Hello and welcome to the details of ‘They knew’: Victims of paedophile French surgeon blame systemic failure and now with the details
Nevin Al Sukari - Sana'a - RENNES (France), Feb 19 – A French surgeon is set to stand trial for raping or sexually assaulting almost 300 patients, the majority of them children, despite being convicted of possessing abusive images of children and numerous warnings from colleagues, an AFP investigation reveals.
Joel Le Scouarnec, 74, is already incarcerated after a court in 2020 found him guilty of abusing four children, including two of his nieces.
In a separate four-month trial scheduled to begin on Feb 24, he faces charges related to the sexual assault or rape of 299 patients, the majority while they were under general anaesthesia at a dozen hospitals between 1989 and 2014.
Of the 299 victims, 256 were under the age of 15, with the youngest being just one year old and the oldest 70.
Despite his 2005 conviction for possessing sexually abusive images of children, the surgeon was never investigated during his career.
It wasn’t until he retired in 2017 that investigators uncovered his alleged crimes, following an accusation of rape from a six-year-old girl and the discovery of detailed accounts of abuse in his diaries.
Victims and child protection advocates argue that this case highlights systemic failures that allowed Le Scouarnec to continue committing sexual crimes.
‘How many people knew he was a paedophile and let him practise medicine in contact with children?’ one of the victims, who wished to remain anonymous, told AFP. ‘They knew and they did nothing.’
‘Asked him to resign’
Le Scouarnec was practising in the western town of Lorient in 2004 when the FBI alerted French authorities that he was among hundreds in France who had been accessing sex abuse images of children online.
The following year, a court in nearby Vannes handed him a suspended four-month jail sentence.
By then, however, the doctor had moved to work in Quimperlé, another town in the Brittany region.
The Quimperlé hospital, struggling to recruit new staff, was at risk of having its maternity ward and surgery department closed, according to the town’s current mayor, Michael Quernez.
‘The arrival of the new surgeon must have been a relief,’ he remarked.
Le Scouarnec did not inform hospital management of his conviction, but a colleague, psychiatrist Thierry Bonvalot, learned of it through another doctor.
Bonvalot explained to AFP that the colleague ‘made it sound like it wasn’t anything.’
‘He said he was an alcoholic who was lonely, whose wife no longer wanted him, and didn’t provide any proof of the conviction,’ Bonvalot said. ‘But then very quickly other things started to draw my attention.’
Bonvalot, who also served as head of the hospital board, recalled needing to discuss an operation Le Scouarnec had performed on a young boy. ‘He summed up the operation with so many sexual metaphors that I was shocked. He confessed he had been sentenced for child pornography,’ the psychiatrist said.
‘I realised he was dangerous and asked him to resign. He refused.’
Doctors vote
On June 14, 2006, Bonvalot sent a letter to the hospital director questioning Le Scouarnec’s ability ‘to remain completely calm when treating young children’ in light of his ‘legal past.’
Bonvalot followed up with a copy of the letter to the Order of Physicians of the Finistère department of Brittany on July 19. AFP saw the stamp indicating the letter had been received and read by the Order.
Bonvalot also approached the town’s mayor at the time, Daniel Le Bras, who was also an anaesthetist at the hospital.
‘Le Bras told me, “I’ll take personal care of this,”’ Bonvalot recounted.
Le Bras did not respond to AFP’s request for comment.
Despite Bonvalot’s efforts, Le Scouarnec became the head of surgery at the hospital on August 1 of that year.
As part of the promotion process, hospital management requested a copy of his criminal record and received confirmation that it was clean, according to documents from local and regional health agencies.
After receiving Bonvalot’s July letter, the Order of Physicians requested a copy of the 2005 court ruling against Le Scouarnec. The court sent the documents over on November 9, after repeated reminders, according to an email chain seen by AFP.
The Order of Physicians then informed the Finistère Health and Social Directorate, a local state authority.
The directorate received a letter from the hospital director on November 23 defending Le Scouarnec as a ‘serious and competent’ doctor with ‘excellent relations both with patients and their families, as well as with staff.’
The director wrote that Le Scouarnec's arrival ‘has enabled us to stabilise our surgery activities in a satisfactory manner.’ The director has since passed away.
At a meeting at the Finistère Order of Physicians on December 14, 18 out of 19 doctors voted not to sanction Le Scouarnec. They chose to let the local health authority handle the matter instead.
Patient’s death
Around the same time, Yvon Guillerm, head of Brittany’s regional hospital agency ARH, began investigating the hospital following an unspecified ‘complaint to the prosecutor’s office,’ according to a letter dated March 13, 2007, that he sent to Bernard Chenevière, a senior health ministry official.
Guillerm later told investigators that a female patient had died on Le Scouarnec’s operating table, and that this, combined with the surgeon’s past conviction, was ‘concerning,’ according to a judicial document.
On March 14, 2007, Guillerm followed up by sending a report to Chenevière, suggesting the health minister should intervene directly and file a complaint with the National Order of Physicians.
However, 12 days later, the health minister was replaced in a cabinet reshuffle, and no complaint was made to the medical body.
‘Collective failure’
It is unclear what the ARH investigation found, but it led to the closure of the obstetric and surgery wards in Quimperlé in June 2007.
A decade later, allegations surfaced that Le Scouarnec had raped or sexually assaulted more than 30 children at the hospital, including four in the month before the closure.
The surgeon eventually left Quimperlé, briefly working in another town, Pontivy, before being fired after someone alerted the hospital to his past.
In June 2008, Le Scouarnec moved to southwestern France and began working at a hospital in Jonzac. He told the director that he was being investigated, but she ignored this.
Le Scouarnec worked there for nearly a decade until his retirement in 2017.
Frédéric Benoist, a lawyer for French advocacy group La Voix de l’Enfant (The Child’s Voice), said the fact that Le Scouarnec was never barred from practising medicine was the result of ‘collective failure.’
The charity has filed a legal complaint over these failings, which it says ‘put others in danger.’
The prosecutor’s office in Lorient has said that a preliminary investigation has begun. – AFP
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