SINGAPORE: A trainee surgeon originally from Singapore made the news in Australia last year after he was arrested for having secretly filmed and taken photos hundreds of times in the bathrooms of some of the biggest hospitals in Melbourne.
Ryan Yi Cho, 29, pleaded guilty on Thursday (July 9) to 13 charges. These include stalking, producing an intimate image, and installing an optical surveillance device. He now faces a jail sentence for gross violation of privacy, according to reporting from Australia’s ABC News.
The report added that numerous individuals whom Cho filmed viewed the court proceedings online.
The offences occurred at Austin Hospital, Royal Melbourne Hospital, and Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre.
Aside from the people he filmed at the hospital, Cho is said to have also filmed one of his housemates without their knowledge.
The backstory
Cho was first arrested on July 10, 2025, when a phone was found in a bathroom for the staff at Austin Hospital. Detectives later found footage and photos that led to the charges against him. His modus operandi was to leave a mobile phone concealed in a mesh bag, which filmed his victims while they changed clothes or used the bathroom.
An investigation was also carried out concerning two other hospitals where he had worked since 2020.
There were allegedly 10,374 videos and pictures of the junior doctor’s alleged victims across several devices, with as many as 400 people affected—both men and women, the authorities said.
He has since been banned from practising medicine in Melbourne and is not even allowed to enter the premises where he took photos and videos of his victims. His licence has been suspended by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency.
Though he initially faced over 900 charges, these were reduced to 13 as charges were combined. In November, Cho will return to court for a three-day pre-sentence hearing, and his victims will have the chance to testify as to how his wrongdoings affected them.
Cho was released on bail after the July 9 hearing and went home to his parents, who flew to Singapore and with whom he has been living since he was arrested last year.
According to his defence team, he has “complex psychiatric and psychological issues”.
A prosecutor, meanwhile, has characterised Cho’s offences as “bordering on the obsessive”, given that the number of videos seen in his electronic storage devices is in the thousands.
“The images relate to the intimate bathroom behaviour of many hundreds of women,” the prosecutor said. /TISG
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