RedHanded - The Paedophile Diaries: Dr Joël Le Scouarnec | #405

Episode Date: June 26, 2025

“I am a paedophile… and I’m very happy about it.” The thousands of handwritten entries in the so-called ‘black notebooks’ of France’s worst ever child sex offender revealed more than 30 years of horrendous abuse. In devastating detail, they described acts carried out on young patients in his work as a surgeon, in hospitals across western France. He is likely to have abused more than 400 children.The notebooks also showed just how many blind eyes were turned in that time, and how, at home, he descended further and further into depravity: living in filth, surrounded by more than 70 child-sized dolls. Just weeks after the sentencing in May 2025, we open the paedophile diaries of Dr Joël Le Scouarnec.Exclusive bonus content:Wondery - Ad-free & ShortHandPatreon - Ad-free & Bonus EpisodesFollow us on social media:YouTubeTikTokInstagramVisit our website:WebsiteSources available on redhandedpodcast.comSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Red Handed early and ad-free. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondry's American History Tellers. In our latest series, a seemingly ordinary cook in New York City becomes the center of a public health crisis. Officials race to find the woman, dubbed Typhoid Mary by the press, before she can unwittingly spread the deadly illness she carries to even more people. Listen to American history tellers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Saruti.

I'm Hannah. And welcome to Right-Handed en français. En français, le reluctant edition. Le pedo edition. I was just thinking, as I was saying, I was like, why do I feel like I've already done this? We started to record this episode. Yes, we did. And then we had to stop.

Yes, we had some studio difficulties, technical issues, but we are hopefully now not having that because you can see and hear me, hopefully. And if you're only listening to me, this entire episode in video form is available on the Red-Handed YouTube channel. And if you are watching me say that, that's weird. Anyway, it's going to be a rough one, guys. Get ready. I was thinking about it. I was just like, why does this one feel so horrible? Because it is. It is. But there's no like, there's nothing to it apart from it being really fucking awful. Yes. And I think that's what has made me feel so

despondent about being alive today. Let's make everyone feel that way. Welcome. If I have to feel like this, so do you. By telling them this horrible story. So in April 2017, a young couple known publicly only as Jerome and Laura, had just moved to Jean-Tac, a small town in southwestern France. And from the start, it was obvious that their neighbor, a 66 year old surgeon was well, a little eccentric. His windows were very grimy, he was always alone, and they could hear him blaring classical music out into the wee hours every morning.

The classical music, I think I can be like, okay, surgeons are weird, obsessive. I can see that. I don't want the word grimy associated with someone who's going to cut me open. No, the house is absolutely filthy. And we will find out just how filthy soon. But for now, just picture the most disgusting windows you've ever seen. They'd also spot this man occasionally walking around his garden completely naked. And you might think, well, it's his garden. He can do what he wants. He's French. He's French. But they do have a very short fence. And so they can see him quite

clearly walking around very naked. And Jerome and Nora have got kids. So they weren't exactly thrilled about this. But they did have to say that out on the street when they ran into this man, he seemed pretty normal. He was polite, respectable and seemed harmless enough. That is until the 24th of April 2017 when Jerome and his young daughter bumped into their surgeon neighbor as they were coming home from a walk. The surgeon, and this is weird, points his finger down in front of the girl's nose and waggles it about like he's saying no. The girl seems visibly freaked out and asks her dad if she can go inside.

He obviously says, yes, please do go inside. This man is very strange. But things got quite bad for Jerome when he followed his daughter into the house because his ten-year-old said to him, if I tell you something promise you won't get mad. Jerome says of course and then the girl tells him what no father wants to hear. Talking about their neighbor, she said, that man showed me his willy. And she said she hadn't wanted to tell anybody about it before because she was worried that she might go to prison. I think, right, I have observed this a few times, when adults immediately interact with

the child first, before the adult, I think that's always really fucking weird. I feel like even if you're not actually with words, asking permission to interact with child, I feel like speaking to adult to adult, then child, that's the order. Now, I was listening to an interview with, oh God, what's her name? The lady who voices Louise and Bob's burgers.

Kristen? Yeah, Kristen Schaal. Yeah. I was listening to her, the interview the other day, and she said, sometimes, like, if I'm ever with my daughter and fans come up to me, I'm already a bit like, my guard's up because my kid's there, I don't know who you are. Yeah. But she was like, quite a lot of the time, people will ignore me, go up to my daughter and be like, do you know how fucking funny your mum is? Weird. Don't do that. What the fuck is wrong with people?

But unless, if I'm with my dog, however, please don't speak to me. Just engage the dog and then leave. Oh, no, no. I need people to ask permission before they interact with my dog. Please don't speak to me. Do you not? But like that time when I was in the pub and a guy fed meatable chicken from his mouth. Don't feed my dog. This is the thing. People do just, they will. I don't take my dogs to pubs though, because they don't like being there. Anyway. So Jerome's daughter told her father that the previous Saturday,

she had been playing with her brother in the garden, when the man next door had beckoned her over the fence. Beckoning, never not an ominous gesture, in my opinion. in the garden when the man next door had beckoned her over the fence. Beckoning never not an ominous gesture, in my opinion. And then he'd exposed himself to her and asked her to touch him. When she refused, he had reached through the fence and touched her with his fingers. As soon as Jerome heard this, he did the right thing and he rang the police, who very soon afterwards stormed the neighbour's house. And as Saru said, it wasn't just the windows that were gross, the inside was absolutely filthy. In every way that word means that.

It very quickly became apparent that this man was much, much more than just a weirdo neighbourhood nons. And sadly the little girl's disclosure over what transpired between her and the neighbour was just the tip of the disgusting paedophile iceberg. Police found a collection of more than 70 dolls hidden under the floorboards of the man's house. Some were a meter tall and some had been crudely modified with sex toys. Not over, not even close. We're only 10 minutes in. In the living room, investigators found a catalog of horror going back decades. As the horrifying news spread across the country, As the horrifying news spread across the country, these journals became known in France as Le Connoi Noir, the black notebooks. Because this surgeon had kept meticulous, incredibly detailed, handwritten accounts

of the abuse that he had been doling out. And all of these victims that he had were all children who had been in his care. And it is absolutely like mind-boggling the actual numbers when you look at them, because just looking at these notebooks, there were 299 victims spanning over 30 years, carried out at 12 different clinics and hospitals across North West France, all under the guise of medical examinations. And what's maybe even more shocking than the scale and the depravity of what was written in these black notebooks was this man's total unflinching lack of shame over what he had been doing.

Because there are some real choice lines in these notebooks that I'm going to share with you now because one note in these books proudly read, I am a paedophile and always will be. Just wait for someone to clip that and take it out of context with me. I've got more for you to work with, whoever's going to do that to me. Because another note says, it's me. While smoking my morning cigarette, I reflected on the fact that I am a big pervert, a voyeur, a sadist, a masochist, and a fetishist, and a paedophile all rolled into one. And I'm very happy about it. The man's journals revealed in disgusting detail the machinations of a depraved mind.

There were even twisted love letters to his victims, some of whom were as young as one. And there's also a lot of frustration that he talks about in the books, frustration at his friends and family mainly, talking about how they could never understand his so-called lifestyle choice. And also a lot of disbelief that he was getting away with what he was doing and he had got away with it for quite so long. Because after all, this man had been convicted in 2005, but yet still somehow managed to be allowed to continue working with children for another 13 years after a conviction.

For being a paedophile, not for just like nicking a stamp. No, no, no. For some pretty disgusting things, all of which we are going to get into. Fear not or fear a lot, however you want to feel about that. But let's take it one step at a time because this is a very, very timely story actually, because it was only a few weeks ago, the France's largest ever child abuse trial came to an end. And now that it is over, it is time to open up Le Carne Noir or the pedophile diaries of Dr. Lesquanek. My name is Madison McGee. From LA Times Studios comes its latest series, LA Crimes.

From deep dives into the Menendez brothers to conversations about why Bravo TV seems to be a hotbed of white collar criminals, we'll cover it all. We'll speak with LA Times reporters and others in the true crime industry to put a lens not just on these cases, but on our own culture's fascination with them and what that says about us. Tune in every Wednesday wherever you stream your podcast. It's all a lighthearted nightmare on our podcast, Morbid. We're your hosts, I'm Alina Urquhart.

And I'm Ash Kelly. And our show is part true crime, part spooky, and part comedy. The stories we cover are well researched. Of the 880 men who survived the attack, around 400 would eventually find their way to one another and merge into one larger group. With a touch of humor.

Shout out to her. Shout out to all my therapists out there, there's been like eight of them. A dash of sarcasm and just garnished a bit with a little bit of cursing. That mother-fucker is not real! And if you're a weirdo like us, I'd love to cozy up to a creepy tale of the paranormal.

