Stylianou was found guilty on 44 counts against 35 women: six rapes; 20 indecent assaults; 10 instances of cruel, inhuman and humiliating behaviour towards his patients (taking photographs); and eight instances of illegally drugging people in order to rape them.
Stylianou, who opened up a clinic in Aradippou in 1996, “took advantage of the trust his female patients showed him,” drugging them and then raping or indecently assaulting them, the court said.
The court departed from the usual practice of running the sentences concurrently and decreed that Stylianou should serve them consecutively, with the exception of an extra four years for drugging his patients, which is to run concurrently.
If all sentences had been run concurrently he would have served a maximum of 11 years, the longest of the sentences handed down. With the consecutive decision the various sentences add up to 26 years; 11 for raping an underage girl; nine for the rape of five adult women; three for the indecent assault of a minor; two and a half for the indecent assault of adults; and six months for the inhuman, cruel and humiliating way he treated his patients.
The court said the seriousness of the case had merited the harsher sentencing procedure.
The judges said they could not even put into words how people felt about Stylianou’s crimes. “No matter what we say, we cannot accurately portray society’s anger, abhorrence and revulsion,” the court said.
Addressing the court, the convicted doctor said: “In the future, under no circumstances will I do anything of this sort and I will abide by the Hippocratic Oath, I promise in front of God and people, my family, parents, sisters and respected customers.”
However under medical ethics, doctors found guilty of a criminal offence are usually struck off. However the medical association did not immediately respond to the sentencing.
The court ruling said Stylianou had “turned his clinic into a place for committing serious crimes to satisfy his perverted sexual appetites”.
Stylianou’s crime spree only came to an end when one of his patients woke up ten minutes into ‘surgery’ in October last year to discover she was tied with two cables leading up to her breasts with the naked doctor holding her hand on his penis. Stylianou told her at the time that she was hallucinating.
State pathologist Eleni Antoniou later confirmed that Stylianou had not operated on the woman at all and in fact she didn’t need an operation.
Police later confiscated 563 pictures of naked women on the doctor’s computers and camera and had secured 43 written testimonies from women by November.
“His clients entrusted their bodies to him so he could heal them and he drugged them in order to do what he did,” the court said.
Two of the patients he raped were aged 15 and 17; he had also indecently assaulted the 15-year-old on two other occasions. He had told both girls they needed invasive procedures and on one occasion took pictures of the girl while raping her.
Stylianou told the court he had family and health problems and medication had “altered [his] mental make-up” and changed his personality.
He also had minor erectile dysfunction: “this made me feel I wasn’t a complete man at the age of 56 [his age when arrested] which hurt me incredibly,” he told the court.
“I never intended to harm my patients by, for example, publishing their pictures,” he said.
Stylianou said that in the future he would offer his knowledge to help “childless couples to find joy and happiness by having children”. A clinical psychologist told the court that he was aware of his actions and was of sound mind.
“He knew what he was doing was wrong and wanted to stop but could not… He never meant to harm his patients,” the defence lawyer Efstathios Efstathiou said last week.
Source: Cyprus-Mail
By Poly Pantelides
Published on March 29, 2012
