This trial is associated with a single figure: 299. Until now, the number of victims certainly seemed staggering, but it remained abstract before the Brittany criminal court, where Joël Le Scouarnec had been appearing since February 24. The hearings just took a new turn: It was now time for the victims to testify. The procedure was the same. One by one, they took the stand. They are all adults today since the rapes and sexual assaults took place between 1989 and 2014. A photo of the plaintiffs dating back to the year of the abuse was projected onto the screens. Suddenly, childhood invaded the courtroom: kids with eyes that blink in the sunlight, smiles missing a tooth, a skipping rope, birthday candles, the dimples of a chubby infant, three years old on the day of the assault. It was no longer a number, it was the little preys' procession, each with their own story, all different, 299 shades of tears.

"What traumatized me the most? The police," said a farmer on the stand. When he was summoned to the police station, he thought it was because he was "guilty of something, like everyone else in such situations." In reality, "it was worse," he recalled. "I learned that I was a victim." In a 20-minute hearing, including the formalities, a police officer told him he'd been raped under anaesthetic in the operating theatre, some 30 years earlier. On an early winter morning in 2020, the farmer then found himself alone in the police station's parking lot, his life smashed in two. In front of the court, he tried not to break down. "It turned me upside down," he managed to whisper. He glanced at his wife, seated in the front row. She burst into tears for them both.

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