Dutch ‘horror dentist’ on trial in France
Man accused of mutilating patients was arrested in New Brunswick in 2014
PARIS— A Dutchman dubbed the “horror dentist” by French media went on trial Tuesday, facing charges of intentional violence and fraud.
Dentist Jacobus Van Nierop, who was arrested in New Brunswick in 2014 after fleeing France, could be sentenced to 10 years in prison and fined € 375,000 ($554,000) if convicted. More than 50 victims are also seeking damages.
Scores of people came forward with complaints ranging from multiple healthy teeth removed, pieces of tools left in teeth, abscesses, recurrent infections and misshapen mouths between 2009 and 2013.
His trial in the central-eastern town of Nevers is expected to last until March 18, with a ruling expected later.
Van Nierop came to Canada on Dec. 18, 2013, with the plan of meeting up with a woman he’d met online, despite being under conditions not to leave France.
That relationship ended by the following May, but Van Nierop remained in Canada beyond the time he was permitted, partly because he had no financial means to leave.
According to a statement of facts in his Canadian extradition case, the RCMP went looking for Van Nierop after receiving a complaint and determining he was the subject of an Interpol notice.
He was located by police on Labour Day 2014 in an apartment west of Fredericton, N.B.
More than 50 victims are seeking damages in France.
One patient, Sylviane Boulesteix, has said she was unexpectedly summoned to his dental office in May 2012. Without warning, the dentist pulled eight of her teeth out and immediately fixed dentures on her raw gums. For three hours, the elderly woman says she sat gushing blood.
In the following days, she says Van Nierop refused to relieve her pain. A judicial expert later described a “cruel and perverse” man whose incompetence made Boulesteix lose several healthy teeth, go through a trauma and suffer irreversible damage to her mouth.
Van Nierop has said he remembers only one of the 75 patients who allegedly suffered “mutilations” or “permanent disabilities” at his hands be- tween 2009 and 2013, according to court documents.
He now has to face many of them in court.
“I dread the moment where I’ll see him again because it won’t be any longer the 100-kilogram rugby man who was smiling at us with disregard,” Nicole Martin, president of a victim association, told The Associated Press on the eve of the trial.
Van Nierop, who used the assumed first name Mark with his patients, refused to answer questions during the investigation, saying only that the oral health of people in the region was “deplorable.”
He claims he was suffering from a borderline personality disorder.