Or you love to hop in the way back machine and dissect the details of some of history's most notorious crimes You should tune in to our podcast, Morbid. Follow Morbid on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to episodes early and ad free by joining Wondery Plus and the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Joël Esquenegh was born in Paris in the suburbs in the 1950s. His parents were hardworking people, a carpenter and a nanny, and they had three children. Joël was the eldest, which meant he felt an immense amount of pressure to succeed from an early age. And so at the age of just 10,

he decided that he wanted to become a surgeon, which a lot of psychopaths do. He was a quiet child who liked to be alone with his books and classical records for company. He kept detailed written lists of his collections of not just books and vinyl, but also operas that he'd seen, films he'd watched and cities he's visited. But as you might have guessed, there was something a bit off. When his grandfather died and he visited the mortuary, he later said, I knew what it meant, but I didn't show any emotion, didn't feel anything, even though it was my grandfather, which is a very Dennis Nilsson. Yeah, he really does have a lot of like tick boxes for lots of different other characters

that we've come across in the world of true crime. And yeah, that did strike me as quite Dennis Nilsson-y. I think from a very early age, you can see that something's not quite right with him. He is very, very detached. And I think maybe it is because of that relative detachment, alongside with this sort of steely focus that he has to like record everything that he's doing, collect everything and have it in very orderly notes that he keeps from being a very young child. Maybe that's why he was able to actually stick to his guns and become a doctor. Because there is this thing of like the Hannibal Lecter effect where it's like, oh, these psychopaths who are brilliant and genius. And actually, most psychopaths or most people with that condition are not able to achieve very much

because they actually become quite distracted quite easily. They have a very, very low boredom threshold. And they don't like being told what to do. By people who they think is less intelligent than they are. Absolutely. And as we see time and time again with killers, the reason that they're doing what they're doing is because they're not getting enough of a thrill from ordinary everyday activities. So there is obviously a higher percentage of people who lack empathy or could sit somewhere on that psychopathic spectrum who go into very high flying jobs like politicians,

CEOs and surgeons, but it's by no means like the majority, but there is a higher than average proportion in those jobs. And maybe it's because it helps. Like if you're literally going to take a scalpel and cut into another human being, maybe you do need to have that level of like detachment and maybe that is what helped Joelle get to where he got to. Yeah, I think a lot of, well not a lot of, but if you've listened to Dr Death you will know. There's also the attraction of being a surgeon is being the best of the best. Of course. And it's a very small pool of people who are even capable of getting close, but similarly to like someone with a psychopathic brain, which let's remember one in

a hundred, we've all met one. It's easier for them to rise to the top of business because they're ruthless and they do not care and they will slit your throat as soon as you look at you. And it's the same, same thing. I don't think it's difficult to equate like how hard it is to even get the access you would need to become a surgeon in the first place. That's a lot easier if you're going to send someone down the hall to the wrong interview, isn't it? Yes. So he absolutely does stick to his guns and he studies in Paris and then ends up qualifying as a surgeon in Nantes. And then he starts working as a surgical trainee at the Hôtel

Dior Hospital in Paris. There he started specializing in abdominal issues like appendicitis, hernias and gastrointestinal surgery. And he operated on children and adults. While he was there, he started dating a young nursing assistant with a very French name, Marie France. I think you mean Marie France. I was going to say Marie France for sure. You're the one with the French GCSE my friend, not me. Thank you. And when he got a job as a surgeon at a clinic in Vain, the two of them moved there together

and they lived a pretty swanky life. The two of them went on to have three boys together. They had a very, very active social circle, they went on lavish holidays to Italy and they lived, to complete it all, in a big fuck-off manor house on a giant hill, complete with a grand piano in the lounge. Now as a busy surgeon, Lesquanek wasn't around much for his kids, but when he was, he did like to take his boys out to museums and encourage them to take music lessons. Like that was something that he was particularly interested in for the children. And the kids do say that they remember

their childhoods being a happy one. What instrument are you going to force on your child? Oh, I just, I can't, I can't because I will definitely be a Tiger mom to an extent. That's just shocker. Foregone conclusion. I think you should set expectations for your children and they should, you know, strive to meet them in some way. But I would, I would like to say to them, I want you to be happy, healthy and financially

independent by the time you're 18. They've got to excel at something. That's what I would like for them to do. That's what my future child has to look forward to. But I will not push musical instruments on them because I don't think I can do that because I am so shocking musically. What would you push on a little Maguire? Well, have to find someone to shag me first. That's the first hurdle. After that box is ticked.

Oh, piano. Piano. Yeah. Nice. Anyone can play guitar. So yeah. Even you. I mean I don't, I honestly don't think I could. I watch people play guitar and I'm like what the fuck. Don't get it. So yeah, the kids are like whatever instrument was being pushed on them, whether they liked it or not, they remember their childhoods being a happy one. That is, unless their grandfather was around. Their

paternal grandfather, that is. Yeah, before we move on, we have to take a jump back to look at Joseph Le Squannet Cousel's father. We already told you that he was a carpenter, mostly working in Paris. And when he was 40, whilst commuting into the big city, he met a young 19-year-old called Christian Dubois. When I picture this story in my head, Christian Dubois is played by Matt Damon in the Tantrum Mr Ripley. Okay. That's who's getting into this train carriage.

I can see that. 19 though. Yeah, man. Everyone looked older back there. Anyway, so Joseph Fluswenek, who was 40, starts talking to a 19 year old, Madding. And that starts to happen most mornings and they struck up a friendship. When Joseph lost his job, Christian Dubois got him a new one at the bank where he worked.

Before long, Christian Dubois was part of the furniture in the Los Juanac house. He even started to go on family holidays. On one of these holidays, Joelle's sister walked in on Joseph, her dad, and Christian Dubois, playing with a stuffed animal, which had been taken from Dubois's own stuffed animal collection. When she walked in, they looked worked up and embarrassed and they shouted at her to close the door. Years later when Joelle's mother died, Christian Dubois moved in with the family and you're just going to have to decide what you think of that all on your own. I feel like not a lot is made in the resource material that we've seen about why 19 year

old Matt Damon slash Christian Dubois has a stuffed animal collection. That's just kind of like taken as a given. Don't know. Don't know what's going on there. But that's what kind of sex the time is being part taken in. So the record. Sarouchi Bala is not saying if you have stuffed animals. You are a pervert. No, I am. Yes, she's not. No.

I've said it before. I think stuffed animals, I think I said it in the, what was it? The one with the like Hello Kitty. Hong Kong. Hong Kong Hello Kitty murder. I just think when you see a stuffed animal, I'm just like, that is filthy. It's filthy. It's disgusting.

Especially when you see a stuffed animal in the hand of a small child or a 19 year old man who's fucking your dad. It's filthy. It's disgusting. Especially when you see a stuffed animal in the hand of a small child or a 19 year old man who's fucking your dad. It's disgusting. So anyway, I'm going to buy your children. So many. And they're all going to be cream. So they all look just a little bit gray and disgusting all the time and you'll never be able to wash them? Oh my god, this is just so upsetting. This is why parents are sick all the time. Wipe down toys only. Anyway, let's leave your future progeny and their fluffy toy problems in the future where

they belong and stick with the details of this strange menage-a-trois or perhaps menage-a-deux if you don't count the stuffed animal. But it is relevant because we now know that Joseph's sexual proclivities go beyond bringing his little side piece on holiday to play with teddies. And we know that because years later when Joelle had his own children, they started calling Joseph Grandpa Maniac. Yeah. It's not the best. It's not the best like granddad nickname, is it? Did you have a nickname to your grandparents?

Oh God, no. Oh, did you not? No, no. My dad wasn't even allowed to call my granddad by his first name because he was a Catholic. Oh. Had to call him Mr. Jones. Or granddad. Wasn't allowed to call him Colindad by his first name because he was a Catholic. Oh. Had to call him Mr. Jones. Or granddad. Wasn't allowed to call him Colin.

Oh my god. At least he's not grandpa maniac. Something. Not in words. Classic Colin. So you might be wondering where did this nickname grandpa maniac come from? We don't know exactly, but we can hazard some guesses because the kids apparently heard Joseph asking their mothers to record porn films for him off the TV. I'm also like, what porn films are just playing on TV?

I know you're going to say it's France. Yes. Sure. And yes, Grandpa Maniac with his VHS tapes full of porn films ran his household with an absolute iron fist. When the boys were at Joseph's house, they weren't allowed to shower or set foot in the dining room, which he always kept pristine. They were also never allowed out into Grandpa's hut, which was basically like a wooden shed that sat at the bottom of their grandparents' garden and where Joseph would often lock himself away for hours. And no

one was allowed in there except for one of his three grandsons, Fabian. But that dubious honour of being allowed into grandpa's shed wasn't exactly a treat. Because it was in that hut that Joseph sexually abused his grandson Fabian for years. The boy later testified, I was between five and nine years old, happened everywhere, in the kitchen, in front of the TV, in the shed. One day a desperate Fabian actually told family friend Christian Dubois about his grandfather flashing him, touching him and forcing him to give oral sex. Dubois actually confronted his twice his age live in colleague mate about what was going on and Joseph apparently broke down saying that he had been raped by a priest when he

was a child and that's why he was doing what he was doing now. And he also swore to Dubois that he would change and he would never do it again. Now it's important to say probably that Joël denies ever being abused by his father. So Joseph is his father and Fabian is Joelle's son. But Joelle says, my father never touched me. He never sexually abused me. Nothing like that ever happened. Now, as to whether I believe that, we'll come back to you later. If you believe Charles' testimony, which I don't, but if you do. He wasn't always a paedophile. He claims to have operated

on children for years and even worked on a paediatric ward for six months and never felt any attraction or desire at all. But in 1985, in his own words, he transferred his sexuality. And that started with his five-year-old niece, who very unfortunately for English speakers on this side of the Atlantic, is known in the courts as Fanny. Look, I'm just like, it's not her real name, so they could have picked any. I know. I know. I feel like I've done something wrong. It's just the way it be. Sometimes it do be like that. He claims his niece was very affectionate towards him. She would always sit on his lap and at first it disturbed him but then his thoughts turned sexual so it's all her fault being a five-year-old. And this is when Liswanek

considers that he discovered he was a paedophile. He started making what he calls unfortunate gestures and then soon in his black notebooks he chronicles the sexual abuse he perpetrated. He writes this, before her I never would have had such an idea. Before that I had a normal life. I made love with my wife. I had nothing to write about. But after this instance, he did start writing and it totally consumed him. There's like, I watched this really interesting like analysis of Lolita. So like in the film adaptions, right? She's very obviously a teenage girl, like young-ish, but she's, you know,

approaching womanhood. In the book, she's supposed to look like an eight-year-old boy. Yeah. I mean, in the movie adaptations, she looks like a 17-year-old girl, I would say. And that's the whole point of the book is that she doesn't look like a woman at all. She looks like a child, but he still writes about her as this irresistible siren. I think it's the palatable version for the mainstream, just actually losting after this eight-year-old child, but that's what the book is about. But no, I think he is possibly not a kind of preferential paedophile, like somebody

who is purely attracted to children and children only, I do think he is possibly one of these people who goes on to become essentially a child sex offender because I think he, and it sounds awful because that's what he's saying, like discovers this turn on that he has when this little girl sits in his lap. And we see that now all the time and that makes it sound like fucking terrifying, but we do see this with the consumption of like so much pornography that some people are consuming, that it leads to a point where they stop getting aroused by kind of ordinary sex. And so they're constantly on this hunt for looking for more and more things that are increasingly taboo. It's

kind of like a drug, like you need a bigger rush of like taboo or weirdness or like kinkiness or freakishness or something in order to get that same erotic rush. Of course that doesn't happen to everybody and I'm not conflating everybody who's into kinky stuff with being a fucking pedophile or being into bestiality, but that is the road that some people end up going down and that's what can lead somebody who is in other ways, attracted to adults down a path where they are now engaging with child sex abuse images. And it is mind boggling. And I think he is the kind of person who it goes hand in hand with that kind of God complex

of being a surgeon. And we see it when he, cause he does most of his offending in hospitals. I'm not saying it doesn't happen elsewhere. We will get to that, but mainly in hospitals with victims that are under his care. I think he is just getting off on the fact that he can do these horrific things to these children. Nobody clocks it. Everybody trusts him implicitly. Doctor, in a white coat, why would we question you? You are the God, you're the savior in the room. Everybody's listening to you. Nobody's questioning you. And he can just walk around doing whatever he wants with impunity.

