A FORMER paediatrician from Salisbury denied gang-raping a female patient also molested by Jimmy Savile as he took to the witness stand.

Michael Salmon, 79, denies 11 counts of indecent assault, three counts of rape and two counts of procuring an abortion relating to eight different girls, aged 11 to 18, between 1973 and 1988.

One woman says he, Jimmy Savile and another doctor raped her after Salmon drugged her drink at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Buckinghamshire.

Salmon also told jurors he would not have had the skills to carry out backstreet abortions on a former female patient, having never |carried out the operation in his medical career.

A former teenage female patient claimed Salmon told her “one favour deserves another” as he raped her after performing a |backstreet abortion on her in his bedroom.

The complainant, now 46, told the court she thought she had fallen pregnant after losing her |virginity with a neighbour in 1984, and turned to Salmon to help her.

Salmon insisted the witness had never been to his home and that she would not have been able to contact him as his home phone number was ex-directory.

He denied doing anything to the girl to make her believe she was undergoing an abortion.

Salmon was struck off in 1991 following his conviction for indecent assaults on patients.

His conviction for indecent assaults on three young women came about when detectives searching his office for evidence of fraudulent activity discovered love letters from young female patients, the court heard.

He was jailed after admitting assaults on three girls aged 12 to 16.

He told jurors: “I felt guilty, remorse. I felt awful, I felt destroyed, I felt helpless – hopeless.

“I let them (the victims) down.”

He said: “I was extremely foolish and wrong.”

Cross-examining, Miranda Moore QC asked Salmon whether he ever pretended the young girls were at fault.

“Not at all,” Salmon said. “I was at fault. I should have been upright about this whole business and not succumbed to the electricity that was obviously between us.

“One of them was all over me. She wanted to marry me.”

Ms Moore said: “She was 12 years old. She made all the running? She made sexual advances to you at 12?

“Do you understand the concept of grooming?”

Salmon replied: “I know exactly what the word means.”

Ms Moore said: “Do you accept that you would groom young female patients?”

Salmon said: “No, I do not.”

The trial continues.