The lawyer who defended ‘the worst mass paedophile who has ever lived’ has died in an apparent suicide, a prosecutor has said.
Maxime Tessier, 34, defended Joel Le Scouarnec, 74, dubbed ‘the devil in a white coat’ who raped hundreds of patients under the age of 15 between 1989 and 2014.
They are made up of 158 men and 141 women who had an average age of 11 when they were allegedly attacked in hospitals across the country.
Lawyer Maxime has since been found dead, with chief prosecutor Frederic Teillet, from the western French city of Rennes, saying: ‘Everything points to suicide.’
Maxime was one of two lawyers who defended the rapist, who is considered one of the most notorious in criminal history.
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His associate Catherine Glon said he ‘had a very high regard for justice and was therefore very demanding towards himself’.
Le Scouarnec usually attacked his victims, with the youngest being just four, while they were under the effects of anaesthesia.
He was sentenced to 20 years in prison, but many of his victims said he should be jailed for longer.
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Thomas Delaby, a barrister representing one of his victims, described Le Scouarnec as an ‘atomic bomb of paedophilia’.
He added: ‘Your victims will never forgive you.’
He was put on trial this year after police found evidence, including child sized sex dolls chained up in his home and thousands of child abuse images.
Back in 2005, he was handed a suspended four-month prison sentence for possessing child pornography, but managed to secure a job as a surgeon at a public hospital in Quimperle, western France, the following year.
He continued to work in public hospitals until his re-arrest 12 years later on suspicion of raping his six-year-old neighbour.
He abused young patients across 10 hospitals and clinics over the span of 25 years.
She told her parents that ‘the man with a crown of white hair’ had exposed himself and sexually touched her through a broken garden fence.
Police searched his home, uncovering a cache of dolls, wigs and 300,000 pictures and 650 paedophilic, zoophilic and scatological videos.
Notebooks where Le Scouarnec detailed his sexual assaults on scores of patients were also found.
In one handwritten note hidden under a mattress, the doctor is alleged to have written: ‘I am a paedophile and I always will be.’
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