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The doctor, the bedroom attack and the discharge without conviction

Sunday, 21 June 2026

After a reporting process so re-traumatising she had to re-start counselling, the assault victim had to listen as the judge called the gravity of her husband’s offending low and let him off with no conviction and name suppression. (File photo)
After a reporting process so re-traumatising she had to re-start counselling, the assault victim had to listen as the judge called the gravity of her husband’s offending low and let him off with no conviction and name suppression. (File photo)

He was a women’s health doctor; she was a lawyer. After he seized her throat and thrust her head against the pillow in the supposed sanctuary of their bedroom, it took two years for her to summon the fortitude to report it. But at the end of a process so re-traumatising she had to re-start counselling, she had to listen as the judge deemed the gravity of his offending low and let him off with no conviction and name suppression. Now he’s free to treat women, while her voice is silenced, again. By Nikki Macdonald.

It had been another evening of arguments.

Trust was thin - even before the wedding, Amy* had strongly suspected her fiance was cheating on her. But she’d already quit her job as a lawyer and booked tickets for the move to New Zealand, where her husband-to-be had landed a position as a women’s health doctor.

“So I didn’t tell anyone, like an idiot, and then went to New Zealand, and of course it kind of just festered.”

The newlyweds had been here over a year when the first incident happened, in December 2019. They’d been out for dinner, and on the path back to the house the doctor painfully twisted her wrist to snatch the house keys.

On this night - a month later - they’d gone to bed after arguing, again. About 1am there was a dispute about Amy’s sprawling sleeping. An ongoing point of friction, it had started, she says, as a joke, but became something else.

She rolled over, and thought that was the end of it.

“He got up behind me, kneeling, grabbed me by the neck from behind, and then was thrusting me, holding my neck, with my head back into the pillow several times.

“It was just so out of nowhere, it was just a complete shock, and obviously I couldn’t breathe, and he was shouting ‘Shut the f… up’ over and over again. And then when he let go, I remember I just let a guttural scream out, and he retreated into the next room.”

Court documents show the attack left her feeling worthless, isolated and in complete despair. But the next morning, he said he was sorry. With a reddened neck, she wishes she’d reported it then. Twice, she went to book a GP appointment. Twice, she changed her mind.

“You are very much, I suppose, wanting to keep the peace. You don’t want it to happen again, and you’re hoping it won’t happen again, and you’re almost wanting the better person that you think may still be in there, to still be in there, and it’ll all be OK.

“But of course it isn’t.” Amy’s voice crackles at the retelling. “There’s not a day goes by that I don’t wish I’d reported it.”

Finding the courage to report

Two years later, she finally did.

By then, she’d left the doctor and New Zealand and returned to her home country.

After the strangling incident, she’d never gone back to sharing a bed. But he was a Christian and the marriage vows were hard to untangle. It was toxic, but she stayed until that August, when she says she returned to the house to discover a file named “recording number 28” on their shared computer - some banal argument allegedly recorded without her knowledge.

Feeling unsafe, she called police, who referred her to Women’s Refuge. Her counsellor, she says, told her she’d been manipulated by a narcissist.

The Sunday Star-Times attempted to contact the doctor multiple times, in order to put the allegations of the recording and cheating to him, but received no response.

Even after the couple separated, it took two years - and distance - for Amy to find the courage to report the earlier strangling incident.

“I wanted to speak out for other women that had been through that. And because I think a common misconception still is that, if you’re a professional woman, you wouldn’t be a victim of that.

“It’s such a shocking issue in today’s society that we still have such prevalent violence against women…I wanted to have my voice.”

And so on March 29, 2023, she read her victim impact statement to the court, telling how the attack had killed her confidence both in her personal life and at work. How the doctor had blamed her for provoking him, and had accused her of being the abuser, because she couldn’t forgive him.

“The impact of the trauma of the violence in my own home, in my own bed, where I should have felt safe, remains with me,” she said in the statement.

The doctor was up for sentencing, having admitted to one charge of assault for the key-snatching incident, and one of assault on a person in a family relationship. He’d initially been charged with strangulation/suffocation, but that was downgraded.

While the maximum sentences were a year and two years in prison respectively for the two charges, Amy never expected the doctor to go to jail. But having had to restart counselling to deal with the re-traumatising reporting process, what she did expect was accountability, and a clear message to the world that strangling a woman was not OK.

