At 7am each morning, the bells of Saint-Gervais church ring out throughout the principle sq. of the sleepy French city of Jonzac, summoning the trustworthy to Mass.
Within the south west, near the world-famous brandy-producing area of Cognac, the city affords its 3,500 inhabitants a quiet life and everybody greets one another with an compulsory ‘Bonjour’. Â
Everybody besides Joel Le Scouarnec, a surgeon as soon as employed on the native hospital, that’s. He would do his utmost to remain within the shadows and located Jonzac’s charming conventions a vexatious intrusion.
The one time neighbours noticed him was when he headed to his automobile earlier than driving off to work and when he returned residence.
But, Le Scouarnec is accused of committing acts of such unimaginable horror that Jonzac residents try to overlook the sinister physician ever walked amongst them. His trial, one of many greatest intercourse abuse circumstances in French authorized historical past, begins on Monday in Vannes, Brittany.
On the terraced property he referred to as residence for 11 years, the surgeon – then in his 60s – saved greater than 30 years’ of meticulous confessional logs, by which he described, in graphic element, the sexual abuse of no less than 299 girls and boys.
Le Scouarnec has denied no less than among the assaults and rapes outlined there, claiming his writings had been simply ‘fantasies’. Many victims are stated to have been molested whereas nonetheless underneath anaesthetic after surgical procedure at hospitals throughout France the place Le Scouarnec labored. The typical age of his alleged victims was 11. The youngest was 4.
Within the diary entries – within the type of each handwritten journals and pc recordsdata – Le Scouarnec commonly described himself as a ‘paedophile’, saved a graphic report of precisely how he had abused every baby, together with their title, the date on which the abuse occurred, and the situation (‘within the workplace’, ‘in my room’).
Joel Le Scouarnec (pictured) is accused of the sexual abuse of no less than 299 girls and boys
Certainly one of Le Scouarnec’s victims, Mathis Vinet died of a drug overdose aged simply 24
The house of Le Scouarnec in Jonzac, a village in south west France, near the world-famous brandy-producing area of Cognac
A few of the entries had been even addressed to the victims, with phrases similar to ‘Pricey toddler’. Yearly, on his birthday, he would report his age and write: ‘I’m a paedophile and I’m pleased with it.’
The double lifetime of the person – described by one lawyer representing ten of his victims as a ‘true Jekyll and Hyde’ – solely got here to mild when he openly assaulted the six-year-old daughter of his next-door neighbours eight years in the past and so they contacted police.
Throughout the subsequent raid on his Jonzac residence, officers discovered as much as 70 life-size baby dolls which the surgeon was utilizing for his personal sexual gratification hidden beneath the floorboards.
Additionally they found movies of Le Scouarnec sporting wigs or attire, taking part in with the dolls, which he wrote about lovingly in his journal, in addition to the diaries.
When the a whole lot named in his data had been contacted by police, they had been appalled to study that Le Scouarnec might have been stopped in 2005, when he was convicted of possessing baby pornography. It adopted a sting organised by America’s FBI.
However investigators failed to find his diaries, so he received off with a four-month suspended sentence, moved to a unique a part of France and landed one other job as a surgeon. Now aged 74, Le Scouarnec is languishing in jail, having been sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment in 2020 for the assault of his two nieces, a affected person and his neighbour’s daughter.
For the brand new alleged victims –recognized after the invention of the journals and the media frenzy surrounding his earlier trial, which was held in personal in the course of the Covid pandemic – the case is about holding individuals to account.
For Le Scouarnec’s actions are stated to have pushed sufferers to suicide, sparked drug and alcohol dependency in others and destroyed relationships.
The victims and their households need the authorities, who they are saying ought to have stopped him earlier, to reply for his or her shortcomings.
Coming simply two months after the sentencing of Dominique Pelicot, dubbed the ‘monster of Avignon’ for inviting 50 males to rape his spouse, Gisele, whereas she was sedated, it represents an unwelcome return to the highlight for France’s angle in direction of consent and sexual assault.
By chatting with a variety of Le Scouarnec’s alleged victims, to attorneys within the case and to neighbours, the Mail has constructed up a stunning portrait of a person his ex-wife described as ‘possessed by the satan’.
