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Göttingen professor in the dock: previous sentence against him was toughened

Photo: Christina Sticht/dpa

A university professor from Göttingen has been sentenced to one and a half years in prison on probation because he is said to have sexually abused two doctoral students and a university employee.

The Göttingen regional court found the scientist guilty of bodily harm in office, coercion in a particularly serious case and deprivation of liberty.

According to the prosecution, he is said to have hit the women on the buttocks or breasts with a bamboo stick or the palm of his hand.

Beforehand, he usually locked the office door and put the key in his trouser pocket.

The man's previous conviction was made even more severe with the current sentence.

In addition, the responsible chamber imposed several fines on the man, as a spokeswoman for the court announced.

According to the indictment, the professor beat three women under his authority several times between 2014 and 2017 in order to “sexually arouse” himself.

The now 60-year-old was sentenced to an eleven-month suspended sentence in March 2022, but the Federal Court of Justice (BGH) partially overturned the verdict.

Now two further acts from the summer of 2015 have also been assessed as coercion.

"It was a humiliation of the first order"

On both occasions, the man asked a witness to take down her pants and underpants in order to be beaten, said presiding judge David Küttler.

After at least ten painful blows, he hugged the woman and asked her to thank her.

“It was humiliation of the first order,” said the judge.

The professor ignored the fact that the doctoral student refused corporal punishment and had previously threatened her with similar acts to end the supervision of her doctoral thesis if she resisted.

The verdict is not yet legally binding.

The defense has not yet commented on whether it will appeal the verdict.

If the verdict becomes final, the professor at the University of Göttingen would automatically lose his civil servant status.

After the incidents became known, the university had banned the professor from conducting official business since 2017 and sued for his removal from office.

The three women affected had already appeared as co-plaintiffs in the first trial.

"I'm very happy for my client," said lawyer Steffen Hörning after the hearing.

"She has been through years of suffering with a lot of psychological stress." The lawyer criticized the defense strategy as "sexist and racist."

In his verdict, the presiding judge also rejected the defense's claim that the young woman had made a "punishment agreement" with the professor because she allegedly knew this from her school days in Vietnam.

Rather, the defendant put the witness under massive pressure and forced her to subject herself to humiliation, said Küttler.

The professor had denied sexual motives for the beating on the bare bottom and said that he had rather wanted to motivate the doctoral student to perform better and prepare her for future jobs.

He perceived the beating as more of a “blunder”.

The case of the lecturer, who is accused of further misconduct in addition to the allegations heard again by the regional court, has already occupied the courts several times.

In October, the Göttingen Administrative Court demoted the man by two salary groups for five years in separate disciplinary proceedings.

The court considered relevant allegations from the period from 2006 to 2017 in the proceedings brought by the University of Göttingen against the official, including its own taking of evidence, to be proven.

According to the university's lawsuit, the disciplinary proceedings involved more than 40 incidents below the criminal liability threshold, of which the court ultimately considered only some to be proven.

However, it was nevertheless determined that the professor had “harassed female students and employees in a sexualized manner” through words and touching for years.

fok/AFP/dpa