This is the testimony of a 6-year-old girl who ended Joël Le Scouarnec's pedophile career in April 2017. The little girl confides to her parents that the neighboring "bad guy" showed her her "hairy dick". His parents file a complaint. While searching the surgeon's home in Jonzac, the gendarmes found three hard disks and a USB key. Photos and accounts of sexual assault and rape of minors. In questioning, Joël Le Scouarnec confesses to having "abused little girls for years and years". This first trial concerned four victims: her little neighbor, two nieces and a patient hospitalized in 1993.
"It is first of all the story of an uncle who raped his nieces", explains Maître Delphine Driguez who represents the two daughters of Joël Le Scouarnec's sister. Two young women now aged 29 and 34 who wish to remain anonymous and whom we will call Aurélie and Hélèna. They underwent the repeated attacks of the surgeon in their childhood in the 90s and will constitute civil parties at the hearing. "It is then the story of a family omerta", denounces their lawyer.
"He kept telling me it was a secret between us"
It was in his immediate circle, in the family circle that Joël Le Scouarnec, father of three boys began his career as a child criminal. His first victim is the daughter of his sister-in-law. Uncle pretext of piano lessons to assault the little girl: "He kept telling me that it was a secret between us," she recalls. "I never talked about what he had done to me. My family comes from a working class environment, he has a social class which makes him admired by all". During her audition, the niece of the couple Le Scouarnec evokes with horror a night when he abused her while her parents were sleeping in the same room. Today the facts are prescribed, but the forties will still testify at the trial. In audition, Joel Le Scouarnec spontaneously spoke of this niece as "the trigger" of her attraction for little girls. After her, he explains to the investigating judge, "it was a rehearsal with the other children".
During the same period, at the end of the 1980s, Joël Le Scouarnec attacked another young girl whom his wife regularly looked after. The attacks and the rapes lasted several years. For her too, the facts are now prescribed. Just like the daughter of a couple of friends of the Le Scouarnec couple, barely 5 years old. "I do not remember threats or someone violent," she explains to the gendarmes. "I rather felt in retrospect that he was manipulating me that he was presenting what he was doing as a game."
"I really want my aunt because I feel like she was protecting him"
In the 90s, Joël Le Scouarnec attacked Aurélie and Hélèna - borrowed names - the two daughters of his own sister. They are barely 4-5 years old. "Around the age of 9, when Hélèna, the youngest, succeeds in distinguishing good from evil, she confides in her mother saying that she does not want to go to this dinner with this uncle who does things to them ", explains his lawyer. "The mother has no idea of notifying the authorities, she will try to resolve this within the family." The mother then talks to her brother who recognizes the facts, she makes him swear to treat himself. It won't go any further.
The wife Le Scouarnec claims to have "fallen from the clouds in 2004" when her husband was arrested for consultation of child pornography images and videos. One of the three sons attended the search. Nothing is said to the other two so as not to "clutter them with that". From this date, the couple separated but remained united by the bonds of marriage. "For religious reasons," she says, as he talks more about financial reasons. JoëL Le Scouarnec also claims that his wife had suspicions as early as 1996. His nieces are convinced of it, she was aware: "I really want my aunt because I feel she was protecting him," says Aurélie to the investigating judge.
The magistrate was surprised that even after the conviction of Joël Le Scouarnec in 2005, his wife had taken no measures to protect the children of the family. Not even his own little girl. Heard by the gendarmes, the eldest son of the Le Scouarnec couple was dizzy. "My daughter was the age of the little girls my father was attracted to, and suddenly he could have attacked her (…) He destroyed our family."
"I will rebuild everything and resume the thread of my pedophile sexual activities"
In the diary he keeps very scrupulously, Joël Le Scouarnec writes in April 1996 "A cataclysm has come to strike me: she (his wife, note) knows that I am a pedophile. And in my irrational fear i I destroyed without thinking and irremediably precious documents: the list of all the little girls and boys with whom I have abused for 10 years (…) Fortunately, I spared the photos I took of Aurélie and Héléna and of their childish vulvas. The surgeon then makes a promise: "But to evoke the past is useless, I will reconstruct everything and now resume the thread of my pedophile sexual activities".
The investigators found all of his private books dated from 1996 to 2017. Word documents of around a hundred pages in which, the surgeon reports daily the attacks he is engaged in by disclosing the identities of the children he abuse. At the terrifying rate of twenty new small victims each year.
"The year 2004 ends in the greatest disarray," writes Joël Le Scouarnec after being placed in police custody. "I will now be listed as a pedophile, which I do not deny, however. What will happen in 2005? I am a little apprehensive." His conviction in 2005 will not change his behavior. Justice suspects him to have made more than 350 victims in 30 years, the investigation is still in progress under the direction of the public prosecutor's office of Lorient which centralizes more than 200 complaints. Which will be the subject of a second trial in a few years.