When retired urologist Benoit Le Portz, 76, took to the stand last week at the trial of his former colleague Joël Le Scouarnec, nothing, it seemed, could shake his composure. Neither the extraordinary list and nature of the charges against Le Scouarnec, namely 111 rapes* and 188 sexual assaults involving 299 victims, to which he has admitted, nor the insistent questions of the presiding judge over why he did not raise an official alarm after he learnt of his colleague’s prosecution for possession of child pornography.
Le Portz spent ten years working at the same time as Le Scouarnec, specialised in general surgery, at the Sacré-Cœur clinic in Vannes, in north-west France, from 1994 to 2004. Le Portz, a tall figure dressed in a dark suit, said he could recall little of significance about Le Scouarnec, who he described as a “discreet” and “ghostly” figure, who appeared to have “no difficulty” in his relationships with people. “We ran into each other in the corridors, we’d say ‘Bonjour’.”
However, there was one matter that struck him as “strange”, which was that “he spent a lot of time in his office without having a patient in consultation. Alone”. But Le Portz said he never looked in on Le Scouarnec to find out what he was doing. A clue came in early 2005, when Le Portz’s wife, a lawyer at the Vannes lawcourts, discovered that Le Scouarnec was due to stand trial for possession of child pornography images.
With Doctor Le Scouarnec no longer being there, it didn’t really interest us.
In October 2005, Le Scouarnec was found guilty of possession of “paedo-pornographic” images and was sentenced by magistrates in the same courthouse in Vannes where his current trial is taking place, and was handed a four-month suspended jail sentence. By then, he had left Vannes and was now working in a hospital in the town of Quimperlé, about 70 kilometres further north.
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Last Wednesday, Le Portz told the court that he and his colleagues, after learning of Le Scouarnec’s trial in 2005, spoke about it for no more than “one or two days”.
“And were you not curious enough to ask what had happened?” responded the presiding judge, Aude Buresi.
“No, because he was no longer there [at the clinic] since a year, so that didn’t concern us anymore,” said Le Portz. Judge Buresi pointed out that the charges for which Le Scouarnec was found guilty concerned a period between 2002 and 2003, when the general surgeon was working at the Sacré-Cœur clinic in Vannes.
“So it concerned you a bit, you the medical community, all the same,” she told to Le Portz.
“Yes,” admitted Le Portz with a smile, before adding: “You know, we were very taken up with our work. With Doctor Le Scouarnec no longer being there, it didn’t really interest us.”
“Unthinkable crimes”
The urologist gave the court an account of his appreciation of the events surrounding Le Scouarnec. “The possession of child pornography images was, certainly, a criminal affair, but without carrying out a crime [the sexual assault of children], it wasn’t something that justified us going to the French Medical Council,” said Le Portz. “It was not within our duties.”
Speaking outside of the court, Jean-Christophe Boyer, a lawyer for the child protection association L’Enfant Bleu, which is among the plaintiffs, commented: “Through these doctors, it is the whole of society that is being questioned,” he said. “In 2025, we’re still at the stage of asking if possession of images of child pornography concerns fantasising or the perpetration of a crime. Obviously it is the perpetration of a crime.”
Back in court, Benoit Le Portz added that within the clinic in Vannes there was no administrative structure that dealt with “that kind of thing”. After a short pause, judge Buresi asked him: “Do you believe that when one doesn’t see a problem, it doesn’t exist?”
“It wasn’t our problem,’ replied Le Portz, causing a stir among the plaintiffs’ lawyers.
“And now that you know that there were 200 victims at the Sacré-Cœur clinic, do you not think that it was, a little bit, your problem?” asked Buresi.
“Yes, obviously,” replied the urologist. “On the other hand, there is an enormous cognitive bias in judging a situation at the moment in time ‘X’ with what one knows at ‘X’ plus ten years. For us, what doctor Le Scouarnec did was unthinkable.”
One after the other, the panel of magistrates, and lawyers for the civil parties, attempted to place Le Portz before his responsibilities, but their efforts would prove in vain.
"Everyone was in the know"
The second former colleague of Le Scouarnec to take the stand last week was Rachid Hannoun, who practices general surgery. He did not hide his irritation at having to testify in person after the court turned down his request to appear via a video link. As a result, he had had to drive the 760 kilometres by road that separate Vannes from the town of Puy-en-Velay, in south central France, where he is based today.
Hannoun had known Le Scouarnec over a period from 2005 to 2007, when both men worked at the hospital in Quimperlé. He said their relationship was a “professional” one although Hannoun said he had invited Le Scouarnec to have dinner at his home on “two or three” occasions. There was no reciprocal invitation. “He didn’t have a home,” explained Hannoun, who said Le Scouarnec slept in one of the rooms for trainee doctors.
He said that one day Le Scouarnec came to see him and “perhaps” also an anaesthetist colleague – he was not certain. But he said he remembered very well what Le Scouarnec had come to say, which was: “It’s best you hear my version rather than learn rubbish from right and left.” Le Scouarnec, he said, had broken into tears.
Hannoun said a rumour was circulating in “all the hospital”, adding “everyone was in the know”.
The surgeon told the court: “He told me that, following marital problems, he lost his way, going onto paedophile websites and that the gendarmes had carried out a search of his home.” Hannoun said that the subject of a ruling by the Vannes court was brought up, but “nothing more”, adding that “for me, the story ends there”.
At the time I was concentrated on my work.
The investigations that led to the current trial established that a psychiatrist at the Quimperlé hospital, Thierry Bonvalot, had alerted management to Le Scouarnec’s paedo-criminal history, but the surgeon continued to operate upon children without any precautionary measures put in place.
Judge Buresi asked Hannoun: “For you, the fact that he’s working with minors did not pose a problem, given his conviction?”
“The [hospital] management had told me nothing,” he replied. “Everyone continued to work with him.”
Buresi asked if anyone within the hospital raised the subject of Le Scouarnec. “Ah, no, I didn’t ask anything,” said Hannoun, his elbows resting on the lectern.
“With the benefit of 20 years of hindsight do you think you could have said something?” the judge asked him.
“Until very recently, I believed there had never been any cases [of Le Scouarnec’s crimes] at Quimperlé,” he replied.
According to the prosecution, Le Scouarnec committed sexual assaults against 38 patients, male and female, in the hospital. “At the time,” said Hannoun, “I was concentrated on my work.”
For Jean-Christophe Boyer, lawyer for the child protection association L’Enfant Bleu, “These doctors, they’re extracted from formalin. In 20 years, nothing has changed.”
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* In France, the legal definition of rape is “any act of sexual penetration: vaginal, anal or oral. The penetration may be carried out by the sexual organs, fingers, other parts of the body or by an object”.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse