On May 2, 2017 at 8:45 a.m., police officers armed with a warrant stormed a terraced house in Jonzac, the small town in southwestern France where surgeon Joël Le Scouarnec lived. The forced entry was in response to a complaint from a six-year-old neighbor who alleged he had exposed himself to her. But the French police had long suspected that Le Scouarnec, now 74, was a dangerous pedophile who had used his status as a doctor to abuse hundreds of minors.
Inside the house, they found dozens of dolls with names and sex objects attached, 300,000 photos of pedophilia and zoophilia and 151 videos and USB keys. At the end of the search, officer Nadia Martineau discovered some hard drives under a mattress. On them, Le Scouarnec had stored the account of most of his crimes from 1990 to 2014, at a rate of 50 pages per year. Martineau became obsessed with the case. She combed through the notes that were filled with horrific details of the man’s abuse. The documents were the key to solving the case. They also became a black hole from which Martineau would not be able to emerge for years to come.
The impact of Le Scouarnec’s diaries on Martineau was such that she had to ask for a leave of absence that has kept her away from her job for the last three years. At the end of February, as the mass sex abuse trial opened, she was unable to finish her virtual testimony before the court, breaking down in tears as she tried to relay the details of the files. “I would have wanted to… I’m so sorry,” she said excusing herself. The court authorities intervened: “On behalf of the court, we hope you can recover and get through this ordeal,” she was told as she was excused from finishing her testimony. Martineau’s trauma is of course a reflection of just how dehumanizing Le Scouarnec’s crimes were. The facts contained in the summary of the case, to which EL PAÍS has had access, will allow for a maximum sentence in what is considered France’s largest ever pedophilia trial.
The first entry in the surgeon’s diary — and also in the documents that he meticulously separated under the titles of vulvas and penises — is dated 1990 and refers to Delphine, a girl who was then 10 years old and was in his care for acute appendicitis. As with the other victims, Le Scouarnec addressed her directly in his writings. “Delphine, when I first saw you, you had not finished waking up. That’s why I was able to push aside the clothes that covered your naked little body, open your legs and admire your little sex […] I could not breathe your smell of sex, caress you. Too bad. Goodbye, little Delphine, I love you.”
Le Scouarnec’s detailed descriptions of his abuse have been central to his investigation and trial. For 18 years, he wrote down all his crimes on sheets of paper which were transferred to word files. In all the entries, he described his patients and addressed them directly. He classified them by age. He described them physically, noted the first impression they made on him and always placed them in a specific space: the operating room or his office. He also details whether the minors were alone and how he managed to escape their parents’ attention or that of any other potential witnesses. He also had a list where he wrote down his criminal biography, with names, ages, places and dates. There are several years that were erased when he thought his wife was about to expose him.
The average age of his alleged victims was 11 years old, as confirmed by the prosecutor in the case, Stéphane Kellenberger. One hundred and fifty-eight were male and 141 female. Only 14 of them were over 20 when they were assaulted, while 256 were aged under 15. In most of the cases, he claimed to love them, without showing any remorse or guilt for what he had done, though he has since repeatedly expressed remorse for ruining the lives of his family and his victims. The crimes were always enacted either in the consulting room or in the operating room where the minors were generally suffering acute pain from appendicitis or peritonitis. “You wouldn’t let yourself be done because you had pain in your belly…” he said of Delphine, who had unsuccessfully resisted the abuse.
One of the younger victims was Tiphaine D. In 1996, he wrote: “Thursday. Aug. 1 17.30. In my office: I caressed the small nipples and the belly of a little girl of one and a half years old, who was only wearing a diaper. When her mother turned her back to me, I lifted the diaper to see her pubis. Unfortunately, I could not stay alone with the child to insert my fingers.” Le Scouarnec, who has admitted to the “vast majority” of the charges against him, declared to the police that he did not sexually abuse the infant, but that it was not her age that deterred him.
There are some parallels between Le Scouarnec’s case and that of Dominique Pelicot, the man who for decades drugged his wife Gisèle to allow 51 individuals he met on the internet to rape her in her own home. Beyond the horror and the magnitude of the crimes, and the social and media repercussions, there is a similarity in the need of both men to meticulously record what they were doing — one in images and the other through the written word.
There appears to have been a certain pleasure taken in recording the details of their crimes so they could be revisited; pleasure in constructing a narrative of the suffering of their sleeping victims, but also the inevitable awareness that those documents could constitute the definitive proof of their guilt. It is as if, somehow, they had wanted to leave clues so that someone could catch them.
Laurent Layet, the psychiatrist who analyzed Dominique Pelicot before he was sentenced in December to 20 years in prison, believes that recording their crimes “is part of the perversion mechanism of this type of individual, which indicates, on the one hand, the need to have control and the desire for domination, hence writing everything down and documenting it … On the other hand, it is a way of prolonging the criminal act. By keeping the evidence of the crime, they prolong the pleasure it gives them. And that cataloging is usually meticulous; they take the time to reference, to classify.”
Layet points out that there is probably a dissociation or split personality at work, though in Le Scouarnec’s case, a psychiatric profile has not yet been made available. This split personality “is what allows them to present a respectable image — one of a good father or husband, on the one hand, and also prolong their criminal activity for so long.” It is, he explains, “like a hard drive that works with one part first and then the other, without them colliding.”
Le Scouarnec was a gastric surgeon who worked for 30 years in clinics and private hospitals in western and central France. Family members describe him as a very intelligent and cultivated man, curious and fond of classical music. “Regarding perverse schemes, intelligence is often put at the service of the perversion and that is why it takes longer to discover the perpetrator. Those who are not intelligent are caught sooner,” adds Layet.
Le Scouarnec’s last diary entries are made January 3, 2014. The last victim he talks about is Hugo C., who was 10 years old. “Friday, January 3. 9.30. In his room in Jonzac. Hugo is a very cute boy and for once a kid is alone in the room. I took advantage of it; I pulled down his pants […]” When the police officer discovered the notebooks and the police located Hugo C. for questioning, he was still a minor. Le Scouarnec told investigators that “it was enough for him to touch the child for a few moments” in order to record the encounter.
Hugo Lemonier, journalist for Medipart and author of the book Trapped in Dr. Le Scouarnec’s Diary, believes the culture of silence surrounding the surgeon’s abuse was due to the incestuous environment that prevailed within the family and the shame that accompanied that.
Regarding the writings and notes, Lemonier says: “Diaries are something collectors do, and he is one. They found more than 300,000 files on him. But he’s not exceptional. This type of person keeps everything. They want to create a treasure through pedophilic images. It is rare to write so much, but that was part of his treasure trove. He also wrote by hand, but he scanned it later. They amount to pedo-criminal autofictions. And that was all he had. The family had already abandoned him.” And he kept those files over the years, even though they provided key evidence that could get him convicted. “He thought he was above the law, he didn’t think he would get arrested. That’s why he kept doing it,” Lemonier says.
Reading Le Scouarnec’s diaries is traumatic for anyone, particularly for those who read them unprepared for what they reveal. Like the police officer who discovered them, Lemonier also had therapy after reading: “Of course. And I cried, and I cried for the police officer. Whoever is exposed to the bulk of these writings can’t help but have enormous sympathy for her. And I think she should be honored for the work she did. For her sacrifice. Without her, this case would not exist.”
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