Drugged and assaulted by her would-be supervisor: Dr Dominique Lee tells her shocking story
In the days after Dr Dominique Lee was assaulted by a senior radiation oncology consultant at his home, the thought of going to the police was not something she entertained.
She was struggling to believe that someone she trusted had intentionally harmed her.
And part of her wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, as she went through all the possible reasons for what he did.
That changed when she discovered a week later that he had drugged her.
It was 2013 and Dr Lee was in her final year of her radiation oncology training in Sydney.
She had just spent a year on secondment at Liverpool Hospital, she was now returning to St George Hospital when Dr John Kearsley, 60, the head of radiation oncology at the hospital, offered to mentor her.
He invited her to dinner so they could discuss it further.
“I didn’t have a reason to doubt his intentions,” Dr Lee tells AusDoc.
“Registrars come and go, and people don’t pay much attention, so when someone reaches out from a very senior position and says, ‘Let’s do this mentoring so we can do better for our registrars next year,’ most people would jump at that.
“He had previously hosted [students] at his home so I don’t think it dawned on me at the time that it was unusual.”
Dr Lee assumed Dr Kearsley’s wife would be there, but when she arrived at Dr Kearsley’s home she was told his wife was away.
Dr Lee cannot pinpoint exactly when she knew the evening started to go badly wrong.
“That’s what’s haunted me for years. The things I reported were vivid memories but there are gaps in that 24-hour period.
“I think it was during dinner time that I started to wonder why I was feeling so sleepy.”
At one point Dr Kearsley took her for a walk in nearby Centennial Park.
She recalls leaning against him because she was struggling to walk properly.
She next recalls sitting on a couch back in Dr Kearsley’s home while he massaged her.
Her next memory is lying in his bedroom while he took her clothes off and touched her breasts, despite her repeatedly saying no.
Finally, he allowed her to leave and watched her drive off. She was still drugged.
The following morning the memories of the evening were a blur, but friends told her she had called them in distress.
It was then that a close physician friend insisted on taking her to a GP who insisted a drug test be performed.
The results came a week later.
The GP called to say the urine tests showed she had been drugged with benzodiazepine, Dr Lee says.
“Until the results came back, I thought the assault that happened that night was a result of him drinking and maybe he was too drunk.
“I knew that I couldn’t go back and work there with this man, but it didn’t cross my mind that it was malicious or done with criminal intent.
“I think we excuse a lot of bad behaviour because somebody’s drunk or under the influence or whatever. But then the drug test came back positive and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is criminal’.”
Nevertheless, it still took time to grapple with the reality.
Initially, she and a friend decided to make anonymous calls to the local police and a sexual violence support service describing a hypothetical situation involving the friend and asking what they should do.
When the police officer started asking questions, Dr Lee said she would hang up.
“One day, within two weeks of the positive drug test, I just decided, well, it’s either I pursue my career and be quiet, or I try and stop it from happening to other women.”
“It was affecting me in such a devastating way. I was dead inside. But if I found out the same thing happens to another woman down the track, I just knew I wouldn’t be able to live with myself,” she says.
She says the police officer who took charge of her case fought her corner. But Dr Lee stresses she still had to “wave the piece of paper of evidence in front of him five times” to convince him.
“Without that drug test result, I don’t think he would’ve pursued it. That was the sad reality.
“I was reminded by the police that [Dr Kearsley’s] record was pristine.”
The aftermath
The initial test ordered by the GP only revealed the class of drug in Dr Lee’s system. A key part of the case was the police request for further tests which showed the drug was actually lorazepam — commonly used in radiation oncology as an anxiolytic.
It was found in Dr Kearsley’s office at his hospital during a subsequent police search.
As part of the investigation, Dr Lee said she also had to speak to Dr Kearsley after police secured permission for ‘pretext’ calls — where the victim of a crime can phone the suspect under the supervision of a police officer to see if they will confess on tape.
When Dr Lee contacted him by email to ask if they could speak he agreed.
She told him what she remembered and asked what had happened. At first he said had no idea what she was talking about.
“He then made some weird comparison between his mother touching him and it would have been like a fatherly touch, which was ridiculous.”
Dr Kearsley then sent emails to Dr Lee saying he suspected he had suffered an alcoholic blackout which she did not believe for a second.
“He walked me out to my car and watched me drive away in a completely altered state. I asked him what type of blackout allows people to walk and talk and co-ordinate their movements?”
He also suggested they attend counselling together.
“He tried to offer me a fellow position and told me that reporting these things never has a satisfactory outcome for either party.
“I found the process demeaning — I couldn’t believe he thought I would agree to any of these things.”
Career and personal impact
Dr Lee knew she could not return to St George Hospital as planned, but she did have the support of the Liverpool Hospital medical director.
A few months after the assault, she passed her fellowship exams.
