“You were the devil and he sometimes is dressed in a white coat.”
That is what prosecutor Stephane Kellenberger told Joel Le Scouarnec at the end of France’s largest-ever child abuse trial, a horrific case that rocked a country already reeling from other high-profile sex crimes.
The trial of the former surgeon dubbed “France’s worst-ever paedophile” has been shocking for the sheer scale alone. Le Scouarnec abused 299 victims over 25 years, with an average age of just 11.
Now victims, their families and lawmakers in the country are grappling with a legal system that only allowed the abuser to be sentenced to a maximum of 20 years in prison.
But at least two of those he abused were not able to see justice served, having taken their own lives some time before the trial.
“Unfortunately today, the verdict isn’t protecting our kids and grandkids in France,” the mother of one of the victims who died said outside court following Wednesday’s sentencing.
Le Scouarnec has now been convicted of raping or sexually assaulting 158 boys and 141 girls from 1989 to 2014, triggering questions over how he was able to get away with such crimes for so long.
The French prosecutor has opened a separate probe into the possible criminal liability of other public bodies or individuals who could have prevented the abuse.
“There is rarely for all time a manner that any individual can rape and assault children for all those years with out the working out of oldsters round,” said Homayra Sellier, head of Innocence in Danger, which is supporting 40 alleged victims and is a plaintiff in the case.
Presiding Judge Aude Buresi also called this out while reading out Le Scouarec’s sentence.
“Your acts had been a blind residing in the scientific world, to the extent that your colleagues, the scientific authorities, had been incapable of stopping your actions,” she said.
Echoes of the Dominique Pelicot trial
Le Scouarnec attacked some of his victims when they were unconscious, in a chilling echo of Gisèle Pelicot’s case heard in France just months before.
Ms Pelicot’s now-ex-husband, Dominique Pelicot, and 50 other men were convicted of raping or sexually assaulting her in December following a three-month trial in Avignon that the world watched in horror.
The case triggered a conversation around sexual violence across the world and forced France to examine the prevalence of rape culture in its society – but less than two months later, the country’s worst child abuse trial opened, raising more concerns as damning details emerged.
Le Scouarnec had already been convicted of sex crimes on two previous occasions. He was handed a suspended four-month jail sentence for possessing child pornography in 2005, but managed to secure a job as a surgeon at a public hospital in Quimperle, western France, the following year.
He continued to work in public hospitals until his re-arrest in 2017 on suspicion of raping his 6-year-old neighbour. Police discovered diaries that appeared to detail his sexual assaults on scores of patients in hospitals across the region.
Notebooks and ‘my paedophile letters’ detailed years of graphic abuse
In 2020, Le Scouarnec was convicted of the rape and sexual assault of his child neighbour, as well as two of his nieces and a four-year-old patient, and sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Further investigations into Le Scouarnec’s notebooks, which detailed the abuse in graphic language, led prosecutors to later charge the former surgeon with the aggravated rape and sexual assault of 299 people. One such document was titled “my paedophile letters”, The Guardian reports.
Many of Le Scouarnec’s victims only learned they had been assaulted when they were contacted by police.
One victim had her appendix removed by the surgeon when she was 10. More than 20 years later in 2019, police knocked on her door to tell her she had been raped.
Now 38 years-old, she told The Guardian she was disgusted to read Le Scouarnec’s notes about her. “There was my family name, my first name, age, the address of my parents, everything he did and how he felt,” she said. “It was disgusting. The word ‘raped’ was hard enough, but here were these obscene phrases of what happened.”
Le Scouarnec told the court during the trial that he did not see his victims as people.
“They had been the shuttle residing of my fantasies. Because the trial went on, I began to examine them as people, with emotions, anger, struggling and peril,” he acknowledged.
A guilty plea and hundreds of victims, but possible freedom in years
The trial began on 24 February and became attributable to final four months but Le Scouarnec pleaded guilty partway thru court docket cases.
Despite the scale of his crimes, Le Scouarnec could per chance additionally most intriguing be sentenced to a most of twenty years, which could per chance well proceed similtaneously to his previous sentence.
Le Scouarnec’s approved genuine Maxime Hessier acknowledged his client did no longer intend to appeal, and hoped to create amends with the victims. “Today, justice has been served,” Hessier acknowledged.
In France, it does no longer topic if a criminal is convicted of 1 charge or hundreds, they most intriguing face basically the most penalty for one depend of basically the most serious offence, which in Le Scouarnec’s case is aggravated rape.
Following the sentencing, French approved genuine Myriam Guedj Benayoun acknowledged it became unjust that Le Scourarnec faced the identical sentence as somebody who’s convicted of raping one person.
“He’ll undoubtedly act all over again if he is released, and because it stands now, given the recent sentencing, the truth of it is that in 2030 Mr Le Scouarnec will possible be released,” she acknowledged. A recent trial is anticipated in the impending years, after recent allegations emerged in the latest trial.
One lady who became 10 when she became abused by Le Scouarnec acknowledged France wished to interchange its rules so offenders fancy him could per chance additionally by no manner walk free all over again.
“He only got 20 years,” she told Reuters after the ruling. “In the United States, he would have got thousands of years. It’s unbearable that someone like that can get out.”
As Marie Grimaud, a approved genuine representing some of Le Scouarnec’s alleged victims, told journalists sooner than the listening to began on the significant day of the trial: “My purchasers don’t inquire of one thing else from Le Scouarnec. In France, whether or no longer you rape one slight one or 300, it’s the identical sentence.”
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