A former French surgeon on trial on charges of sexually abusing almost 300 patients, mostly children, said on Monday he was “done with lying” and “ready to admit” to some rapes.

“Today I feel ready to admit to some acts of rape that I have wanted to hide, deny. I’m ready to admit to them. I’m done with lying,” the accused, Joel Le Scouarnec, told a French court after an investigator’s testimony about meticulous records the doctor kept of the abuse.

During the investigation, Le Scouarnec had admitted to the rape of boys under the guise of rectal examinations, the investigator told the court.

He had confessed to sexually assaulting girls, but dismissed his written accounts of rape against young female patients as “exaggeration” or “fantasy”, he said.

Le Scouarnec, 74, has been on trial in the western city of Vannes since last week in one of the country’s largest child sex abuse cases.

He is believed to have abused 299 patients, most while they were waking up from anaesthetic or during post-op checkups, at a dozen hospitals between 1989 and 2014.

The surgeon was never investigated during his career despite a 2005 sentence for owning sexually abusive images of children.

He continued to practice until his retirement in 2017, after which a six-year-old accused him of rape and police discovered diary accounts of abuse against his patients stored on his computers.

The former surgeon is already in jail, having been found guilty in 2020 of abusing four children, including two of his nieces.

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