VANNES, France — The ex-wife of a former surgeon at the center of France’s largest ever child sexual abuse case told a court Wednesday she knew “nothing” of her husband’s near 30-year history of abusing children, including members of their family, until his arrest in 2017.
Marie-France Lhermite, 71, testified as her ex-husband, Joël Le Scouarnec, watched in the Palais de Justice in Vannes, a town in Brittany, northwestern France, where most of the alleged assaults took place.
“I never had doubts about my husband,” Lhermitte said, speaking in a stuttering voice, at times barely above a whisper.
The presiding judge Aude Bursis of the criminal court in Vannes led Lhermitte through a review of her husband’s writings that chronicle what investigators say is more than 300 rapes and sexual assaults of children, as her husband slouched a few feet away, often with his head in his hands.
Joël Le Scouarnec, 74, is charged with raping or sexually assaulting 299 victims over nearly 30 years, most of them children under 15, many as they recovered from surgery, and chronicling the abuse in a digital diary seized by investigators in 2017.
Prosecutors and his lawyer, Maxime Tessier, have said that Le Scouarnec, who is already serving a 15-year sentence for the abuse of four other children, has admitted to the “vast majority” of the charges, but not all of them.
Alternately combative and emotional — “Am I on trial?” she demanded at one point, Lhermitte repeatedly asked for questions to be repeated and sparred with the judge, who rebuked her to answer the questions in a respectful manner.
Asked if she was the woman alluded to in a 1996 passage, in which Le Scouarnec wrote that “a cataclysm” had struck “she knows I’m a pedophile,” Lhermitte denied that it was a reference to her.
Investigators believe the surgeon was referring to his wife, according to court documents.
Asked about the rapes of two young nieces in the 1980s, Lhermitte denied knowing about them and declined to look at photos displayed overhead of a niece’s genitalia that the judge said her former husband took in the 1980s.
LeScouarnec is serving 15 years in prison after a 2020 conviction for raping and sexually assaulting the niece when she was a child, her sister, a 4-year-old patient and a 6-year-old neighbor. It was the neighbor’s rape complaint in 2017 that led to the surgeon’s arrest and the investigation that followed.
Asked when she learned of allegations that her husband began assaulting a third niece, she replied by describing the niece as a girl who craved attention.
“She was always hanging around my husband’s neck,” she said. “I told myself she was blackmailing him.”
Bursis responded, “She was 5 years old, do you think she manipulated your husband?”
“Go figure, she’s devious,” Lhermitte said, as spectators in the crowded gallery gasped.
Victims watched the trial by video-link in a 450-seat auditorium a short walk from the courthouse. Two other transmission rooms in a former law school are broadcasting the trial to the media and spectators. The trial is expected to take about four months.
On Monday, the niece Lhermitte accused of craving attention told NBC News that her aunt’s denials, which she made this month in Ouest France newspaper, were “a pack of lies.”
NBC News does not typically name victims of sexual abuse, but Alexandra, 47, agreed to the use of her first name. She expects to testify next week that her uncle abused her from ages 5 to 13, although the incidents happened too long ago to be prosecuted under French law.
As early as 1996, Alexandra said her mother spoke with Lhermitte about her husband’s unusual fondness for little girls. She added her aunt replied that “all men like little girls.”
Asked about that exchange in court, Lhermitte denied she said it.
Lhermite’s testimony, which lasted over four hours, came after Le Scouarnec’s brother Patrick Le Scouarnec, 70, told the court by video-link that she knew about her husband’s abuse as early as 1996.
“There’s one person who could have had my brother arrested, and that’s his wife, Marie-France,” he said. “She was aware of her husband’s actions and did nothing.”
He added that he cut off ties with his brother after his arrest in 2017. “I think he should be imprisoned until he dies,” he said. “It would be good for society.”
After the brother’s testimony came to an end, Le Scouarnec begged his brother for forgiveness, adding that he had “committed the worst of crimes.”
In France, defendants are allowed to reply to testimony, if the presiding judge allows it.
If convicted, Le Scouarnec faces up to 20 years in prison, which would run concurrently with his 15-year term.
But those assaults were only part of what appears to have been widespread intergenerational abuse in the family.
On Tuesday, one of Le Scouarnec’s sons, Fabien Le Scouarnec, 42, told the court that he was sexually abused by his late paternal grandfather, Joseph Le Scouarnec, over several years.
The abuse “happened dozens of times” until he was 10, he said. When he told his mother, he said she replied that she, too, had been “abused” by “several people.”
His younger brother, Florian Le Scouarnec, 38, testified that he had “happy memories” of his family and that they had been involved in his life and helped him with his studies, but his father’s “perversion exploded like an atomic bomb in the family.”
“I think that’s also why I haven’t been in touch with him since 2017, because deep down I want to keep that image of him,” he said.
