A south-west Sydney physio has this week been found guilty of unsatisfactory professional conduct by the Health Care Complaints Commission, after he used a secret camera setup to film his patients in the nude without their consent, including a teenage girl.
On January 27, Andrew Weinzettel was found guilty of misconduct, but his punishment is to be determined when the case continues in the Civil and Administrative Tribunal on February 12.
He pleaded guilty to seven counts of filming a person’s private parts without their consent in August 2019 at Liverpool Local Court, and was sentenced later that year to only 30 months imprisonment, served as an intensive correction order in the community, News.com.au reported.
The camera in 52-year-old Weinzettel’s office was disguised as a coat hook and positioned at eye-level facing the shower, The Daily Telegraph reports. It was apparently an $11 spy cam he bought on eBay in October 2018.
Andrew Weinzettel was caught after a patient complained about the secret camera to police in November 2018. She noticed a pair of men’s swimmers on a hook, pulled on it, only for the hook to fall off the wall to reveal the camera’s memory card and charger. There were shots on that memory card of women in various states of undress.
When interviewed by the cops in November 2018, Weinzettel admitted that he had installed the $11 cam in order to film a particular patient, a 20-something woman. He said he wanted to “see how she looks naked,” adding that she was “very good looking.”
The Sydney physio denied to the Health Care Complaints Commission two parts of the complaint against him, writes the Liverpool Leader.
He said that he was not guilty of professional misconduct, and that he had not been motivated by sexual gratification when he installed the camera in the clinic bathroom.
Andrew Weinzettel claimed that he originally bought the camera a month earlier to actually spy on cleaners who he claimed were not rolling up rubber mats or cleaning up piss, and that he had pointed the camera at the ground.
But his excuses were dismissed by the Health Care Complaints Commission and they ruled that the disputed complaints were in fact proven.
His registration to practice physiotherapy was suspended by the Physiotherapy Council of NSW in November 2018 and it has not been reinstated.
