Doctor admits to public masturbation in the same vehicle he used to follow children
A physician has admitted before a panel of an Ontario discipline tribunal that his acts of repeatedly following 12 girls with his vehicle and publicly masturbating in the line of sight of an adult woman amounted to professional misconduct.
In College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario v. Parajian, 2025 ONPSDT 15, the registrant involved in the disciplinary proceeding lived in Toronto’s Beaches neighbourhood. Reports of incidents of indecent exposure by a man in a white vehicle circulated the neighbourhood beginning in June 2019 and throughout 2020.
The physician received criminal charges for criminal harassment under s. 264(2)(a) of the Criminal Code against 12 girls with ages ranging from 10–15 and an indecent act of public masturbation, witnessed by the only adult complainant.
In December 2021, the physician pleaded guilty in the Ontario Court of Justice to criminal harassment by driving slowly near the child victims with his white vehicle between November 2020 and May 2021.
The physician received a sentence of probation for rehabilitation and ongoing community supervision for three years. He has since completed his probation.
Before a panel of the Ontario Physicians and Surgeons Discipline Tribunal, the physician admitted to the facts presented, including the incident in which a woman saw him masturbating in his vehicle while parked on the street. Two girls were nearby at the time but appeared not to see what happened.
The panel determined that the physician committed acts of professional misconduct under:
The panel acknowledged that the acts of misconduct occurred outside the registrant’s medical practice. However, the panel held that these acts impacted patients’ trust and confidence in him and the profession’s reputation in general.
The physician and the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario made a joint submission on penalty, which the panel accepted. Thus, the panel asked the registrar to revoke the physician’s registration certificate and ordered the physician to appear for a reprimand and pay the regulator costs of $​6000 at the standard tariff rate.
The panel decided that the proposed penalty met the applicable test in R. v. Anthony-Cook, 2016 SCC 43, because it would not bring the regulator’s professional discipline system into disrepute.
The panel acknowledged what appeared to be mitigating factors in this case. First, the panel found that the physician’s guilty plea in criminal court and admission of misconduct in the disciplinary proceeding spared the victims from testifying and saved the regulator the costs of a contested hearing on the masturbation allegation.
Second, the panel said the physician showed insight and accepted the seriousness of his misconduct, including by admitting the facts and consenting to the proposed penalty. The panel added that continued counselling would help him deal with the issues that led to the acts of misconduct.
Third, the panel said the character letters showed that the physician was committed to his practice and that his misconduct was a deviation from his usual behaviour.
Despite these mitigating circumstances, the panel found revocation appropriate due to the misconduct’s seriousness and its impacts.
The panel stressed that the misconduct deeply affected the victims, who were mostly children and thus especially vulnerable. The panel noted that the physician’s reckless public masturbation also could have affected the girls close to his vehicle.
The panel also said revocation would help the public remain confident in the medical profession.
“Patients come to physicians for protection and healing,” wrote the panel. “The publicity around these incidents has diminished the public’s confidence that any physician they visit will care for them and they will be safe in their vulnerable relationships with them.”
Despite their joint submission, the physician and the regulator disagreed on whether the panel should consider his absence of a disciplinary history a mitigating factor for the penalty.
The panel determined that the lack of prior discipline was a neutral factor, not a mitigating one, and chose not to consider it when assessing the proposed penalty. The panel noted the inconsistency in the case law and the parties’ inability to find Ontario precedents discussing this issue in detail.
The panel explained that registrants lacking a disciplinary history would generally get lighter penalties than those disciplined more than once because repeated misconduct called for stronger sanctions, not because the lack of prior discipline was mitigating.
The panel said being more lenient to a registrant due to a lack of misconduct findings would go against the principles of progressive discipline and send the wrong message to the public and the profession.
“Fewer than 30 discipline cases per year currently come to this Tribunal among the approximately 50,000 registrants,” wrote the panel. “Not having been among them is not something that should be seen as worthy of credit.”
