The case of doubt was decided in favor of the defendant, said Judge Paul Menardi. They had to answer for deprivation of liberty, severe coercion and serious bodily harm.
The exercise in question, including the restraint, makes sense in itself, Menardi explained in the reasons for the judgment. The victim also voluntarily went to the operating table. The defendants therefore rightly assumed the woman’s consent at the beginning. She subsequently revoked this, but it is not clear how she did this. “The fact that she said from the beginning that she didn’t want it cannot be established with any degree of certainty,” the judge said. “It was a mess, but not every mess is criminal,” concluded Menardi.
Planned exercise?
On the first day of the trial at the beginning of June, the nurses and their defense attorney had already pleaded “not guilty”. At that time, the lawyers of the four accused stated that it had been discussed in advance that they would have to practice a “complex operation or the associated storage”. There can be no question of a “conscious, planned collaboration” or even a criminally relevant act. In any case, the woman knew “that this operation had to be practiced,” said the first defendant in his interrogation at the time. There was also a “cheerful, exuberant mood,” which only changed when photos were taken of the alleged victim in a kneeling position. One defendant admitted that the situation had gotten out of hand and that the action could have been “excessive”.
The prosecutor, however, emphasized that the woman had said several times that she should be untied. The psychiatric expert Gabriele Wörgötter also certified that she had an “adjustment disorder” and stated: “The fact is that the woman was previously healthy enough to be able to cope with her everyday life and job without any problems.” Now she is “unable to work for the time being”, is afraid and suffers from a depressive disorder.
Previously a friendly, relaxed relationship
The fact that, as already discussed in June, there had previously been a collegial and sometimes very relaxed relationship between the four defendants and the alleged victim was brought up again on the second day of the trial. “They often joked with each other,” explained a cleaning worker who was interviewed as a witness and who had first observed what was happening in the operating room through a window. Incidentally, she and her failure to appear were the decisive factor in the second day of the trial, which was originally scheduled for September, being postponed to October.
“I first heard loud laughter from everyone involved,” the witness told Judge Menardi. In the operating room, which she ended up in later, the mood changed: “She stopped laughing and finally wanted to loosen the waist belt.” These attempts were accompanied by her statement “I can’t, I can’t”. Nevertheless, she didn’t think that the woman was really in distress: “She didn’t scream or call for help.”
Exercise in this form is not common
The woman vehemently contradicted this in her contradictory interview. “I screamed and at a certain point I just wanted to leave,” she explained. For her, it was “never fun at all.” Originally she had climbed onto the operating table “quite voluntarily” because she believed her ex-colleagues that they actually “needed to practice” the special positioning for an upcoming operation, but then she quickly realized that they were “kidding me.” . The situation finally ended when photos were taken of her and her pants were “painted”. “It was all just so humiliating,” the alleged victim said through tears. The “combination of fixation, photos and painting of the pants” was particularly bad and stressful for her. Such an exercise in this form is also not common: “Of course you practice positions and positions, but then there is no fixation and there are superiors involved.”
When asked about the sometimes “too cheerful interaction” with her colleagues and any “rough and coarse humor” on her part, she explained that there were only harmless jokes and innocent teasing. However, there were never any “crude jokes” and there was no question of her touching a colleague’s crotch or offering him a massage – as one of them stated.
According to the public prosecutor’s office, the four defendants aged 48, 45, 50 and 31 are said to have tied their work colleague to an operating table with Velcro straps in February last year, kneeling on her stomach with her legs spread, under the pretext of practicing positioning for an operation. Despite her repeated requests to untie her, she is said to have only been untied after the third defendant had drawn an anus and a vagina on her work trousers with an Edding pen. The second and fourth defendants are also said to have taken photos of the woman in this position. The four employees suspended after the incident initially said it was a “joke.”
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