And I think that is a big part of the erotic rush for him, not just the fact that they are children. I think it's because they are so vulnerable and in his care and children and the elderly unfortunately often fall victim to this in these kinds of institutions because either nobody believes them or they're too scared to speak out. But I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. So anyway, Leskwanek starts recording his abuse of Fanny and the other children of family

friends. So like I said, it's not entirely just in the institutions he works in. He's also absolutely happy doing it to children that he knows and quote-unquote should love because they're literally related to him. And all of this he refers to in Le Canin Noir disgustingly as his sex life. His life basically breaks into two at this point. On the one hand, you've got the kind of well-to-do surgeon, husband, father, who's thriving, advancing in his career, living in this massive manor house and attending all these glitzy parties.

He's in the upper echelons of society at this point. And then on the other hand, you've got the abuser and he's descending deeper and deeper into more and more depravity with the kind of abuse that he's engaging in. And Joelle later wrote in his notebook, I no longer examine children as young patients. I looked at them with the eyes of a paedophile. Every gesture took on a sexual connotation. And over the years, the hospitals and the clinics that Joelle worked in became his hunting

grounds. Walking through the halls, he would look the clinics that Joelle worked in became his hunting grounds. Walking through the halls, he would look for children who were alone in their rooms. And this is where, again, where I was saying about he kind of takes on the guise of lots of people we've covered before, it starts to feel very Jimmy Savile. He's got free reign, he's got the keys to the castle in all of these institutions, and he makes the fucking most of it. He would never ask a nurse to leave because he was very careful about the abuse that he institutions and he makes the fucking most of it. He would never ask a nurse to leave because he was very careful about the abuse that he

carried out. He doesn't want to get caught. And nor would he wait around too long so that he wouldn't draw too much attention to himself. He would only move on a child and this is all stuff he's written in his own books when he knew the coast was clear. He would step into the room and say one of his stock phrases like, I've come to see if your tummy hurts or does it burn when you pee. Then Esquanet would act as if he was carrying out a medical examination, exposing the child's lower body and abusing

the young patient. Again, also very Larry Nazza. I was discussing this with a friend of mine and she made the point that it's quite rare even as a grown-up to be on your own in a hospital in a room with the doctor. And I used the Larry Nassar example and she was like yeah but physio is a bit different. Fair point. However no one's gonna stop a doctor going into a room on their own are they? Yeah. Do you know what I mean? No absolutely I think that's how he's able to abuse with such impunity because no one was going to stop him.

Of course not. And as a parent, even if you were in the room or if your child told you that this has happened, what do you say? Oh, the doctor touched my belly and then touched me here. As a parent, you're just going to think, well, he's just doing a medical examination. What do I know? I can't question him. Like, I think there is that level of like, I don't want to say naivety because you are there for help and the doctor is in a trusted position. It's trust that comes with that white coat.

Heather Meehan Yeah, unless you're my mom who thinks every doctor is an idiot. Anyway, if he ever was walked in on by a nurse or anyone else, which was rare but sometimes did happen, he would quickly pull up the sheet and carry on as if nothing was amiss. He never left any marks and he was careful never to cause too much physical pain. If he felt any resistance or suspicion he would stop, but that almost never happened. And we can't quite overstate the position of authority that a doctor in a white coat will have over a child on their own. He wrote, the advantage of girls between three and ten is that you can touch them without them

asking too many questions. And most of his abuses were carried out exactly in this way, under the pretense of some sort of medical exam. The others, those he carried out on older children, happened in the operating theatre, mostly while the children were unconscious. And this might strike people as odd because no surgeon is ever in an operating theatre alone with the person that's on the operating table. Most operations are complicated procedures requiring at least five professionals, let's say, all working in tandem. To explain that, we can go straight to the disgusting horse's mouth itself because in his book, Dr. Luskwaneck

wrote, you have to be patient and count on luck. So basically he would wait until his colleagues had their backs turned and then he would slip his hand underneath the sheet. Again, I do not believe for a second that that is not part of what is getting him off. It is not just the idea of like getting away with it because you know I'd be very careful I'll wait until the child is on their own like yeah day to day he's doing that but the thrill he must be getting of knowing what he's doing and knowing that there's a room full of people who if they just turned round

he would get caught. God the thrill of that is absolutely what is driving this man and that's why I think he fits in that scope of like a man who sexual desires, sexual depravities, proclivities, whatever, are so out of control that he's constantly having to push the boat further and further and further to get that erotic thrill. Now some colleagues, and this is shocking, some colleagues performed literally hundreds of procedures with Joelle and no one ever suspected a thing, or at least if they did, no one ever said a thing. For the first few years, there were only a few entries in his sick diaries, but by the

early 90s, these entries into La Canne Noire ramped up significantly. First it was just girls, then it was boys too. Sometimes there were four entries in just a single day. And Joelle clearly took pleasure not just in the acts, but also in the very act of documenting what he had done. He wrote in these journals, for example, I was possessed by the desire to write. I'd go home and enjoy writing. I didn't use certain words at first but then the despicable

began to escalate." He is absolutely reveling in these journals that he is keeping. I think for him they become this sort of like private memory palace in book form where he can relive and fetishize and write it down like some disgusting pornographic fan fiction of himself. I think it's there for his memories, for his trophies to have all of these records of abuse. It's like a collector. I think you see that from his childhood when he's doing that. But to see it carried through into the abuse is not something I can remember seeing this explicitly in any other abuser, but it's very interesting. I suppose not in the writing it down, but there have been a lot of sexual abusers will keep their trophy record in film.

Yeah, I guess it's whatever speaks to you as a killer or as an abuser, whatever that trophy takes. Is it in the form of a living trophy, like a co-conspirator that you're controlling? Is it in the form of photographs? Is it in the form of just actual items you've stolen from your victim? And here it's these incredibly detailed accounts. And we'll go on to see, like I said, I called them like these twisted love letters he writes to his victim. He's addressing them a lot of the time in the abuse, using their names, using their ages, using when he's done it, when it happened. Like when I say detailed, I mean detailed, meticulous accounts of the abuse, not just, dear diary, today I did this. It's like, this is who and what I did and how I did it and what time it was and

where we were. It's like so that he can perfectly go back into that one snapshot of time. And he called this his manic collecting side. He noted everything down with the precision and detail of a medical professional. Every time he wrote down the victim's full name, their age, the time and the place that the abuse happened, and their addresses as well. Here's an example. Loche Hospital, 1990. Delphine. When I first saw you, you weren't quite awake yet. That's how I was able to lift the sheets. And as Saru said, he wrote to all of his victims like this, addressing

them by name and then describing their sexual abuse in horrifying detail, like love letters. In 1999, he returned seven times in a row to the bedside of the same little girl. And of her he wrote, today I hadn't planned to see you alone in your room, but when I saw that I could touch you again, I couldn't resist the pleasure. Now the vast majority of entries in his diary chronicle abuses of patients in his care. But not all. One entry reads the following. Sunday, June 16th, 1996, 6am.

Today is Father's Day, but I'm a bit sad. Alas, I didn't have a daughter. She would have always worn a dress, white socks and white panties. And in the evening I would have joined her in her room to cuddle her and she would have hugged me and whispered, Daddy, I love you. In 1998, a listing notes abuse of F and F. And these Fs refer to funny and fancy. And they were the family's two silver collies. So yeah, here we again have a man crossing the boundaries, pushing another taboo, moving through paedophilia into bestiality.

And this isn't just a theory on our part because he actually writes in the journal, quote, I was multiplying transgressive experiments. I was proud to break the law. So again, he's taking a sick pride in what he is doing and how he's escalating and getting away with it. That theme runs right throughout all of these journals. And Joelle also obsessively followed stories about paedophiles on TV and in true crime magazines, kind of weirdly like seeing himself as one of them, like kind of associating it as like, oh, I found my people, like this is my tribe. And he writes about himself in his journals,

like he's some sort of martyr. Like I don't understand what the cause is specifically. Is it just being transgressive? Maybe. But that is definitely how he sees himself. I think it has to be. I mean, he's not one of those like pie people that's like, it's sexual preference. Like he knows what he's doing is completely disgusting. He writes it down himself. He loves it. He loves being, I think that is the key thing for him. He is getting off not just on the sexual abuse. He is getting off on pushing the boundaries, pushing the taboos, becoming more and more depraved and getting away with it in plain sight. And also

keeping all these detailed meticulous notes of it. Well quite like you have to wonder when he's writing things down in such detail and not really making any attempt to hide it either as in hide the books how did he get away with it for quite so long. I don't really have a convincing answer for you but let's give it a go. At a small private clinic called Sacre Coeur which was run by nurses in a town called Vain where he committed the vast majority of his crimes apparently no one ever noticed a single thing. Even parents didn't realize that anything was wrong. No red flags were raised. But people knew. And we're going to start with someone very close to

home. LaSwanek's wife had known for years what her husband was. Not that she would admit it obviously. Very French Mary-France LaSwanek swears to this day that she never had an inkling of her husband's sick double life until the trial. But there is quite a lot of evidence that suggests that she's lying. We're going to come on to all of that. But according to Dr. Lesquanek himself, Marie had actually confronted him about all of this in 1996. He says, and he writes this in his journals like contemporaneously, apparently his wife pointed out a cupboard that he always kept locked in the house and shouted, you're a paedophile, I don't want to know what's in there,

