Dr Dominique Lee

When Dr Dominique Lee reflects on the sexual assault by her supervisor that changed the course of her medical career, she returns to one question. 

“In my experience, around 90-97% of the people I’ve worked with in medicine are good, kind, ethical people. It’s only one or two percent who repeatedly cause serious harm. So the real question becomes, why does the 97% stay silent?”

Her forthcoming memoir traces the personal toll of that silence. But more than a decade on – from the assault itself to the protracted criminal and civil processes that followed – Dr Lee says her focus has now shifted to addressing the structural conditions that enabled it in the first place. Those conditions, she argues, are shaped by medical colleges, hospital governance, workforce hierarchies and a regulatory environment that still leaves junior doctors exposed. Despite everything she endured through the legal system, she believes the policies designed to protect doctors remain fragmented, inconsistent and heavily weighted towards institutional self-protection.

“People are conditioned very early to believe that speaking up is dangerous,” she says. “So silence becomes self-protection. And when silence is normalised, the behaviour of that 1-2% is allowed to continue unchecked.”

Her book examines not just the harm she experienced, but the policy failures that allowed it to happen – and why she believes meaningful reform will require external pressure, not just internal cultural change.

A criminal conviction that exposed policy gaps

In 2013, Professor John Kearsley, a then-prominent senior radiation oncologist and Dr Lee’s supervisor, drugged and sexually assaulted Dr Lee three months before her specialist exams. She reported him to police, triggering a two-year criminal process that she believes was deliberately drawn out.

“I think his legal team knew he didn’t have a strong case, and they’d dragged the process out hoping I wouldn’t endure it,” she says.

Days before the trial, he pleaded guilty. It was a turning point – but not the one she hoped for.

The guilty plea meant the full evidence was distilled into a short agreed summary. For Dr Lee, the compromise was deeply consequential. “I was advised to agree so I could achieve the outcome I wanted without having to testify,” she says. That abbreviated record would later be used to reduce Kearsley’s sentence on appeal. He ultimately served only a few months in custody with the court noting his “extraordinary service to the medical profession” and relying on numerous character references from medical colleagues and former patients.

What followed was another legal battle. Driven by a sense of injustice, and concerned about the impact on her career, Dr Lee pursued a civil case for damages. Even then, she was warned the system was not designed for someone like her to succeed. “When I went through the court process, there was no precedent,” she says. “Everyone told me I would lose.”

What sustained her, she says, was not confidence in the justice system but a deeper ethical conviction. “It comes back to why I went into medicine – to help people,” she says in an interview with the limbic. “If I didn’t do everything possible to protect other women, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.”

Hierarchy as a structural policy failure

Now a fully-qualified radiation oncologist practising in Brisbane, Dr Lee says the assault did not occur in isolation – it was enabled by a system that conditions compliance long before doctors enter specialist training. Her earliest memory of this dates back to medical school.

As a fourth-year student, excited to scrub into her first theatre case, she was pushed to a far corner of the operating room and instructed to stand silently for hours. “There was absolutely no need to humiliate me like that,” she says. But the message was clear. “For the first few years of training, your job is to be invisible.”

That invisibility, she argues, becomes the foundation on which more serious abuses occur. “We train people for over a decade to stay quiet,” she says. “So even when they reach senior roles, they don’t suddenly speak up.” The profession’s small size reinforces that instinct. “It’s a small community. Everybody knows everybody. Deviating from that norm feels dangerous,” she says.

Disgraced former Sydney oncologist John Kearsley leaves Sutherland Court House after receiving community service, Sydney, Monday, October 9, 2017. Kearsley was found guilty of indecently assaulting the daughter of a cancer patient. (AAP Image/Dean Lewins)

Dr Lee describes specialty training as a kind of behavioural conditioning. “Specialty training especially, I think, is a form of taming,” she says. “It’s five or seven years of learning how to behave and think the same way as everyone else.” That process, she argues, doesn’t just shape clinical judgment – it shapes who feels permitted to speak. “If you’re tamed or trained to think like that, to deviate from it is really hard,” she says.

Her own identity shaped how she navigated those expectations. “For me, being a woman of immigrant background mattered. I learned how to wear a mask – how to behave in ways that made me seem agreeable and non-threatening,” she says. “But what my perpetrator didn’t see was that I’d been fighting all my life – against expectations within my own family, my culture, and the systems around me.”

Policy frameworks – harassment guidelines, training standards, “speak up” policies – rarely acknowledge how these intersecting pressures deepen vulnerability or limit the willingness of individuals to challenge harmful behaviour. Instead, they place responsibility on those with the least power, in environments where dissent carries significant career risk, Dr Lee notes.

A workforce unprepared for real-world relationships

Dr Lee says one of the most significant but least acknowledged gaps in the system is the lack of training in how doctors relate to one another.

“We teach patient care extensively,” she says. “But we don’t teach doctors how to work with other people.”

She believes the profession often assumes seniority reflects trustworthiness and that clinical expertise equates to good character. “That’s simply not true,” she says. “We give blind trust to people who may not be kind, emotionally safe or ethical.”

She argues that medical programs should equip doctors to recognise unhealthy dynamics, understand power imbalances and navigate complex interpersonal environments – skills she says are essential for safety and wellbeing but are rarely taught.

“What I see now, working with junior doctors, is that many are exceptionally intelligent but completely unprepared for real-world professional relationships,” she says.

The consequences are widespread – burnout, attrition and a profession that prizes empathy in patient care but discourages vulnerability among clinicians themselves.

