Hidden Monsters

J oël Le Scouarnec, now 74, was convicted in 2005 of accessing child-porn websites. Le Scouarnec, a gastric surgeon, paid for child porn on a dark-web Russian site, an international FBI investigation found. He was arrested and received a four-month suspended sentence — but he was allowed to continue his professional practice because, at the time, his hospital was understaffed. So began a life of impunity.

In 2006, Le Scouarnec was reported by a colleague to l’Ordre des médicins, a professional network of doctors. The Ministry of Health was informed of the report and of Le Scouarnec’s criminal record, and it did nothing. When Le Scouarnec transferred hospitals in 2008 to the Jonzac Hospital, he notified the hospital director of his 2005 conviction. The director did nothing.

All the while, from 1989 to 2014, Le Scouarnec was sexually abusing his patients at clinics throughout France. The monster was caught only in April 2017, when his neighbor’s six-year-old daughter reported that Le Scouarnec had exposed himself and assaulted her through a damaged garden fence. Police then searched Le Scouarnec’s home, where they found more than 300,000 images of child sex abuse and diaries, recording the details of his sexual abuse of patients.

Many of Le Scouarnec’s victims were identified from his personal diaries. Police found spreadsheets that contained the victims’ names and ages as well as details of their abuse, which ranged from assault to rape. The average age of his victims was eleven. At first Le Scouarnec denied some of the details of his written accounts and brushed off some of the assaults as fantasies. About a month into his trial, though, he recanted the denial and admitted to everything he had written: “For 30 years I acted without any qualms and with a single objective, to commit sexual assaults as often as I could,” he told the court.

There’s no telling how many of Le Scouarnec’s 299 victims (and those are only the ones police know of) could have been saved from sexual assault if anyone — at any time — had acknowledged, reprimanded, or suspended the surgeon for his prior conviction. Knowing what they know now, Le Scouarnec’s former employers would have taken his 2005 conviction seriously enough to suspend or fire him. Most officials who could have stopped the abuse are now regretful; some officials who knew about Le Scouarnec’s prior conviction seem to be in denial.

What could have been done? The French court that handed Le Scouarnec a suspended sentence in 2005 for his child-porn conviction didn’t require him to undergo psychological therapy, as it had other perpetrators, the New York Times reported. Under French law, judicial authorities were required to “promptly notify” Le Scouarnec’s clinic after he was convicted, the Times also reported. The court did not. Thierry Bonvalot, the aforementioned colleague who reported Le Scouarnec, was reportedly tipped off by the court and wrote a letter to the head of Le Scouarnec’s hospital questioning whether the surgeon “could remain calm while interacting with young patients.” When an official oversight board was forwarded the letter, François Simon, one of the board members, met with Le Scouarnec to ask about his conviction. As the Times reports, “Le Scouarnec described it as a blip after having split up with his wife. He said he had fallen into depression, had been drinking and scrolling through pornographic websites, and had gone to ones involving children ‘by accident.’”

“I took him at his word,” Simon said.

Hierarchical disorganization within France’s medical system meant that Le Scouarnec’s conviction went formally unnoticed. And no guardrails to protect children were put in place at Le Scouarne’s medical practice.

“If these institutions had acted properly, they could have stopped Le Scouarnec long before. But each professional at the heart of these institutions, be they legal or medical, did nothing and because of their inaction he was able to continue for 30 years,” a lawyer for Child’s Voice, Frédéric Benoist, told the Observer.

The Le Scouarnec case is considered the largest mass sexual abuse case in France’s history. It’s been a record-setting year for France, in terms of high-profile cases that unearth horrific crimes: First, there was Dominique Pelicot, now Le Scouarnec. Both men were monsters who hid in plain sight.

Pelicot solicited dozens of men online to rape his wife, Gisèle Pelicot, while she was drugged and unconscious. He was found guilty of aggravated rape; 48 other men were found guilty as well. Gisèle waived her right to anonymity in the mass rape case to bring attention to the systemic nature of her assault. The men who raped her, many of whom lived in the French city of Avignon alongside the Pelicot family, included a nurse, a journalist, a prison warden, a soldier, and farmers.

The cases are connected by the eerie feeling that many people, at many points in time, could have stopped the abuse yet didn’t. When it first became mainstream in 2017, the Me Too movement had two extremes on its ideological spectrum: “Believe all women” or “believe no women (until proven otherwise).” In the middle of the spectrum, though, were women all too familiar with the ways in which sexual abusers get away with sexual harassment and assault. The Me Too movement, while it received flak from many conservatives for using unproven and sometimes dubious sexual misconduct allegations as political leverage, did women in the middle of that spectrum a great service: It taught them that abusers can be held accountable.

But in France especially, first with Gisèle Pelicot and now with Le Scouarnec’s 299 victims, the sense that victims can receive real justice for horrific sexual crimes committed against them has dwindled. Le Scouarnec received a 20-year jail term on Tuesday — the maximum sentence — for sexually abusing hundreds. This is on top of the 15-year sentence he received in 2020 for assaulting four children, including two of his nieces. Dominique Pelicot was sentenced to 20 years. Other men who raped and sexually assaulted Gisèle Pelicot received prison sentences that ranged from three to 15 years.

The sentencing of Le Scouarnec and Gisèle Pelicot’s abusers, though the maximum sentences possible under French law, don’t feel like justice. Years of gross incompetence contributed to the abuse of Le Scouarnec’s patients. Hospital administrators can try to explain why they didn’t follow rules that would have restricted Le Scouarnec’s practice, but they cannot relieve the pain of victims, some of whom have fallen into deep depression, and two of whom killed themselves. Likewise, webs of sexual predators participated in Gisèle Pelicot’s abuse. Judges can explain the rules of maximum sentencing, but they cannot explain why a 20-something-year-old man who paid to rape an unconscious Gisèle Pelicot will be released from prison in 15 years.

When he was seven years old, journalist David Holthouse was violently raped by the 17-year-old son of his parents’ best friends. Holthouse didn’t tell his parents, but he never forgot the event: “I wanted to protect [my mother] and my father from the terrible knowing that he had raped me when I was seven years old, while they were upstairs with his parents, drinking wine and playing board games. I didn’t want their memories of my childhood tarnished with his scum,” he wrote in Westword.

So Holthouse, acutely aware of his situation but for years powerless to — as he put it – “confront the Bogeyman,” waited. Obsessed with the thought that his rapist was out in the world assaulting other little boys, Holthouse planned to kill him. The plan was foiled when his mom found a diary entry detailing the abuse. After Holthouse’s mother told the rapist’s parents what their son had done, Holthouse mailed a letter to his rapist, demanding contact. The two met up. The rapist apologized. “When I had nothing else to say to the man who’d raped me when I was seven, we parted ways. He blended into the crowd,” Holthouse wrote.

Holthouse’s article, even though it was written in 2004, described prematurely what many hoped the Me Too movement would do: make it impossible for predators to blend in. The political nature of Me Too thwarted that hope. Thrust into the spotlight of the movement were high-profile cases involving celebrities or political figures, cases that couldn’t be verified easily, which often turned into games of “he-said, she-said.” Seemingly ignored were cases like the ones recently prosecuted in France, ones that don’t fully hold accountable the individuals, procedural structures, or systems that give predators the ability to hide.