Edit of 09/30/2024: Former surgeon Joël Le Scouarnec has indeed been referred to a criminal court for rape and sexual assault, Lorient prosecutor Stéphane Kellenberger announced on Monday
This is perhaps the biggest child crime case that France has ever known. Firstly, by the number of victims: more than 300 children are said to have been victims of the actions of the man nicknamed “the rapist surgeon”. By geographical area too: over the course of his career, Joël Le Scouarnec has regularly moved and changed establishments. Its victims are therefore scattered in Morbihan, Indre-et-Loire, Finistère and Charente-Maritime. In total, 293 families are affected by this trial. But the man caused more victims, with certain cases having to be dismissed due to the statute of limitations. Completed in July, the investigation of this file of more than 750 pages will soon be judged before the Morbihan departmental criminal court, in Vannes.
According to the attorney general at the Rennes Court of Appeal, to which the Vannes court depends, the trial of Joël Le Scouarnec should be held in 2025 before the Morbihan criminal court. “This is a case of exceptional scale, which will require a lot of work and organization up front. The order of the investigating judge should be known in the coming days, if there is no appeal,” said the magistrate, who is “hopeful” to be able to organize this trial in the first half of 2025 . For what duration? “Hard to say. Probably three to four months,” replies the secretary general of the court. For comparison, the Mazan rape trial, which is being held before the Avignon criminal court, should require 69 hearing days to judge Dominique Pelicot and his 49 co-defendants.
Already sentenced to fifteen years of criminal imprisonment
The difference with the Le Scouarnec affair is that there will only be one man in the accused box. Joël Le Scouarnec, 72, has already been sentenced by the Charente-Maritime Assize Court to fifteen years of criminal imprisonment for sexual assault on one of his nieces and a young patient in the 1990s, as well as rape on another niece, at the same time, and her six-year-old neighbor. The septuagenarian appealed this conviction. It was thanks to the complaint of one of them that the scandal broke out. In 2017, a girl then aged 6 denounced the actions of a man who describes himself as an “exhibitionist, voyeur, sadist, masochist, scatological, fetishist, pedophile”. Before adding: “And I am very happy about it. »
Investigators discovered these words in chilling writings found at the surgeon’s house. Small notebooks where the doctor compiled his atrocities committed between 1984 and 2006, listing his victims in two categories: “vulvettes” for girls and “cocks” for boys. Taking advantage of the fact that the children were alone or asleep, the doctor increased the abuse. “He refrains from any penetration with his penis,” the investigators noted.