Joël Le Scouarnec, a former surgeon now 73 years old, is fired for 300 sexual assaults and rapes on 299 victims over a period of 35 years.
745 pages which detail the 300 sexual assaults and rapes for which Joël Le Scouarnec is referred to the Morbihan criminal court. An investigating judge issued his indictment order on September 27 requesting a trial for the former digestive surgeon accused of having caused 299 victims during 35 years of professional practice, between January 1989 and January 2014.
The dismissal of Joël Le Scouarnec is, however, not definitive. Given the number of victims, not all have yet received notification of the charging order.
These parties, like the defense of Joël Le Scouarnec, have the possibility of appealing this decision. If there is no appeal, the trial could be held in the first half of 2025.
Victims under the age of 20
Without wanting to make this extraordinary file a collection of “cold statistics” or simple “numbers”, the Lorient public prosecutor provided data illustrating the scale of this affair. The average age of the 299 victims at the time of the events was 11 years old. More generally, 285 victims out of 299 were under 20 years old, 256 under 15 years old.
These victims, 158 men and 141 women, were mostly identified after the discovery of notebooks and word processing files in Joël Le Scouarnec’s computer in which the surgeon detailed acts of sexual assault and rape committed on patients, very often asleep.
The facts were, for some, revealed to them when they were summoned to the police station or the gendarmerie following the discovery of the surgeon’s notebooks as part of the investigation into the rape of a niece, a little neighbor and touching another niece and a patient.
Joël Le Scouarnec was sentenced to 15 years of criminal imprisonment for these facts. A verdict against which he appealed.
“Everything has been done” for the identification of the victims
During the preliminary investigation and then the judicial investigation, Joël Le Scouarnec, 73, admitted “in its entirety” the alleged facts, explaining his “mode of operation”, his “motivations for his actions” and its modes of operation so as not to be discovered.
The Lorient prosecutor mentioning the “concealment strategies” of Joël Le Scouarnec who preferred to “postpone certain actions or even give up rather than be confused”.
The investigating judge dismissed Joël Le Scouarnec for 111 acts of aggravated rape and 289 aggravated sexual assaults. Throughout the preliminary investigation and then during the judicial investigation, everything was done” to identify all of the victims, insists the prosecutor Stéphane Kellenberger. The magistrate also specifies that “investigations made it possible to calm certain victims which were not linked to this procedure.
