Prominent Brampton physician facing sex abuse allegation
Dr. Brian Thicke, Alan Thicke’s father, is accused of groping female patient during 1990s
The case of prominent Brampton physician Dr. Brian Thicke — patriarch of the famous Thicke family — is again being reviewed after Ontario’s medical regulator at first dismissed in secret an allegation he sexually abused a patient.
The longtime doctor, father of the late actor Alan Thicke and grandfather to singer Robin Thicke, is accused of groping a female patient’s breasts on two occasions, in 1993 and 1995, during a physical examination that was required to receive a private pilot’s licence.
A panel of the inquiries, complaints and reports committee of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO), which operates behind closed doors and reviews documentary evidence but does not hear from witnesses, decided to take no further action in the complaint against Thicke, 88, after it was received in 2015.
The dismissal would never have been publicly known had the complainant, Lisa Fruitman, not appealed the decision to the Health Professions Appeal and Review Board (HPARB), a civilian body that makes its decisions public.
The board found in September that the complaints committee’s investigation was “adequate,” but that its decision to take no further action was “unreasonable.” The board criticized nearly every finding made by the committee, and ordered that the complaint be sent back for review.
The case has once again raised concerns over how self-regulating health colleges handle sexual abuse allegations, and highlights the secrecy in which their committees screen complaints.
“It’s a good thing Ontario has a review board for college decisions like this one,” said Sen. Marilou McPhedran, who chaired three Ontario task forces on sexual abuse by health professionals, calling the complaints committee decision “chilling.”
If not for the appeal, it would also not have become public that Thicke has faced a similar accusation before, in1994. The complainant in that case went to the police, and Thicke admitted to officers to doing breast exams for pilot licences for the past 38 years, according to a police report.
The police took no further action in that case, finding there had been “no intent” to commit sexual assault.
Thicke has always denied his conduct was sexual in nature or inappropriate. His lawyer, Paul-Erik Veel, declined to comment to the Star. Once dubbed Brampton’s Most Valuable Physician and feted at a gala in 2011 by former mayor Susan Fennell, where he received the “Stepping Out for Brampton Award for Lifetime Achievement,” Thicke retains an active licence to practise medicine, according to his CPSO profile.
“I’ve been living with the shame and embarrassment of what happened to me in the early ’90s, and in 2015, over two years ago, I was giving my eldest some parental advice before she was leaving for university about the importance of speaking up for oneself and knowing what is right and what is clearly wrong,” Lisa Fruitman, the complainant whose accusations are being reviewed by the college, told the Star in a statement.
(The Star generally does not name alleged victims of sexual assault without their consent. Fruitman consented to her name being published.)
“I realized that my hiding what happened to me was both hypocritical and wrong, and had been truly haunting me for over 20 years, and had emotionally scarred me for life. I shared my story with (my daughter), and she was not only supportive, but she encouraged and strongly demanded that I report it to the college.
“I found the courage to report so that hopefully it will help our government and the college make sure that this doesn’t continue to happen to others. And to let people know that the pain never ends, but gets worse for a victim, or in this case a patient, even after 20 years.”
A CPSO spokesperson said the college’s inquiries, complaints and reports committee (ICRC), made up of doctors and members of the public, takes seriously any case sent back for review.
“The ICRC is committed to conducting comprehensive investigations of sexual abuse and boundary violations of a sexual nature. In this case, HPARB confirmed that the investigation was adequate, and returned the matter to the ICRC to consider its decision in light of the reasons given by the board,” Kathryn Clarke said.
The details surrounding Fruitman’s allegations in this story are found in the HPARB decision.
Fruitman sent a complaint to the CPSO in January 2015 about two physical exams performed by Thicke in 1993 and 1995 for a civil aviation medical examination. She said in her complaint he did not offer a chaperone or leave the room when she disrobed.
“She recalled that it felt to her like the respondent was playing with her breasts,” the HPARB decision said. “She recalled that it felt wrong, like there was no need for the breast examination. The examination felt more like a massage.”