empty it out, get treated. So why is he writing that in there Marie France if you didn't know? And there's another entry that's a little bit more black and white if you think the first one wasn't enough where Joel wrote simply she knows I'm a paedophile. Sure. And this tragically is just the first in a long list of times that this story should have ended. If it is indeed true that Marie France, his wife, knew that he was a paedophile this should have ended. If it is indeed true that Marie France, his wife, knew that he was a paedophile, this should have been the end of it. But it wasn't because as precise as Lascuanec's grotesque routine had become, more and

more people did find out and that list just got longer and longer. Joelle's sister, Annie, the one who'd walked in on their dad's weird teddy party all of those years before, confronted Joelle in the year 2000. Annie said that her 10-year-old daughter had said, in children's words, Joelle had touched her. And on hearing this, Joelle broke down in tears and promised to seek treatment, saying that he'd work for the rest of his life to make amends. It is interesting to me that when he gets confronted with something like that, he doesn't just say, she's like, or she's confused, or I just have to go to the toilet, or I was helping her change her pants or something. Like the fact that he immediately just breaks

down very like his father, Joseph, when he's confronted by Matt Damon, Christian Dubois, about abusing the grandson Fabian. He just breaks down, says that he was abused by a priest and that's why he's done it and he's going to stop and make a change. I suppose, yes, I agree. It would be a normal person's reaction to be like, that's not true, boss, when I'm done with my first place. But I wonder if there's this like, have you seen Little Children, Kate Winslet film? No, I don't think I have.

The running theme of it is one of them is this Peter Vah who really doesn't want to be one, but he can't help it. And I'm not going to ruin it, but like, yeah, it ends badly for him. I wonder if it's this like attempt to not that he thinks he has something that he is in his fault and can't control, but kind of induce a sympathy in the person of like, I don't want to be doing this either, please help me. Like to invoke that sort of sympathy reaction enables him to be like, they know when they haven't left. That's how much power I have over these people. And maybe he was right because it took 25 years for Annie to come forward. She said the only reason she did not go to the police at the time was because she thought her daughter

had been the only victim. And she said that it was inconceivable to her that her brother could be a dangerous man. She didn't know her brother had already abused her other daughter and he had absolutely no intentions of stopping. And Annie also told Murray France, who said that she already knew. Yeah. And look, I think it's no secret and it's something we've talked about before, but sort of the attitude towards paedophilia, particularly in France in days gone by, sometimes not even days long gone by, has been concerning. And I feel like there is definitely an ilk of that here where people are just like, nah, well, what are you going to do?

Like, shrug. It's like, what the fuck? Because just remember what is happening here. Marie France is being told by her own sister that her niece has been sexually abused by her husband. And she's like, yeah, I know. I know what it's like. It's bonkers. Her response to her sister when she brings this to her is quote, well, all men love little girls. It's very, very hard, I think, for us to wrap our heads around how casually everybody takes this. And I do think a part of it is due to that kind of like laissez faire attitude. I'm not saying everybody,

but it's definitely in pockets of French culture. We have seen it time and time again, French society where this kind of thing has been ignored. I don't think that's particularly controversial to say the evidence is there. But I also think something important as to why it's happening in this family is because both Marie France and Joelle come from working class aspirational families. And Joelle makes it. He studies to be a doctor. He becomes this big surgeon. He's making so much money. He's climbed that ladder. He's in the top tier of society. So I think there is an element of his family also don't want to fucking kill the golden goose. Like what benefit is there

for them to chop down the man that has kind of dragged them out of not poverty, but dragged them into a different social class in some ways. Yeah, I mean, it is the cultured opera loving Lord of the Manor after all. Yes, I agree. Also, incest is a lot more common than we think it is. And we don't like thinking that so we don't think it like the Kinsey reports, one in 100 women had had sexual contact with their father. We think it never ever ever happened. And I went to go and see Giselle Pelico's daughter speak the other week. And her argument is that her case has been ignored because of the incest taboo attached to it and people don't want to examine it because

it's too horrible to look at in the face, right? Absolutely. There's also that famous book that came out, or I was just Googling it to remind myself who wrote it. But there was that famous book that came out in 2022 called La Familia Grande. And it's basically written by this woman called Camille Kochner, who was the daughter, I believe, of this very, very, very prominent French, I don't know, intellectual part of like the literati of France and how he had basically been abusing and raping her and how incest and rape was such a common part of that social circle. And that's what she wrote the book about. And it was when the laws got changed in France to actually put in place an age

of consent, because up until then then there was no age of consent. This was another thing that I, in that discussion, that it was kind of like, not by Caroline, but oh well everyone in the coverage is like oh my god like the French have got some real problems, blah blah blah, like we're fine and I take that point of like avoiding being introspective and like however, as you have said in the examples you have just given, there are structural things within French society that do make this easier to get away with a matter of fact. And I was quite disappointed at the way that was presented in that discussion. We're so scared to say things like that though, as a society. And I'm just like, well, who

does that serve? Yeah, right. Yeah. So anyway, yeah, as you can imagine, I think, I do think this idea of them not wanting to knock the surgeon in their family off his pedestal played a role in this. So the accusations were absolutely downplayed, brushed off and buried. And this is all obviously within the family. Now family friends who found out again didn't go to the police. They just cut off all contact and like quietly disappeared from this man's life. Again, the crucial thing is that nobody reported him to the police. Even when Joelle and Marie France separated in 2004, she still didn't go to the police even though she knew what he had been doing.

But didn't matter because eventually the police would come to Joelle. Not just any police. In November 2004, French intelligence were contacted by the FBI. The FBI had been investigating an international network circulating child sexual abuse material and the investigation had revealed three payments made using the Swinex credit card to a Russian sexual abuse site on the dark web. And the French police response to learning that this doctor was a paedophile was perhaps not what you might expect. Yeah, this is really disappointing.

Perhaps one may have predicted a dawn raid on his house to seize hard drives. All of his big fat pedophile diaries, maybe a medical license revocation, something along those lines. No, that's not what happened at all. The French police called Zoëlle and they asked him to come to the police station in the next town over whenever he could, whenever he had a minute. Ah, he was a very busy man. Authorities never followed up with a search of his house. They didn't search the hospital either.

They didn't contact any of his relatives or his colleagues. Azoul was actually at the police station for a grand total of 25 minutes. Oh, phew. During which he was asked five questions. He fumbled some answers about having a regrettable phase after his marriage fell apart. And the very next day, Paula Swanek was back working with young patrons. Now, in 2005, the law does catch up to the smallest extent possible for a man who's doing what he's doing.

And he was actually convicted of possession of child sexual abuse images and was given a four month suspended sentence. When any French medical professional has been convicted by a criminal court, because that is what's happened here, he has been convicted by a criminal court, then the judicial authority is legally required to notify the National Medical Council to tell them that that's what's happened. But for some godforsaken fucking reason in this case, that doesn't happen. And this isn't just like sloppy. This is breaking the law, the fact that they did not inform the Medical Council of what had happened here. But that's exactly what happened. And 55-year-old Lesquanek just went

home and wrote in his journal, I've slipped through the cracks, presumably with some sort of maniacal laughter implied after. Now, Frédéric Benoit, a lawyer at Voice of the Child, which is a non-profit association advocating for children's rights, said the following, If they had arrived at 6am, they would have found everything. We wouldn't be talking today. It would all have been stopped back then in 2004 and there would have been no more victims. And he's absolutely right. But as it was, nothing did happen at that point and Lasquanek was not reported and 50 more children would go on to be abused over the next 12 years. I mean, it's just one of those ones where

it's like we talk a lot about law enforcement like doing their job. They should have done the Dawn Raid. They should have done all that. Yeah, sure. But they did convict him. And here all that needed to happen was some fucking bureaucrats to do some paperwork. And that wasn't done. And that led to 50 children, at least being sexually abused. I mean, look, we've all had a bad day at the office, but could you live with yourself? The year after his conviction, Joël was offered a fancy new position at a hospital in Campollet as a hospital practitioner. Which means it is finally time for some good news.

We're going to meet the one and only whistleblower in this whole story, Thierry Bonvillot. And Thierry blew that whistle quite fucking loud. He was the president of the hospital's medical committee and had heard about the pedophilia case against Leswanek from a colleague who'd evaluated him at the time. And because Thierry is a person with a brain, that concerned him. So he wrote a letter to the hospital's director and reported Leszwanek to the national and local orders of the French national order of doctors. And it is their literal job, by the way, to uphold integrity within the medical profession.

That's why they exist. And they requested a copy of Zoella Swaneck's criminal record, but then came back saying nothing to report. Please somebody explain to me how in 2005 slash six, how they could look at a conviction for possession of child sexual abuse images and be like, it's all good. I can tell you. The filing system at the council had a bit of a backlog. And in the year since Leswanek had been sentenced, his file hadn't been updated. And the council voted overwhelmingly that he hadn't violated the medical code of ethics and he was officially

appointed to his position on the 1st of August 2006. I still don't understand. But if you're upset, as upset as me, never fear because it's only going to get worse. Because a few months later, his updated record was sent to the local medical board. Yes, the one that said in black and white that their new hire was a convicted paedophile. And it was kicked around from office to office with no public body quite wanting to take responsibility for having hired this man. But then in early 2007, the ministry wrote, quote, had his convictions been known earlier, he would never have been appointed.

