***DISCLAIMER- THE FOLLOWING WAS WRITTEN BY A STUDENT JOURNALIST AND IS COMPLETELY ALLEGED***

A former french surgeon was put on trial on Monday for the alleged rape or sexual abuse of 299 victims. Most of them are children who were patients of Joel Le Scouranec, now 74 years old. He will be facing  hundreds of victims during a 4 month trial in Vanness, Brittany. He faces up to 30 years in prison if convicted, on top of 15 years he’s been serving for being found guilty for rape and sexual assault of children back in 2020, in which he did to 4 children, including 2 nieces. He doesn’t deny the allegations but he says he doesn’t remember. 

Some of the alleged victims have no memory of the assault because they were unconscious at the time. One man, now in his thirties, testified and said that he was assaulted and a victim during a consultation back in 1995, when he was a younger boy: “I remember certain things in the recovery room. I was in total panic. I called my dad.” The cases began in 2016, when a 6 year old neighbor said that the doctor had touched her over the fence separating their properties. A search of his home revealed that he had over 300,000 photos and 650 pedophilic, zoophilic, and scatalogical video files, as well as notebooks where he would describe himself as a pedophile and detailed his actions, according to investigation documents.   

The doctor allegedly sexually abused both little girls and boys when they were alone in their hospital rooms. One of the victims, Amelie Leveque, recalled her time in the hospital when she was 9 years old in 1991. Years later, she described feeling overwhelmed when she found out that her name was in his notebook. “I felt like I had lost control of everything. I wasn’t crazy, but now I had to face the truth of what happened,” she told public broadcaster France 3. 

Joel Le Scouranec had been convicted in 2005 for possessing child sexual abuse material and was sentenced for 4 months of suspended prison time. Despite the conviction, he was appointed as a hospital practitioner the following year. 

Now, all we know is that the trial will be set to last four months. And during that time, the 299 alleged victims who are now adults will be called on to recount what they can remember of their interactions with Joel Le Scouranec, who faces 20 years in prison if convicted.