'Devil in a white coat' surgeon jailed for 20 years in France's biggest ever child sexual abuse scandal
28 May 2025, 14:28 | Updated: 28 May 2025, 14:50
A French paedophile surgeon described as a ‘devil in a while coat’ has been jailed for 20 years after admitting sexually abusing hundreds of children.
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Joel Le Scouarnec, 74, abused most of his victims while they were under anaesthesia or just waking up from surgeries.
The sentencing wraps up one of France’s largest-ever child sexual abuse trials.
Le Scouarnec was accused of 300 separate offences, with his victims including an almost equal number of boys and girls.
Most of the children were under the age of 15, with an average age of 11.
He admitted committing 111 rapes and 189 sexual assaults, which took place in more than a dozen hospitals over a 25-year period, between 1989 and 2014.
Prosecutors described him as "a devil in a white coat,” and asked for him to be sentenced to 20 years in prison.
This is the maximum sentence he could have received, as sentences in France aren’t added together. If they were, like in the US, Le Scouarnec would have been jailed for 2,000 years, according to state prosecutor Stéphane Kellenberger.
Le Scouarnec admitted all the assaults in court, saying in his final statement: “I am not asking the court for leniency.”
During the harrowing trial he also said: “I was a surgeon who benefited from my status to attack children, I don’t deny that.”
“You were the devil and sometimes the devil is dressed in a white coat,” Kellenberger told Le Scouarnec.
He was already serving a 15-year prison sentence after being convicted of the rapes and sexual assaults of four children, including two of his nieces, in 2020.
But he was known to be a paedophile for decades. French authorities were made aware of him viewing child sexual abuse images on the dark web by the FBI in 2004.
A year later, the surgeon was convicted of owning child sexual abuse images, and given a suspended jail sentence of four years. However, the ruling did not prevent him from working with children again.
He continued to work in numerous elite hospitals in France for years, until retiring in 2017, systematically abusing children in his care throughout this period.
Le Scouarnec kept detailed accounts of the abuse he committed on numerous children in hundreds of notebooks and diaries.
He was eventually arrested after his neighbour, a six-year-old girl, told her mother he had sexually abused her while playing in the garden of her home.
Police found 300,000 indecent photos and videos of children in his home when they searched it, as well as 70 child-sized dolls and notebooks and diaries.
A psychiatric assessment concluded that he remained extremely dangerous.
Dozens of victims and campaigners were gathered outside the courthouse, holding a banner made of hundreds of sheets of paper, each depicting a black silhouette of a child to represent one of his victims.
Some of the papers included the first name and the age of the victim, while others simply said “Anonymous”.
