It took her decades to find her alleged abuser. Then she learned of the doctor's disturbing history
CBC
WARNING: This article contains graphic descriptions of child sexual abuse and may affect those who have experienced sexual violence or know someone affected by it.
Susanne Barrow says she was sexually assaulted by a doctor at the Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) during a family vacation in Toronto, after she fell ill with food poisoning.
She was 12. It was the summer of 1980.
It would take her 35 years to muster the courage to put into her own words what happened to her.
"He put on gloves, lifted up the cover and told me to pull my shorts and underwear down. Then he inserted his fingers deep into my vagina. Then he walked away," Barrow wrote in a letter to SickKids in 2015, describing the physician's unorthodox approach to taking her "internal heat."
"Despite suffering horribly from food poisoning, something wasn't right. I knew something dirty had just happened to me and I was too sick to talk," the letter read.
At first, hospital administration responded swiftly and provided support, but over time, Barrow said it became increasingly difficult to get answers about the identity of the perpetrator.
Her near decade-long quest for justice would eventually lead to a $2.3-million lawsuit against not just her alleged assailant, but SickKids, too. The case remains before the courts.
It all began with a simple question: Who was the attending physician who violated Barrow all those years ago? Not knowing the truth haunted Barrow throughout her youth and adulthood.
"One day, something just hit me like a ton of bricks and I thought, I can't be the only one," she told CBC.
"That's when I decided that I needed to write a letter to the SickKids hospital, let them be aware that there was a pedophile, that I had been assaulted, and I didn't want it to happen to anybody else," said Barrow, now 57 and living in a hamlet south of Ottawa.
Barrow had long suspected she wasn't the only victim, but said neither police nor SickKids staff were particularly cooperative in helping her track down her abuser — until she retained an Ottawa-based law firm in 2015.
In 2017, when her legal team requested Barrow's medical records from the hospital, staff advised them to pay attention to the admitting doctor on the day she was there as a child.
The 1980 record listed a doctor named Eleazar Noriega.
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