Respected French medic Joel Le Scouarnec is said to have hidden a dark secret for decades – the systematic abuse of vulnerable children. We take a closer look at the diaries that form the centre of the prosecution’s case against him
A paedophile surgeon accused of raping scores of boys and girls is said to have made a chilling boast each birthday.
Joel Le Scouarnec, 74, faces charges of sexual violence against 299 victims with an average age of 11. The monster is on trial at the Morbihan Criminal Court, in the Brittany town of Vanne, where horrific details of his alleged crimes against 158 males and 141 females are emerging.
The children were allegedly attacked in hospitals and other medical centres across France, with his youngest victim just one-year-old. All of the charges against the surgeon are aggravated because he was a respected medic in a position of authority, with many believing this to be the reason he escaped punishment for so long.
Le Scouarnec is said to have kept meticulous diaries detailing the names, ages and types of abuse he carried out over a period spanning more than a quarter of a century. His own words form the backbone of the prosecution’s case against him, with the sexual predator already serving a 15 year sentence after being found guilty of abusing four children in 2020.
The diaries reveal a horrific brag on the surgeon’s birthday each year. After recording his age, he would write: “I am a paedophile, and I am proud of it.”
The monster is thought to be France’s worst-ever paedophile and was first caught when his six-year-old neighbour told her mother he had sexually abused her while she was playing in the garden of her home in Jonzac, southwest France. Le Scouarnec was later jailed for raping and sexually assaulting four young girls but evidence uncovered by the police during their investigation suggested these crimes were a fraction of the extent of his offending.
Searches of the paedophile’s home revealed 300,000 indecent photos and videos of children, 70 child-sized dolls, some of whom were chained up and crucially, hundreds of diaries and notebooks detailing his abuse. Chillingly, up until their names were discovered in Le Scouarnec’s diaries, the court heard many of his alleged victims had been unaware they had been assaulted due to them being under anaesthesia or recovering from surgery.
“Everything in this terrible story is out of the ordinary… it wasn’t the victims that approached the investigators but the investigators that alerted the victims,” public prosecutor Stéphane Kellenberger told the court. “Many of them had no memory… several would have rather gone on not knowing. But silence had reigned for too long.”
One of the monster’s alleged victims had her appendix removed when she was nine and, while under anaesthesia, she was raped. “I remember crying a lot, I was very scared,” she told RMC. “I always associated him with the smell of lemon. So I remember this lemony smell and his hands placed on parts of my body. All the sensations in my body came back.”
Another young patient, Mathis Vinet, was 10 when his father and grandfather took him to the Quimperle hospital with stomach pain. His family said he was never the same after the hospital visit and he died of an overdose aged 24.
The paedophile initially claimed his diaries were retellings of his “fantasies”, but police believed his level of detail meant his sick claims were more likely to be truthful. At least two years of his notebooks have disappeared, meaning there could be more victims still to identify.
Le Scouarnec was first convicted in 2005 following a sting by the US’s Federal Bureau of Investigation, better known as the FBI, who found his bank card had been used to access a Russian child sex abuse site on the Dark Web. He was given a four-month suspended sentence for possessing the images but while his employers were alerted, it is said he wasn’t suspended due to staff shortages.
On the first day of his trial, the predator said he was prepared to “take responsibility” for his actions. “I am perfectly aware that these wounds are indelible, beyond repair,” he told the court. “I can’t go back, but I owe it to [the victims] and their relatives to admit my actions and the consequences they had and that they undoubtedly will continue to have throughout their lives.”
With many other opportunities missed to stop the paedophile carrying out his alleged abuse of 30 years, many people in France have hit out at what they feel is their country’s lax controls on paedophiles in positions of authority.
For help, contact the NSPCC Helpline on 0808 800 5000, ChildLine on 0800 1111 or the Stop It Now helpline