A former surgeon went on trial charged with raping or sexually assaulting almost 300 patients, most of them children, with some of them being unconscious.
A lawyer for the 74-year-old accused told French media on Monday his client admitted to the “vast majority” of the charges.
If convicted , the accused faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.
French daily Le Figaro cited a person familiar with the case calling it “undoubtedly the biggest case of child sex crime in France, or at least the case involving the most victims sexually assaulted or raped by a single man.”
Defendant already in jail
The trial will be held in public, but seven days of testimony from victims will be held behind closed doors.
The defendant is already in jail after being found guilty separately in 2020 of abusing four children, including two of his nieces.
French law does not allow sentences to be added together even when there are multiple victims.
In the current trial, the defendant faces allegations that he assaulted or raped 299 patients between 1989 and 2014.
Many of the victims were waking up from anaesthetic or during post-op checkups.
More than 250 of the victims were under 15.
Investigators uncovered his alleged crimes after he retired in 2017, when a six-year-old girl accused him of rape and police found accounts of abuse in his diaries.
Similarities with Pelicot case
The suspect was practicing in the western town of Lorient in Brittany in 2004 when the US FBI alerted French authorities that he was among hundreds in France who had been consulting sex abuse images of children online.
He practiced until his retirement, despite a 2005 sentence for owning sexually abusive images of children.
This comes just two months after was convicted of enlisting dozens of strangers to rape his heavily sedated wife Gisele, who has since divorced him and earned notoriety
Like in the Pelicot case, the accused sex offender documented his actions, noting his victims’ names, ages and addresses and the nature of the abuse.
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