12 NEWS
12 NEWS
13 FEBRUARY 2026 ausdoc. com. au
A tribunal heard this case— most never get that far
THE BORDER MAIL / ACM
Associate Professor Leslie Bolitho has denied allegations of inappropriate touching.
Heather Saxena LATE last year, a tribunal found that a former RACP president had inappropriately touched seven female doctors under his supervision— both interns and registrars.
Associate Professor Leslie Bolitho’ s behaviour had occurred between 2014 and 2018, and perhaps because of this, his reputation for failing to respect the personal boundaries of female doctors was known to some staff.
It is worth quoting the testimony of one of the doctors to provide insight into what was happening.
She told the hearings that about eight weeks into her rotation as an intern, she had been with him on a ward round where he had walked past her and grazed her backside with the flat of his hand as she wrote patient notes at the end of a hospital bed.
She stressed there was 3.5m of clear space behind her. From that point, what she had at first assumed was an accident happened 6-8 more times, she said.
“[ Professor ] Bolitho would have his arm down with his palm open and continue to walk behind me,” she told the tribunal.
“ I think this was designed so you would think the touching was accidental, but when it became a recurrent behaviour in situations where it could have been avoided by walking further behind me, it was clearly a deliberate act.
“[ Professor ] Bolitho would also wait at doorways and put his hand on my lower back to guide me through the doorways.
“ Combined with the touching of my bottom, which became more frequent during the rotation, maybe a couple of times a week on the daily ward round, this collection of inappropriate behaviours felt like sexual harassment.”
There were many similar incidents described by the other doctors who gave evidence.
As Australian Doctor reported, Professor Bolitho, who was awarded an AM for his services to medicine, has denied the allegations against him, saying that he was a tactile person who used touch in his communication with colleagues.
He also said he was from a generation where such incidental physical contact was more common than it is now.
Questions raised
For Dr Dominique Lee, who survived at great cost one of the most notorious cases of doctor-on-doctor abuse in the last 25 years, the
‘[ Professor ] Bolitho would also wait at doorways and put his hand on my lower back to guide me.’ tribunal findings have raised once again the questions she has asked many times.
How was justice done here, who raised the alarm, who responded, who was believed, who was supported?
Did Victoria’ s Northeast Health Wangaratta, where Professor Bolitho was working as a VMO, make a notification following complaints from the trainee doctors, or was it the women who alerted authorities about what was happening to them?
And did they do that collectively? Or were they on their own, at least initially?
The questions are important to Dr Lee because they go to the heart of how the system supports vulnerable doctors when they would have very good reason to fear the consequences of making a complaint against their bosses.
“ It is unbelievable to me that it’ s taken five years for the tribunal to come to the decision,” Dr Lee tells Australian Doctor.
“ My heart goes out to the brave doctors who made the brave decision to report the behaviour and having to endure five years for their truth to be validated.”
As readers may know, Dr Lee has lived experience of being assaulted by a senior doctor. She was drugged and indecently assaulted as a registrar by her would-be mentor, Dr John Kearsley.
He was jailed and subsequently went before a tribunal.
But Dr Lee, a radiation oncologist, says she has not seen any other cases where a doctor who assaulted a colleague has been publicly held to account.
And that is striking simply because based on the feedback she has received in the decade since she was attacked, she knows the problem of doctor-on-doctor abuse is significant and that