But since he's already been hired and we've received no complaints from patients or staff, and hiring is a nightmare. They considered the whole thing to have been irrelevant anyway. Precautionary measures were reportedly put in place to ensure that Laskwanek didn't have contact with children, particularly in the emergency room. But my God, what the actual fuck. Firstly, they don't seem to have been actually enforced. But secondly, the idea in anybody's head that we were like, we know what he likes, we'll just make sure he's never alone with any kids. Is that okay? Is that all right for everybody? The idea that you would be okay with having a doctor on site who you have that fear about. And

I think have that fear about is too strong a phrase because these people don't have any fear about anything that this man is capable of doing and then not even to enforce it is mind-boggling. There was no administrative investigation. There was nothing. The hospital director wrote in a letter that Laskwanek was professional and competent and he went even further praising Laskwanek for pulling the hospital out of a severe staffing crisis with his integrity and professionalism. And look, we have come across cases where I'm like, oh, there were red flags that somebody should have picked up on. This isn't even that. This is them being told that this man is a convicted pedophile. Do we call him a pedophile if he has child

sex abuse images? Let's say that. He's a man who's convicted of possession of child sexual abuse images and they are like, don't tell me we're in a real rut for doctors over here. It is mind boggling. And later, because it didn't stop there, the promotions kept coming because after this, Dr. Lascwanek was unanimously admitted to the local medical board. But even he, so good a doctor nobody minded he was a pedo, could save that particular hospital from its staffing crisis. It closed down in 2008 and he moved on to Jean-Eck Hospital in the west of France. This time his criminal record was very much acknowledged but there was still that pesky

shortage of doctors and the hospital really needed the help. The hospital director noted that Le Swanek was very kind and that since no physical assault had taken place to their knowledge, no restrictions were placed on him at all. And Dr. Nance was welcomed onto the team. And this has been referred to quite a lot in the French press as structural failings, but it's not really it, is it? It's not quite aggressive enough a phrase. Yeah, structural failings implies like what I was saying earlier, it's like red flags are ignored, like maybe people made some reports about him or like colleagues complained about

him and they kind of don't follow up. There's no, like what about this is just a structural failing? I'm struggling to understand. It's abuse enablement is what it is. And there's another problem, something that writer Hugo Lemony calls collective blindness, an unthinking respect for doctors that trumps all red flags and common sense. He says, we just can't imagine a predator could hide beneath a white coat. In his book, Piers, which is about this case, and very well researched if you can stomach going all over this again, he doesn't just speak to victims or family members. He also digs deeper into the profound structural clusterfuck that allowed someone like Lasvanik to thrive in hospitals that had children in them.

Because all the while, while all this is going on, Lesquanick's career just went from strength to strength. The gap between his personal and professional life widened into this deep dark chasm. And when he was transferred to that clinic in Jean-Zac, he moved out there alone. Because he and Marie-France, like I said, had separated, and they had been separated by this point for a few years. Though he did continue to financially support her, and he usually went back to stay with her and the boys, three times a year at least. The rest of the time, however, Lascwanek lived a solitary existence and sunk deeper and deeper into his own sick world.

Writing in his diary, he grieved the loss of his family and friends, saying nothing will be left for me, but I embrace my paedophilia and I will embrace it for the rest of my life. And almost as if he wanted to fully lean into that disgusting old pedo lifestyle, this is when Zoëlle Laskwanek stops washing himself or cleaning his flat. And when I say that sort of sinking into depravity, you see it in every manifestation of him. It's like becoming more and more sexually depraved, the things he's writing in his book. I think without the influence or the normality that's pushed upon him by like having a wife and

children at home where he has to at least pretend to be normal when he's like in his personal life, that's gone. So he's just like fully sunk in, fully entrenched in this disgusting, I don't want to call it a lifestyle, but this paedophilic mindset that he's got himself into. There is like no reprieve from it apart from when he's having to obviously pretend that he's normal when he's at hospital. Yeah, I think like saying like he sort of gave into it or like it took over makes it sound like he's not, I don't know, you're not saying that, but like I'm just trying to think of a way of saying it makes it sound like he didn't really have a choice and that it just

overwhelmed him. No, he's actively choosing to, yeah, as you say, lean into it. I wonder if it's- Fall into it, jump into it, dive into it. Absolutely, like lay back and let the darkness take over and embrace him. And I almost wonder, look, you could just say he's not mentally well and that's why he's sinking into this like pit of depression. He's not cleaning himself. He's not cleaning his fat. He's also drinking a lot. There's reports that he was drinking up to a litre of whiskey a day. I mean, that'll do all sorts of things to you.

Quite. But I also wonder if it's part of that transgressive attitude, part of that transgression amplification that he's doing where it's like society tells me I need to clean my house and clean myself and put clothes on and I fuck everybody, I'm going to do what I want. It's like that added attitude to taboo building or whatever. He's enjoying the fact that he's living this disgusting lifestyle in this disgusting shit hole of a house that he never cleans. I don't know if that's part of the enjoyment of breaking society's rules for him. For sure. I think that's always certainly where it started, but I also don't believe for a second that a doctor who is this obsessed with getting away with shit isn't taking loads

of fucking drugs. I just don't believe for a second that he wasn't doing all sorts of shit. Once you're drinking that much and taking mind altering drugs and you're also, I mean, he's evidently not well, not that that's an excuse, but then your ability to interact logically with the world goes away. LW and that's pretty much exactly what happens. The house just piles up with magazines, CDs, documents, all sorts of things like every single sofa, every single surface in the house is covered with his kind of clutter that he's hoarding. And eventually he basically just lays a blanket in the middle of the living room floor that

he sleeps on and lets the rest of the house go to rot. He'd walk around naked in his garden, as we know, with the very little fence, just a meter and a half tall separating him from his neighbors. Mold covers his walls and bodily fluids were all over his diaries as well. I hate that I took a big gulp of my drink and then looked down and saw the words bodily fluids. I hate that you just said gulp. No. Let's all just get through this. We acting bad, bad, bad, bad. We ain't trying to hurt nobody.

For decades, he was untouchable. I've gone from Harlem to Hollywood. But now, it's all coming undone. Sean Combs, the mogul as we know it is over he will never be that person again even if he's found not guilty of these charges. I'm Jesse Weber host of law and crimes the rise and fall of Diddy the federal trial a front row seat to the biggest trial

in entertainment history. Sex trafficking racketeering prostitution allegations by federal prosecutors that span decades and witnesses were finally speaking out. The spotlight is harsher the stakes are higher and for did he there may be no second chances. You can listen to the rise and fall of did the federal trial, exclusively with Wondery+. Join Wondery+, in the Wondery app, Spotify, or Apple Podcast, right now. You know those creepy stories that give you goosebumps? The ones that make you really question what's real? Well, what if I told you that some of the strangest, darkest, and most

mysterious stories are not found in haunted houses or abandoned forests, but instead in hospital rooms and doctor's offices. Hi, I'm Mr. Ballin, the host of Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries, and each week on my podcast, you can expect to hear stories about bizarre illnesses no one can explain, miraculous recoveries that shouldn't have happened, and cases so baffling they stumped even the best doctors. So if you crave totally true and thoroughly twisted horror stories and mysteries, Mr. Bolland's Medical Mysteries should be your new go-to weekly show. Listen to Mr. Bolland's Medical Mysteries on the Wondry app or wherever you get your

podcasts. You can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Spotify or Apple podcasts. Over time, the windows of his house darkened with grime until the sun was eventually totally blocked out. And according to his colleagues at the time, nobody noticed that anything was wrong. One even said that he seemed under control. Not at all someone who was going off the rails. Although some of the nurses did notice his smell,

but he was a surgeon, so his authority was absolute. I also just feel like somebody coming to work with poor personal hygiene or somebody just being in life with poor personal hygiene is quite a challenging thing. Like being on the tube sat next to somebody who is not smelling very fresh, not my favorite thing. But a surgeon, a surgeon turning up at the hospital looking and smelling dirty, who's also a convicted bedavar. And we're just like, yeah, cool. I feel like if the hospital administration are not going after him for being a convicted betavolt, they're not going to go after him for being a bit gross.

Just wash your hands. There's a doctor shortage. Anyway, apart from some perceived hygiene issues, it would seem to the rest of the staff at the hospital that he was normal, straightforward, chatty, like always. He's really able to switch, isn't he? Oh, you'd have to. It'd be completely impossible to live any kind of successful life without being able

to turn it on. Imagine laying around in a pit of filth in your house and then just coming outside and be like, hey, hey nurses, how you doing? How's that date yesterday? Like it's bonkers to me how he is able to just like, manage all of this. And obviously the systems and the structure and whatever the fuck is going on with everybody else enables him to continue doing this. I'm not saying he's some sort of genius, but he does just enough. It would seem.

And perhaps that had something to do with the fact that he wasn't really home alone. He had all of those dolls. And here's a diary entry from the 9th of May 2013 that he made at 4.30pm. In the living room in Johnzack, I'm out of money. It's raining. I've got a cold and a cough. I'm old and tired. I drink too much. But my little Veronique is always there. Attentive to my distress, my beloved little girl snuggled up against my nude body. Veronique was his favorite doll. She was around the size of a five-year-old child, favourite doll. She was around the size of a five-year-old child, always dressed in various princess gowns. And she was one of almost seventy dolls that Lesquanec kept in his house.

And like we said, Veronique was his favourite. He had even installed what the courts refer referred to as a replica female sex organ on the doll. Now for Laskwanek by this point the dolls replaced the real people in his old life, even his victims. After a few years the real-life abuses did dwindle because again remember we can see the frequency of them because he's writing about all of them in his journals and you can see the frequency of the abuses dwindle because again remember we can see the frequency of them because he's writing about all of them in his journals and you can See the frequency of the abuses dwindled to maybe just a few a year Mostly by the end Lesquanek lived alone naked in his filthy house surrounded by his seventy dolls Until April 2017

When as we told you at the top of the show, he touched his neighbor's six-year-old daughter through the fence. He was 66 when that happened, just a few months off retirement. And this time, finally, everything went as it should have decades before, because that little girl's parents went straight to the police. And an investigation was opened. On Tuesday, the second of May, 2017, just before 9am, five police officers surrounded Lesquanec's house. They caught sight of him through a grimy window. He knew that they knew that he was in there. He was just a big naked man through the windows. In my head, it's the Tots TV house.

