Vaginal exam ‘shocked’ El-Tatari’s former patient
“Wow! Are you ever nice and tight.” A former patient testified Tuesday that her family physician, Dr. Bassam El-Tatari, uttered those words as he performed a vaginal exam on her in 2012.
“I was shocked,” the woman said. “I immediately started looking for another doctor.”
The woman is the fourth former patient to testify at the Windsor doctor’s sexual assault trial, which began this week in Superior Court. El-Tatari, whose full name is Bassam Mohamed Khalil Darwish El-Tatari, is charged with six counts of sexual assault involving six female former patients. The first accuser went to police in 2015. After police announced they had charged El-Tatari, five more former patients came forward with allegations dating back to 2009. This fourth woman said she was alone with the doctor at the time of the alleged incident despite El-Tatari having offered to have a female staff member in the examination room.
“I declined because he was my doctor. I thought I could trust him.”
The incident made her think back to another time when she saw El-Tatari for a breast exam. She had a skin tag on her nipple that she wanted removed. “He kept playing with it,” she said.
The 46-year-old woman said she had no choice but to keep seeing El-Tatari because she was having stomach issues that necessitated gall bladder surgery.
“I never let him do another female exam again,” she said, under questioning by assistant Crown attorney George Spartinos, who is prosecuting the case.
But defence lawyer Robert DiPietro pointed to an entry by El-Tatari in the woman’s medical records that indicated he performed a breast exam on her only weeks later.
“I don’t remember having another breast exam,” she said. “If I did, I don’t remember it.” Another woman who testified earlier in the day Tuesday said she stopped going to El-Tatari in 2014. During breast exams, he would squeeze her nipples, she said, and he once squeezed a pimple on her vaginal area.
But under questioning by DiPietro, the 39-year-old woman couldn’t disagree that the incidents were medically necessary. All four women who have testified in the trial so far have said El-Tatari would hug them during appointments. One woman testified El-Tatari kissed her on the lips. Another said that at the end of a physical exam, El-Tatari asked for two hugs while she was still wearing a paper gown. During the second embrace, he touched the small of her back and cupped the side of her breast and asked if she liked being held that way, she testified. El-Tatari, who went to medical school in the Czech Republic and did postgraduate training at Western University in London, remains licensed with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario, but is prohibited from being alone with patients. Discipline hearings that may impact his medical licence are pending.
His trial before Superior Court Justice Scott Campbell is scheduled for three weeks.