Young athlete says ‘creepy’ physiotherapist touched her inappropriately

The physiotherapist saw the young patient for lower back pain. Photo / 123rf

A young athlete said she started freaking out after a handful of sessions with a physiotherapist where his massages escalated from touching the top of her bare buttocks to more intimate areas.

She brushed it off at first but finally told him to stop at their last session.

“I was angry and felt really uncomfortable and violated,” she told a Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal today in Auckland.

Both the woman and physiotherapist’s identities are protected.

The young woman was 18 when she started seeing the physiotherapist in May 2019 for pain in her lower back after falling awkwardly while playing sports.

He asked her to perform lunges and several other movements before asking her to lie down.

Without warning, she said, he lifted her top to bra height or slightly higher, pulled her pants and underwear halfway down, and rubbed the top of her buttocks.

“After that I found him a bit creepy,” she told the Tribunal, saying she recalled his fingernails being “quite long”.

The buttock massages occurred at every appointment thereafter with the physiotherapist’s behaviour escalating, becoming bolder at each session, she said.

The man would be “dead silent” during the massages, she said. “There was no communication from him at all about the treatment and I had no idea why he was doing what he was doing.”

She said his hands brushed against her vagina over clothing repeatedly at earlier sessions and, at their last session in July the same year, he put a stabilising hand so high up on her thigh that it made skin-to-skin contact with her vagina at least once when her underwear was stretched and pushed aside.

“It’s quite an alarming proposition that a physiotherapist would touch a patient’s vagina even once,” the man’s lawyer Rhys Walters said.

“But you’re saying this happened many times?” he asked the woman, who said yes.

She told the tribunal she was young at the time and did not speak up to the physiotherapist at first.

“My mother said it was fine and that’s how treatment is, " she said. “I thought I was wrong.

The one time the patient’s mother accompanied her to treatment felt “completely different” - the physiotherapist did not pull her pants down as far down or rub her hamstrings as high up, she said.

Her mother also told the Tribunal they laughed it off initially because she wanted to give the physiotherapist the benefit of the doubt.

Later, she thought about taking her daughter to a different physiotherapist but didn’t - “Which I now regret,” she said.

The young woman said she had been seeing physiotherapists and chiropractors since she was 13 for sporting injuries and had never come across therapists who put their hands in such intimate areas, she told the hearing. “I didn’t think it was accidental,” she said.

The man also took hers and another teenage patient’s phone numbers from the clinic’s computer system and texted them using his personal mobile phone.

He has admitted the messages were not necessary or related to their treatment.

Clinic owners told the hearing the man was an independent contractor and had been with them for about four or five years at the time.

“He was quite good at the other practices,” said a director.

The tribunal before chair Theo Baker and four other members continues tomorrow.