That's dark, isn't it? Why did you go there, brain? Thanks. I don't know. To me, it was that house in True Detective. That's much more normal to think that. Where that guy's like fucking his sister or something. I think it's because I only

realized in my 30s that half of TOTS TV was actually in French because I was a kid when I was watching it. So I was just absorbed. I didn't know. And then we were watching it in the office and I was like, hold on a minute. This is French. You're right. One, two, three. But I didn't- We'll just take anything when my kids want me. So that's the story I'm going to tell myself. Why my brain made that quite dark sign-ups connection. Moving on. This isn't about me. When the investigators caught sight of him through a grimy window, it was all over. Eventually, he answered the door. He was arrested and then

the house was searched. Dolls were everywhere. Some were a meter tall, some of them were baby size. And they also found a box full of children's toys and underwear. And then they came to the living room. Surrounded by piles of junk, a blanket lay in the middle of the floor. And on it was a doll of a small blonde girl, with a white nightgown pulled up to its hips. It's just so grimy and disgusting. I'm putting in an official request.

Yes. No more pedos. Ever. For a while. I need six months. It's fucking rank. And you'll just be like, sorry, structural error. Yeah.

Structural fault. Filing has been lost, system not updated. They're like, here's a paper copy of his conviction. I honestly am absolutely baffled. The only thing I can say is at least he was eventually caught. So the police are in there, they're looking, they're dealing with these horrifying scenes of these fucking weird dolls. And under a mattress, the police found a collection of hard drives. And you know, you know when you're the police, you go into this flat to actually find the hard drives, you're like, Bagsie, not me! Like, who's gonna have to

fucking watch this shit? You know what's on there. It's not just gonna be TOTS TV. It's gonna be a very different type of TOTS TV and nobody wants to be fucking watching that shit. I know. Because just in case anyone was in any doubt about what was going to be on those hard drives, there was actually a little note on top of them that Dr. Leskwanek had written himself. And the note said, clearly it was meant for his family, his enabling family, destroy it all without reading anything. You know how you didn't read all of those files? Yeah.

Keep doing that. Yeah. Yeah. And just destroy this. Don't even look at it. You don't want to see this shit. I am going to though make some folders on my laptop that just say that in case I do get hit by a boss one day.

It'll be fine. There'll be nothing in it, but it might be quite fun, you know, for a moment where someone's like, oh, I was playing with fire there. It's just going to be people clipping that bit of you being like, I am a paedophile. And then a screenshot of my laptop with files that say destroy, do not open. I'm just joking, guys. Anyway, police, infantry, at the house 78 items, including 27 external hard drives, 9 USB sticks, 1 camera, 3 computers, 131 pornographic DVDs and 22 dolls, as well as an absolute plethora of sex toys like a bunch of dildos and also some wigs.

Don't want to know. I've got enough knowing. An investigator started analyzing the hard drives immediately, as the rest of the evidence was still being piled into the van. Over the next few years, all of those drives would come to reveal more than 300,000 photos and videos featuring child sex abuse. Two of the hard drives were actually labeled with girls' names, and those girls' names were those of Zoelle's own nieces. 140 photos could be confirmed as having been taken by Lesquanek himself, so he is not just

a consumer of this child sex abuse, he is creating it and they can prove that he's creating it. And 14 of the photos actually prove that he was indeed the one carrying it out, so he also makes images and videos featuring himself. And then we've got documents, spreadsheets, and of course the black notebooks. 3,600 separate notes described hundreds of acts of child abuse, mostly carried out at the Swanwick's various places of work in meticulous detail. One entry from his birthday simply read, I'm a paedophile. All capitals. That's it.

It's almost like, because you have those, like you said, rightly, there are people who are attracted to children who are paedophiles who don't want that to be the case. I'm sure they would love nothing more than to just be attracted to adult people and to do that. Of course, it's your decision whether you choose to offend or not. And I have no sympathy for you at all if you choose to offend. But it's like he's discovered that he can be a paedophile. And then he is like, oh my God, I'm a paedophile. It's like people who got into like fucking sourdough when they were in lockdown. Like, I can bake my own bread. This is amazing. It's like it is, I do believe him when he said he discovered this later in life because I think he discovered like, look at this horrible transgressive disgusting thing that society

hates that I can be and I can wear that label with pride. Like I am a paedophile. It is so fucking bonkers. Not done, I'm afraid. There were spreadsheets that listed hundreds of victims' names, dates of birth, addresses, and among the chronicles of the decades of abuse, there were separate files for all sorts of depraved interests. One was labeled gore, which had images of piles of corpses, decapitations, torture, and animal abuse in it. And all of the things we've just told you about were analyzed.

And I don't think anyone who had to go through all of it completely recovered. Actually, the lead investigator was put on sick leave for three years. I feel like Laskwanek would be really proud of himself. I think so too. About that. Like we said, it would take years and years and years to analyze and uncover all of the evidence that they found in Laskwanek's house. Then take years more to track down all the victims and build the case against this man. Because there were hundreds and hundreds of potential victims

across more than 30 years. Imagine some of these children were as young as one. So at 31 years old, by the time anyone's even discovered anything happened to them, and they would have had no idea this happened to them. And this is where I feel like it starts to feel very like, yes, a bit like Giselle Pelico, but also like, what was the guy who was fucking the corpses? David Fuller. David Fuller. Because people didn't know this had happened to their loved ones. And then the police have to sit and watch all these videos and identify all of these

individual victims and then decide whether or not to contact the families and tell them what happened. So yeah, they identify as many victims as they can but what was very clear immediately, there was no doubt before they even needed to go down the road of actually identifying these victims was that Laskwanek needed to be locked up. And what they had from the first early analysis of his hard drives was his own written confessions to abusing members of his own family. So soon after his house was raided, Lascuanec appeared before a judge with a court-appointed lawyer in what became known as the Family Trial. There, he described himself as a quote, cold person who has trouble feeling things. Now

at first, Lascuarnak in the family trial denied everything, but as the evidence was presented, including diary entries that he himself had written, describing his own crimes in details, he did eventually admit to everything bit by bit. He admitted that he was attracted to children, mainly to little girls around the ages of 9 and 10, because they were easier to seduce. He admitted to sexually assaulting his niece and two other children, a family friends in the 1980s. His niece, the one who's known as Fanny, who was Lesquinex's first victim,

also testified she was 43 years old at this trial. And this is just heartbreaking. She said at the trial that she carried the guilt of not having said something at the time that could have stopped him abusing all these other children. Fanny, that is not on you. Your fucking mum knew. Your aunt knew. Your granddad knew. They're the ones that should have done something. Based on these confessions, Blacwanek was convicted of the sexual abuse of four girls, his six-year-old neighbour, four-year-old patient and his own nieces, who were just

four when he started to abuse them. And he was sentenced to 15 years in prison. And while he sat in a cell, investigators got to work on their huge, terrible task. Between 2017 and the trial this year, in 2025, investigators poured through the remaining evidence, the years and years of documented abuse that Leswanek had doled out on unsuspecting children in his care. And as a part of this process, they went through the list of names and addresses that Leswanek had kept, and they started to contact victims, many of whom were in their 30s and 40s by this stage. And quite a lot of them had lived their entire lives with no idea that they had been assaulted.

Most of them didn't even recognise the well Leswanek's name, and why would they? He'd been their surgeon for a day or two when they were children. And this is why it reminds me of that morgue case where we were like, obviously they have to contact these victims, obviously they need to build this case against him. But imagine being a person who's in your 30s or 40s, no idea that somebody sexually abused you as a child. And now you're told? What damage does that now do?

I just don't know who wins. I don't know who wins in that. I'm pretty sure we had the same conversation with David Fuller. I can understand the sort of urge to be transparent. The pursuit of truth. But who does that help? Who does that aid? Who comes out positively from that? I don't think anybody does. No, I know. And in a way people could argue, well, if they don't do this and the hospital doesn't or the clinics and the hospitals that he worked at and the people that ignored this, don't pay like the price that they should pay for these things having happened. And I understand that, but I'm like, this is like, okay, when you take the things that happened with all those

quacks that did all the repressed memory stuff, like telling children that they were being sexually abused, the impact was that children who hadn't been sexually abused had the same damaging impact to them mentally and psychologically and emotionally as if they had been sexually abused. So now going and telling people who were in their 30s, 40s, you were sexually abused as a child, the undole damage that is going to do to them. Totally. I think going to the hospital and being like, this many children were abused under your care and that's on you and you need to be penalized. Fine. I'm so behind

that. I don't think they need to be brought into it at all. Let's talk about some of these victims. There's now a woman called Celine Mao Tou, who was told by the police that this had happened to her. At just seven years old, she had been rushed to hospital with acute appendicitis. And shortly after the operation, Celine changed. She started off by cutting her hair short and swapping her dresses for trousers. Later, she was unable to be physically intimate with her husband for years at a time. And she now believes after being told that she was abused, that it was because she had been abused. And this is the thing, not all of the victims knew that they had been abused.

None of them did. None of them knew that this happened because often they were unconscious, although they just thought it was a medical examination. Some of them say that it had a detrimental impact on them. They just couldn't pinpoint what had actually happened to them. Some of them were absolutely perfectly fine and had no idea that anything had happened to them. And Celine, like all of the other victims were offered the opportunity.

Again, I'm like, why? I don't know. Obviously it's not my place to say it because I'm not a victim in this, but they were offered the right, offered the possibility to read the passage that was referencing them in these black journals. Celine refused, but not everyone did. Again, I'm just like, that's just evidence. Why do they need to see that? But maybe some people who are victims advocates say that they deserve that transparency. I don't fucking know man, it's fucked. Amelie Levucay found out herself at 43 years old. She read an article in her local newspaper about the family trial and contacted her GP who checked her medical records and saw that Leswanak had removed

her appendix in 91. And Amelie said that whilst seeing a psychotherapist, suppressed memories had resurfaced. She told a local newspaper, in a few seconds I was back to being nine years old again in the recovery room at the clinic. Everything came back. The feelings, the smells, the cold, the heat, the rape, all of it. Then in 2019, two gendarmes knocked on the door of a 38-year-old mother of three called Marie. And in an instant, Marie learned that she too had been the victim of a serial paedophile who'd been accused

of raping and sexually abusing hundreds of children. And Marie actually did choose to read the entry that Lesquadec had made about her in his journal, and it was from when she was 10 years old. And she told the media the following, I couldn't think they were talking about me. It's like cancer. You think it only happens to other people. And how could I have forgotten that? A boy called Matisse was admitted to a hospital in Campollet with appendicitis in June 2007.

