Patient says she feels ‘violated’
Woman says she is being coerced to testify in doctor’s sex abuse case
A woman says she feels “violated” by the regulator trying to discipline a Toronto doctor accused of sexually abusing her.
The woman, who can only be identified as Patient A due to a publication ban, has been refusing to testify at the discipline hearing at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario for Dr. Suganthan Kayilasanathan.
She has retained her own lawyer, Neil Perrier, who is asking a panel of the college’s discipline committee to quash what is known as a summons — a document that was served on Patient A indicating she has a legal obligation to testify at the discipline hearing, which is currently on hold.
On Monday, Patient A did appear at the college to testify, but only for the purposes of the hearing to quash the summons.
“This whole process has felt like I’ve been violated,” she said, under cross-examination by college lawyer Lisa Brownstone.
“I’ve got to be honest, I have no faith in the system, I have no faith in doctors,” she continued, at times becoming emotional. “I don’t talk to anybody about personal things, because what’s the point? It’s going to be exposed.”
Kayilasanathan faces allegations of sexually abusing a patient and of disgraceful, dishonourable or unprofessional conduct, all of which he denies.
The college alleges that he wrote Patient A two doctor’s notes in the span of a week in December 2010 so that she could avoid exams, and that the two had sex at a hotel one night during that week.
The regulator also alleges Kayilasanathan exposed himself to Patient A in his car when he drove her home one night two months later, after she had visited him at his condo but rebuffed his advances.
The woman never complained to the college herself, and maintains she’s being coerced by the college to testify against Kayilasanathan.
The regulator found out about her case through another doctor in early 2011. (Health care professionals are required by law to report to their respective college allegations of other health care professionals and patients having sex.)
Should the discipline panel rule that the summons stands, and if Patient A still refuses to testify at the discipline hearing, the college has indicated it will take the unprecedented step of going to court to enforce the summons.
The college would ask a judge for a bench warrant, which would mean having Patient A arrested and brought to the college to give evidence.
The case has called into question whether it is ever in the best interests of justice to force an alleged victim onto the stand, particularly in sensitive cases such as sexual abuse.
The college submits that Patient A was co-operative in the early part of its investigation into Kayilasanathan, and consented to the regulator accessing her medical records.
But the patient said Monday she only co-operated because she felt she was required to do so.
“I’m an upstanding citizen,” she testified, saying she was following the law. She said no one among her family, friends and colleagues knows about the case, and she’s fearful they will find out.
She agreed with Brownstone on Monday that she told a college investigator in 2011 she had received a phone call from a mutual friend of hers and Kayilasanathan, suggesting that if she pursued the allegations “the doctor’s PR team would go out of their way to destroy me and sue me for millions.”
But she said that was only part of the reason why she didn’t want to testify at the discipline hearing.
Patient A said on the stand Monday that she and Kayilasanathan did have sex at the hotel in December 2010.
(Again, her testimony was only for the purposes of the hearing to quash the summons, and not for the purposes of Kayilasanathan’s discipline hearing, and so she was not crossexamined by the doctor’s lawyer.)
She testified that after she read a February 2011article about Kayilasanathan facing a criminal sexual assault charge, in a case involving a different woman, she went to see another doctor out of concern regarding sexually transmitted infections.
It was that doctor who reported her case to the college.
Kayilasanathan and his friend and fellow doctor, Amitabh Chauhan, were acquitted by a judge in 2014 of the criminal sexual assault charge.
The hearing to quash the summons is expected to conclude Tuesday, with the college and Patient A’s lawyers making final arguments.