Le Scouarnec’s actions are stated to have pushed sufferers to suicide, sparked drug and alcohol dependency in others and destroyed relationships
Roland and Mauricette Vinet present images of their grandson Mathis, one of many retired surgeon’s victims
The native hospital the place Le Scouarnec labored as a surgeon and abused dozens of sufferers
David Boureau was eight when he went into Clinique La Fontaine hospital in Loches, within the Loire Valley, for minor surgical procedure.
It was 1984 and Le Scouarnec had solely lately certified. All through his life, Mr Boureau has at all times suspected one thing untoward had taken place on the hospital, and he has lengthy struggled with intimacy.Â
‘I’ve at all times had this sense of discomfort about relationships, as quickly because it will get intimate. I’ve some form of psychological block,’ he advised the Mail. ‘This psychological block has ruined my life.’
It was the protection of Le Scouarnec’s 2020 trial that ‘set one thing off in me’, he stated. When he referred to as his mom, she confirmed he was handled by Le Scouarnec.
Mr Boureau, like a number of different individuals named in Le Scouarnec’s diaries, has had hypnotherapy in recent times in a bid to free recollections that had been locked away.
He had lengthy recalled somebody standing over him within the restoration room after the operation, whispering that it could ‘all be OK’.
He even remembered the physician’s watch and his genitals being touched. He additionally believes he was given a second dose of anaesthetic so the surgeon might spend extra time alone with him.
Mr Boureau is one in all about 15 alleged victims who’ve taken out a civil case in opposition to Le Scouarnec as their circumstances fall exterior France’s 30-year statute of limitations for reporting critical crime. His lawyer, Francesca Satta, says this represents a ‘double punishment’ as they’d been ‘sexually assaulted or raped’ however then ‘not… recognised as victims’.
Now 50 and a social employee for individuals with disabilities, Mr Boureau, who’s talking out for the primary time forward of the trial, says he needs to ‘look [Le Scouarnec] within the eye. I am not scared. Now could be the time to talk up.’
One other sufferer, Mathis Vinet, was ten in 2007 when he was taken to the casualty division at a hospital in Quimperle, Brittany, by his grandfather, Roland Vinet. The boy had abdomen pains and was vomiting uncontrollably.
By now, Le Scouarnec was a specialist stomach surgeon and he determined Mathis ought to keep in a single day for remark.
After the boy returned residence, his grandparents observed a deterioration in his behaviour. First, he would consistently take showers. Then, in his teenage years, he turned extra aggressive.
At 15, Mathis left residence and developed addictions to alcohol and medicines. In 2018, his household had been contacted by the police and advised Mathis’s title appeared in Le Scouarnec’s diaries of abuse – with the dates matching the boy’s time on the hospital.
In a single entry, shared with the Mail, Le Scouarnec stated he ‘could not bear in mind the Christian title of this gorgeous little boy of ten however what mattered was that he was alone in his room.’ Subsequent, he described a intercourse assault intimately.
The next day, the surgeon wrote that ‘in his room in Quimperle the little boy from the day earlier than was nonetheless alone. After I entered he stated nothing.’ He then described molesting him once more.
Mathis was interviewed by police within the wake of the diary revelations and picked out Le Scouarnec out of a photograph line-up of medics on the hospital on the time.
He stated he had suffered flashbacks of the abuse and had recollections of the physician flattening his underpants. (Not like lots of the different victims, Mathis wasn’t given an anaesthetic.)
Lawyer Francesca Satta (pictured) says victims have been topic to a ‘double punishment’ as they’d been ‘sexually assaulted or raped’ however then ‘not… recognised as victims’
A drawing of Le Scouarnec throughout his trial on the courthouse in Saintes
This {photograph} exhibits a letter of Le Scouarnec about sufferer Amelie Leveque, who was operated on when she was simply 9 years outdated in Loches, central France
Mr Vinet stated Mathis struggled to come back to phrases with what he had realized from the diaries. Tragically, in 2021, he died of a drug overdose. He was simply 24.
‘The very day he died we stated we will proceed the battle,’ his grandmother, Maury Vinet, stated. ‘Sure, Mathis is now not right here however we advised him that we’d at all times be with him.’
One uncommon function of the Le Scouarnec case is the vary in age of his victims and the very fact they’re of each sexes. Of the 299 victims on the indictment, which spans January 1989 to January 2014, 158 are males and 141 are girls.
