The former surgeon who pleaded guilty to sexually abusing 299 people, most of them children, was sentenced to the maximum 20 years in prison by a French court on Wednesday, in what is considered the largest pedophilia case in the country’s history.
“It was predation on victims the most vulnerable, when they were sick in the hospital,” Judge Aude Buresi told the courthouse in Vannes, a coastal town in Brittany where the majority of the abuse took place. She also barred the former surgeon, Joël Le Scouarnec, from ever practicing medicine or having contact with minors and said he must serve two-thirds of his sentence before being eligible for parole.
The trial revealed large cracks in the legal and health administrative bureaucracies that failed to take seriously one clear warning sign: In 2005, Mr. Le Scouarnec was convicted of downloading child abuse imagery and given a four-month suspended sentence by a French court. Still, he was permitted to continue treating children unsupervised until his arrest in 2017.
Three years later, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for raping and sexually assaulting four children. Wednesday’s terms supersede that, since there are no consecutive prison sentences in France.
The latest trial came amid a growing reckoning in France over sexual abuse, with the numbers of victims reporting to the police surging, cases crowding the courts and new #MeToo movements erupting at a dizzying pace.
Many of the victims felt the trial of Mr. Le Scouarnec was drowned out by that chorus and did not prompt the public outcry and political responses they had hoped for. After the verdict, many who had gathered outside the courthouse expressed disappointment, saying they had hoped that Mr. Le Scouarnec would receive an exemplary sentence breaking new legal ground, given the scale of his crimes.
“What kind of message does it send that you can rape one, 10 or in this case 300 people and you get the maximum sentence of 20 years?” asked Gabriel Trouvé, a victim who agreed to be identified. “I mean, this guy could have maybe raped one person and it would have been the same.”
A former gastric surgeon, Mr. Le Scouarnec, now 74, committed the sexual abuse from 1989 to 2014, while working in nine clinics and hospitals in western and central France. The victims’ average age was 11. Many were sedated or recovering from operations during the abuse, and had no memory of it.
The crimes were discovered during a police search of Mr. Le Scouarnec’s home, after he exposed himself to a 6-year-old girl living next door and her parents reported him.
There, the police found computers and more than two dozen hard drives filled with child sexual abuse imagery, and hundreds of pages of the doctor’s personal diaries detailing the sexual abuse he had committed against individual children. They also found two spreadsheets that listed many of the victims’ names, ages, addresses and synopses of the abuse they had suffered — sexual assault and rape, mostly related to penetration with fingers.
Heading into the trial, Mr. Le Scouarnec denied some of the charges, saying that some of his writing had been fantasy and other acts were part of medical procedures. But a month into the trial, he stunned the courtroom by admitting to having done everything he wrote about, and perhaps more.
“For 30 years I acted without any qualms and with a single objective, to commit sexual assaults as often as I could,” he said, standing in the dock where he appeared day after day over three months, often staring blankly at the room.
After his confession, the long-anticipated trial took a different turn, shifting its attention to the victims, many of whom had been unaware that they were abused.
Now adults, victims spoke about their reaction to the shattering news from the police. They recounted feeling abandoned, left on their own to deal with an intimate crime they did not remember. They described shock, fury, anxiety and feelings of dissociation.
“People need to realize that it was the police who reached out to the victims, and not the other way around,” said Mr. Trouvé’s mother, Christine, who attended much of the trial with her son. “It was a double shock.”
Some separated from their partners over the revelations. Some experienced depression and stopped working. Two died by suicide.
About 100 did not participate in the trial at all. Most of those who did gave their testimony from behind closed doors or sat silently in the courtroom as their cases were examined. Some sent lawyers in their stead.
“I am getting worse, I have been on sick leave since 2024 and I am currently in a psychiatric hospital,” one victim, now a young woman living in Belgium, wrote in a letter that was read aloud by her lawyer. “I feel very helpless, like I don’t have access to what happened to me.”
She said she still struggled to identify as a victim. “I feel like I should take an interest in the trial but I can’t,” she wrote. “Coming here would make it too real.”
Few of those who testified agreed to be publicly identified. Large support dogs lumbered between them in an overflow room near the courthouse, where they watched the proceedings on a screen.
As the trial went on, several who had been reluctant to attend began to come forward, forming what Ms. Trouvé called a “family of struggle.”
While many talked about the trauma of the discovery, some said it offered a long-sought-after explanation for their broken childhoods and troubled adolescence that bled into their adult lives.
“Learning about the rape allowed me to understand a lot of things,” a nurse, now 36, told the court. “Why I felt different. Why I ran away from home when I was 10. Why I was bullied at school. Why I stuttered.”
Some victims said the revelations had rocked them just as they were becoming parents, themselves. “Two months after learning the news from the police, I found out that I was going to be a father for the first time,” said the nurse, his voice breaking. “I became very afraid of passing it on.”
Most victims said they now had a hard time trusting doctors. One refused to be sedated for foot surgery, she told the court.
And they spoke of the collateral damage to their families, particularly their parents, who often carried their own guilt for not having protected their children from the surgeon, or having ignored the warning signs and even dismissed their children’s reports of being touched.
“Our life became a nightmare,” said the father of a soldier, now 22, who was among Mr. Le Scouarnec’s last victims. His wife, who has since died of cancer, never got over the news, he said, tearing up.
“In the evenings she would cry, she repeated the same thing over and over again — that she had been waiting just outside, just a few doors from where it happened,” he told the courtroom. “That she had told her son, as they took him to the operating room, that everything would be OK.”
The few victims who remembered the abuse spoke about not being believed by their parents and internalizing self-doubt.
“I remember a person with glasses and a white coat entering the room in a strange way,” one man told the court. The doctor then asked him to lift his legs, penetrated him with his fingers, and touched his genitals.
At the time, he raised the issue with his father, who suggested that it was part of the medical procedure. “So then I lived with it, telling myself it was normal,” he said, “but it always stayed in a corner of my head.”
He struggled with trust and intimacy, he told the court, chuckling awkwardly. “Laughter replaced the stutter,” he explained. “It’s a way to go through difficult conversations more easily.”
Less than two weeks before the verdict, about 60 of the victims created a collective to draw attention to the case and demand political responses so that children are better protected from predatory medical practitioners.
Though Judge Buresi said Mr. Le Scouarnec had been receiving treatment since 2017 and understood the gravity of his crimes, few victims felt the same way.
From the glass dock, Mr. Le Scouarnec delivered the same responses about each case in a flat, emotionless tone. He acknowledged the abuse. But he remembered very few of his victims.
“I ask for your forgiveness,” he repeated mechanically.
When one 26-year-old victim confronted Mr. Le Scouarnec from the stand during the trial,her words captured the feelings of many victims in the room.
“You ruined my life,” she shouted, trembling with anger. “Allow me to doubt the sincerity of your apologies for things you don’t even remember.”
Catherine Porter is an international reporter for The Times, covering France. She is based in Paris.
Ségolène Le Stradic is a reporter and researcher covering France.
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