A criminal court in France’s Brittany region on Wednesday convicted a former doctor of sexually abusing and raping 299 children. The accused doctor was sentenced to 20 years in prison. This is the largest child sexual abuse case in French history. The trial in the case has been ongoing since February 2025. The accused, Dr. Joel Le Scornec (age 74), was a former gastric surgeon. He sexually abused and raped hundreds of children while working in nine clinics and hospitals in France between 1989 and 2014. Two victims committed suicide due to stress after the news broke. Many of the victims were unconscious or under the influence of drugs when these incidents occurred, so they did not remember anything. The accused first sexually abused his 5-year-old niece in 1985. The accused doctor is already serving a 15-year sentence for raping four children, including his two nieces. He was sentenced in 2020 for this case.
The whole matter came to light in 2017, when the police searched Le Skorneck’s house because he had committed lewd acts in front of a 6-year-old girl living in the neighborhood. The girl’s parents had filed a complaint regarding this. Police found boxes filled with sex toys and dolls, computers and more than two dozen hard drives containing images of child sexual abuse in his home. Along with this, his diary of hundreds of pages was also found. In it, he wrote details of sexual abuse of children. Two spreadsheets contained the names, ages, addresses of the victims and details of the abuse they suffered.
