At 7am every morning, the bells of Saint-Gervais church ring out across the main square of the sleepy French town of Jonzac, summoning the faithful to Mass.
In the south west, close to the world-famous brandy-producing region of Cognac, the town offers its 3,500 inhabitants a quiet life and everyone greets each other with an obligatory ‘Bonjour’.
Everyone except Joel Le Scouarnec, a surgeon once employed at the local hospital, that is. He would do his utmost to stay in the shadows and found Jonzac’s charming conventions a vexatious intrusion.
The only time neighbours saw him was when he headed to his car before driving off to work and when he returned home.
Yet, Le Scouarnec is accused of committing acts of such unimaginable horror that Jonzac residents are trying to forget the sinister doctor ever walked among them. His trial, one of the biggest sex abuse cases in French legal history, begins on Monday in Vannes, Brittany.
At the terraced property he called home for 11 years, the surgeon – then in his 60s – kept more than 30 years’ of meticulous confessional logs, in which he described, in graphic detail, the sexual abuse of at least 299 boys and girls.
Le Scouarnec has denied at least some of the assaults and rapes outlined there, claiming his writings were just ‘fantasies’. Many victims are said to have been molested while still under anaesthetic after surgery at hospitals across France where Le Scouarnec worked. The average age of his alleged victims was 11. The youngest was four.
In the diary entries – in the form of both handwritten journals and computer files – Le Scouarnec regularly described himself as a ‘paedophile’, kept a graphic record of exactly how he had abused each child, including their name, the date on which the abuse occurred, and the location (‘in the office’, ‘in my room’).
Some of the entries were even addressed to the victims, with phrases such as ‘Dear little one’. Every year, on his birthday, he would record his age and write: ‘I am a paedophile and I am proud of it.’
The double life of the man – described by one lawyer representing ten of his victims as a ‘true Jekyll and Hyde’ – only came to light when he brazenly assaulted the six-year-old daughter of his next-door neighbours eight years ago and they contacted police.
During the subsequent raid on his Jonzac home, officers found up to 70 life-size child dolls which the surgeon was using for his own sexual gratification hidden underneath the floorboards.
They also discovered videos of Le Scouarnec wearing wigs or dresses, playing with the dolls, which he wrote about lovingly in his journal, as well as the diaries.
When the hundreds named in his records were contacted by police, they were appalled to learn that Le Scouarnec could have been stopped in 2005, when he was convicted of possessing child pornography. It followed a sting organised by America’s FBI.
But investigators failed to discover his diaries, so he got off with a four-month suspended sentence, moved to a different part of France and landed another job as a surgeon. Now aged 74, Le Scouarnec is languishing in jail, having been sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment in 2020 for the assault of his two nieces, a patient and his neighbour’s daughter.
For the new alleged victims –identified after the discovery of the journals and the media frenzy surrounding his earlier trial, which was held in private during the Covid pandemic – the case is about holding people to account.
For Le Scouarnec’s actions are said to have driven patients to suicide, sparked drug and alcohol dependency in others and destroyed relationships.
The victims and their families want the authorities, who they say should have stopped him earlier, to answer for their shortcomings.
Coming just two months after the sentencing of Dominique Pelicot, dubbed the ‘monster of Avignon’ for inviting 50 men to rape his wife, Gisele, while she was sedated, it represents an unwelcome return to the spotlight for France’s attitude towards consent and sexual assault.
By speaking to a number of Le Scouarnec’s alleged victims, to lawyers in the case and to neighbours, the Mail has built up a shocking portrait of a man his ex-wife described as ‘possessed by the devil’.
David Boureau was eight when he went into Clinique La Fontaine hospital in Loches, in the Loire Valley, for minor surgery.
It was 1984 and Le Scouarnec had only recently qualified. Throughout his life, Mr Boureau has always suspected something untoward had taken place at the hospital, and he has long struggled with intimacy.
‘I’ve always had this sense of discomfort about relationships, as soon as it gets intimate. I have some sort of mental block,’ he told the Mail. ‘This mental block has ruined my life.’
It was the coverage of Le Scouarnec’s 2020 trial that ‘set something off in me’, he said. When he called his mother, she confirmed he was treated by Le Scouarnec.
Mr Boureau, like several other people named in Le Scouarnec’s diaries, has had hypnotherapy in recent years in a bid to free memories that had been locked away.
He had long recalled someone standing over him in the recovery room after the operation, whispering that it would ‘all be OK’.
He even remembered the doctor’s watch and his genitals being touched. He also believes he was given a second dose of anaesthetic so the surgeon could spend more time alone with him.
Mr Boureau is one of about 15 alleged victims who have taken out a civil case against Le Scouarnec as their cases fall outside France’s 30-year statute of limitations for reporting serious crime. His lawyer, Francesca Satta, says this represents a ‘double punishment’ as they had been ‘sexually assaulted or raped’ but then ‘not… recognised as victims’.
Now 50 and a social worker for people with disabilities, Mr Boureau, who is speaking out for the first time ahead of the trial, says he wants to ‘look [Le Scouarnec] in the eye. I’m not scared. Now is the time to speak up.’
Another victim, Mathis Vinet, was ten in 2007 when he was taken to the casualty department at a hospital in Quimperle, Brittany, by his grandfather, Roland Vinet. The boy had stomach pains and was vomiting uncontrollably.
