Françoise Gourlet remembers clearly the events when she visited her 12-year-old son Nicolas at the hospital in the north-west town of Quimperlé in February 2006. She found him lying prostrate in an armchair. “He very quickly told me he didn’t want to stay there,” she told the court where retired surgeon Joël Le Scouarnec, 74, is standing trial on charges of raping and sexually assaulting 299 people, 296 of whom were his patients, most of them children.
Françoise Gourlet and her son Nicolas, now aged 33, were in court to testify, as civil parties (plaintiffs) in the case, how Le Scouarnec’s actions broke Nicolas and for years their family, the parents unaware of the sexual assaults their son had suffered.
Beyond establishing the horrific history of the surgeon’s vast catalogue of attacks, and how he was able to find employment with children under his care despite a conviction for possession of child pornography, the trial, which opened on February 24th and is due to end on June 20th, has also focussed on the devastating outcomes for the victims and the deep distress of families.
The trial is being held in Vannes, in the north-west region of Brittany where Le Scouarnec, specialised in general surgery, practiced for 13 years (ten of them at Quimperlé hospital and three at the Sacré-Cœur clinic in Vannes). The charges against him also include sexual assaults in south-west France, where he previously practiced.
Early on in the trial, he admitted carrying out all the crimes he is accused of, which were committed between January 1989 and January 2014. These include 111 rapes* and 188 sexual assaults, involving 158 male and 141 female victims. The details of the crimes were found recorded in several notebooks, in Le Scouarnec’s handwriting, during a gendarmerie search of his home in 2017, as part of an investigation into a complaint he had sexually assaulted a six-year-old girl who lived near to his home.
Many of the victims presented in his notebooks, who were subsequently traced by investigators using Le Scouarnec’s very detailed descriptions, were unaware of the sexual assaults they were subjected to because they were anaesthetised.
But that was not the case for Nicolas, who was operated by Le Scouarnec to remove a cyst on his navel. His mother told the court how, that afternoon in February 2006, a nurse had informed her that there had been a problem a little earlier, and that the surgeon would explain everything to her.
“Mr Le Scouarnec arrived, pleasant,” Françoise Gourlet recalled. “He [said he] had explained his operation to Nicolas, everything that he had carried out, and that my son had suffered a malaise.” She was not overly surprised, she told the court, because Nicolas had always been “sensitive, like his father”.
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Gourlet said Le Scouarnec told her he wanted to keep the boy “under surveillance”, to which she replied that that would not be necessary. Immediately, she recalled, the surgeon’s attitude changed, becoming “curt”, adopting the “authority” that those in a doctor’s white apparel can sometimes abuse. “It’s the protocol, Nicolas stays here,” she remembered him as saying, before marching off. Nicolas broke into tears. “He begged me to bring him home, but I didn’t see the danger,” said Gourlet. “I explained to him that he was going to have a peaceful sleep, that I would come and pick him up as soon as possible. Then I left my son.”
From that moment, she would never reunite with the young son she had known until then, a son who was, she said, “the perfect little Nicolas” with his little spectacles and curly hair, and “a little mischievous” character. He who would always want to be close to his mother, “like a limpet”, suddenly became distant, no longer interested in their past pleasures of outings together to the swimming pool, archery and dance classes.
During the school holidays, I ended up not coming back home for lunch, and in the evening I would return late to be with him as little as possible.
Together with this sudden self-isolation he started to suffer from acne, and feelings of shame, the court heard. The child appeared overwhelmed by anger when in the company of his family. Neither his parents, his brothers, nor the family dog would escape his bouts of rage.
Questioning him in turn, Nicolas Gourlet’s lawyer, Julia Delalez, asked him: “What had happened with this pet animal?”
“I had a lot of anger against him, because on the day of the operation my mother left the hospital to take him for a walk,” he replied.
Nicolas’ emotions appear today to be dulled. With a flat voice but resolute manner, he detailed the different therapies he undertook to overcome the handicaps imposed by the surgeon’s sexual assaults, which his subconscious mind, and not the effect of anaesthetics, had blocked any recall of. The medical help he received included around 80 sessions with a psychiatrist, another 76 with a psychomotor specialist, and about 20 with a speech therapist.
After returning home in February 2006, the memory of what he had suffered was swept away by an all-consuming rage. The young boy had no words to describe his condition. It was only in 2018 that the truth of what happened was explained to him by the gendarmerie investigators who identified him from among the more than 300 victims described in detail by Le Scouarnec in his notebooks.
His family had finished up believing his mood swings were down to adolescence, but their enduring eruptions, year after year, wore down his parents’ affection. “During the school holidays,” his mother told the court, “I ended up not coming back home for lunch, and in the evening I would return late to be with him as little as possible.”
Nicolas, she said, grew from upset teenager into an elusive adult. Then came the invitation for him to meet with the gendarmerie investigators in September 2018. For his mother, it was “Good news, we then knew why Nicolas suffered, but I felt guilty to have left him defenceless,” she said. “How could he have confidence in me anymore?”
In this extraordinary, four-month trial, it is rare for the parents of victims to accompany their sons or daughters to the witness stand. For they are themselves the indirect victims of crimes which they could not imagine. Of the around 100 victims who have testified so-far, only some 20 were joined at the stand by a parent or parents.
Most of the time, the mothers and fathers who are present at the courthouse remain silent silhouettes. Some sit in the public gallery, leaving when the court begins hearing the most intimate moments of what the victims’ endured. Others take their place in another hall where the public can follow the trial on a large TV screen. More rarely, there are those who wait patiently outside.
But there are some parents whose children discouraged them from coming to the court. Antoine (not his real name), one of the cited victims, said he “above all” did not want his father to be present alongside him. “And I don’t think he would have succeeded in coming,” he added. Antoine had spoken with his father of his unease after a supposed “rectal examination” imposed on him by Le Scouarnec. “My father told me that it was a medical act, he minimised,” Antoine said.
Many of the victims’ parents had recognised behavioural changes in their children, but without understanding the cause. The relatively rare testimonies of parents before the court have occasionally illustrated how their blindness to the problem was exacerbated by that of medical professionals who missed the clues.
But occasionally, the wounds can begin to heal, at least, in the case of Nicolas and his family, partially. Taking the stand on April 23rd, Françoise Gourlet directly addressed Le Scouarnec. “You have shattered this joy of life but you have not broken our family, which is still here, united and, I hope, more and more joyful,” she told him. “Today, Nicolas and I manage to talk to each other. We have returned to the swimming pool and he once again calls me ‘Mum’.”
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse