Christian D. presents himself as Joël Le Scouarnec's best friend.
The only one, actually.
He is in any case the only interlocutor with whom the ex-surgeon still exchanges on the phone, every Sunday afternoon, from the Saintes remand center (Charente-Maritime) where he has been imprisoned since May 2017. Over time and sordid details that accumulated, the three sons and the ex-wife of Dr Le Scouarnec ended up cutting the bridges.
Christian, on the other hand, remained absolutely faithful, beyond any moral judgment.
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“For me, Joël has been like a brother for about fifty years and he remains so despite everything,” confides this 76-year-old single man living in the Paris region.
He has committed acts for which he probably deserves to be punished, but I refuse to turn my back on him.
In my eyes, Joël is not a monster.
The friend does not hide his face, however.
"The Le Scouarnec family is broken up, nobody talks to each other anymore ..." And he finds himself alone in the middle of this field of ruins.
The story begins in the early 1960s with a meeting with Joseph Le Scouarnec, Joël's father, in the suburban train that takes them every morning to the capital.
“Joseph was twenty years older than me, but the current passed between us immediately,” recalls Christian, a former bank employee.
He invited me to the family table in their house in Villebon-sur-Yvette (Essonne).
We became friends and I took care of him in the last years of his life, until the end of 2018. ”
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Christian remembers a Le Scouarnec family "united and hardworking", where parents went without to raise their three children.
Joël is the oldest.
He has a younger sister Annie and a brother, Patrick, who was disabled from birth with hemiplegia.
The father is a cabinetmaker.
The mother, Jeanne, works as a cleaning lady.
At home, the atmosphere is sometimes weighed down by the patriarch's fits of anger.
“Joseph was a storage freak,” Christian admits.
In the house as in the garden, he could not stand any disorder, it became painful for the children.
"
Joël, him, appears as a teenager "awake, intelligent and joker".
With a penchant for black humor.
In Christian's wake, he sometimes took very chaste Parisian trips.
“We went to classical music concerts, at the Salle Gaveau or in churches, but never to pray,” says the music-loving friend.
Joël has always been an atheist.
"
"His thing was surgery"
Son of workers, the young Le Scouarnec aims high.
"Very quickly, he understood that he wanted to study medicine," continues Christian, a bank employee.
Her thing was surgery and not just any kind.
He wanted to understand what was inside, what he called
the slackness
of the human body.
»A way of designating the digestive system.
After two failures in the Paris boarding school competition, Joël Le Scouarnec succeeds in the Nantes (Loire-Atlantique) competition.
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In the meantime, a woman has entered his life.
Her name is Marie-France.
He was an outpatient, she was a nursing assistant.
The wedding was celebrated in Saint-Nazaire in June 1974. Christian is in the wedding photo, one row behind the young couple.
To listen to him, the honeymoon would have lasted only a moment.
“Marie-France cheated on Joël with one of his brothers-in-law just after the wedding, he understands.
The whole family knew about it, Joël's parents were furious but he held on and things got better.
Apparently, at least.
In the early 1980s, two boys were born, then a third.
Joël and Marie-France Le Scouarnec, on their wedding day, in June 1974./DR
According to his own confessions, Le Scouarnec was already crossed at this time by pedophile impulses that he projects on his nieces.
His best friend, "his brother", claims to have never known anything about it.
“Sexuality, feelings and all that, we never spoke with Joël,” he says.
The door was double locked and I didn't insist.
We were talking about something else.
But I never saw any inappropriate gesture on his part.
"
Between 2008 and 2017, he also witnessed, without asking too many questions, the slow drift of the surgeon from Jonzac (Charente-Maritime) who now lives reclusive in an insanitary house populated by dolls, obsessed by his sexual impulses.
“Even his clothes smelled of mold,” illustrates the childhood friend.
Who, with hindsight, remembers the only instruction that Joël Le Scouarnec gave to his rare visitors.
"
Let me know when you come to see me
," he said to his children and to me.
When I got to his place, I imagine everything was tidy.
Besides, it didn't occur to me to search his cupboards or look under the slats on the floor.
"
"Joël never wanted me to go see him in prison"
It is there that the gendarmes will discover the notebooks of the tenant of the premises which will then make it possible to identify more than 300 potential victims of rape and sexual assault.
We can guess Christian's vertigo when the scale of the affair appears.
"Joël never wanted me to go see him in prison in Saintes, that's how it is," he sighs.
Since his business is in the public square, he has been in solitary confinement and does not even go out for a walk.
He spends his days in the 9 square meter cell he shares with a fellow inmate.
To keep busy, he took up English and because he has a certain artistic gift, he paints watercolors and draws in pencil.
"
Among the works sent to his friend, a copy of Michelangelo's Pieta and a painting from his childhood home, in Villebon-sur-Yvette.
Even where the father of Joël Le Scouarnec would have demanded a fellatio from one of his grandsons.
"The main person concerned, one of Joël's sons, confirmed it to me," sighs Christian, perplexed.
Le Scouarnec also worked for his trial.
“Joël tells me that he has every intention of defending himself, relays Christian, called as a witness.
He accepts to pay for what he has done, but not for the rest.
In any case, this first trial anguishes him much more than the second part of the case.
There, it is about the family, his sister, his nieces and he knows that he risks big.
"
