The Assize Court of Saintes plunges until Thursday in the pedophile itinerary of the former surgeon Joël Le Scouarnec, accused of rape and sexual assault on four minor victims at the time of the facts, the first part of a dizzying affair.
Begun on March 13, and interrupted on the second day of hearing by confinement, the trial of the 70-year-old surgeon before the Charente-Maritime assizes should resume behind closed doors, without press or public, at the request of several civil parties .
Read also: In the footsteps of Joël Le Scouarnec, the surgeon suspected of hundreds of pedophile attacks
It was the story in April 2017 of Lucie *, her six-year-old neighbor in Jonzac, which sparked the affair.
Three years later, Le Scouarnec appears detained for acts of rape on this girl and on a niece in the 90s in Loches, as well as for sexual assaults at the same period in this commune of Indre-et-Loire: a another niece and a four-year-old patient in 1993, who says she doesn't remember anything.
The retired surgeon recognizes touching but disputes the rapes for which he faces twenty years of criminal imprisonment.
The lawyer for Lucie * 's parents Francesca Satta says she hopes he will
confess so that the victims can rebuild themselves
(because)
he has nothing more to lose
.
"It is not in a logic of denial"
, assured in March the lawyer of the accused, Thibaut Kurzawa.
"He knows that for years he has been behaving badly."
I am a pedophile.
And I am very happy about it.
"
Joël Le Scouarnec
Because this trial is only the first step in an unprecedented pedophile case in France.
Indicted in October in a second section in Lorient, Joël Le Scouarnec is also suspected of rape and sexual assault on 312 adult and minor victims.
Facts dating back to the period 1986-2014, revealed thanks to the careful analysis of its secret archives,
"to the point of nausea"
, according to the public prosecutor Stéphane Kellenberger.
The name of the young patient from Loches came out quickly.
In his house in Jonzac, where the man lived as a hermit with dolls, the gendarmes seized at the time of Lucie's complaint *, more than 300,000 pedophile images including photos of the two nieces.
But it was the discovery of thousands of pages of listings and diaries typed on his computer that threw the affair into outsized dimensions.
Day after day, the digestive surgeon recorded the names of his potential victims, coupled with a litany of accounts of assault during his thirty-year career in hospitals in the center and west.
He congratulated himself by writing:
“I am a pedophile.
And I am very happy ”
.
Read also: Coronavirus: the first trial of Joël Le Scouarnec dismissed
This “hospital” component will not be mentioned at the Saintes trial, which will mainly focus on the origins of the accused's itinerary, in family and “incestuous” closed doors.
"We are going to discover not the surgeon but what man he was in his private life, how he began his career before he fell into a kind of overkill in the professional sphere"
, estimate Nathalie Bucquet and Marie Grimaud, lawyers of the civil party association Innocence in danger.
The experts described
"a manipulative subject fascinated by pedophilia"
, without
"any empathy"
.
What did he think of his actions afterwards?
“It's an attitude that I ended up considering as
“ normal ”, he said in 2017 before the judge.
Until then he had never been worried, despite alerts to the hospital after his conviction in 2005 to four months in prison suspended for consultations of child pornography images.
Read also: Pedophilia: the first trial of Joël Le Scouarnec opens in Saintes
From the 90s, his wife who
"knew"
according to him, and his sister, who had received the confidences of her daughters on
"uncle Joël"
, had questioned him about his inclinations, but the secret never came out. clan.
Their testimony is eagerly awaited.
"A family omerta has allowed other victims to exist,"
said lawyer Francesca Satta, one of the few to defend a partial closed session to
"break the silence"
.
On the contrary, the three other victims oppose it, out of
“modesty”
.
