his lifetime that he was himself abused, the court heard.) Joël Le Scouarnec’s sister, Annie Jobard, said that she was raped by two boys when she was 14 and had never told her family.
His former wife said she had been raped by two male relatives when she was a child. She kept it a secret, she said, even from her husband.
“When you are raped, you feel dirty,” she testified. “So, you don’t talk about it.”
Family members described Le Scouarnec as a good husband, good brother and good father who loved reading and opera and who worked long hours.
His three sons said he was not home often, but when he was, he helped them with studies, took them to museums and ensured that they had music lessons. They described their childhoods as happy. Their father never abused them, and they were completely unaware of his paedophilia, they said.
“We had everything we needed to be happy, and perversion exploded like an atomic bomb throughout the family,” Fabien, 42, said.
“It’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde,” he later added. “There is a part of my father’s personality that I don’t know.”
But Le Scouarnec’s sister, Jobard, knew of at least one case. She told the court that she had confronted her brother in 2000, after her younger daughter told her the reason she did not want to go to dinner with him: he had been sexually abusing her. Chain-smoking in her car, Le Scouarnec admitted to the abuse and said he would work the rest of his life to make amends, she testified in court. She said she told him to get treatment.
Asked why she did not go to the police back then, Jobard said she thought her youngest daughter was the only victim. At the time, she did not know that Le Scouarnec had also victimised her elder daughter.
“I didn’t realise he was someone dangerous,” said Jobard, now 72, a retired English teacher. “For me, it was inconceivable that my brother was someone like that.”
Even when she later learned that Le Scouarnec had been arrested on charges of owning child sexual abuse imagery, and after Fabien told her about the abuse he had suffered from his grandfather, she said she did not make the connection that there was a much deeper problem in the family.
In retrospect, she said, “I think it was denial”.
Lhermitte, Le Scouarnec’s former wife, also testified.
Sitting in a swivel chair in the middle of the courtroom, she denied that her sister, whom she called a birdbrain, or her sister-in-law, Jobard, had ever spoken to her about their fears he was abusing their children.
She also said she did not know that her husband had been convicted of owning child sexual abuse images, despite having been at home when police arrived to search the house. She went shopping during the search, she said, and when she returned, her husband was relaxed and told her it was all a big mistake.
She separated from him soon after the police search, but divorced him only more recently and continues to visit him in prison.
When Aude Buresi, the presiding judge, asked her about her sessions with a psychiatrist and whether they had helped her to understand the root of abuse in her family, she refused to talk about it, stating that it was her private life.
Buresi tried to force her to confront the abuse by projecting photographs found on her husband’s many confiscated hard drives on to screens in the courtroom. They revealed naked, intimate pictures of the two nieces he was convicted of abusing.
“You are destroying us,” she said to the judge, adding later: “It’s so abusive of you. I don’t have the intellect to take in all that. I don’t know how I will survive that.”
Testifying in court this week, Le Scouarnec repeatedly defended Lhermitte, whom he still referred to as his wife. He argued that he had lied to her for 30 years, though he said she knew “some things” without giving details.
“I had two lives,” said Le Scouarnec, who was mostly composed as he addressed the court. “A family life, a social life, a professional life, and next to that, the life of a pedo-criminal, a paedophile who thought of nothing else.”
But he was also vague when asked key questions, like why he had destroyed some of his diaries. Most often he answered that he did not remember.
Although the court spent days demanding illumination from Le Scouarnec’s relatives and then from him, the source of his paedophilia remained elusive.
Jobard tearfully asked him if their father had also abused him.
Le Scouarnec stood up in the courtroom’s glassed-in box for the accused to offer a response.
“I have talked to psychologists for a very long time, I asked this myself, and I still don’t know,” he said. “What I am certain of, and I repeat: I was never abused by anyone.”
The next day, addressing his elder son Renan Le Scouarnec for what he said might be the last time, he caused a commotion in the courtroom when he disclosed another distressing family secret.
“I acknowledge having committed acts of sexual abuse on my granddaughter,” he said.
Then he asked for his son’s forgiveness.
The court abruptly adjourned as the son and son’s wife were whisked away into the care of two psychologists.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Catherine Porter, Aurelien Breeden and Ségolène Le Stradic
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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