When internal processes fail doctors 

A key structural issue, she says, is the extent to which senior clinicians hold overlapping positions across hospitals, universities, and colleges.

She is careful to stress that, when those positions are occupied by people with integrity and compassion, the influence can be positive. But when that power goes largely unquestioned, it can also create conditions in which harmful behaviour is difficult to challenge.

“One of the problems is that the people who tend to climb into leadership positions don’t just hold power in one place,” she says. “They often sit across multiple institutions at the same time. Their influence spreads across the system like tentacles.”

This cross-institutional influence is rarely governed by a clear accountability framework, she observes. A senior doctor involved in a trainee’s assessments might also sit on accreditation panels, disciplinary boards, research committees, or college leadership teams. It leaves trainees exposed to individuals who hold power over their training outcomes, job prospects, references and reputations, she adds.

“They’re not just your boss,” she says. “They may influence your training, your assessments, your references, your career progression – even if they’re not directly supervising you.”

She believes this concentration of influence is why a small minority can cause repeated harm. “Most people don’t start out abusive,” she says. They test boundaries. They behave badly once, and nothing happens. Then they do it again – and again – and the behaviour escalates.”

“Every time it’s excused or minimised, it’s reinforced.”

Why the majority stays silent

Dr Lee insists the silence of the “97%” is not a moral failing but an outcome engineered by the system itself.

“People are conditioned very early to believe that speaking up will cost them their career, their reputation, or their place in the profession,” she says.

She identifies structural factors that reinforce this:

• internal complaints processes with limited independence
• lack of protections for whistleblowers, particularly trainees
• civil settlements reliant on NDAs
• governance structures dominated by successive cohorts of similar leaders
• no mandatory transparency around substantiated misconduct

She says these create an environment in which silence feels like the safest option.

The missing external mechanisms

One of the most glaring gaps, Dr Lee argues, is the absence of an independent body to support doctors experiencing harassment, bullying or assault.

“What would have helped most was independent, third-party support,” she says when asked what she needed most after her assault. “Not an institutional body, but a truly neutral organisation that could step in and guide someone through the process.”

When she reported the assault, she had no clear understanding of what would follow and had little support navigating the system.

“I didn’t understand the process. I was living with constant anxiety,” she says. “I didn’t sleep properly for months.”

Despite a decade of published evidence about high rates of harassment and bullying in medicine, Australian hospitals and training bodies still operate without mandatory external reporting pathways, she says.

“If the statistics are accurate – and they suggest that 10-30% of doctors experience sexual harassment or assault, and 30-50% experience bullying – that’s an enormous loss to the community,” she says. “Why is that acceptable?”

Even more troubling is what happens after: “We have no pathway to help doctors recover and reintegrate into the profession afterwards,” she says. “There is no rehabilitation process.”

Rebuilding a career after harm

When Dr Lee finally told her story publicly in an article published in The Guardian in 2023, the response was immediate. “I received messages from people all over the world – colleagues, strangers, people who tracked me down through work – all sharing their own experiences,” she says. “That response was what truly began my healing process.” 

It highlighted, she says, how rarely doctors feel able to speak publicly about harm. Many who contacted her had been bound to silence. “I’ve met many people who were paid out – through civil courts, hospital HR processes, or settlements – and were required to sign NDAs,” she says. The experience reinforced her belief that telling her story mattered.

“I realised that if I could be a little braver and share my story more openly, it might help others heal too – and perhaps we could collectively improve the system. There simply aren’t enough examples of people who have survived and remained within medicine after experiences like this.”

It also helped crystallise an idea she had been developing quietly for years: a program to support doctors outside traditional institutional structures. HeyBoss [link here], the coaching and wellbeing initiative she now leads alongside coaching specialist Shivani Gupta, aims to fill the human gap left by policy failures.

Dr Lee says HeyBoss could only be built outside formal medical structures because she had watched too many people with good intentions run into immovable institutional barriers. “No matter how hard they work towards their goal, the barriers of institutions unnecessarily made things really difficult,” she says.

The college and hospital systems, in her view, were never designed to offer emotionally safe spaces for doctors to speak honestly about harm. “If I’m going to go out and do something, I’ll go and do it on my own,” she says. “So the only barrier that I have is myself.”

Only by stepping outside the system could she build something honest, protective and grounded in lived experience.

“Every participant has described the experience as transformative,” she says. “Not because we give them answers, but because we ask questions they’ve never been asked before.”

Pilot programs with Icon Cancer Centre have already expanded, with international interest now emerging. “Humans aren’t designed to be lone rangers,” she says. “We heal when we feel understood.”

A message for the profession

For junior doctors who feel unsafe, Dr Lee’s advice is direct: seek help externally. “If it’s sexual harassment or assault, don’t rely solely on internal processes,” she says. “Reach out to independent organisations – women’s legal services, for example – and get advice before you take any steps.”

For policymakers, her message is equally clear: without external oversight, the profession cannot keep its workforce safe.

“I genuinely believe that if the 97% felt safe enough to speak the system would look very different,” she says. “But the cost of speaking up is perceived as being far too high.”

She wants independent reporting bodies, mandated protections, transparent outcomes, and governance structures that limit unchecked influence.

Until then, she says, the silence will continue.

“We do much better together than we do trying to be the smartest person in the room,” she says. “But the system needs to give people a safe place to speak – or they never will.”

If this story has raised issues for you, confidential support is available. You can contact 1800RESPECT (1800 737 732) the national sexual assault, domestic and family violence counselling service or Lifeline (13 11 14). Both services are available 24 hours a day.