Before complaining to the college in 2015, Fruitman had contacted Transport Canada, only to learn that a breast exam was never required as part of the examination required for a private pilot’s licence.
Thicke, who is a designated civil aviation medical examiner for pilots, told the college’s complaints committee through his lawyer that “it was possible that he conducted a physical examination of the applicant,” but had no recollection of Fruitman and no medical records related to her.
“He stated the examinations performed in such circumstances were comprehensive physical examinations, which could have included a breast examination, as was the standard practice at the time,” reads part of the HPARB decision, summarizing Thicke’s position to the college complaints committee.
The three-person HPARB panel had a number of criticisms regarding the college complaints committee’s decision to take no further action.
First, while Thicke may not have had any medical records pertaining to Fruitman, the college complaints committee did have her entire Transport Canada medical file before it, yet made no reference to the file in its decision.
The medical file confirms “that the respondent examined the applicant on the dates in question; that a breast examination was not a required part of the assessment, and that the respondent included no information about the breast examination in the written notes,” the HPARB ruling said.
And while the complaints committee found that a full physical examination, including a breast exam, was the “standard of care at the time,” the HPARB panel found no evidence of that, as Transport Canada said itself that a breast exam was never part of pilot physicals, and there was nothing in Fruitman’s case to indicate that a breast exam was clinically necessary.
The information before the complaints committee was “unambiguous” that a breast exam was not required for a private pilot’s licence, HPARB said.
As part of its investigation into Fruitman’s complaint in 2015, the CPSO learned that another woman had complained, this time to Peel Regional Police, about Thicke conducting an “inappropriate breast examination” when she saw him for a civil aviation licence examination in June 1994 — one year after Fruitman’s first visit to him and a year before her second.
According to the police report, which the college investigator obtained through a Freedom-of-Information request, the woman alleged Thicke told her: “Now we are going to look at your boobies,” then raised her shirt, undid her bra and squeezed her breasts.
The report states Thicke was arrested on June 29, 1994, admitted doing the breast examination and said he had been doing breast examinations for the aviator exam for the past 38 years. He was released when the police concluded there was “no intent” to commit a sexual assault, according to the report.
HPARB said the college investigator was unable to track down the woman who complained to police. The panel also noted that police informed Thicke in 1994 that other doctors did not routinely conduct breast exams as part of the aviation physical, a year before he allegedly groped Fruitman a second time.
The HPARB panel also took issue with the complaints committee saying that Fruitman had been given “three opportunities to describe her version of events, but she has provided little basis for her concerns aside from her feeling of uneasiness with the examination.” The committee had concluded that Fruitman “gave few concrete details to support her claim that (Thicke)’s technique was inappropriate.”
But the HPARB panel said these findings were not supported by the information before the complaints committee. They noted there were several instances when Fruitman explained why she perceived the exam as sexual rather than clinical.
For example, Fruitman told the college investigator that she had had breast exams in the past conducted by a gynecologist, but that Thicke’s exam in 1993 felt “more of hands on my breasts versus looking for a lump” and that it felt longer than other breast exams.
The complaints committee learned of another committee decision where Thicke had been required to meet with the college registrar related to a February 2010 complaint. He had allegedly told an injured worker to remove her top, pulled her underwear partway down to assess her “lumbar range of motion, and slapped her on the buttocks,” according to the HPARB ruling.
“Moreover, the decision reflects that as a result of comments that the respondent made to the investigator, including that he would now have to ‘address a broad who is obviously unhappy,’ and a description of injured workers as ‘scum of the earth,’ ” the college undertook an investigation which led to a “no further action” decision, according to the HPARB ruling.
None of this is captured on Thicke’s public profile on the College of Physicians website because the CPSO does not post results of complaints committee decisions when no further action is deemed necessary.
“For these reasons, the board finds that the committee’s decision is unreasonable as it is not supported by the record and requires the committee to reconsider its decision in light of these reasons,” the HPARB panel said.