VANNES, France — For more than three decades, Stéphanie kept a dark secret: The “adored” doctor who had been like a second father had repeatedly raped her when she was a child.
Now 46, she is one of three victims who shared their stories about her alleged abuser, Joël Le Scouarnec, a once highly respected surgeon who is now standing trial in what is considered France’s largest ever pedophilia case, charged with raping or sexually abusing 299 people, all of them former patients and most of them children under the age of 15.
“He took me to dance class, to flute competitions,” Stéphanie said in one of a series of interviews last month. “He raped me in the car.”
“I never spoke up when I was a child,” she said, adding that she hoped sharing her experience would help other victims of abuse to find “the strength to break free and speak out.”
The closest she came to telling her family about her abuse was in January 2017, after her sister Christine died in a car crash at age 56. But she stayed silent for the same reason she always had — to protect her mother.
Instead, she said, she wrote a long letter detailing how Le Scouarnec, once a close family friend, had repeatedly raped her, and slipped it into Christine’s coffin.
Now an office manager with a 14-year-old son, Stéphanie said she will testify against Le Scouarnec, who is currently serving a 15-year sentence for the abuse of four other children and whose current trial opened late last month in the picturesque town of Vannes.
NBC News does not name victims of sexual abuse unless they are willing to be publicly identified. Stephanie and one of the other interviewees agreed to the use of their first names.
Le Scouarnec began abusing her in 1985 when she was just 6, Stéphanie said, adding that it began after she started staying at his family home near Loches, a quaint medieval town around 200 miles east of Vannes.
Le Scouarnec invited Stéphanie to stay at his family home after her father died of a heart attack at age 52. It looked like he was helping out her mother, now 89, who had four older daughters and worked with him as a medical assistant at a private clinic.
Living in the same home as Le Scouarnec, his then-wife Marie-France Lhermitte, now 71, and their three sons, all of whom are younger than Stéphanie, she said the abuse started immediately.
Lhermitte testified that she knew “nothing” of her husband’s 30-year history of abusing children, including members of their family, until his arrest in 2017. Her sons, ages 44, 42 and 38, told the court they did not suspect anything at the time.
Stéphanie said some of her memories, like times and dates of the abuse, are patchy. But like many of his victims, she was able to fill in the blanks because Le Scouarnec carefully chronicled his abuse in digital diaries he kept on hard drives, which were seized by police when they raided his home in May 2017, according to testimony in court. Some of the diary entries have been projected onto a screen in the courtroom.
Dating back to the mid-1980s they show that the majority of his victims — 256 — were under age 15 at the time they were assaulted. The average age of the alleged victims in the current trial — 158 male and 141 female — is 11. Most were under the effects of anesthesia or recovering from surgery.
Each time she visited Le Scouarnec’s home, Stéphanie said she knew what was going to happen, “but I don’t feel I can refuse.” Although she resisted a few times, she said he told her, “I’m not doing anything bad.”
Other victims have also recounted hearing those words.
For years, “there was a lot of suffering, shame,” she said, adding that the abuse stopped when she was around 12, after she changed schools and declined to sleep at his house. “I got older,” she said. “I am out of the Le Scouarnec prison.”
But Stéphanie said she didn’t have the courage to tell anyone. She credited several years of therapy she sought as an adult with helping her to rebuild her confidence. “Being freed from this secret buried for so many years was the beginning of my reconstruction,” she said.
While her mother was unaware of the abuse, one of Le Scouarnec’s nieces, Alexandra, 47, said she did speak up, but he was protected by “the silence of incest.”
Now a nurse, Alexandra said she thought she was her uncle’s first victim, adding that he started abusing her around 1982, when she was 5. Le Scouarnec, she said, would prey on her during piano lessons and sleepovers at his house, often when other family members were present in the home.
Some of the assaults took place in the bathroom, leaving her scared to go, she said, adding that she was also left terrified of medical exams. One one occasion, she said, she screamed “to death like a hysteric” and had to be held down as a doctor approached her.
