New French probe seeks 'forgotten' victims of paedophile surgeon

Nevin Al Sukari - Sana'a - This court sketch created on March 4, 2025, shows French retired surgeon Joel Le Scouarnec (L) speaking during his trial on charges of assaulting or raping 299 patients, at the Criminal Court in Vannes. — AFP pic

VANNES (France), March 24 — A French paedophile has admitted to sexually abusing 299 patients during his career as a surgeon, but now investigators are hoping to identify additional victims after it emerged dozens more may have been overlooked.

Joel Le Scouarnec, 74, has been in court since last month accused of 111 rapes and 189 sexual assaults at a dozen hospitals in western France, in one of the country’s largest child sex abuse cases.

On Thursday he admitted to all charges, his lawyer Maxime Tessier said, but the trial is to continue until June.

The former doctor is already in prison after being sentenced in December 2020 to 15 years for raping and sexually assaulting four children, including two of his nieces.

The surgeon practised for decades until his retirement despite a 2005 sentence for owning sexually abusive images of children.

After he retired in 2017, a six-year-old girl accused him of rape and police found hundreds of written accounts of abuse stored in files on his computer.

Police have identified and spoken to 332 victims mentioned in these files, including several for whom the statute of limitations has expired.

But they never got in touch with several other potential victims, including some the convicted ex-surgeon listed himself, according to several documents, a journalist, a judge, an investigator and a lawyer.

Thus two people the doctor described as having raped when they were nine and 13 were never contacted, nor were dozens of others he appeared to have assaulted, a 2022 appeals court decision seen by AFP showed.

In another example, Le Scouarnec during the trial admitted to abusing his own granddaughter, a case mentioned in his notes but that investigators did not look into.

‘Copy-paste error’

The new probe is to focus on “victims who might not have been identified or whose cases recently came to light,” the prosecutor’s office in the city of Rennes told AFP last week.

Journalist Hugo Lemonier said he had found around 30 victims who had been “forgotten” by the mammoth investigation into Le Scouarnec while researching a book on his case.

“Whether due to a lack of means or because they were eager to get the probe over and done with, investigators left many victims aside,” he said.

Detectives mostly focused on the surgeon’s computer diaries, but even these were “not exhaustive” as several years were missing from them, Lemonier said.

“Why didn’t they systematically ask hospitals for lists of the patients Le Scouarnec operated on in order to fill in the gaps?” he asked.

The lead investigator last month told the court his team had “covered the majority” of victims reported in Le Scouarnec’s computer files, but admitted they should have better examined some of the other cases he had listed.

The presiding judge grilled him on why certain people mentioned in his writings had remained unidentified or been overlooked.

And there were some mistakes.

A document obtained by AFP showed that police had contacted one person telling them that Le Scouarnec had raped and twice sexually assaulted them as a child.

That person told AFP they became suicidal after the revelations and had to be hospitalised.

But when it came to the official indictment, the ex-surgeon was only accused of a single sexual assault—not a rape—on them when they were 13 years old.

Another person with the same first name is thought to have been victim of a rape and sexual assault when they were 10, but that case has not yet been investigated.

Policemen conflated these two cases “through a simple copy-paste error”, Lemonier said.

‘Overwhelmed’

Celine Astolfe, the lawyer for a children’s rights group that is a civil party in the trial, said she was shocked investigators did not scan the surgeon’s patient lists.

It’s as if “overwhelmed and blinded by his writings”, they forgot procedure that is “basic practice in any probe”, said the lawyer for Fondation pour l’Enfance (“Foundation for Childhood”).

Attorney Francesca Satta, who represents some of the victims, welcomed the new probe as “great progress”.

She said one of her clients, 42-year-old Amelie Leveque, had appeared in the doctor’s diary descriptions as someone he had observed and fantasised about.

But through therapy, she remembered him raping her and filed a legal complaint.

On March 9, Le Scouarnec in court admitted to raping her when she was nine.

“Every single look described in these diary notes—and I see around 50 -- needs to be more fully investigated,” Satta said.

With Le Scouarnec having admitted to all charges, Lemonier said the trial was now essentially shining a light on the treatment of victims and the resources available to investigators looking into their cases.

“This trial is no longer about establishing the defendant’s guilt. But if it’s about making amends, it should be for all victims,” he said. — AFP