100 and eleven of the fees are aggravated rape and the remainder are aggravated sexual assault – ‘aggravated’ as a result of the offences had been in opposition to kids.
Amelie Leveque, now 42, was operated on for appendicitis by Le Scouarnec in 1991 at a hospital in Loches within the Loire. She believes she was raped by him.
‘I at all times knew one thing irregular had occurred,’ she stated, including she had come ahead following protection of his 2020 trial to encourage ‘all victims to file a grievance’, citing the instance of Gisele Pelicot.
Like David Boureau, Ms Leveque instructed Ms Satta, who confirmed that her title was talked about in Le Scouarnec’s notorious diaries.
‘Instantly, I stated to myself: ‘Right here it’s, that is what occurred to me.’ It defined so many unusual issues in my life, like my phobia of hospitals… my consuming problems, my life in dotted strains because the operation,’ she says.
Le Scouarnec, one in all three kids, was born in a Paris suburb to a cabinet-maker father who moved into banking, and a mom who was a concierge earlier than quitting to convey up the youngsters.
He’s stated to have proven an curiosity in medication aged simply ten, qualifying as a health care provider in 1981. He later specialised in gynaecological and stomach surgical procedure.
Whereas finding out medication, he met his spouse, Marie-France, then a nursing assistant, and so they had three sons. The household moved home commonly as Le Scouarnec took up posts in numerous hospitals from Brittany to Nantes and later to the south-west of France.
He started conserving his diary within the late Nineteen Eighties and his alleged victims now have questions on how a lot his spouse knew of his actions. In a single diary entry, from 1997, he wrote that ‘it has been 9 months since she found that I’m a paedophile’.
Le Scouarnec then blithely writes that his spouse’s discovery has prompted him to ‘begin smoking once more’. He provides that he had stopped cigarettes to pay attention ‘all my free money and time on my paedophile actions.’
In one other entry, from across the identical interval, he writes that his spouse ‘killed my little Breton woman’. Court docket paperwork recommend that this was her destroying one in all his life-size dolls.
In 2004, Le Scouarnec’s diaries might have been discovered when an FBI operation recognized males who had paid for excessive baby pornography from a web site.
Le Scouarnec secured a full-time put up in Jonzac in 2008. The director of the hospital was reportedly conscious of his conviction however employed him anyway as a result of there had been ‘no bodily assault’
Amelie Leveque (pictured), now 42, was operated on for appendicitis by Le Scouarnec in 1991 at a hospital in Loches within the Loire. She believes she was raped by the surgeon
The physician was one in all three arrested in France. He was handed a four-month suspended jail sentence however quickly received a job as a surgeon in Quimperle.
Following his conviction, Marie-France moved out of the household residence however was reportedly being paid hundreds of kilos a month by her husband. ‘He paid for her silence,’ Ms Satta claims.
When a hospital colleague examine his conviction within the native press and raised issues with the regional medical affiliation, it was determined he had not violated the medical code of ethics and no sanctions had been imposed.
In 2008, Le Scouarnec secured a full-time surgical put up in Jonzac. The director of the hospital was reportedly conscious of his conviction however employed him anyway as a result of there had been ‘no bodily assault’, based on paperwork obtained by Radio France.
It was on this sleepy city that Le Scouarnec lived alone, hoarding his dolls, compiling his horrifying diaries and persevering with to behave with impunity till 2017, when, bare in his backyard, he reached over the fence and molested the six-year-old woman subsequent door.
As a result of his conviction for that assault and his lengthy jail time period, there’s little probability of aged Le Scouarnec ever being launched.
However on the courtroom in Vannes on Monday, 299 different victims will search justice at a trial that can price three million euros. Such is the dimensions of Le Scouarnec’s alleged depravity, the indictment is 745 pages lengthy.
A whole bunch will ship harrowing testimony of the abuse they declare to have suffered by the hands of the surgeon, as soon as thought a pillar of his neighborhood.
Confronting the physician who has haunted their nightmares for therefore lengthy will likely be painful for all of them, however many clearly take the view that seeing him outdated, frail and shorn of his energy within the dock could make all of it worthwhile.
Further reporting: Tim Finan
