The ex-wife wife of a surgeon accused of sexually abusing hundreds of child patients in France pulled up to court this morning covered head-to-toe as she hid her face from the cameras.
Joel Le Scouarnec, 74, is charged with assaulting or raping 299 boys and girls over three decades. Many were patients under anaesthetic following surgical procedures at hospitals across France where Le Scouarnec worked.
The average age of his alleged victims was just 11.
In what has been described as France’s largest-ever paedophile trial, dozens of the surgeon’s former patients – now adults and seeing him for the first time since they were abused – watched the first day of court proceedings.
When asked by the judge if he’d like to make a comment yesterday, Le Scouarnec -who is already serving a 15-year prison term after he was convicted of assaulting his six-year-old neighbour, a four-year-old patient and two nieces in 2020 – appeared to admit to many of his crimes.
‘I sympathise with the suffering of the victims concerning acts I admitted during my interrogations,’ the white-haired, bespectacled man said.
This morning, his former spouse Marie-France Le Scouarnec arrived at court to attend the second day of his trial. She divorced the convicted paedophile but is thought to have known about his deplorable activities for years.
In 1997, Le Scouarnec wrote in a diary seized by police: ‘It has been nine months since she discovered that I am a paedophile’.
He went onto practice medicine for another 20 years.
Ex-wife of retired surgeon Joel Le Scouarnec, Marie-France Le Scouarnec
Ex-wife of retired surgeon Joel Le Scouarnec, Marie-France Le Scouarnec, arrives for the trial of Joel Le Scouarnec on charges of assaulting or raping 299 patients at the Criminal Court in Vannes, western France, on February 25, 2025
Joel Le Scouarnec (pictured) is accused of the sexual abuse of at least 299 boys and girls
Joel Le Scouarnec, now 74, in the courtroom. He is accused of raping or abusing 299 people, mostly child patients (court sketch)
Le Scouarnec’s lawyer, Maxime Tessier, had earlier told the court in Vannes, in the Britanny region of France, that the surgeon ‘admits responsibility for a vast majority of the acts.’
Le Scouarnec added that he was ‘perfectly aware that these wounds cannot be erased or healed’.
‘I swear to the victims I will assume the consequences for my actions,’ he said.
Under French law, for serious crimes it is for the prosecution to prove guilt and for judges to rule on guilt and sentence.
The 74-year-old faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted, on top of 15 years he has been serving after being found guilty in 2020 of rape and sexual assault of children.
His is the second major sexual abuse case to rock France in a matter of months, after 51 men were convicted in December of raping or assaulting Gisele Pelicot at the behest of her husband, Dominique.
The true scale of Le Scouarnec’s alleged offending only became clear in 2017 when the six-year-old daughter of his next-door neighbours told her parents that ‘the man with a crown of white hair’ had molested her over their shared garden fence.
After they contacted police, a raid on his property in the small town of Jonzac, south-west France, revealed 300,000 photos and videos depicting child abuse.
Officers also found both handwritten and digital diaries containing meticulous accounts of his assaults on boys and girls including the names of victims, dates and descriptions of the attacks going back to the 1980s.
Police also discovered a collection of life-sized dolls under the parquet flooring of the house which Le Scouarnec, a specialist abdominal surgeon, was using for his own sexual gratification.
In his diaries he professed his love for the dolls.
Ex-wife of retired surgeon Joel Le Scouarnec, Marie-France Le Scouarnec, arrives for the trial of Joel Le Scouarnec on charges of assaulting or raping 299 patients at the Criminal Court in Vannes, western France, on February 25, 2025
The home of Le Scouarnec in Jonzac, a village in south west France, close to the world-famous brandy-producing region of Cognac
Le Scouarnec’s lawyer Maxime Tessier, told the court in Vannes, in the Britanny region of France, that the surgeon ‘admits responsibility for a vast majority of the acts’
Le Scouarnec’s actions are said to have driven patients to suicide, sparked drug and alcohol dependency in others and destroyed relationships
Le Scouarnec secured a full-time post in Jonzac in 2008
In other notes, Le Scouarnec wrote: ‘I am a paedophile and I always will be’.
Following the 2017 discovery, police tracked down hundreds of alleged victims.
They found some had been driven to suicide; suffered from alcohol and drug addiction or had difficulties forming relationships.
It has emerged that Le Scouarnec’s offending could have been stopped when he was convicted in 2005 of possession of child pornography following a sting launched by America’s FBI.
However he was instead given a four-month suspended sentence and later took up a full-time hospital post in Jonzac, where he continued practising – and allegedly abusing patients – until 2017.
In 2006, Le Scouarnec was reported to the L’Ordre des Médecins (The Order of Physicians) – France’s professional body for doctors – when a colleague discovered his criminal conviction, but no action was taken.
Ahead of the trial’s opening at the Morbihan Criminal Court in Vannes yesterday, angry French doctors and victims of Le Scouarnec described an ‘omerta’ in reporting medical professionals which allowed the doctor to continue abusing large numbers of children even after his conviction.
‘I didn’t really remember the operation. I remembered the post-operation, a surgeon who was quite mean,’ one of the victims, Amélie Lévêque, recalled of her time in the hospital when she was 9 years old in 1991. ‘I cried a lot.’
Years later, she waived her anonymity and described feeling overwhelmed when she learned that her name appeared in Le Scouarnec’s notebooks.
‘That was the beginning of the answers to a lifetime of questions, and then it was the beginning of the descent into hell,’ she told public broadcaster France 3. ‘I felt like I had lost control of everything. I wasn’t crazy, but now I had to face the truth of what had happened.’
‘I fell into a deep depression. … My family tried to help, but I felt completely alone.’
Lévêque, now 42, told reporters yesterday: ‘I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time,’ as the trial got underway.
Amelie Leveque, now 42, was operated on by Le Scouarnec in 1991. The alleged abuse she suffered was detailed in one of his diaries
Some child protection groups have joined the proceedings against Le Scouarnec as civil parties, saying they hope to toughen the legal framework to prevent other doctors from practising after being convicted on sexual abuse charges.
During a rally outside the courtroom yesterday, signs were held up reading: ‘Stop the code of silence.’
GP Annick Plou said: ‘We have known about him for some years. What is terrible is that we and other doctors in France are prohibited by law from criticising our colleagues in any way.’
Le Scouarnec’s alleged offending is detailed in a 745-page indictment. He is accused of assaulting 158 men and 141 women between 1989 and 2014.
He has admitted to child abuse dating to 1985-1986, but some cases could not be prosecuted because the statute of limitations has expired.
The doctor sexually abused both boys and girls when they were alone in their hospital rooms, according to investigation documents.
He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. French law does not allow sentences to be added together even when there are multiple victims.
The trial is expected to last until June.
