A 74-year-old surgeon who is believed to be France’s most prolific child abuser has pleaded guilty to sexually abusing 299 of his patients.Â
Joel Le Scouarnec has been on trial charged with assaulting or raping the patients, many while under anaesthesia or waking up from operations, between 1989 and 2014.
In total, he’s accused of 300 separate offences – 111 rapes and 189 sexual assaults – which took place in more than a dozen hospitals.
The average age of his alleged victims was just 11 years old, with an almost equal number of boys and girls.
Read more: How did Le Scouarnec carry out abuse unchecked for decades?
He has been on trial since early March in one of France‘s largest child sex abuse cases.
Until now, he has admitted his guilt on a case-by-case basis during the legal proceedings.
He is serving a jail sentence, having been found guilty in 2020 of raping and sexually assaulting four young girls.
Le Scouarnec kept detailed records in notebooks and diaries of the abuse he inflicted.
Le Scouarnec in a courtroom sketch. File pic: Reuters
He was never investigated during his career despite being sentenced in 2005 for owning sexually abusive images of children.
He was only apprehended after he retired in 2017 when his six-year-old neighbour told her mother he had sexually abused her while she was playing in the garden of her home, in the town of Jonzac in southwest France.
When the police searched Le Scouarnec’s house after this, they found 300,000 indecent photos and videos of children, 70 child-sized dolls – some of which were chained up – wigs and hundreds of notebooks and diaries detailing his acts of abuse.
