Note - Sept. 6, 2019: This column is subject to legal complaint by Amitabh Chauhan.

You’re a doctor. You’ve admitted to an inappropriate sexual episode with a colleague — a young medical student who turned to you for mentoring, who was indisputably drunk and semi-conscious when the sex you claim was consensual occurred.

You’ve never acknowledged unprofessional and unethical behaviour.

You have, allegedly, a history of sexual impropriety.

You and another doctor, a close friend, were found not guilty on charges of drugging and sexual assaulting the woman at trial — a judge-alone verdict that still stuns and I covered the entirety of that 44-day trial in 2014. You were also acquitted on a separate charge of sexual assault from several years earlier, that complainant coming forward when she learned about the later accusations.

Your licence to practise was revoked by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario — where the level of proof is less than a criminal court — and a request for reinstatement of the certificate denied by the professional body after reviewing trial transcripts, a psychiatric report and a risk assessment report. The college didn’t believe that you “would practise medicine with decency, integrity and honesty.”

Yet the Health Professions Appeal and Review Board overruled the college, ordering it to reinstate the medical certificate.

As a medical resident, you were both a student at McMaster University and an employee of the city’s two hospital systems, Hamilton Health Sciences and St. Joseph’s Healthcare.

The university commissioned a third-party risk assessment report but, though agreeing to co-operate, you refused to be interviewed by individuals retained to conduct an occupational health and safety assessment. That report described you as having “a history of problematic sexual behaviour” that “raises serious questions regarding (your) judgment, attitudes and insight.” Your decision-making may “have been disinhibited by alcohol intoxication and negative attitudes.”

However, the probability of future problematic sexual behaviour “would appear to be low” if you refrained from substance abuse, continued in your “stable and happy marriage” and were “motivated to avoid sexual relationships at work.”

Both hospitals refused you permission to rejoin the residence program where you had completed only seven months of a five-year residency — where you have not been for more than six years.

A joint committee of senior doctors from each hospital concluded that not guilty at trial was by no means an exoneration of your conduct and judgment.

The committee took the position that you were the sole author of your misfortune and that the misconduct established your “complete unsuitability” to return to the residency program in teaching institutions, particularly among female colleagues and female patients.

Letters from 16 residents were received by the hospitals, concerned about your conduct and possible reinstatement.

The only favourable assessments for reintegration into the program came from a psychiatrist hired by your defence counsel and a forensic psychiatrist who never examined you — and is a colleague of your psychiatrist spouse.

All that, yet an Ontario Labour Arbitration Awards panel last month upheld your grievance for wrongful termination by the hospitals, leaving it for the hospitals to find a resolution, including the possibility of returning to work as a plastic surgery resident at the institutions.

Jesus wept. What does it take for a labour arbitration panel to concede that so severely compromised a doctor should be sent packing?

“When the evidence put before us is distilled to its essence, it is insufficient, on any labour relations standard, to justify termination from employment on a just case standard.”

Your name is Dr. Amitabh Chauhan and any reasonable person should be appalled that all hospital doors haven’t forever been shut in your face.

Arbitration boards and other quasi-judicial entities are not courts. But if a labour arbitration board can independently weigh the seriousness of your sexual misconduct — to be clear, not the criminality of it, which has already been determined with acquittal on a high standard of proof, the same barbed-wire fence that time and again has snagged complainants of sexual assault — then so too can that same board afford greater credence to the complaint.

This board panel didn’t see it that way. This board accepted the position of the Professional Association of Residents of Ontario, which represented Chauhan at the hearing, that the whole hornet’s nest of a case was a straightforward dispute between employer and employee. “He has learned from his mistakes,” according to the decision, “regretted the shame and stigma his actions brought upon his wife and children, made changes to his lifestyle, and was ‘committed not to make such mistakes again’.”

Says who? Says Chauhan and the pair of psychiatrists, one of whom never examined him.

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It is to gag.

But Chauhan was never in a supervisory position with the complainant. That apparently counted for a lot. He merely, at best (or worst) took advantage of an intoxicated colleague who looked to him for guidance and advice, a woman in a senseless state — an abuse of trust, power and authority.

The college did its best to rid society of Chauhan as a doctor. Even after his certificate revocation was reversed on appeal, it tried again to discipline Chauhan in 2017. That attempt was abandoned because the complainant — the medical student, who can only be identified as P.W. — refused to testify, so traumatized had she been by the scathing cross-examination to which she’d been subjected at trial, allowed by the female judge.

I do not blame P.W. one bit. She was put through the grinder, every crevice of her own sexual history mined, precisely the type of invasive questioning that the Supreme Court of Canada has warned against under the “rape-shield” law.

The university and the hospitals tried their damndest to bar Chauhan from resuming his residency but were stymied by the board panel and now must find a way to reintegrate him into the residence program, despite innumerable practical difficulties, potential legal liabilities and “reputational concerns that would undoubtedly arise when staff and patients became aware of his history and behaviour.”

A finding of no just cause for termination “usually, but does not always, lead to reinstatement,” the board acknowledged. Sometimes, other remedies can be agreed upon or imposed. “This may be one such case,” the decision grudgingly grants.

If all parties concerned can’t agree on appropriate remedies, “we will make ourselves available as expeditiously as possible to resolve all outstanding matters.”

Take two chill pills and call us back later. Seriously.

And that other doctor, Chauhan’s co-accused, arising from a threesome night in a downtown hotel? Dr. Suganthan Kayilasanathan was also acquitted. He too had his medical licence revoked. But not because of this sordid incident. No, that resulted from another finding by the college of sexual abuse of another woman.

Similar M.O. though. After a long night of partying in 2010, Kayilasanathan suggested to that woman that she come in to his clinic the following day to get a doctor’s note so she could avoid taking an exam for which she wasn’t ready.

The woman did so again a week later, for another note. In between, she and Kayilasanathan had sex at a hotel. Sex between health-care professionals and their patients is forbidden under Ontario law, requiring mandatory revocation of one’s licence.

The college compelled the woman to testify at a hearing against her will. She’d made no complaint against Kayilasanathan and pursued a legal battle not to appear, though twice served with a summons. Long story short: She ultimately did.

Last week, a three-judge panel of the Divisional Court upheld the finding made by the College’s discipline committee that Kayilasanathan sexually abused a patient and should lose his licence to practise.

What a pair, these childhood friend docs.