District Court judge Bill Hastings.
District Court judge Bill Hastings.

The doctor, however, argued he should be discharged without conviction, with his name suppressed so as not to “engender unnecessary concerns” among his patients.

‘Inherently dangerous’, but low gravity

In his sentencing notes, Judge Bill Hastings acknowledged that both offences involved family violence, and that the assault on Amy’s neck and throat was “inherently dangerous”.

“Everyone who lives in a place they call home is entitled to feel safe there. Your actions eroded that feeling of safety and eroded the trust your then-partner was entitled to as a member of your family in her home,“ he told the doctor.

Hastings quoted a part of Amy’s victim impact statement, which he said struck him because it highlighted the psychological injury the assaults caused.

“I still have nightmares and flashbacks over the strangulation incident,” he quoted.

“I know it is the right thing to do to speak out against violence against women, to bring out of the shadows this heinous and insidious crime, the trauma of that assault will stay with me forever, it has deeply scarred me.”

The judge did not, however, quote the paragraphs that followed, in which Amy wrote:

“It will significantly and detrimentally affect my mental health and psychological well-being if [the doctor] succeeds in his application for final name suppression and a discharge without conviction.

“Both will have the effect of further invalidating my experience and minimising the violence inflicted upon me in my own home by my husband and will effectively continue to shroud the assaults in silence and to remain hidden.”

Instead, Hastings went through the three-step process to decide if the doctor should be discharged without conviction. While the aggravating factors put the offending in the “medium” range, Hastings also considered the mitigating factors.

These included the fact the doctor had no previous convictions and had not offended since, the fact the couple had joint counselling at the time of the offending, and that the doctor later had individual counselling and attended a Living without Violence programme.

Hastings noted the doctor had also admitted the offending to church colleagues, written a letter to Amy and seen a clinical psychologist, who considered him at low risk of re-offending.

“You took steps to address what you did years before the police became involved.”

Together with the doctor’s remorse, and 51 hours of community service, that downgraded the gravity of the offending to “low“, Hastings determined.

Despite not needing to work because he had a large pension and property in two countries, the doctor argued a conviction would harm his job prospects.

Hastings considered that to be “out of all proportion to the gravity of the offending”, so granted a discharge.

He also granted permanent name suppression, accepting the doctor’s argument that naming him would cause extreme hardship.

“In my role I am required to deal with women in vulnerable positions and they are trusting me,” the doctor wrote. “I have never done anything in my work environment to suggest that I was nothing but of the highest integrity and treated the women I cared for with dignity and respect. To have my name and occupation made public in relation to something that happened over three years ago in a domestic setting will damage my reputation and engender unnecessary concerns among my patients.”

Listening to the arguments, Amy felt like he’d won.

“Who says that they'll volunteer for a couple of hours, and that means they're OK. It's fine that you strangled your wife, and you're a good bloke, really. That's just ridiculous.

“It’s upsetting, because strangulation is inherently dangerous. I wasn’t after a prison sentence, but I thought a conviction is right, to mark the seriousness of the offending. And he should have had his name published, like any other defendant, who didn’t have the means and the resources and his job, would have had their name all over the paper.

“It was really not right.”

A framework that has drifted beyond its moral and legal justification?

In 2025, 3697 Kiwis were granted discharges without conviction for offences as serious as fraud, burglary and even homicide. That’s an 80% increase on the 2016 numbers.

Traffic and vehicle charges made up more than half the discharges, accounting for 1935 people, followed by 686 people let off without conviction for assault. The data does not break down discharges for family violence.

While a discharge without conviction is often thought of as a mechanism to protect young people from having their whole lives blighted by early mistakes, almost half those discharged in 2025 were 25 or older.

Former district court judge, David Harvey, argues the law’s pressure release valve has become “a framework that has drifted beyond its moral and legal justification”.

While there has always been provision to discharge offenders since Harvey began practising law 50 years ago, it used to be applied only for “nuisance“ offences such as disorderly behaviour or student antics.

Harvey argues the 2002 Sentencing Act, and the case law that’s followed, means discharges are “out of control”.

Former district court Judge David Harvey says when he occupied the bench in south Auckland, discharge applications were infrequent.
Former district court Judge David Harvey says when he occupied the bench in south Auckland, discharge applications were infrequent.

