'Why did nobody stop him?' France in shock as trial of alleged child abuse doctor begins

Joel Le Scouarnec worked in hospitals for years following a 2004 conviction over child sex abuse images. Kim Willsher talks to family members as surgeon faces court over 299 young victims

- Kim Willsher

When two gendarmes knocked on her door in 2019, Marie had no idea that she was about to find herself at the dark heart of one of the world's biggest child abuse cases.

The French mother of three, now 38, was shocked when the officers told her she had been the victim of Joël Le Scouarnec, a surgeon and an alleged serial paedophile accused of raping and sexually abusing hundreds of children.

She recalled asking them: "Was I touched?"

"No, madame. Raped," they replied.

"I couldn't think they were talking about me. It's like cancer, you think it only happens to other people," she said. "And how could I have forgotten that?"

Faced with the blank in Marie's memory, the police showed her handwritten notes in Le Scouarnec's "black books" from 1996, when she was 10 years old and he removed her appendix.

"There was my family name, my first name, age, the address of my parents, everything he did and how he felt. It was disgusting. The word 'raped' was hard enough, but here were these obscene phrases of what happened."

Le Scouarnec, now 74, will appear in court tomorrow accused of the rape or sexual abuse of 299 patients - 158 male and 141 female and the majority under the age of 15 while they were under anaesthetic or recovering from operations between 1989 and 2014. The average age of his alleged victims was 11.

The surgeon, who entitled one document "my paedophile letters", denies penetration with his penis. Under French law, rape is an act of sexual penetration by any body part or object.

During the four-month trial, local health and hospital authorities will also face difficult questions over why the surgeon, employed in a dozen public and private medical establishments across Brittany and western France, was allowed to continue practising for almost a decade after a conviction for accessing online child abuse images.