But by then, Dr Lee was worrying about being a “burden” to the Liverpool Hospital radiation oncology department.
“I thought no-one would want me in that specialty, even though no-one told me that and the few people that knew about [the] assault were extremely supportive and kind to me.
“I just felt based on my lived experience to date, that I’d be labelled as a troublemaker and I just wouldn’t be able to carry on.”
So Dr Lee accepted a palliative care fellowship at Westmead Hospital.
She stayed in the position until some of her colleagues suggested she apply for a radiation fellowship.
“Working in that radiation oncology department was very, very difficult just because I was always looking over my shoulder, wondering if people were talking about me.
“In hindsight, I was experiencing a lot of PTSD and I couldn’t really speak in front of people. So I’ve no idea how I got through that time working in the capacity that I did for almost two years.”
Dr Lee also had to deal with inappropriate comments from people who were aware Dr Kearsley had been charged.
“People would say, ‘Oh hey, I trained at St George. I hear that you were there as well. What happened to Professor Kearsley?’
“Or, ‘He was really wonderful to me. I can’t believe this happened’, or, ‘I can’t believe he would do that to someone’, or something along those lines.
“It would take a lot of strength for me to get out of the house and go to a gathering, like a meeting. Those kinds of inappropriate comments just became a bit too hard.
“I used to be super social, very extroverted. I used to know everyone in the hospital. And even though it’s been 10 years and I feel like I’m much better, I still retreat.
“I have a very small circle of trusted friends. And the way you see the world is completely changed.
“That’s the part of sexual violence, that’s the humiliation and the altered worldviews that victims are left with that is just not talked about enough, I think. Because if people knew, I think it’d be very hard to minimise the consequences of these assaults.”
Court case
In 2016, Dr Kearsley pleaded guilty to indecent assault and administering an intoxicating substance to commit an indictable offence.
He was sentenced to two years and three months in jail.
The experience was traumatic for Dr Lee.
“The whole court process is a way of, well, telling you where your place is, and how important you are … or not important you are,” she says.
“People testified for his character; they stood in the courtroom and went on about how amazing this person is. These were people that I worked with. And I was like, ‘What is wrong with you? He just pleaded guilty.'”
During a motion hearing after that guilty plea, Dr Lee says a lawyer referred to the fact she was married and pregnant and that this meant she was not as affected by the attack as she was suggesting.
“I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing. And on the day when my victim impact statement was read out, I was so distraught, I couldn’t even do it. My friend had to go and read it on my behalf.”
Then, as she was leaving the courtroom a senior executive from St George Hospital chased after her.
“She came to watch the trial and she told me; ‘We had a bet, within our office that you would win’.
“I remember thinking, ‘You guys had a bet about my life? This is not a joke to me.’”
Dr Lee was also angry over the comments running through social media about the case.
Although Dr Kearsley had not pleaded guilty until the day before the trial, she said many people commented that the plea meant he could not have been that bad of a person.
Then Dr Kearsley’s sentence was reduced
The appeal court judges wrote that he had a very strong case due to his “extraordinary service to the medical profession and, through it, to the community at large”.
Part of the submission to the appeal court was that Dr Kearsley had been experiencing major depression at the time of his offence, that he was in psychological decline, that he was drunk on the night he attacked Dr Lee and that he “may” have used lorazepam.
One of the appeal court judges wrote: “While his precise motivation for the offences is not known, due to his lack of memory, it is probable that these factors explain why he acted in a way, to quote [his psychiatrist], ‘that was completely incongruous with his usual attitudes, behaviour and values’.”
Although Dr Kearsley did spend time in jail (where according to his lawyers he was threatened and moved between different facilities) his sentence was cut to nine months.
For those who may be assuming that Dr Kearsley’s actions, disturbing though they were, were strictly a one-off, a product of stress, a difficult professional life and depressive illness, it is worth pointing out that a few months after his sentence was commuted, he was convicted of another indecent assault.
This assault happened in December 2012, a year before he invited Dr Lee to his home to discuss her future career options.
The victim was the daughter of one of his elderly prostate cancer patients.
According to an ABC news story on the case, he had invited her to his office to discuss him writing a case report about her father.
He served canapes and champagne and then took her on a tour of the clinic’s new facilities.
During the tour, he asked: “Your mother died of breast cancer didn’t she?”
She said yes and he offered to conduct a breast examination which she accepted.
It was soon after they returned to his office where once she undressed he began squeezing her breasts and inappropriately touching her nipples.
When there was a sudden knock on the door, Dr Kearsley answered it and she was able to dress herself and eventually leave his office and the hospital.
She complained to police three years later when her sister told her of the media coverage surrounding his attack on Dr Lee.
“She’d been blaming herself for allowing herself to get into that situation. But then she realised that it wasn’t her,” Dr Lee says.
