Woman with stomach pain taken aback by doctor’s vaginal, rectal, breast exams, court told
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/05/2023 (858 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
A Manitoba woman testified Tuesday she was “frozen in shock” as a doctor performed an invasive physical examination that seemingly had no relevance to her medical complaint.
“He didn’t say anything, so I had no idea what he was doing or why he was doing it,” the woman testified about her Aug. 3, 2001, encounter with Dr. Arcel Bissonnette.
Bissonnette, 63, is on trial accused of sexually assaulting five patients during medical examinations at the Ste. Anne Hospital and Seine Medical Centre.
The woman said she was suffering from abdominal pain following emergency surgery for an ovarian cyst when she made an appointment to see Bissonnette, who was filling in for her doctor.
MIKAELA MACKENZIE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS Dr. Arcel Bissonnette at the Law Courts for the first day of evidence in his trial in Winnipeg on Monday.
The woman said she was told to undress completely, “which I thought was unusual, but I complied,” before Bissonnette entered the examination room and after a brief discussion conducted vaginal, rectal and breast exams.
The woman said Bissonnette placed one or two fingers in her vagina and made “a lot of prodding motions, searching movements,” she said. “I felt like he was searching for a marble in there, he looked and looked and looked.”
The exam, which lasted “multiple minutes,” lasted “much longer” than any she had before or since, the woman said.
Bissonnette didn’t say anything during the exam, she said.
“I was wondering why it was taking so long , what he was looking for… He didn’t give me an inkling,” she said.
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When he was done, Bissonnette, without a word, placed one or two fingers in her rectum and made similar motions with his fingers, the woman said.
“While he was doing that, he was looking at my vagina,” she said. “I was in shock at that point, because he didn’t tell me he was going to do a rectal exam. I’m used to doctors telling me why they are doing these things.”
At one point during the rectal exam, Bissonnette “double penetrat(ed)” her, placing his thumb in her vagina, the woman said.
“I couldn’t believe he was doing that. It was really shocking,” she said.
The woman said she felt confused and vulnerable and didn’t say anything.
“He’s the doctor and felt he needed to do this and I didn’t feel I had the right to object,” she said. “It’s still difficult to talk about, because it’s so disgusting.”
From the rectal exam, Bissonnette “just moved on and did the breast exam,” the woman said.
“He’s the doctor and felt he needed to do this and I didn’t feel I had the right to object. It’s still difficult to talk about, because it’s so disgusting.”
While there was nothing unusual about the breast exam itself, “I couldn’t make sense of why he did that when I was in there for abdominal pain,” she said. “I was in shock.”
The woman said she told no one about the incident until Ste. Anne police issued a media notice in November 2020 announcing Bissonnette had been arrested on charges involving six other female patients.
“It’s really hard to explain to someone when you really don’t understand it yourself,” she said.
The woman said she felt sick and distraught when she heard about the charges against Bissonnette and “knew I had to do something.”
“I wrestled with the right thing to do. I felt it was important to tell what happened to me,” she said.
The woman called police and provided a video statement, but many details including those involving the rectal exam, were “fuzzy in my mind,” she said.
She said it was only after seeing a therapist that she provided police with a second video statement “clarifying” details in October 2022.
Therapy “gave me confidence to go to the police again and give more information about what happened,” she said.
Defence lawyer Lisa LaBossiere alleged the woman left the medical exam giving Bissonnette “the benefit of the doubt,” and that it was only after learning other women had filed complaints with police that she came to believe she had been assaulted.
“The fact that he was charged made it more legitimate to you… It didn’t make sense to you for 19 years until you got that information,” she said.
The woman said she always knew “something bad had happened. I just didn’t know how to describe it. Even though I tried to forget about it, the negativity never left me.”
LaBossiere said several comments the woman made in her first police statement suggested she had no memory of Bissonnette conducting a breast exam.
The woman said she had no memory of the specific “mechanics” of the breast exam, not that she had no memory of it happening.
dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca
Dean Pritchard is courts reporter for the Free Press. He has covered the justice system since 1999, working for the Brandon Sun and Winnipeg Sun before joining the Free Press in 2019. Read more about Dean.
Every piece of reporting Dean produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.
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