A Doctor Was Assaulted By Her Boss. She Knows She's Not The Only One

Gemma Bath (0:01)

It's 7:30 p.m. on a November evening in 2013, and Dr. Dominique Lee has arrived at an apartment block in the Sydney suburb of Glebe. She's here for dinner with the head of the Radiation Oncology Department at St George's Hospital, Professor John Kearsley. He's been mentoring her as she prepares to graduate as a specialist consultant. But as she enters his apartment, she notices his wife isn't home. She hadn't realised it was just gonna be the two of them. She pushes back a feeling of unease. As he starts cooking their lamb, he asks, would you like some? Gesturing to a carafe of red wine. She refuses, but he insists. It's Grange Hermitage, $800 a bottle, he tells her.

As they get to the end of their meal, Dominique starts to feel fuzzy, groggy. He starts rubbing her scalp, but it feels like she's frozen in place. The heaviness in her body not allowing her to move. Next thing she knows, she's lying on a bed. And what happens there will derail Dominique's life and career for the next decade.

I'm Gemma Bath, and you're listening to True Crime Conversations, a podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them. According to a 2015 survey from the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, 49% of fellows, trainees and medical graduates reported being subjected to discrimination, bullying or sexual harassment. Surgical directors or consultants were by far the most frequently reported perpetrator. But Dominique's case was the first in Australian history where a doctor was sent to jail for assaulting another doctor. Let that sink in. The first. In 2026, Dominique remains the only junior doctor to win a criminal court case against a senior doctor for sexual assault.

Before the assault, Dominique was a confident, vivacious 32-year-old woman without a doubt in her mind about her abilities. But that one night changed everything. And despite being told over and over again how difficult it was to win cases of sexual assault, she persevered, putting her reputation, her career, and her mental health on the line in the fight for justice. She's released a book about her story, called What's Been Broken is All the More Sharp. Dominique joins us now to share her story.

Just a warning, this is a conversation about sexual assault, but it also contains mentions of suicide. Please take care while listening.

Dominique, thank you for joining us on True Crime Conversations. I wanna start with your childhood. Did you always have a plan for what you wanted to do with your life?

Dominique Lee (3:16)

Well, I don't know why, but I've always wanted to be a doctor. No idea why, because we have, there's no one in my family who's even remotely medical, but all I just wanted to be is a doctor, and I used to play with the stethoscope, and my brother used to hate it. I've got an older brother, and I used to lie him down on the bed, get the, play stethoscope and just play with him, and I'd be hanging out at the local pediatrician's office, just hanging out there.

Gemma Bath (3:43)

What do you mean, for fun?

Dominique Lee (3:44)

Yeah.

Yeah. And back in those days, it's the 80s, but you could, you know, if you're five or six, you could just roam around with our parents, like in the neighborhood, because people know you. And my mom would get this every now and then embarrassing phone call from the pediatrician's office asking, your daughter's here again. Can you come and grab her? But the nurses were so lovely. They used to give me the syringes and things to play with, and I used to drag my playmate from kindergarten there, and we'd hang out there for hours. And I just loved it. And growing up, my mom wanted me to become a pianist, a classical one. And she said, you know, why would you want to be a doctor? You can marry one. And I always used to wonder, why, why can't I do that? And I remember in high school is when shows like, I don't know if you know, Chicago Hope, and these, you know, Doogie Howser, all these things that we grew up watching. I just wanted to be in that mix.

And then there was other shows like ER that I just loved watching. And so, you know, I was academic enough to have the dream and feel like it was, you know, I could reach. And, and yeah, so that's all I ever wanted to be. Can't explain it.

Gemma Bath (4:59)

So your parents weren't, because lots of parents would be like, you want to be a doctor? Great. But that wasn't the case in your family.