Prosecutors say Joel Le Scouarnec abused and raped hundreds of people, most of whom were children, over a 25-year period. A former surgeon who allegedly raped and abused hundreds of young patients, many of whom were under anaesthetic, will be the subject of France’s largest ever child abuse trial later this month. Joel Le Scouarnec, 73, a once-respected surgeon who worked in regions across France, stands accused of assaulting or raping 299 people in a 25-year reign of terror, usually targeting his child patients while working in Brittany.

The surgeon is accused of detailing his rapes and assaults - and naming his victims - in depraved diaries discovered when his home was searched in 2017. Le Scouarnec has admitted to some but not all charges in the upcoming trial in Vannes, northwest France. In 2020, he was sentenced to 15 years behind bars in 2020 for the rape and sexual assault of four minors - including two of his nieces. In May 2017, Le Scouarnec was brought to the attention of French authorities for the first time after his six year-old neighbour in Jonzac, southwestern France, told her mother that Le Scouarnec exposed himself and molested her over the fence.

A thorough search of Le Scouarnec’s home followed, revealing twisted insight into the alleged mass rapist’s mind. Officers discovered detailed diaries chronologically listing and naming his victims over decades, disclosing the assaults which he had allegedly committed or wanted to commit across the several hospitals he had worked in, including in Loches, Vannes, Lorient, Quimperlé, and Jonzac. Police also found 300,000 images of child abuse images and pornography as they searched his home.

Le Scouarnec has claimed his diaries, which in multiple cases stated “I am a paedophile”, only detailed his “fantasies”. The indictment brought forward by the public prosecutor of Lorient, in Brittany, says the doctor felt “omnipotent” and was “flirting with danger” in a “calculated manner” as he allegedly carried out 300 acts against 299 people, French outlet Le Monde reported. Le Scouarnec’s strategy was to pass off his sexual violence as a professional gesture and target patients so young that they wouldn’t remember or understand what was happening, investigators said. He would take advantage of children as soon as he was alone with them in the hospital room, they added.

But the doctor would allegedly also target older children in the operating room, often when they were asleep or under anaesthesia, his diaries state. While some of his former patients have said they remember the surgeon touching them, many have no recollection of the assault as they were under anaesthetic when he abused them, the BBC reported. These victims were contacted by police and told that their names, alongside graphic descriptions of how they were abused, appeared in Le Scouarnec’s diaries.

Marie, one of the alleged victims who was assaulted in 1996 in the Sacré-Cœur clinic in Vannes, told France Bleu that she is “apprehensive” about the trial. “On the one hand, it has to be settled so that we can move on once and for all. But when we talk about Le Scouarnec, there are images that come back to me over and over again,” the mother-of-three, who was 10 at the time and is now 38, told the outlet.