Maxime Tessier, a 33-year-old lawyer and co-defence counsel for Joël Le Scouarnec, a former surgeon who stood trial earlier this year on charges of rape* and sexual assault of 299 victims, mostly child patients, died in an apparent suicide overnight on Tuesday. Le Scouarnec, whose trial lasted three months from February 24th to May 28th, was found guilty as charged and handed a 20-year jail sentence.
The horrific details presented in court of Le Scouarnec’s crimes – which he admitted to – was a harrowing process for the victims and also for many of the professionals present at the marathon trial, including lawyers, magistrates, and gendarmerie investigators. In Tessier’s case, he had already been exposed to the horror over a period of nearly three years while preparing the defence of the 74-year-old, specialized in surgery of the digestive system and who preyed on patients at numerous hospitals and clinics around south-west and north-west France.
Tessier’s death has highlighted the lack of psychological support offered to lawyers and other professionals involved in particularly sordid criminal cases. For many involved in the trial, the shock of his death was especially painful given his sensitivity towards the victims, and his part in gaining Le Scouarnec’s admission of guilt in all of the 299 cases.
Rennes public prosecutor Frédéric Teillet on Wednesday announced an investigation was underway to establish the exact cause of the young lawyer’s death, but added that “everything points to a suicide”. Tessier was found still alive but died soon after he was taken to a hospital.
There were numerous homages paid to Tessier, notably from representatives of Le Scouarnec’s victims, and the lawyer’s former colleagues, who unanimously praised his sensitivity towards the victims. “We are in shock and shattered,” Manon Lemoine, a member of a collective association representing the victims, told Mediapart. “Even though he took up the role of defending a man who committed horrific acts, he did his job with benevolence towards us.”
In a statement released on Wednesday, the victims’ association noted: “It is undeniable that to be in contact with perversion for so long, being plunged into what is the most sordid, into horror, does not leave any man or woman unscathed.”
“He demonstrated, over a period of three months, a rare humanity,” said lawyer Frédéric Benoist, who at the trial represented the child protection association La Voix de l’Enfant. Myriam Guedj Benayoun, a lawyer for two of the victims, commented on Linkedin: “I will never forget the brilliant lawyer, charismatic, so humane.”
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It was in 2022 that Tessier teamed up with Le Scouarnec’s then only lawyer, Thibaut Kurzawa. Five years earlier, Le Scouarnec had been handed a 15-year prison sentence for, variously, the rape and sexual assault of two of his nieces, a girl patient and the daughter of a neighbour, all minors.
It was from the investigations into those crimes that evidence emerged of his rapes and sexual assaults committed on more than 300 victims, mostly child patients of his. He himself logged his crimes in detail in notebooks found in a search of his home, recording his crimes over a 20-year period and the identities of his victims.
Gendarmerie investigators subsequently interviewed them, all by then adults, many of whom had no knowledge of what they were subjected to because the surgeon often abused them while they were still under the effects of anaesthetics. Some of the cases were ruled invalid for prosecution because of France’s statute of limitations, and Le Scouarnec finally stood trial this year for crimes committed against 299 victims between 1989 and 2014.
Speaking to Mediapart, Thibaut Kurzawa said of his colleague: “I’ve lost both a very notable [and] promising colleague, with who I learnt a lot, but also a great friend.” Kurzawa spoke of how, during the trial, Tessier had chosen to anchor his defence of Le Scouarnec, who within a matter of days in court confessed to all the crimes he was charged with, on the latter’s show of repentance. “Maxime did so in a completely sincere manner. He wasn’t playing a role, he was authentic. He would have been incapable of doing otherwise, he didn’t cheat.”
Tessier was attentive throughout the trial to show the respect in which he and Kurzawa held the victims. “We regularly told [the victims] of our admiration and their courage,” he commented after the verdict was announced in late May. “I am very sad,” said Béatrice Zavarro, the defence lawyer for Dominique Pélicot, who in December last year was sentenced to 20 years in jail for raping his wife Gisèle, and organising over several years the separate rapes of her by 50 men at their home in southern France. Zavarro told Mediapart: “I met [Tessier] in March and we had the impression that we were speaking with the same voice, of living the same thing, this feeling of solitude that you always have in defence, only here [in these cases,] more than ever.”
