Editor’s Note: The following story contains graphic descriptions of sexual assault that may by upsetting to some readers. Discretion is advised.
When Hilda Fitzner read a story in which former Thompson resident Laurie Ravenhorst accused a now-dead doctor of sexually assaulting her back in the mid-1970s, the details sounded familiar.
Fitzner eventually contacted Ravenhorst to confirm the identity of the alleged perpetrator.
“Reading her story immediately bought back a most painful, humiliating memory that I tried to suppress for many years,” Fitzner told the Nickel Belt News. “I also want to share my story because too many times victims are not believed, victims are often further victimized by friends/supporters of the one who did the assaulting.”
The incident occurred in 1976, when Fitzner went to the old Burntwood medical clinic to get a check-up from that physician.
“Of course, since women are built differently than men we get examined [on the] inside. And he had his fingers in there and he placed his thumb on my clitoris and … he was trying to look me in my eyes,” she said. “I turned my head away. I couldn’t move. I was terrified. He was a doctor and I was only 16. He was trying to get a reaction from me and he pressed his body against my thigh, because I was in those stirrups.”
As was the case with Ravenhorst, no one else was in the room to witness this alleged assault and Fitzner never told the police about the encounter, believing that the word of a young Indigenous girl wouldn’t hold any weight against a well-respected member of the community.
“After this ordeal was over, I felt … if I said anything to anybody, I would not be believed,” Fitzner says. “After all, how could a doctor do that? He was a person of authority and I was ‘just an Indian’ with no voice. I went home and tried so hard to block it, I kept trying to convince myself that I imagined it, that it couldn’t have happened. I felt humiliated, dirty, used.”
Fitzner’s older sister Margaret Thibault, who lives in Winnipeg now, says the same thing happened to her when she visited the Burntwood clinic a week before giving birth in June 1977.
“I was pregnant with my daughter and he was examining me,” said Thibault, who was 26 at the time and said the doctor also began stimulating her clitoris after checking on the fetus. “The reason why I know this is because my legs started shaking and I had this sensation. I know he was doing something to me and I didn’t like what he was doing.”
Thibault didn’t report the incident to the police or even confide in her husband. Like her sister, she feared that no one would believe her because of the doctor’s status in the community.
The same year that Thibault’s alleged assault took place, this physician left Thompson and would go on to practise medicine in Abbotsford, British Columbia until his death in December 2004 at the age of 67.
Some time before the doctor’s departure, fellow Burntwood clinic physician Dr. Ted Redekop received a complaint from a patient concerning the same doctor’s conduct, which he submitted to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Manitoba (CPSM) for review.
A CPSM spokesperson couldn’t confirm or deny that any reports of misconduct were filed against the doctor because Manitoba’s Regulated Health Professions Act forbids the college from providing information unless the person being investigated is censured for their conduct. The doctor was never disciplined by the college while practising in Manitoba.
However, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia (CPSBC) told the Nickel Belt News in an email that the physician in question was scheduled to attend a disciplinary hearing on accusations of sexual misconduct on Jan. 31, 2005, roughly a month after his death. The CPSBC said these complaints were filed by a young female patient who sought out the doctor’s services between 1983 and 1992.
Despite knowing that the doctor has been dead for over a decade, Fitzner’s memory of this incident is permanently burned into her mind and has coloured her experience with many male doctors she’s encountered since then.
“I couldn’t look at male doctors in the eye for many, many years,” she wrote. “I still avoid male doctors when it comes to my female health. I am so thankful today that a nurse always has to be in with the doctor when they do exams on women.”
While Thibault said that she’s been seeing male physicians for the last 20 or so years, the memory of her original assault never leaves the back of her mind.
“When I know I’m going to a male doctor I always wonder what I’m going to go through,” she said. “It was so hard to get a female doctor. Even now it’s hard to get a female doctor.”
While these two incidents happened more than 40 years ago, both Fitzner and Thibault still find it difficult to talk about their experiences.
However, more and more people are getting the courage to speak out about their past experiences with sexual assault and misconduct. In Northern Manitoba alone, some individuals have even proved willing to take a Crown corporation to task.
In August 2018, Fox Lake Cree Nation members publicly alleged sexual abuse at the hands of Manitoba Hydro workers dating back to the 1960s. As a result, the Manitoba RCMP called for external investigators to look into these complaints.
More recently, the RCMP revealed that they have investigated nine cases of sexual assault at the Keeyask dam site since 2015, a revelation that a Native Studies professor from the University of Manitoba described as “the tip of the iceberg” in a Jan. 26 CBC report.
Moving forward, both Fitzner and Thibault hope that conversations surrounding sexual assault continue to open up in the future, since they say it is the only way that we can progress as a society.
“I share my story to add to Laurie’s as hers added to mine,” wrote Fitzner. “Telling our stories brings us a sense of justice and hopefully will encourage the other 94 of 100 females who do not report their sexual assaults.”