Dr Kearsley was again charged and convicted in a local court and required to perform 340 hours of community work.
According to reports, his victim had a nervous breakdown.
Tribunal hearing
All along, Dr Lee says her number one aim was to ensure Dr Kearsley was deregistered to protect the public.
Although a select few both in and outside the medical profession know of his exact fate, the tribunal which sanctioned him issued a non-publication order on his name, essentially preventing the linking in the public domain of any of the details of the tribunal case to Dr Kearsley himself.
The only clues of what happened ended up being the conditions it imposed which were listed on the AHPRA register.
Dr Lee says nobody contacted her to give evidence.
She only realised there had been a hearing when she read a news report in AusDoc about an unnamed doctor before a tribunal whose transgressions seemed to mirror Dr Kearsley’s.
“I found the suppression of his name outrageous. It was just another way of making me feel insignificant.
“My self-confidence is so damaged that I find anything really quite hard to do. But I wrote a letter to the judge and I sat on it for maybe three months, and then I finally sent it, outlining how appalled I am that no-one contacted me.”
The future
Dr Lee eventually moved to Brisbane to escape the attention.
From the moment Dr Kearsley was charged, Dr Lee’s real identity was kept from the public domain. To the wider world her identity as one of Dr Kearsley’s victims has been unknown.
But then last month there were more media headlines on the bullying and sexual assault faced by female surgeons in the UK.
A survey published in the British Journal of Surgery found that two-thirds of female surgeons had been sexually harassed and a third sexually assaulted by colleagues over the last five years.
And 11% of female surgeons reported forced physical contact related to career opportunities. Eleven doctors said they have been raped.
The BBC interviewed a number of women — who went on to become senior surgeons in the NHS — about what they went through as younger doctors.
Retired surgeon Dr Liz O’Riordan said she faced years of sexual harassment.
“That ranged from being in an operating theatre where the consultant asked me who I was having sex with and then propositioned me, to being at a Christmas party and a married consultant from another hospital came up to me, ground his erection against me and said, ‘It’s not cheating if I kiss you on a dance floor’.”
These stories were the main reason Dr Lee decided to talk publicly.
“It’s been 10 years since my case, and it was an unprecedented case,” she said.
“Not just here, but I’m sure elsewhere in other countries also. But just understanding that there’s been no change in the culture to make the system better was what drove me to go public and speak out about what happened to me.”
She continues: “I’d always hoped that one day I’d be in a strong enough position where I’m able to speak about my experience so that I can help other people.
“Too often I see stories on the news or other outlets where, because of sexual assault, women end up committing suicide. Or more commonly, I think in our field, the victims leave their field, or it’s something that drives people out of the hospital system.”
Dr Lee says the fight continues.
She is aware of a female doctor who has been forced to keep working with her rapist.
She believes AHPRA or an external body needs to be funded to investigate doctor-on-doctor assaults.
“I was lucky at the time that the people who were occupying quite powerful positions within [The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Radiologists] became my mentors, in a way.
“They were just really good people — they were the ones that asked me to apply for the job that got me back into radiation oncology.
“But I think [it] was their thing, as opposed to a college thing. Because if the college was really shocked and appalled by what had occurred, then I think they would’ve by now put in a system or some sort of oversight to help its own members in future.
“We know that these harassment and violence or assaults are a third of our members’ experience.”
Dr Lee also believes hospitals — with reputations to protect — should not be responsible for investigating assaults.
“It’s come to my attention that there is a [federal] Respect@Work Act, which was revised after the National Inquiry into Sexual Harassment in Australian Workplaces, where the onus is put back on the employer if they do not handle these harassment matters adequately.
“It was designed to prevent people in situations like mine from being silenced, I suppose, or their cases mishandled.
“And no-one in medicine even knows about it. And that just says everything.”
She continues: “Our system allows abusers to rise up the ranks without being held to account.
‘In medicine, people think that the normal rules of [society] don’t apply to us. I don’t think this is a problem we can fix from within our institutions.”
If this news story has raised issues for you, or you are concerned about someone you know, you can call the following support services 24 hours a day, seven days a week:
Doctors’ health services:
- ACT: 1300 374 377
- NSW: 02 9437 6552
- NT: 08 8366 0250
- Queensland: 07 3833 4352
- SA: 08 8366 0250
- Tasmania: 1300 374 377
- Victoria: 03 9280 8712
- WA: 08 9321 3098
Mental Health Support Line (telepsychology):
- 1300 374 377 (Dr4Drs)
Other services:
- Lifeline: 13 11 14
- Beyond Blue: 1300 22 4636
- Suicide Call Back Service: 1300 659 467
1800RESPECT — a 24-hour national sexual assault, family and domestic violence counselling line:
Read more:
- ‘It was his smirk – I felt humiliated’: Female surgeons in the UK sexually assaulted while operating
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