“It’s completely out of whack…The way in which the courts have interpreted it has expanded beyond all recognition.

“Pretty much any offence short of murder can qualify for consideration of a discharge without conviction, depending upon whether or not you can dilute the gravity down to such a point that the consequences of a conviction are clearly disproportionate.”

And the emphasis on consequences erodes the principle of equal justice under the law. Because the more you have to lose from a conviction - and the better your ability to prove that - the more likely you are to get off.

When Harvey was a judge in South Auckland, applications for discharges were infrequent. Partly because more offenders had previous convictions, but also because fewer had flash jobs or reputations that they could argue were in jeopardy.

That changed when he switched to a court in a wealthier area.

“Is this available more frequently for bourgeois and affluent people? Yes, it is. Is it asked for on behalf of folks from the lower socioeconomic group? Generally not. And that’s an unfortunate thing. The better off you are, and whether or not you can appoint a KC to represent you and get together all of the necessary information and flood the courts with all sorts of stuff, possibly works in your favour.”

Harvey argues taking into account indirect consequences - such as future inability to travel or career barriers, means “speculative future disadvantage is routinely elevated above the actual harm caused by the offence”.

It also robs victims - and society - of the accountability and deterrence that comes with a conviction.

Women
Women's Refuge chief executive Naomi Ogg believes discharge without conviction is never appropriate for family violence offences.

“For victims, the consequences are acute,” he wrote in a column. “A conviction serves not merely punitive ends, but symbolic ones. It recognises harm, affirms wrongdoing, and validates the victim’s experience.”

Harvey argues there should be a maximum sentence threshold beyond which discharges without conviction are not available - say three months.

“A line in the sand - that’s what the criminal law is all about.”

Women’s Refuge chief executive Naomi Ogg (Ngāti Kauwhata) thinks discharges without conviction should not be an option for family violence offences.

“It’s never appropriate. Not at all.

“The harm still happened, regardless of what the outcome is, and that’s the part that’s missing. The safety for the person was not a priority, and the system failed that victim, and it wasn’t strong enough to hold the perpetrator accountable.”

The court process is confusing and demanding of time and brain-space, so for that to end with no accountability makes women feel invalidated, Ogg says.

“All of this for what? For nothing. It’s not an easy process to go through. Our people, we see them trying to do the right thing and show up in ways that they’ve never shown up before, because that’s what the system requires them to do. And then they walk away, not feeling any safer, feeling more exposed.”

Amy also worries that her experience - and others like it - will deter women from speaking up.

“I think giving name suppression and a discharge without conviction will lead to less people coming forward, not more, because they’ll see that and think God, I’m not going through all that. They’re just going to get away with it and they’re still going to make my life a misery, because they’ll be taunting me saying ‘I’ve got away with it, so why did you bother?’.”

First do no harm?

The doctor has now left New Zealand and appears to be back treating women in his home nation.

When a concerned person advised the medical licensing body in that country of the doctor’s offences, they said they already knew.

In New Zealand, the Medical Council requires doctors applying for an annual practising certificate to disclose any police investigations, charges or criminal proceedings, even if they’re discharged without conviction.

The council also has a memorandum of understanding with police, and a clause in the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act requires court registrars to notify particular convictions. But a discharge would not trigger that.

If the council thinks an offence raises questions about the safety of a doctor’s practice, it can refer the case to the Professional Conduct Committee (PCC), which could eventually result in a doctor being struck off.

But in this case, a lawyer told the court the PCC would be more likely to bring disciplinary charges if the doctor was convicted, rather than discharged.

The Medical Council can’t say how many doctors have reported discharges in the past five years, or what the consequences of those disclosures were.

Amy is shocked the doctor is back working with women.

She’s still on her own, and doesn’t think she’ll ever trust enough to have another relationship. She still chokes up talking about that night, but says she’s now in a good place. And despite the outcome, she doesn’t regret speaking up.

“He won, in effect, didn’t he? But he’s still been in a courtroom, and faced justice of sorts.”

She’s angry, though, that the doctor’s name suppression means she can’t be named either. Silenced again, like the hands around her throat.

“Again, you’re losing your voice by the whole system. Why can’t my name be out there, just because I’ve got to protect him. That is really ridiculous.”

*While the victim was happy to be named, we cannot legally use her real name as it would identify the offender, who has name suppression. Amy is a pseudonym.

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