Among the legal profession, as also among Le Scouarnec’s victims, many believe the death of Tessier was in some manner connected to the horrors of the former surgeon’s crimes detailed in court, and also his working proximity with the man in preparing for the trial. No-one spoke of a direct link, but many see a vicarious traumatism, one that occurs in ricochet.
“Such an intense trial, with such a presence of maleficence and suffering, can cause a vicarious traumatism,” said psychiatrist Thierry Baubet, who was called as a witness during Le Scouarnec’s trial when he described the scarring consequences, sometimes decades later, of sexual violence suffered during childhood, even when they have been hidden from conscious memory.
Baubet, head of the psychiatric department of the Avicenne hospital close to Paris, and who treated a number of survivors of the November 2015 terrorist attack on the Bataclan theatre in the French capital, while not commenting in detail on Tessier’s death, said “one can imagine that this whole sequence had been a factor of fragilization”.
A team of psychologists from France Victimes – a federation of around 130 associations which offers, under the auspices of the French justice ministry, professional support for victims of crime – were present during Le Scouarnec’s trial, and in principle were open to consultation by lawyers. “But people who are not direct victims rarely feel it is legitimate for them to say they are affected by what they hear and that they need help,” said Baubet, citing the examples of Investigators, magistrates, doctors, and also lawyers.
“The process of taking one’s life is often multifactorial but, for as much, one can’t forget what he [Tessier] went through these past months,” commented Gwendoline Tenier, a lawyer with the Bar in Rennes, the capital of the north-west region of Brittany where, in the town of Vannes, Le Scouarnec stood trial. She represented a civil party (plaintiff) during Le Scouarnec’s trial, although she usually acts as a defence lawyer. “We saw what happened, one can feel things, one sees how a lawyer invests himself for his client.”
Former magistrate Denis Salas, the director of a legal affairs review, Les Cahiers de la justice, was in contact with Tessier and preparing to publish a lengthy interview with him, who he described as a “brilliant” lawyer. “If the hypothesis of a vicarious trauma would be proved to be right, I think that the Bars should reflect on [establishing] a therapeutic help of the kind that magistrates have at their disposal within appeal courts,” he said.
Questioned by Mediapart, the Rennes appeal court, which was responsible for organising Le Scouarnec’s trial in Vannes, confirmed that the magistrates and court clerks were given “as much as necessary, assistance from a clinical psychologist attached to the judicial services”, but that the level of support offered to lawyers was the responsibility of “the president of the Bar”.
Gwendoline Tenier said the death of Maxime Tessier should prompt a collective awareness of the problems faced by lawyers: “We must, in the end, go about ensuring that lawyers are shouldered, preserved. We can’t continue like this.” She would like to see the idea of the creation of psychological support debated by the Rennes Bar Association, of which Tessier was a member, as of the post-summer holiday return of activity.
On June 18th, French health minister Yannick Neuder met with the collective association set up by a group of Le Scouarnec’s victims. Neuder supported the urgent organisation of post-trial support for the victims and co-victims (the close entourage of victims), when he also referred to the need to help professionals who became affected by the trial. But Manon Lemoine, member of the association, said “nothing” had yet been put in place. She recently spoke with the minister by phone: “I told him that we can’t wait until the end of the holidays, that we are afraid of a suicide during the summer.”
Questioned by Mediapart, Neuder’s office said he had pledged to set up a system of close assistance for the victims, involving the health and justice ministries and the high commission for children, as of the end of the holidays. It said a system of psychological support should already be in place by the end of July.
But no commitment was made regarding support for the professionals involved in the investigation and trial, like the police officers who wept in court, and Nadia M., the gendarmerie sergeant who studied the sinister contents of Le Scouarnec’s notebooks and who had to leave the stand, in tears, unable to continue testifying. She is still today on sick leave.
“We’re very angry,” said Manon Lemoine, an anger over what she called “the general abandonment by the state”. She argued that political leaders treat the victims of terrorism with more attention than the victims of paedo-criminals.
Meanwhile, the case of Le Scouarnec is far from over. Having now been tried twice, in 2020 and 2025, he is likely to face a third trial in the future, as investigations led by the Rennes prosecution services continue into several dozen potential other victims of the surgeon.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse