The Butcher

“I say it now and a hundred times, I was laying there on the bed. With a big light on top of me, the anaesthetist was behind me, and Doctor Smith* bent over and whispered into my ear, ‘I’m going to take your clitoris.’

Women aren’t supposed to blow the whistle, they’re supposed to just go and hide and put a blanket over their head and disappear. I did turn into jelly for two years and then I saw a headline in the local paper “Obstetrician struck off for gross professional misconduct” and I just snapped, I said right, I’m going to get him and I’m going to get the lot of them. But one of the things is with me, I am a living proof of what he did do because you can see what he did do. And I’ve got the medical evidence to say what was wrong with me and what he did. Here it says there was no malignancy, the vulva is otherwise unremarkable. There was nothing wrong with me that couldn’t be cured with a cream.

So what was cut out of me was the equivalent of taking off the penis and the scrotum of a male. Now, when a male loses a penis, it’s considered catastrophic, and huge compensation payments are made, because it’s the be all. The family jewels. But if it’s cut out of the equivalent of a woman it doesn’t really matter does it? It’s oh well, doesn’t matter.

The length was 95, the width was 55, so that’s in between your legs, and was 34 millimeters deep into me. And I lost one and a half litres of blood, my body temperature went down to 34, which is hypothermia, and my blood pressure went down at, I think it was 82 over 54. It bloody nearly killed me.

I want those responsible for the cover up to be held responsible. When Dr Smih was being charged, no previous complaints were allowed to come to the court. If somebody’s raped somebody before, and they’ve been found guilty and then this same person is raped again, that court should be told about the previous thing, because he had been struck off in 1996. He’d been under psychiatric care since 1996. How the hell can they expect, you know, how can you have a place where you don’t consider previous complaints? So what are doctors? Are they a breed that are totally protected? And if you’re a gynaecologist obstetrician, you’ve virtually got open sesame to do whatever you bloody well like. And some of them do. It’s… I don’t know what else to say. I don’t know what else to say.

So then Dr Smith* was having legal aid, so all you people who pay your taxes, he got legal aid all the way through for the three and a half weeks for the first trial, three and a half weeks for the second trial, and then went to the Supreme Court, then went to the High Court, and then went to the Court of Criminal Appeal, and he got legal aid all the way through. Then in the end he was let out, because he had some diabetes and they said they couldn’t … his defense lawyer said that he wouldn’t be getting adequate medical attention. I don’t think I need to say anything more.

I’ll say it now and I’ll say it a hundred times that I was lying there on the bed with a big light on top of me. The anaesthetist was behind me, and Dr Smith* bent over and whispered in my ear, “I’m going to take your clitoris too.” And then I was gone. Why I read that to you is because they were trying to say that I’d imagined it, trying to say I was making it up and all the rest of it right in the beginning. Also during the trial was a question of why didn’t you complain then? And my answer was who could I complain to? And what about? I mean, I had all the stuffing knocked out of me. It’s more horrifying than you could imagine.”

Carolyn DeWaegeneire, Australia 2015

*The name of the doctor cannot be named because of other pending criminal charges. Dr Smith is a pseudonym.