Dimitris Kouimtsidis
A SPANISH dentist has been sentenced to three years in prison for secretly filming one of his workers getting changed.
The female employee discovered a USB drive that included footage of her getting changed in the storage cupboard at the clinic in Alcorcon in the Madrid region.
The judge has sentenced the dentist, identified by the initials J.A.R.R., to three years in prison for crimes against privacy, aggravated by abuse of trust.
The 53-year-old was found guilty of placing a camera in the storage room to film his employee while she got changed.
The judge dismissed the dentist’s claims that the camera was put there because money had gone missing from a safe in the room, pointing out that it was positioned to give an ‘optimum close-up view’ of the worker.
The employee who has been given a fake name (Arancha) was working as a receptionist.
She would change into her uniform every day in the storage cupboard that was provided for this reason.
One day her boss asked ‘jokingly’ if he could stay and watch.
This conversation was captured on the camera that he had set up to record Arancha undressing.
The victim said she discovered she was being recorded in February 2016, when she found the USB stick on the floor of the reception area.
Arancha told the court she thought it belonged to someone and plugged it into the computer to figure out who’s it was in order to return it.
Instead, she found out she had been recorded on a hidden camera, with the USB drive containing the video of her undressing down to her underwear.
In January 2019, the Supreme Court sentenced the dentist to pay her €62,500 in damages for ‘seriously and repeatedly breaking her basic rights’, as a worker.
Judge Vazquez also banned the 53-year-old from practising as a dentist for three years and ordered him to pay a fine of €7,500, plus €3,000 in compensation to the victim.
He also rejected the accusation put forward by the dentist’s lawyers, who claimed that Arancha had filmed herself in order, ‘to get money out of [the accused] in the most despicable way’.
