A 74-year-old surgeon from France, Joel Le Scouarnec, has admitted to sexually abusing 299 of his patients, making him one of the country’s most notorious child abusers. His trial has revealed a disturbing pattern of assaults that occurred between 1989 and 2014, often while victims were under anesthesia or waking up from surgery.
Le Scouarnec faced a total of 300 charges, including 111 counts of rape and 189 counts of sexual assault, across more than a dozen hospitals. The average age of his victims was just 11 years old, with an almost equal number of boys and girls among them. He has been on trial since March, and although he has confessed to individual cases, this recent plea marks a significant acknowledgment of his extensive wrongdoing.
The surgeon’s history is troubling. In 2005, he was convicted for possessing sexually abusive images of children but was not investigated further during his medical career. His crimes only came to light after he retired in 2017, when a six-year-old girl reported that he had abused her while she played in her garden in Jonzac, a town in southwest France.
Following this report, police searched Le Scouarnec’s home and uncovered a shocking collection: 300,000 indecent images and videos of children, along with 70 child-sized dolls, some of which were chained. They also found numerous notebooks and diaries where he meticulously recorded his acts of abuse.
Le Scouarnec is currently serving a prison sentence after being convicted in 2020 for raping and sexually assaulting four young girls. His case has drawn significant attention in France, highlighting serious issues around child protection and the failures in the system that allowed him to operate unchecked for decades.