His grandparents remember him as a happy child at first. Recently they said he loved to be out in the garden with his grandfather picking green beans. He was a charming boy, but as you know there was a before and there was an after. He was kept in hospital overnight after his operation and then he was sent home, which is when the change happened. According to his grandparents, the unease set in little by little. It happened gradually in the first year, then he stopped being happy and became aggressive with everyone. As a teenager, Matisse distanced himself from his family, experimenting with harder and

harder drugs. He was in and out of rehab. Eleven years after his hospital visit, in 2018, police arrived at Matisse's doorstep and told them that he had been mentioned in the black books of Dr. Lascuanec. They read an excerpt from this journal aloud to Matisse, then left him alone with his thoughts. His grandparents described this as the beginning of his descent into hell. His grandmother said, the sky fell on his head. We tried to support him, but he refused to talk about it.

It killed him. And she's not talking hyperbolically because just two years later, Matisse died of an overdose at the age of just 24. And his grandparents believed that the abuse explained it all. And his grandparents believed that the abuse explained it all. And they joined the 267 plaintiffs in the case against the swanac. Police also spoke to more than 100 doctors across 10 different establishments. None of them said that they'd even noticed a gesture or a word suggesting pedophilia, not even in hindsight. The ignorance was so deep that investigators started to wonder if they had

agreed not to say anything. I wouldn't be surprised. Oh, nothing surprises me anymore. No, I wouldn't be surprised at all if there's some sort of collusion going on where everyone's just like, you know, it's done now. Let's not make ourselves or our hospitals look worse. No, literally who loves a whistleblower? Fucking nobody. Anyway, even people who made note of him withdrawing somewhat either thought that it was because of his divorce or that he just loved playing piano so much that he was

just staying inside all the time. I'd lost interest in being a so-called. Are these people for real? Are you fucking for real right now? Where you're like, oh, you did seem a bit weird, but it's always because you fucking love playing the piano. What? Oh my God. I can't cope. Exactly. We know. Obviously it's nothing to do with the fucking piano. He wrote himself in his diary that paedophilia was consuming him. Interesting. Finally though, at the start of this year, 2025, the trial kicked off in Vannes, Brittany, where the majority of the abuses took place. And anyone who knows Vannes will know that

it is a small town. And it took over two years to work out how France's largest ever child abuse trial was going to be made possible to unfold in this modest 90 capacity courthouse. Hundreds of plaintiffs, 65 lawyers and almost 500 journalists were set to attend the four-month trial. For the overspill, proceedings were broadcast to former lecture halls nearby, one for press, one for plaintiffs when they weren't testifying, and another one for the general public. Outside the courthouse, doctors protested what they referred to as the omerta in the medical community, which means like mafia slang for code of silence. Now other activists also protested outside against the lack of

resources for victims of sexual assault and the fact that so many assaults still go unpunished. The eyes of the world were very much going to be on this trial. And remember, this trial took place just two months after Dominique Pellica was sentenced for decades of sexual assault against his own wife Giselle, entirely without her knowledge, like so many of the victims in the case against Asquanek. I wonder whether like, because this hasn't got as much coverage as Giselle. No, no. I think people thought the eyes of the world were going to be on this, but they weren't.

No, we were fatigued. Yeah, yeah. But what it definitely did do within France was provoke yet more soul-searching about the state of sex crimes within the nation. Victims filed into the courthouse wearing green lanyards if they were willing to talk to the media and read if they were not. And support dogs wandered up and down the aisles of the courthouse. This one stood accused of 300 acts of rape or sexual abuse against 299 patients, 158 male and 141 female. The vast majority were under the age of 15. The average was 11. The oldest was 70 and the youngest was 1.

All the victims listed were assaulted while they were under anesthetic or recovering from operations between 1989 and 2014. These 299 represented only the victims that could be identified and brought to trial. 31 cases were dismissed because the statute of limitations had lapsed or there was a lack of evidence and there were more victims that the police just couldn't identify. Yeah because like they're going off the journal entries that he's making and they're cross referencing it against names of children who would have been in those institutions on the dates that he's saying. But it's again, very much like the morgue case where they just can't identify everybody. So the 299 is like, what's in the journal? We don't even know

if that's all of them. And they couldn't even find all of them. And I would say small mercies. I know that sounds awful, but small mercies if you're one of the ones, I guess that you might feel like justice in your case wasn't done, but I just wouldn't want to know. In total, it's estimated that the true number of victims is more than 400. The trial began just after 1 p.m. and Bliswanec walked in to total silence. And as soon as he sat down, every single one of the hundreds of victims' names were read out to him one after the other. The 74-year-old admitted to the majority of the charges and said he would explain himself over the course of the trial. That first day he made a very short statement to the court saying, quote, I've done hideous things. I'm perfectly aware today that these wounds are irreparable,

and I owe it all to these people and their loved ones to take full responsibility for my actions and their consequences. All right, thanks. Now, what might shock people more than just what fucking happened in this case? Is it Lesquanek faced a maximum sentence of just 20 years? And if that seems low, it's because, much like in Britain, in France there are no consecutive sentences. And basically it means that it's the same maximum sentence for one rape as it is for 300. Another quirk of French law that became very relevant was its definition of rape. And this is what it was.

Any act of sexual penetration of whatever nature in any oral genital act committed through violence, coercion, threat or surprise. So legally, according to that, if it's not penetration, it's not rape. Not even if it concerns a victim under 15 years old. And at first, Luswanec was very careful to deny penetration with any part of his body. The unenviable job of defending Jalaswanek went to Maxim Tebo Kozawa. Kozawa went nonspecific saying, he's waiting to be judged to say what he has to say to each of his victims. From the beginning, he's been ready to accept his responsibility. I mean, that's really the best you've got, isn't it?

Why, literally, what else can you say? I think I would just stand up and just nod and sit down. That's all I would say. And he says, you know, I was never abused by my father. There's nothing that they can even work with to say, here are some mitigating circumstances. No. As for the prosecution, who had a slightly easier job, the bulk of their case came from the Swinex meticulously handwritten notes. Despite the unbelievable

number of victims, the prosecution's case was pretty low on eyewitness testimony because barely any of the victims remembered a thing. But they still were offered their chance to speak and most of them took it. One woman who attended by chance as an observer only learned that her son had been raped 30 years before when his name was read out. Ugh, God, can you fucking imagine? You've just gone to this bloody trial and then your son's name is read out to this fucking rapist. Oh my God. Now in the end, a lot of the testimony came from the surgeon's own family. The well's son Fabian described the abuse he had suffered from his paternal grandfather Joseph between the ages of five and ten. He said that in his family

quote, perversion exploded like an atomic bomb. Fabian also said that if Zowel had been molested by his own father it could be considered a mitigating factor. But Zowel flatly denied ever having been abused and said he only found out about Fabian's abuse when he was arrested. Joelle said about his father having two abusers in the same family was purely a coincidence. Other family members and the parents of children that Joelle had abused spoke to, all thinking that they had been the only ones who had suffered all along. So like, it's kind of implied that nobody knows about everybody else, but like, some people did fucking know because there was one person who

had been told by victim after victim within her own family what her husband had been up to. within her own family what her husband had been up to. That is, of course, Marie France. The prosecution alleged that she was repeatedly made aware, but didn't do anything to stop it. And I think we agree. But apparently there was a reason. Joelle's brother testified that Marie France was too comfortable in the lifestyle that was funding to speak out. But marie france herself wasn't going to take any responsibility because remember even after they get divorced he keeps paying for lifestyle presumably is harsh money because he knows that she knows because he writes in his journals she knows i'm a beautiful bright. The seventy year old marie france took the stand in a wig and two face masks. In a raspy voice, she told the judge that she was suffering from asthma and laryngitis, which is probably what the two masks was about. The judge asked for a health certificate, at which point

she suddenly removed both masks and her voice went back to normal. When she was asked if there had been any warning signs with regard to her husband, she responded that there was nothing, nothing, nothing, three nothings and that she never had any doubts. She also flatly denied that her sister or her sister-in-law had told her anything and she denied having any idea that Zoell had been convicted for accessing child abuse images back in 2005 despite having been at home when the police arrived to search the house. Oh my god. She said that she'd gone shopping while the police search took place and that her husband told her later on that the whole thing had been a big mistake. She did admit that she once found a

collection of pedo films in their house before quickly correcting herself to pornographic films. But worst of all, Marie France tried to cast blame on the victims themselves. She accused her five-year-old niece of, and this is a quote, hanging around my husband's neck trying to blackmail him. It's amazing how often you see that, isn't it? I mean, read the fucking room. She can't. Marie France, she's like, even, I'm not here to give credit in any way shape or form to Laskwanek but

at least he's like yeah I did it and I don't believe him but at least he's like I'm gonna take responsibility for it I did do it he's not even offering up any mitigating circumstance he's just like yeah I did it she's like I'm gonna blame this five-year-old my own niece at that. Read the fucking room you You honestly think, all those protesters outside, you honestly think that you're going to come off well saying that shit. You sound crazy. Mad. And that wasn't all. Marie-France said her five-year-old niece was devious and loved the attention. Alas to testify was a very unexpected guest, furry loving family friend and Matt Damon impersonator

Christian Dubois. I'm so glad it's not one of the dogs that's really where I thought you were going with that. L'Escouarnac has spent the two years leading up to the trial in solitary confinement and in that time he had received just one visitor Christian D and it's not Christian D. And let me tell you Dubois was a sarcastic little worm on the stand and repeatedly minimized the victim stories and he says on the stand he quote couldn't afford to cry over everything that happened in the world and that if Lascouarnac gets out of prison, Christian Dubois says he has promised to take him in. Also under examination in this trial was the healthcare system itself, the one that allowed

Desquanek to operate on children for 13 years after his conviction. And from the healthcare workers that testified, it was also pretty clear that something was quite drastically wrong in the system itself. One nurse said that the surgeon is considered like God. A physician said that not interfering with a colleague's work was the golden rule of their profession. Is it? I think it's do no harm. I don't think not interfere.