By now, Le Scouarnec was a specialist abdominal surgeon and he decided Mathis should stay overnight for observation.
After the boy returned home, his grandparents noticed a deterioration in his behaviour. First, he would constantly take showers. Then, in his teenage years, he became more aggressive.
At 15, Mathis left home and developed addictions to alcohol and drugs. In 2018, his family were contacted by the police and told Mathis’s name appeared in Le Scouarnec’s diaries of abuse – with the dates matching the boy’s time at the hospital.
In one entry, shared with the Mail, Le Scouarnec said he ‘couldn’t remember the Christian name of this pretty little boy of ten but what mattered was that he was alone in his room.’ Next, he described a sex attack in detail.
The following day, the surgeon wrote that ‘in his room in Quimperle the little boy from the day before was still alone. When I entered he said nothing.’ He then described molesting him again.
Mathis was interviewed by police in the wake of the diary revelations and picked out Le Scouarnec out of a photo line-up of medics at the hospital at the time.
He said he had suffered flashbacks of the abuse and had memories of the doctor pulling down his underpants. (Unlike many of the other victims, Mathis wasn’t given an anaesthetic.)
Mr Vinet said Mathis struggled to come to terms with what he had learned from the diaries. Tragically, in 2021, he died of a drug overdose. He was just 24.
‘The very day he died we said we’re going to continue the fight,’ his grandmother, Maury Vinet, said. ‘Yes, Mathis is no longer here but we told him that we would always be with him.’
One unusual feature of the Le Scouarnec case is the range in age of his victims and the fact they are of both sexes. Of the 299 victims on the indictment, which spans January 1989 to January 2014, 158 are men and 141 are women.
One hundred and eleven of the charges are aggravated rape and the rest are aggravated sexual assault – ‘aggravated’ because the offences were against children.
Amelie Leveque, now 42, was operated on for appendicitis by Le Scouarnec in 1991 at a hospital in Loches in the Loire. She believes she was raped by him.
‘I always knew something abnormal had happened,’ she said, adding she had come forward following coverage of his 2020 trial to encourage ‘all victims to file a complaint’, citing the example of Gisele Pelicot.
Like David Boureau, Ms Leveque instructed Ms Satta, who confirmed that her name was mentioned in Le Scouarnec’s infamous diaries.
‘Right away, I said to myself: ‘Here it is, this is what happened to me.’ It explained so many strange things in my life, like my phobia of hospitals… my eating disorders, my life in dotted lines since the operation,’ she says.
Le Scouarnec, one of three children, was born in a Paris suburb to a cabinet-maker father who moved into banking, and a mother who was a concierge before quitting to bring up the children.
He is said to have shown an interest in medicine aged just ten, qualifying as a doctor in 1981. He later specialised in gynaecological and abdominal surgery.
While studying medicine, he met his wife, Marie-France, then a nursing assistant, and they had three sons. The family moved house regularly as Le Scouarnec took up posts in different hospitals from Brittany to Nantes and later to the south-west of France.
He began keeping his diary in the late 1980s and his alleged victims now have questions about how much his wife knew of his activities. In one diary entry, from 1997, he wrote that ‘it has been nine months since she discovered that I am a paedophile’.
Le Scouarnec then blithely writes that his wife’s discovery has prompted him to ‘start smoking again’. He adds that he had stopped cigarettes to concentrate ‘all my free time and money on my paedophile activities.’
In another entry, from around the same period, he writes that his wife ‘killed my little Breton girl’. Court documents suggest that this was her destroying one of his life-size dolls.
In 2004, Le Scouarnec’s diaries could have been found when an FBI operation identified men who had paid for extreme child pornography from a website.
The doctor was one of three arrested in France. He was handed a four-month suspended prison sentence but soon got a job as a surgeon in Quimperle.
Following his conviction, Marie-France moved out of the family home but was reportedly being paid thousands of pounds a month by her husband. ‘He paid for her silence,’ Ms Satta claims.
When a hospital colleague read about his conviction in the local press and raised concerns with the regional medical association, it was decided he had not violated the medical code of ethics and no sanctions were imposed.
In 2008, Le Scouarnec secured a full-time surgical post in Jonzac. The director of the hospital was reportedly aware of his conviction but hired him anyway because there had been ‘no physical assault’, according to documents obtained by Radio France.
It was in this sleepy town that Le Scouarnec lived alone, hoarding his dolls, compiling his horrifying diaries and continuing to act with impunity until 2017, when, naked in his garden, he reached over the fence and molested the six-year-old girl next door.
Due to his conviction for that attack and his long jail term, there is little chance of elderly Le Scouarnec ever being released.
But at the court in Vannes on Monday, 299 other victims will seek justice at a trial that will cost three million euros. Such is the scale of Le Scouarnec’s alleged depravity, the indictment is 745 pages long.
Hundreds will deliver harrowing testimony of the abuse they claim to have suffered at the hands of the surgeon, once thought a pillar of his community.
Confronting the doctor who has haunted their nightmares for so long will be painful for all of them, but many clearly take the view that seeing him old, frail and shorn of his power in the dock may make it all worthwhile.
Additional reporting: Tim Finan