A former French surgeon, on trial for sexually abusing hundreds of patients, told the court he’d used his status as a doctor to attack children but still believed he was a good medical practitioner.
He admitted he was “a pervert” and said his paedophile activity “had no impact” on his professional activity, that he “separated the two”.
“I was a surgeon who benefited from my status to attack children, I don’t deny that,” Joël Le Scouarnec (74), told a court in Brittany, in what is one of France’s largest ever child abuse cases.
“I carried out my professional activity as well as I could, but at the same time I carried out sexual assaults on little patients. My medical treatment of patients does not erase the crimes I carried out in the same period …I know this can seem difficult: my paedophile activity was one thing, my professional activity another, and this paedophile activity had no impact on my professional activity.”
The Guardian reports that the digestive surgeon, who often operated on children with appendicitis, is accused of attacking 299 patients at a dozen hospitals across France between 1989 and 2014, most of them children under 15, with an average age of 11.
He is accused of targeting some when they were under anaesthetic, in the post-surgery recovery room or in their hospital beds.
Evidence in the four-month trial will include handwritten notebooks in which Le Scouarnec listed patients’ initials and his alleged crimes against them – some of whom had been unconscious and anaesthetised at the time and were told of the alleged abuse before the trial.
Asked about former colleagues who had thought he was a good surgeon, he said: “I betrayed them all. I lied to them to cover my activities, and I apologise.”
Despite being being flagged to French authorities by the FBI in 2004 for viewing child abuse imagery on the dark web, for which he was convicted and given a four-year suspended prison sentence in France in 2005, he was never prevented from working with children and continued to gain prestigious jobs in hospitals across the country.
Le Scouarnec was never investigated during his career, despite some of his colleagues sounding the alarm over suspicious behaviour.
He continued to practise until his retirement in 2017, after which a rape accusation was made against him and police discovered diary accounts of abuse against his patients stored in notebooks and on computers.
He is currently in prison after being found guilty in an earlier trial in 2020 of abusing four children.
Asked in court about doctors at one clinic, who found out about his 2005 conviction for possession of child abuse imagery and challenged him on it, Le Scouarnec said: “They asked me for clarifications. I… lied and said nothing.”
He told the court he had a vocation to become a surgeon from a young age.
Earlier this week, he’d told the court: “I feel ready to admit to some acts of rape that I have wanted to hide, deny. I’m done with lying.”
He described being “invaded” by fixations on abuse and called himself a “pervert”.
The trial continues until June.
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Staff ‘turned blind eye’ to rape-accused French surgeon’s crimes, trial hears
French surgeon on trial for sexually abusing hundreds of children
Stress of sex abuse impacts on girls’ physical growth and maturation