A former French surgeon is on trial accused of raping or sexually assaulting almost 300 people, mostly children.
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Former French surgeon Joël Le Scouarnec went on trial in France on Monday for the alleged rape or sexual abuse of hundreds of victims.
The case details that Le Scouarnec has sexually assaulted 299 people who were his patients, most of them children, in what investigators and his own notebooks describe as a pattern of violence spanning over three decades.
“I committed odious acts,” admitted Le Scouarnec to a court in Vannes, “they were only children.”
The 74-year-old faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted, in addition to 15 years that he’s already been serving since being found guilty of rape and sexual assault of children in an another trial in 2020.
The former surgeon told the court that he acknowledges committing rapes and sexual assaults, but denies full guilt of all the cases, saying he doesn’t remember everything.
“I am aware that these injuries are irreparable,” he said. “I cannot go back in time but I owe it to all of these people and their loved ones to take responsibility for my actions.”
Some survivors have no memory of the assaults as they were unconscious at the time. One man, in his thirties now, testified that he was assaulted during a consultation in 1995, when he was still a young boy.
“I remember certain things in the recovery room. I was in total panic. I called my dad,” he told the court.
Le Scouarnec’s trial comes as activists are pushing to lift taboos that have long surrounded sexual abuse in France. The case builds on momentum generated by the highly publicised rape case of Gisèle Pélicot.
Pélicot was drugged and raped by her ex-husband and dozens of other men, who were convicted, with sentences ranging from three to 20 years in prison.
The four-month long trial in Vannes in western France will examine alleged rapes and other abuses committed in a 25-year period, between 1989 and 2014. The abuses were committed against 158 men and 141 women, who were on average aged 11 at the time.
The doctors sexually abused the boys and girls when they were alone in their hospital rooms.
Le Scouarnec had been convicted in 2005 for possessing and importing child sexual abuse material and sentenced to four months of suspended prison time. Despite that conviction, he was appointed as a hospital practitioner the following year.
Some child protection groups joined the proceedings as civil parties, saying they hope to toughen the legal framework to prevent such abuse.