An orthopaedic surgeon has been sentenced to five and a half years in prison in Germany for secretly filming female patients and for sexual abuse.
The Osnabrück Regional Court also found him guilty of producing child and youth pornography, and imposed a lifelong ban on the 43-year-old from treating female patients.
The court found it proven that the doctor, from the Osnabrück district some 50 kilometres from the Dutch border, had been secretly filming female patients in his consultation room using a smartphone since 2018.
He later went on to secretly photograph his victims – including a child and several teenagers – from the front with their tops off and their knickers pulled down, whilst touching them in their intimate areas.
He had told the patients that these were medical examinations – in reality, there were no medical reasons, said presiding judge Nadine Laatz-Petersohn.
More than 190 cases had been assessed by the court. In around half of them, in addition to the secret photographs, there had also been medically unjustifiable touching of the genital area.
The court considered committing the man to a psychiatric clinic, but decided on a ban on treating female patients because there were no pictures of men among the 9,000 images examined during the trial.
To many female patients, the defendant had appeared to be a "fantastic orthopaedic surgeon," the judge said. This made the shock all the greater for those affected when they heard of the allegations during the investigation.
Some female patients had since completely lost their trust in doctors, while others had consequently developed a fear of any intimate contact, the judge said.
