If the facts are true, it would be the biggest scandal of pedophilia that France has known. Joel Le Scouarnec, a surgeon who practiced in the city of Jonzac, Charente-Maritime, is implicated for acts of pedophilia on nearly 200 victims. The case was revealed Monday by the Charente Libre .
"Unsustainable writings"
It all starts in spring 2017, when a 10-year-old girl accuses her neighbor, a surgeon at Jonzac hospital, of having sexually assaulted her in her garden. The gendarmerie places the man in custody and searches his home. There, the investigators make a disturbing discovery: dolls hidden under the floor, wigs, photos, sex objects and notebooks. In these hundreds of pages of diaries, kept since the 1990s, the doctor tells what he would have inflicted on children and his fantasies. More than 200 names of children were found over the pages, all potential victims. He allegedly assaulted them during their stay in the hospital, sometimes even when they were waking up.
"Unsustainable" writing, as evidenced by the lawyer of one of the families. "He considers the child as a sexual object," she says to the regional daily. One of the victims, whom the newspaper contacted, did not suspect anything. He then recounts the disgust he felt when discovering the case, and decided to file a complaint.
Incarcerated since 2017
Given the magnitude of the case, the training has been going on for almost two years in the utmost discretion. From these notebooks, the investigators tried to find the victims of the doctor specialized in digestive surgery. But the facts sometimes go back as much as 20 years, since the doctor, who is now 60 years old, did not practice in Jonzac, but also in Brittany and Touraine.
Joël Le Scouarnec has been incarcerated in Saintes prison since 2017 and is expected to appear before the Assize Court for two rapes committed on little girls - the daughter of his neighbor but also a member of his family - and for three attacks. sex on a young patient. In 2005, the doctor had already been sentenced by the Criminal Court of Vannes to four months suspended sentence and a fine of 20,000 euros for pornographic images. "The testimonials in the notebook correspond more to fantasies than to reality," says his side the surgeon's lawyer. The investigation will have to determine it.