The China Mail - 'A normal family', says son of surgeon in French sex abuse trial

Most of Le Scouarnec's victims were children whom he is believed to have abused while they were waking up from anaesthetic or during post-op checkups, at a dozen hospitals between 1989 and 2014.

Two hundred and fifty-six of the victims were under 15, with the youngest aged one and the oldest 70.

He is already in jail after being found guilty in 2020 of abusing four children, including two of his nieces.

Three of his nieces, including the two from the 2020 conviction, as well as the daughter of a couple who were friends with the doctor and his wife on Friday through a lawyer demanded "the truth" be established, accusing his now ex-wife of knowing her husband was a paedophile but keeping quiet.

His youngest son, now 37 and an electrician, told the court that he remembered growing up in a "normal family" and with a father who was "present", notably concerning his son's studies, but that some things remained "unsaid" in the family.

"I have very good memories of my father," he added, saying this explained why he cut off all contact later. "I wanted to keep that image of him," he said, adding he did not think he himself had ever been abused by his father.

- 'Paranoid' -

But he had become "a little paranoid" in the light of subsequent revelations, telling the court: "I never leave my son unaccompanied."

A government-created commission tasked with protecting child victims of sexual abuse, called the Ciivise, has said the first allegations that Le Scouarnec abused children within his own family should have been "immediately reported" to prevent further harm.

Le Scouarnec in his diaries wrote in 1996: "SHE knows I am a paedophile," an apparent reference to his wife, who appeared in court on Tuesday, but has yet to testify.

In 2005, a court handed the surgeon a four-month suspended sentence for owning sexually abusive images of children.

But his ex-wife has claimed she was in the dark.

Earlier this month she told regional newspaper Ouest France she had no idea about his "predilections", and only discovered the truth after he was arrested in 2017.

"He was Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde. I asked myself how I could have completely missed it. It's a terrible betrayal of me and my children," she said.

Le Scouarnec practiced for decades right up until his retirement despite the 2005 conviction and colleagues sounding the alarm over his behaviour.

Investigators only discovered his diaries documenting years of abuse against patients after a six-year-old girl in 2017 accused him of rape.

Her case was included in the 2020 trial.

Under French law, rape is "any act of sexual penetration, of whatever nature, or any oral-genital act committed on another person or on the person of the perpetrator through violence, coercion, threat or surprise".

L.Kwan--ThChM