a psychiatrist sentenced to eight years in prison for raping a former patient

Psychiatrist Alain Pidolle has already been sentenced to 13 years in prison in another case of rape and sexual assault on six patients.

Psychiatrist Alain Pidolle was sentenced to eight years in prison for rape of a vulnerable person, a former patient, by the Moselle departmental criminal court, on the night of Friday December 15 to Saturday December 16. The accused has indicated through his lawyers that he will appeal, reports The Lorraine Republican.

Between September 2007 and June 2012, Alain Pidolle was a psychiatrist at the Mathilde-Salomon center in Phalsbourg (Moselle), which he himself founded, specializing in adolescents suffering from psychological disorders or psychiatric pathologies. The victim was 28 years old when she met the psychiatrist on the recommendations of her general practitioner, to help her cure anorexia nervosa from which she had suffered since she was 15.

“A total absence of affect”

“Over time, he asked me to take nude photos, to work on my anorexia”explained the victim, who then explained that “the rapes started at the second session, he raped me for several years”. The psychiatrist never denied this relationship, believing on the contrary that it was consensual.

The psychiatric experts who examined him considered that there was in him “a total absence of affect”. The public prosecutor had requested a sentence of seven years in prison. The accused, aged 75, had already been sentenced in another case of rape and sexual assault on six patients to 13 years in prison, by the Bas-Rhin Assize Court in 2018. Half of the new sentence will be absorbed into the previous one.