Doctor who spied on girl, 15, in shower is struck off
ONE of Britain’s most senior doctors has been struck off in disgrace after being unmasked as a peeping tom.
Dr Jonathan Fielden, 56, was arrested by police after he spied on a naked 15-year-old girl through a hole in a ceiling as she took a shower.
He avoided jail last year after blaming work pressures for his behaviour. But he was later referred to the General Medical Council for investigation.
Yesterday, it emerged father-of-four Fielden has been erased from the medical register after a disciplinary panel rejected his pleas to be let off with a temporary suspension.
Fielden was the medical director of University College London Hospitals, whose previous £224,999 salary once made him one of the highest paid doctors in the UK.
Traumatised
In an unusual move, his entire three-day hearing was held behind closed doors last month after lawyers cited humans rights privacy laws to bar the press and public from attending, for fear it would lead to the victim’s identity being made public.
The victim was referred to throughout the hearing as Person A.
The incident occurred in 2016, after Fielden crept into an attic area above a shower room and watched the teenager through a hole next to a light fitting at a property in Leighton Buzzard, Bedfordshire, the hearing was told.
He was able to look for around “15 to 20 seconds” before the girl realised she was being watched.
The girl was so traumatised she could not bring herself to take showers and eventually told a school counsellor about the incident. Fielden was later arrested in December 2016 and resigned from NHS England.
At Luton Crown Court in June last year Fielden, of Biddenham, Beds, admitted voyeurism and was sentenced to five months imprisonment, suspended for a year, and was ordered to complete 150 hours of unpaid work. He was also ordered to sign the Sex Offender Register for seven years.
The court was told that his mobile phone had been examined and some of the websites visited featured child sex abuse images.
Fielden had been hailed by the Health Service Journal as the 49th most influential person in the NHS back in 2015.
At his crown court trial Judge Richard Foster told him: “It’s tragic to see you, a man of such brilliance, responsible for a substantial part of the NHS budget, fall from grace in the way you have because of what you stupidly did.”