Medical doctor Lee Kwan Chen has been suspended for professional misconduct, after offensive comments he made on local online forum board HardwareZone came to light.
Dr Lee, 31, who now lives in Australia, was taken to task by the Medical Board of Australia. The Tasmanian Health Practitioners Tribunal, which deliberated on the case, suspended Dr Lee for six weeks and ordered him to undergo lessons on ethical behaviour, and communications.
Dr Lee made several lurid comments advocating violence against women on HardwareZone. In one comment from 2016 about a college student who purportedly made disparaging remarks about NSmen, Dr Lee wrote: “Some women deserve to be raped, and that supercilious little ***** fits the bill in every way.”
In another comment from 2017, referring to a male Egyptian lawyer who was jailed for saying that women who wear ripped jeans should be raped in punishment, Dr Lee wrote:Â “I’m surprised they didn’t give him a medal instead.”
Just a month later, Dr Lee said that his marriage “would not end in divorce, it would end in murder” if it falls apart. He also posted photos of himself showing his degree certificates to the forum board in separate posts.
Dr Lee agreed that his posts could be seen as inflammatory, misogynistic or racist, but defended that his views did not affect the care of his patients. Insisting that anger had clouded his judgment then, Dr Lee said that he used to have an opinionated bent on social media when he was younger and was relatively inexperienced.
In a joint submission with the Australian Health Practitioners Regulation Agency, Dr Lee asserted that the views he expressed online did not have a bearing on his medical practice and that he has never discriminated against or acted derogatorily against women.
The Tasmanian Health Practitioners Tribunal’s chairman Robert Webster, however, ordered Dr Lee to be suspended and reprimanded. He said:
“The totality of (Dr Lee’s) conduct amounts to professional misconduct.
“The orders should fulfil the objective of maintaining the professional reputation of medical practitioners and also to act to deter the type of conduct that occurred which is quite unbecoming of the standards and reputation of the profession.
“When all the posts are taken together the conduct is all the more grave.”