French Court to Sentence Former Surgeon for Decades of Child Abuse

A above French surgeon is accepted to be bedevilled to 20 years in bastille on Wednesday for the animal corruption of hundreds of patients mostly age-old beneath 15, as the better adolescent corruption balloon in French history ends.

Joël Le Scouarnec, 74, formed as a digestive surgeon in accessible and clandestine hospitals beyond Brittany and the west of France, generally operating on accouchement with appendicitis.

During the agonizing three-month balloon in Vannes, Brittany, he was accused of 111 rapes and 189 animal assaults amid 1989 and 2014 at a dozen hospitals. Many of the accouchement he assaulted were beneath anaesthesic or alive up afterwards operations. Some were assaulted in their hospital beds. The boilerplate age of the adolescent victims was 11.

Le Scouarnec eventually accepted all the assaults in court, adage in his final statement: “I am not allurement the cloister for leniency.” During the balloon he said: “I was a surgeon who benefited from my cachet to advance children, I don’t abjure that.” Psychological assessments begin that he remained acutely dangerous.

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Le Scouarnec’s lawyer, Maxime Tessier, told the court: “He is absolutely guilty.” Tessier said the French medical apple and politicians charge now apprentice acquaint from “the above disfunction of our bloom system”, which had not chock-full Le Scouarnec’s decades of abuse.

French Surgeon Who Abused Children for Decades Faces Final Sentencing Amid Outcry Over System Failures

Le Scouarnac was flagged to the French authorities by the FBI in 2004 for examination adolescent corruption adumbration on the aphotic web. In 2005, he was bedevilled in a French cloister of owning adolescent corruption adumbration and accustomed a four-year abeyant bastille sentence, but the cloister did not aphorism that the surgeon should never assignment with children.

He connected to accretion celebrated jobs in hospitals beyond the country until his retirement in 2017, systematically abusing accouchement who had undergone surgery.

Victims’ groups and adolescent aegis campaigners said the balloon had aloft the affair of austere failings by the accompaniment and officials. They said there should be a abounding government appraisal of how the surgeon had been able to abide alive and abusing for so long.

The 20-year bastille book is the best Le Scouarnec can accept for aggravated rape. In France, sentences are not added together, clashing in the US area Le Scouarnec would accept been confined for 2,000 years, according to the accompaniment prosecutor, Stéphane Kellenberger.

Le Scouarnec is already in bastille afterwards actuality bedevilled in December 2020 to 15 years for raping and sexually assaulting four children.

Kellenberger said there was acceptable to be an added balloon afterwards the prosecutor’s appointment opened an analysis to acquisition added victims whose corruption is not allotment of the accepted case.

“You were the devil and sometimes the devil is dressed in a white coat,” Kellenberger told Le Scouarnec.

Le Scouarnec, whose 2005 confidence was not automatically flagged to hospitals area he worked, was active at a alternation of bounded hospitals that depended on accepting surgeons of his ability in adjustment to break open.

In one instance, Le Scouarnec had told Michèle Cals, the then-director of the Jonzac hospital in western France, about his 2005 conviction, adage he had alone beheld adolescent corruption adumbration because he was agitated about amid from his wife. Cals accustomed no chat from her medical bureaucracy not to appoint him, so she appointed him in 2008. “We were in charge of surgeons,” Cals told the court.

Cals said Le Scouarnec’s 2005 sentencing had not banned him from actuality about minors. She told the cloister she “didn’t dig abysmal enough” and recognised there had been a “disfunction” on her part, and her superiors.

Thierry Bonvalot, a hospital analyst who had approved to accession the anxiety about Le Scouarnec’s 2005 confidence at one hospital area the surgeon after worked, said there had been a medical “fiasco”.

Joël Belloc, the arch of the Adjustment of Physicians in Charente-Maritime, area Le Scouarnec accomplished his career, was asked if he could accept done things differently. He said: “With hindsight, it’s accessible we could have.” He added that “perceptions were different” at the time.

About 20 victims of Le Scouarnec and their ancestors staged a beef alfresco the cloister beforehand this ages over what they alleged the “silence of the political world”. They said a government board should be set up to abode the acquaint from the Le Scouarnec case and anticipate annihilation agnate accident again.

“We are afraid to see that this balloon of the aeon is not a watershed accident in the eyes of the government and, added broadly, the accepted public,” the accumulation said.

Manon Lemoine, now 36, one of the victims who Le Scouarnec accepted to raping back she was 11, said: “They’re aggravating to accomplish him out to be a monster, but this monster is the association that created him and accustomed him to continue.”