Jail sentence for patient who could not resist stalking and libel

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A former patient of a GP in Denekamp has been sentenced to a partly suspended prison sentence for stalking and damaging the good name of the GP by spreading defamatory texts. The man has also been imposed a contact and area ban and has to pay a fine of more than 5,000 euros.

letters

In the period from November 3, 2020 to December 1, 2021, the former patient sent all kinds of letters and USB sticks to the GP himself, and to authorities including the court, police officers, fellow GPs, lawyers and media, according to the ruling of the criminal court of the court in Overijssel. In it he called the GP, among other things, a pathological liar who misleads authorities, the police and the judiciary. He also accused the doctor of fraud, among other things. The subject of the letters was ‘termination of general practice’.

Previous conviction

In 2017, the former patient was also convicted of spreading slander about the GP. In that year, a conflict arose between the patient and the GP about taking a blood test – with a view to prescribing antiepileptic drugs – which the patient believed did not exist. He then believed that he had to protect society from this GP and started distributing flyers with a negative content about the GP as a whistleblower. He was then imposed, among other things, a contact and location ban with a probationary period of three years. But one month after the probationary period ended, he started distributing letters and USB sticks about the GP again.

In letters to the GP himself, he wrote that if the GP did not report him, he would write a book about the GP. If he did report it, he would be filleted in the media. In one of his letters, the Defendant also gave the GP several months to quietly end his GP practice.

Whistleblower

During the hearing, the defense took the position that the accused acted in good faith. He saw himself as a whistleblower and assumed that everything he wrote about the GP was true. However, the judge rules that the suspect should have known that what he wrote down was not the truth. The suspect could have known this because of his previous conviction and because both the regional and the central disciplinary tribunal ruled in 2017 and 2018 that the GP cannot be blamed at all. The court also ruled that the suspect had infringed the privacy of the GP for more than a year and caused him psychological distress: the GP felt threatened, vulnerable and unsafe in his own home.

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