To the women he app-roached on dating websites, Tom Plimmer would make great capital of his status as a GP. There is something about being a doctor, in particular a general practitioner, that conveys an extra layer of trustworthiness, of compassion and empathy.
Sadly, those are qualities that seem to have been sorely missing when it came to this particular GP and his personal relationships.
The 40-year-old Cambridge-educated medic saw his reputation shattered earlier this year when he admitted having sex with women in his consulting rooms. This week, he was further disgraced when the same medical tribunal reconvened and found he had targeted a vulnerable colleague in various ways, including sending her an unsolicited video of him having sex with another woman, bombarding her with explicit photographs and subjecting her to lewd gestures.
The location for much of this activity? The privacy of his consulting rooms at a busy surgery in Swindon, Wiltshire.
The detail of the protracted Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service hearing that still has to determine Plimmer’s fitness to be a doctor, is both deeply disturbing and unpalatable; but as the Mail has uncovered during investigations into the medic’s background – the case is just the tip of a very sordid iceberg.
Perennially unfaithful, a self-confessed sex addict and now, more chillingly, a manipulative sex pest, Tom Plimmer’s proclivities could not be further removed from what most people would expect of a family doctor.
And shockingly, this is not even the first time that Plimmer’s professionalism has been called into question – in fact, his first job as a qualified GP, in Cambridgeshire, ended under a cloud after he was found to have been viewing porn and browsing adult dating sites, looking for sex, on his work computer.
He went on to speak openly and publicly in a national newspaper about his sex addiction – confessing to sleeping with 90 women and being serially unfaithful – and avowing that Sex Addicts Anonymous ‘saved my life’.
Yet, he was allowed to take up a new position as a GP in Swindon in 2017 – a fact that remains baffling to the women who have crossed his path since. This week we have spoken to five women who had relationships with Plimmer. As one puts it: ‘Ninety women? Make that 90,000.’
These women share much in common. They are professional, working women; intelligent, but almost all, in some way, vulnerable.
They have bravely agreed to speak to the Mail anonymously (the emotional scars of their encounters run deep) in the hope that their experiences help prevent any others going through a similar ordeal.
Anna is in her 30s, she’s not a person easily fooled. Now a happily married mother-of-one, she is able to laugh about the sheer audacity of the lies she was told during her relationship with Plimmer seven years ago – but it wasn’t always thus.
She describes meeting Plimmer on Tinder in 2016. ‘I liked that he was a doctor,’ Anna admits. ‘I know that sounds really superficial, but that was what initially drew me to his profile.’
His profession gave her, a woman scarred by a previous abusive relationship, a confidence that this was a kind, caring man she could trust. They began to date – meeting for dinner, speaking every day, seeing each other once or twice a week. He would stay at her home, she visited his just once.
That trust was knocked relatively early on when her protective mother stumbled across a couple of Plimmer’s newspaper confessionals about sex addiction and faking orgasms (one headlined ‘I was a GP… how could I also be a sex addict?’).
But, testament to his remarkable charm, he managed to persuade his partner that he had sought treatment for this, and it was all ‘in the past’; he was reformed. ‘Don’t worry, you are safe with me. I will never hurt you,’ he said.
‘He convinced me it was all going to be OK,’ says Anna. ‘He’s charming and knows all the right things to say. As a GP he will have studied mental health and addiction – he knows how to act as if he has been rehabilitated.’
Just a few weeks later the first elaborate lie landed: Plimmer’s mother was in hospital having suffered ‘a stroke’. Two weeks later, in early October, there was a new development, an early morning message that Plimmer’s mother had died.
Anna laughs as she recalls the event, not because she is without compassion but because she now knows Plimmer’s 72-year-old mum is very much alive. She’s aghast as she recalls: ‘He was talking to me about funeral plans, and I kept offering to help.’ That Christmas he came to meet my family, including my parents and grandparents – my grandfather had suffered a stroke himself a few years before.
‘Tom told my family how difficult things had been since losing his mother, and my mum said to him: ‘If there is anything we can do to be a support, just let us know.’ The whole family even raised a glass to his deceased mother!’
Lies, of course, often crumble, and this deceit imploded spectacularly during a group Sunday lunch in late January, when one of Anna’s friends asked if she could charge her phone. The friend needed to unplug Plimmer’s phone to do so, and as she did his home screen lit up.
‘She came back to the table with tears in her eyes and said, ‘I need to talk to you’, then she took me aside and pressed the button so his home screen lit up again and it was just full of messages, explicit messages from different women — all of which he must have received while we were eating.’
The confrontation that followed was devastating – he didn’t deny the evidence of his infidelity. He’d relapsed, he said.
The next denouement came in a cooler, calmer moment days later when, wondering what else he might be lying about, some online detective work revealed that his mother was, in fact, alive and well. Anna does not want to dwell on the experience, rather she is furious at all that was still to come.
Her own mother wrote to the General Medical Council (GMC) in 2017, highlighting Plimmer’s duplicity, providing evidence of his lies including screenshots of messages Plimmer had sent to her daughter about his mother’s ‘death’, and raising concerns for his mental well-being.
