Victims weep as pervert doctor is jailed for 18 years
VICTIMS of a pervert children’s doctor wept yesterday as he was jailed for 18 years for abusing them at the hospital where Jimmy Savile had also preyed on young patients.
Michael Salmon, 80, was branded a “cold- blooded and ruthless” paedophile who used girl patients as “objects for sexual gratifi cation”.
Salmon got his sexual kicks from molesting girls as young as 12 at Stoke Mandeville hospital, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. Savile was attacking patients there at the same time.
The consultant paediatrician twice raped a 16- year- old when she feared she was pregnant and came to him for help. He would even abuse girls behind a screen while their anxious parents were just feet away.
Salmon, of Salisbury, Wiltshire, denied rape and nine counts of indecent assault involving six girls aged 12 to 18 from 1980 to 1988.
He dismissed the allegations as lies and called the victims “gold diggers”. But a jury at Reading Crown Court found him guilty last week and he was sentenced yesterday.
The woman he raped when she was 16 and several other victims were in the public gallery to see him jailed.
They wept as Judge Johanna Cutts, QC, condemned his crimes as a “gross breach of trust”.
In moving impact statements, she heard how victims have struggled with the trauma of abuse and now have diffi culty in trusting doctors.
Outside court, Jessica Standley, of solicitors Slater & Gordon, said: “The crimes he committed were among the most despicable imaginable.
“Yet again this case raises serious questions about the culture at Stoke Mandeville hospital at the time Jimmy Savile and Salmon were there.”
However, the court heard no evidence to link Salmon and Savile.
Salmon was struck off in 1990 after a three- year jail sentence for indecently assaulting three girl patients.