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In testimony, his three sons, two siblings, former wife, a cousin and a close family friend painted a portrait of a tight-knit family riven with sexual abuse and infused with a culture of silence and secrecy.<\/p>\n
Mr. Le Scouarnec\u2019s son Fabien Le Scouarnec testified that his grandfather Joseph Le Scouarnec had sexually abused him. (The grandfather, now deceased, had told people during his lifetime that he was himself abused, the court heard.) Mr. Le Scouarnec\u2019s sister, Annie Jobard, said that she was raped by two boys when she was 14 and had never told her family.<\/p>\n
His former wife said she had been raped by two male relatives when she was a child. She kept it a secret, she said, even from her husband.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you are raped, you feel dirty,\u201d she testified. \u201cSo, you don\u2019t talk about it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Family members described Mr. Le Scouarnec as a good husband, good brother and good father who loved reading and opera and who worked long hours.<\/p>\n
His three sons said he was not home often, but when he was, he helped them with studies, took them to museums and ensured that they had music lessons. They described their childhoods as happy. Their father never abused them and they were completely unaware of his pedophilia, they said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cWe had everything we needed to be happy, and perversion exploded like an atomic bomb throughout the family,\u201d Fabien, 42, said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,\u201d he later added. \u201cThere is a part of my father\u2019s personality that I don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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But Mr. Le Scouarnec\u2019s sister, Ms. Jobard, knew of at least one case. She told the court that she had confronted her brother in 2000, after her younger daughter told her the reason she did not want to go to dinner with him: He had been sexually abusing her. Chain-smoking in her car, Mr. Le Scouarnec admitted to the abuse and said he would work the rest of his life to make amends, she testified in court. She said she told him to get treatment.<\/p>\n
Asked why she did not go to the police back then, Ms. Jobard said she thought her youngest daughter was the only victim. At the time, she did not know that Mr. Le Scouarnec had also victimized her elder daughter.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cI didn\u2019t realize he was someone dangerous,\u201d said Ms. Jobard, now 72, a retired English teacher. \u201cFor me, it was inconceivable that my brother was someone like that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even when she later learned that Mr. Le Scouarnec had been arrested on charges of owning child sexual abuse imagery, and after Fabien told her about the abuse he had suffered from his grandfather, she said she did not make the connection that there was a much deeper problem in the family.<\/p>\n
In retrospect, she said, \u201cI think it was denial.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ms. Lhermitte, Mr. Le Scouarnec\u2019s former wife, also testified.<\/p>\n
Sitting in a swivel chair in the middle of the courtroom, she denied that her sister, whom she called a birdbrain, or her sister-in-law, Ms. Jobard, had ever spoken to her about their fears he was abusing their children.<\/p>\n
She also said she did not know that her husband had been convicted of owning child sexual abuse images, despite having been at home when the police arrived to search the house. She went shopping during the search, she said, and when she returned, her husband was relaxed and told her it was all a big mistake.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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She separated from him soon after the police search, but divorced him only more recently and continues to visit him in prison.<\/p>\n
When Aude Buresi, the presiding judge, asked her about her sessions with a psychiatrist and whether they had helped her to understand the root of abuse in her family, she refused to talk about it, stating that it was her private life.<\/p>\n
Judge Buresi tried to force her to confront the abuse by projecting photographs found on her husband\u2019s many confiscated hard drives onto screens in the courtroom. They revealed naked, intimate pictures of the two nieces he was convicted of abusing.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou are destroying us,\u201d she said to the judge, adding later: \u201cIt\u2019s so abusive of you. I don\u2019t have the intellect to take in all that. I don\u2019t know how I will survive that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Testifying in court this week, Mr. Le Scouarnec repeatedly defended Ms. Lhermitte, whom he still referred to as his wife. He argued that he had lied to her for 30 years, though he said she knew \u201csome things\u201d without giving details.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n