“They knew”: the victims of the French pedophile surgeon blame the systemic failure

A French surgeon who will be tried for the violation or sexual aggression of almost 300 patients, most of them children, practiced for decades, despite a conviction for holding abusive images of children and colleagues sounding alarm, shows an AFP investigation.

Joel Le Scuarnec, 74, is already in prison, after a court of 2020 found him guilty of abuse of four children, including two of his grandchildren.

In a separate four-month process to start on February 24, he is facing statements that he had assaulted or raped 299 patients, most of them under a general anesthesia to a dozen hospitals between 1989 and 2014.

In total, 256 of the 299 victims were under 15, with the oldest and oldest 70 years.

The surgeon was never investigated during his career, despite a 2005 sentence for having sexual abusive images with children.

Investigators discovered only his alleged crimes after retiring in 2017, when a six -year -old girl accused of rape and police found countless abuse accounts in her journals.

The victims and lawyers of the rights of the child say that the case highlights the systemic failures that allowed them to repeatedly commit sexual crimes.

“How many people knew he was a pedophile and let him practice the drug in contact with the children?” One of the victims said AFP, under anonymous conditions.

“They knew and did nothing.”

“Asked him to resign”

They Scornec practiced in the western city of Lorient in 2004, when FBI alerted the French authorities that he was among hundreds in France, who consulted images of sexual abuse with online children.

A nearby Vannes court handed over a four -month prison suspended sentence.

But until then, the doctor has already gone to work in Quimperle, another city in the same region of Brittany.

Quimperle Hospital was struggling to recruit a new staff, and its maternity section, and the surgery department was threatened with the closure, said the current mayor of the city, Michael Quernez.

“The arrival of the new surgeon must have been a relief,” he said.

Scouarnec did not tell the managers about his conviction, but a practicing colleague, psychiatrist Thierry Bonvalot, heard about it from another colleague.

Bonvalot told the colleague AFP “he made it seem that it would not have been anything.”

“He said he was an alcoholic who was alone, whose wife did not want him and did not provide any proof of the conviction,” Bonvalot said.

“But then very quickly, other things began to draw my attention.”

First of all, Sciuarnec defended a radiologist at the hospital who was accused of raping female patients, Bonvalot said.

The man, Mohamed Frehat, will later be sentenced to 18 years in prison for violating and assaulting 32 patients, including eight minors.

On another occasion, Bonvalot, who also served as head of the hospital’s Board of Directors, had to ask Le Scouarnec about an operation that he performed on a young boy.

“He summarized the operation with so many sexual metaphors that I was shocked. He confessed that he was convicted of child pornography,” the psychiatrist said.

“I realized it was dangerous and I asked him to resign. He refused.”

Doctors vote

On June 14, 2006, in a letter seen by AFP, Bonvalot wrote to the hospital director, questioning his colleague’s ability to remain completely calm when treating young children “considering his” legal past “.

On July 19, he sent a copy of the letter to the Order of Physicians in the Finishing Department of Brittany. AFP saw the stamp indicating that the body received it and read it.

Bonvalot told AFP that it was also close to the mayor of the city, Daniel Le Bras, who was also an anesthetist at the same hospital.

“Le Bras said to me:” I will take care of it for this, “Bonvalot said.

Le Bras did not respond to an AFP request for comments.

Despite Bonvalot’s efforts, on August 1 in the same year, Le Texta became the head of surgery at the hospital.

As it is a routine in such promotions, the hospital management requested a copy of its criminal record and received an answer that stated that it is blank, according to documents from local and regional health agencies.

After receiving the letter from July, the Order of Physicians asked the Vannes Court a copy of the 2005 court decision against Le Scouarnec for holding abusive images.

The court sent it only on November 9, after repeated reminder, according to an E -mail seen by AFP.

The Order of Physicians then alerted the Social Directorate of Health and Social Finister, a local state authority.

The Directorate received a letter from the hospital director, on November 23, defending the chief surgeon as a “serious and competent” doctor, with “excellent relationships with both patients and their families, as well as with the staff”.

His arrival “allowed us to stabilize our surgery activities in a satisfactory way,” wrote the director, who has since died.

During a meeting on the Finishing Order of Medicians on December 14, 18 of 19 doctors decided not to sanction Scouarnec.

Have decided to leave the local health authority to deal with this issue.

The death of the patient

At the same time, Yvon Guillerm, the head of the Regional Hospital Agency Arch, began to investigate the hospital after an “unspecified complaint to the Prosecutor’s Office”, according to a letter of March 13, 2007, which he sent to Bernard Cheneviere, a high official ranking. of the Ministry of Health.

Guillerm tells them to investigators 10 years later that a female patient died on the table of operation of Le Sciuarnec and that death, combined with the last conviction of the doctor, was “in connection with”, according to a judicial document.

On March 14, 2007, Guillerm followed by sending a report to Ceneviiere, who stressed that he thought that they are outstanding them from a moral point of view.

He suggested that the Minister of Health should intervene directly and file a complaint to the National Order of Physicians.

But 12 days later, the Minister of Health was replaced in a reshuffle of the cabinet and never seems to have made any complaints for the medical body.

“Collective failure”

It is not clear what the arch -investigation found, but led to the closure of the Obstetrics and Surgery sections in Quimperle in June 2007.

A decade later, statements that Scouarnec raped or sexually assaulted more than 30 children at the hospital, including four months before closing, will appear.

The surgeon left Quimperle, working briefly in another city in Brittany, called Pontivy.

But then someone called the hospital to inform him about Le Toluarnec’s past and his director fired him, according to investigators.

In June 2008, Le Scouarnec moved to the south -Vest of France and started working at a hospital in the city of Jonzac. He told the director that he was investigated, but she ignored this.

He will work there for almost a decade until his retirement in 2017.

Frederic Benoist, a lawyer for the French Advocacy group at Vol by L’Efant (The Child’s Voice), said that Le Scouarnec was never prevented from practicing was the result of the “collective failure”.

Charity has filed a legal complaint for these failures “by endangering others,” he said.

The prosecutor in Lorient said he had started a preliminary investigation.