Alexandra said she was 20 when she told her mother about the abuse after hearing that Le Scouarnec had locked himself and a little girl in a bathroom two years earlier.
But although her mom confronted her sister, Lhermitte, Alexandra said she balked at confronting Le Scouarnec himself.
“This person was so highly regarded in our family that she [felt she] didn’t have the right to go up to him and say, ‘What are you doing?’” she added.
Calling Alexandra “devious,” Lhermitte denied in court that she knew about the abuse until her husband’s arrest. Le Scouarnec’s diaries, however, refer to the “cataclysm” that resulted in 1996 when “she” learned “I’m a pedophile.” Investigators said the “she” he was referring to was Lhermitte.
Alexandra’s cousin, 34, whom NBC News has agreed not to name, said she feared the “tsunami” she would trigger if she told police about the things her uncle began doing to her at age 3.
“We come from a family that doesn’t make waves,” she said, adding that eventually she told her mother and older sister in October 2000, when she was 10.
In emotional court testimony late last month, the cousin’s mother, Annie, 72, said she confronted her brother, who immediately confessed. Asked by Presiding Judge Aude Buresi why she didn’t go to the police, she said she thought her daughter “was the only victim and it would never happen again.” But in 2017, she said she learned from police that her older daughter, now 39, had also been abused.
Stéphanie and Alexandra, who are due to testify Monday, have disputed Lhermitte’s claim that she was unaware of the abuse, as had Alexandra’s cousin.
Alexandra called her account “a pack of lies.” Le Scouarnec’s brother Patrick Le Scouarnec, 70, told the court by video link last week that Lhermitte knew about her husband’s actions during the same period. “There’s one person who could have had my brother arrested and that’s his wife, Marie-France,” he said.
In France, defendants may respond to witnesses if the judge allows it, and Le Scouarnec admitted that he carried out “hideous” crimes. After Annie’s testimony, he told the court that he could not “make up for the harm I have done to my niece.”
For the first time he also admitted to abusing his granddaughter and that he used his “status as a doctor” to assault kids. His “pedophile activity had no impact on my professional activity,” he told the court in a subsequent declaration.
His lawyer, Maxime Tessier, has said he has not admitted to all of the facts of the case.
If convicted, he faces a maximum of 20 years in prison, which would run concurrently with the 15 years he is already serving for the rape of two of his nieces, a young patient and a 6-year-old neighbor, whose parents reported the attack to police in 2017.
He was also convicted in 2005 of possessing thousands of images depicting child abuse that he downloaded from an internet site monitored by the FBI. He was given a four-month suspended sentence but was nonetheless allowed to carry on working at numerous public hospitals and private clinics in five regions of France.
When reports “exploded” in the press in the summer of 2019 that Le Scouarnec may have sexually abused scores of children, Stéphanie said she decided tell her mother that the respected doctor she was flattered to call a friend had raped her too.
“I protected my mother,” she said. “Who’d have thought that a little girl who just lost her daddy would accuse a surgeon of raping her.”
Her mother “believed me straight away,” she said, adding that her mom felt enormously guilty and told her “she’d blame herself for the rest of her life.”
The crimes against Stéphanie and Alexandra occurred too long ago to be prosecuted under French law. Calling for more support for victims of sexual abuse, both said they hoped France would extend the statute of limitations and toughen penalties for pedophiles.
“It’s a real public health issue” that “society as a whole” must confront, Stéphanie said.
The women said they were inspired by Gisèle Pelicot, who emerged as an icon of strength in France after she allowed her mass rape trial to be opened to the public last year.
“I had to fight to be the person I am today,” Stéphanie said. “We need to help victims rebuild their lives.”
If you are a child being abused, or know a child who may be facing abuse, call the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at (800) 422-4453, or go to www.childhelphotline.org. States often have child abuse hotlines, but if you suspect a child’s life is in imminent danger, call 911.
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, call the National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline at 1-800-656-4673. The hotline, run by the Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network (RAINN), can put you in contact with your local rape crisis center. You can also access RAINN’s online chat service at https://www.rainn.org/get-help.
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