I think you should be surely asking each other questions. You should be surely keeping an eye on each other. You should surely be like offering your expertise, maybe not stepping on people's toes. But I don't get that in a scientific arena that not offering any expertise or not interfering is necessarily the primary goal. I don't know whether it's a goal. I think it happens all the time because it's massive egos. If you think office politics are bad in an office, office politics in an operating room are fucking mad.

I can only imagine. I just hate that they're saying it. Yeah. One urologist said that Leswinec's conviction for downloading child abuse material was not our business. And the most wild of all was the moment that a doctor refused to speak saying I was told to keep quiet, afraid of how the medical board would act if they spoke out against the system. On the 3rd of March 2025, Lesquanek himself made his way up to the stand. And again, I think that tells you just how much his defense team are like, you want to take the stand? Sure, whatever mate. Go fucking nuts. Like they took two years just going through all the evidence. Go fucking nuts. Like, they took two years just going through all the evidence. Go fucking nuts.

When he got up there, he made it very clear that he was not going to be dodging any questions. He said he admitted it all freely, saying that it all just come naturally to him. Lascuanec stood there in court and asked for forgiveness. He even wept sometimes, but mostly he just stared blankly ahead. And I do think it was hard for people to believe in the courtroom that there was any real regret because it was so obvious that Luskwanec had taken great care and pleasure in doing what he had done for so many years. He even admits it as much, saying the court quote, for 30 years I acted without any qualms and with a single objective to commit sexual

assaults as often as I could. So I think it was hard for people to just believe that he now regretted everything. Now as for the question of why, why had he done all of this? Obviously it's not something that needs to be proven in a court of law but I guess you know people got some questions. And for that, he said, why did I become like this? I still don't have the beginnings of an explanation. When the judge asked what his sexuality was today, he said, it hasn't disappeared. I watch a porn film on Canal Plus twice a month in my cell. So many questions. So many questions. Why does he have access to a channel that plays porn films when he

is a man who is in prison for a series of sexual assaults? What is Canal Plus? Well, what's happening? As we learned recently, they show prison break in prisons. So I don't know. Oh my God. So yes, in his final statements after this revelation, Laskwanek admitted to all of the assaults and he said, I'm not asking the court for leniency. And actually there was one other person that I thought he kind of reminded me of. He really reminds me of Albert Fish. Like that kind

of like, I'm going to be as dirty and as disgusting and as filthy and as depraved as possible. And then I'm not saying Albert Fish when he got caught was like, oh yeah, I'll admit to everything and leniency. But like when they executed him, he was like enjoying it. He was like, yeah, but to be executed would be the greatest thrill of my life. Like he took so much pleasure in like freaking everybody out. And I don't know if there's a touch of that. It kind of feels like that, this pantomime-y way he presents himself when he's in court. I mean, Albert Fish wrote a lot of letters. Oh, that too. Yeah. I mean Albert Fish wrote a lot of letters. Oh, that too. Yeah.

Three months later, Zola Swineck was sentenced to 20 years in prison with no chance of parole until 2038 when he'll be 88 years old if he makes it that far. And that is the maximum sentence as discussed, but there are people who are disappointed. He's actually facing less prison time than an armed robber would. But France does allow something called preventative detention. It's quite rare and very vague, but it essentially means that a particularly dangerous prisoner can be kept in a specialized facility after their sentence has been concluded. And of course, he deserves all the punishment that there is out there, but what does it

really change? He abused countless children unchecked for 30 years and he'd practically stopped by the time the police caught up with him. So it's all just a bit too little too late really. Yeah, that's what's so like destroying about this case. I understand people's anger and I am surprised because in this country we also don't do consecutive sentences. You do them concurrently, but we also do have a whole of life order. And I do think if Lasklanek was here being tried under the British system, he'd probably be one of those few people in our country that would get a whole of life order because it so agrees just what he's done. But of course,

like you said, they've got this sort of preventative detention. It seems like it's essentially the same thing. Yeah. And you're probably right. He's not going to make it to ATA, unlikely anyway. But yeah, I completely take your point. It's like, it all just feels far too late because he should have been stopped decades ago. And could have been. And could have been. And should have been. And kind of was. But nobody told the medical board. And then when they did find out, they were like, ah, what are you going to do?

We need a doctor. So yeah, despite how we feel about this for a lot of victims and protesters who wanted him behind bars for life, it was definitely a bitter ending. And outside of this case, like we said, this story has reignited movements to revise those minimum sentencing guidelines within France. Together with Giselle Pellico's famous moment at trial earlier this year, France's confrontation of its sexual assault laws is only growing. The number of victims now reporting sexual abuse to the police has skyrocketed, with

the French Health Minister Yannick N saying, he would work with the Justice Minister to ensure that, never again will we find ourselves in a situation where patients and vulnerable children were exposed to predators. But I think he has a long, long way to go. And I would also say, that's a very lofty ambition to have. Never again will we find ourselves in a position where a vulnerable child or person is exposed to a predator. That is not something you can say.

What you should be saying is we will be putting in place every policy, every possible way in which somebody who does that is immediately removed from being in a position of power. You can never prevent people from getting into professions. We've said this time and time again, anywhere where there is a position of power to be had, predators are going to be attracted to that position. You cannot stop that from happening. What you need to do is when it happens, have all of your fucking eyes wide open. And when it happens and the red flag is in your face, you remove that person immediately. And I would argue, like I understand why people are upset about the 20 years,

but I do think functionally it is a whole of life order. I think it's much more, much more the greater focus, I would argue, instead of changing the law of sentencing, because I mean, this is extraordinarily utilitarian of me, but here we go. The amount of people that will say it's past, like these particularly egregious crimes deserve this whole of life order. There are people that that will affect will be fractional compared to the vulnerable people and children who will be impacted by all of that funding and focus and attention being sort of putting the spotlight on the hospital and medical system that let all of these children down. That's where the focus should be. Much more good is going to be done there.

Yeah. And I would agree with you. I think that the issue of the sentencing, I understand why people are disappointed because it feels like it isn't reflective of what a horrific case this is. Some people will maybe argue that you can walk and chew gum and sure, absolutely go nuts, but I would agree with you that I think the impact on the victims and how you're going to make sure this never happens again. And not that no doctor or teacher or priest will ever be a fucking pedophile again, it's what are your processes in place? What is the safety for whistleblowers? What's the fucking bureaucracy around things being

reported even as basic as somebody who's been convicted of possession of child abuse images? And what are the consequences for people who fail to do that? I want to see some fucking prison sentences for the people who did nothing about this. I want to see some fucking prison sentences for the people who are like, oh, he's a convicted paedophile. Oh, well, you know, but... Because that's the only way you're going to create an actual deterrent that will make people follow up on these cases in the future. You can have all the policies in the world. There needs to be some fucking retribution for the people who didn't do their jobs in this time and didn't protect these children. And that's where I think the time and resources, as you

say, should be spent advocating for that. Yeah. So I'm just going to perform surgery on myself. Do you want to do it on me? I actually would. Oh, scrape it all out. I perform surgery on myself at literally any chance I get.

I had to pull like a little shard of a ceramic plate that had gone into my foot out with some tweezers and I almost passed out. Oh, see, that's a fun afternoon for me. Oh it's rough. Ugh I feel so ill. So that's it guys that is the case of Doctor... Although also surgeons don't like being called Doctor. It's Mister. Only in this country. Oh really?

It's a very British thing. Oh well there you go. Nevermind, whatever. So this is the story of Joel. Lesquanek, what a fucking piece of shit he is. Which if you haven't seen written down is Joel, which was one of my favorite names. No more sausage Joel's for me. Officially ruined.

He killed it. And that's it guys, and we will see you next week for another Red Handed. Goodbye. Goodbye. Today is the worst day of Abby's life. The 17-year-old cradles her newborn son in her arms. They all saw how much I loved him. They didn't have to take him from me. Between 1945 and the early 1970s, families ship their pregnant teenage daughters to maternity homes and force them to secretly place their babies for adoption. In hidden corners across

America, it's still happening. My parents had me locked up in the Godparent home against my will. They worked with them to manipulate me and to steal my son away from me. The Godparent home is the brainchild of controversial preacher Jerry Falwell, the father of the modern evangelical right and the founder of Liberty University. Where powerful men, emboldened by their faith, determine who gets to be a parent and who must give their child away. Follow Liberty Lost on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts.

In the early 20th century, a seemingly ordinary cook in New York City became the center of a medical mystery and a public health crisis. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondries podcast American History Tellers. We take you to the events, times, and people that shaped America and Americans, our values, our struggles, and our dreams. In our latest series, we follow the trail of Mary Mallon, an Irish immigrant and cook to wealthy New York families who was unwittingly spreading typhoid fever throughout the city. Public health officials identify her as a healthy carrier of the disease, meaning that despite showing no symptoms herself,

she's been infecting others for years. But when they try to persuade her to submit to testing and isolation, Typhoid Mary will fight back with a vengeance. Follow American history tellers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Experience all episodes ad-free and be the first to binge the newest season only on Wondery+. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Start your free trial today. The ocean is vast, beautiful, and lawless. I'm Ian Urbina, back with an all-new season of The Outlaw Ocean. The stories we bring you this season are literally life

or death. We look into the shocking prevalence of forced labor, mind boggling over fishing, migrants hunted and captured. The Outlaw Ocean takes you where others won't. Available on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. Last year, long crime brought you the trial that captivated the nation. She's accused of hitting her boyfriend Boston police officer John O'Keefe with her car Karen Reid is arrested and charged with second degree murder. The 6 week trial resulted in anything but resolution.

We continue to find ourselves at an impasse. I'm declaring a mistrial in this case. But now the case is back in the spotlight. And one question still lingers. Did Karen Reed kill John O'Keefe? The evidence is overwhelming that Karen Reed is innocent. How does it feel to be a cop killer, Karen? I'm Kristin Thorn, investigative reporter with Law &, and host of the podcast, Karen, The Retrial. This isn't just a retrial, it's a second chance at the truth. I have nothing to hide. My life is in the balance, and it shouldn't be.

I just want people to go back to who the victim is in this. It's not her. Listen to episodes of Karen, The Retrial, exclusively and ad free on Wondery+.