The response? That what happened in his private life did not affect his ability to be a GP, so no further action would be taken.
Anna is now deeply concerned about how Plimmer continues to be allowed to practise with minimal conditions (effectively, he only has to keep the GMC and various other individuals notified where he is working and in what capacity). To add insult to injury, even now he is operating a health and well-being business under a different first name, which falls outside the realms of any kind of regulation for medical practitioners.
For these services at ‘Mind, Body and Emotional Wellness with Dr Matthew’ in Gloucester, where he lives, Plimmer charges £65 for an individual, 55-minute therapeutic session, or £775 for a group session in a business or educational setting.
Anna is appalled that he is professing to give mental health support to potentially very vulnerable clients, including students. She has fired off letters and phone calls to numerous NHS bodies, police forces and the GMC, all to no avail.
‘He has taken all of us for a ride,’ Anna says. ‘To me, it is really simple that his behaviour and outrageous, harmful lies mean he has bought his profession into disrepute and needs to be erased from the medical register without delay. But more than that, I want to make sure he doesn’t continue to be exposed to potentially vulnerable patients and clients, or to take advantage of any other woman.’
In this sentiment, Anna is not alone – that is the over-riding motivation of each of the women I have spoken to this week. Freya is a teacher and mother-of-three who dated Plimmer for a few months between 2018 and 2019, but never quite let her guard fully down, because there was something in his strangely forceful manner that she was unsure about.
He pushed her up against a wall for a kiss on the very first date, which made her uncomfortable, but tentatively the relationship progressed.
Freya’s uncertainty was fuelled when she, too, stumbled across that newspaper sex addict confession. Understandably, she confronted Plimmer.
‘He said he had been to rehab and was completely healed,’ she says with embarrassed resignation. ‘He said he’d gone and done some spiritual thing and travelled…’
It was the beginning of the end of the six-month relationship, but the aftermath was protracted. ‘He would be messaging me constantly, saying he missed me, that he loved me. He would ring me saying he was crying on the floor. Knowing what I know now is very weird because he was obviously in a long-term relationship with someone else while he was dating me.’
That other woman is Danielle, a PR professional and single-mother-of two who began dating the doctor in 2019 after meeting him online.
The reason Danielle and Freya know about each other is a striking moment in the whole tawdry saga of Plimmer’s web of lies. While he was dating the teacher, her teenage son had been seriously ill in hospital with suspected meningitis. Imagine Freya’s horror when, four years later, she received a photograph from a stranger on Facebook, asking: ‘Is this your son in hospital?’
The sender of this image was Danielle, who had been sent it by Plimmer. He had claimed the photograph was of his own brother, but she turned detective and uncovered the truth after her own relationship with Plimmer collapsed in the wake of his lies.
‘I think he is sick, no sane person would do this. No one would choose a life of this much chaos and disconnection,’ Danielle says.
She shared her life with Plimmer for two years from 2019. He moved into her home, holidayed with her children — all, she was to discover, while having sexual relationships with numerous other women, including the two women whom he admitted having sex with at his surgery in January and May 2020.
‘When you really love someone and you introduce them to your children, it’s nice to think you actually know them, and it’s quite a shock when you find out you don’t,’ she says.
‘It’s like you’ve been living in someone else’s fiction, wasting your time, which in your 30s is quite critical. And then I had to try to explain it somehow to the children, who were very young, and that was hard to do.
‘I’ve tracked him, going back to his Cambridge years, and basically have found this behaviour going on in one way or another since he was 18 – but it seems to have escalated.’
Known as Ms D in the tribunal, Danielle withdrew from the case before it concluded having found the experience too bruising, but is in no doubt that her relationship with Tom Plimmer was ‘relationship fraud’.
‘I certainly think people can be darker than I ever expected,’ she says. Her two-year relationship with the doctor crumbled when she tagged him in a social media post, only to have someone get in contact ‘wondering why I was tagging her boyfriend in my pictures’.
What followed has been a two-year journey of piecing together an ever-growing jigsaw of lies.
‘I set up an Instagram account with just photos of me and him on it, I just wanted to see if any more women noticed him and messaged me, and they did.’
And they kept coming.
As for Plimmer, who is apparently a church-goer, he declined to comment yesterday. He recently uploaded an interesting post to his personal blog; it was entitled No More Lies.
It began thus: ‘Lying can of course lead to a lot of trouble and hurt to both the receiver and, eventually, the deliverer of said lies. However, more than the lie itself it’s the lies that we actually believe that do the most harm.’
Certainly the women he duped would agree with this. But it remains to be seen whether Plimmer’s complex web of lies, and his sordid exploits in his consulting rooms, will be enough to put an end to any prospect of him returning to work as a GP.
* Names have been changed.
William Turner is a seasoned U.K. correspondent with a deep understanding of domestic affairs. With a passion for British politics and culture, he provides insightful analysis and comprehensive coverage of events within the United Kingdom.
