crime
Punishment for professor increased after mistreatment
The accused professor (M, pixelated) was sentenced to a suspended sentence of one and a half years. photo
© Christina Sticht/dpa
A university professor is said to have exploited his position of power as a doctoral supervisor to beat and humiliate women. Now the 60-year-old is threatened with removal from his position as a civil servant.
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 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.
“Humiliation of the first order”
On both occasions, the man asked the witness to take down her pants and underpants for the beating, 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 initially did not comment on whether it would 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.
Defense strategy “sexist and racist”
The three women affected had already appeared as co-plaintiffs in the first trial. “I am very happy for my client,” said 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 blows as more of a “blunder”.