Carolyn DeWaegeneire should be living the country dream. Her home is a beautifully-renovated old courthouse and police station, tucked amid the lush green hills of the Bega Valley in south east NSW.
But the instant you walk in the door, it’s obvious her rural idyll has been invaded. Carolyn’s home is stacked with overflowing boxes and files of documents, highlighted news clippings, medical literature and books she’s used in research in her pursuit of justice.
Carolyn was a victim of the so-called Butcher of Bega, a gynaecologist who indecently assaulted, mutilated or harmed hundreds of women in his care.
In Carolyn’s case, he removed her genitals without her consent. She went to him seeking treatment for a small patch of discoloured skin on her labia, was put under general anaesthetic and woke to discover he had cut out her labia, clitoris and part of her perineum.
Now is she speaking out publicly on the full horror of the surgery that changed her life.
Last month, she stood in a Sydney courtroom “ready to explode” with anger as a judge ruled the gynaecologist, Graeme Reeves, would only receive an extra 18 months on top of his original two-year minimum sentence for what he did to her.
Indeed, more than a decade after she woke from what was supposed to be minor surgery to the unimaginable terror of realising all her genitalia had been removed, her pain is still raw. Not a day goes by when Carolyn can escape the physical reminder of what Reeves did to her under the guise of medicine. “I will be angry for the rest of my life,” she tells The Weekly. “I’m living with a life sentence.”
Reeves, meanwhile, is described by those close to the case as “a broken man”. Overweight and diabetic, he is languishing in prison with critically poor kidney function and preparing to start dialysis.
Two days before Carolyn’s appeal judgment, he appeared at the inquest of 38-year-old Kerry Ann McAllister, who died from an infection within a week of giving birth to her third child in 1996 after he withheld antibiotics. Gone were his usual narcissism and aggression: the 63-year-old, once described by authorities as “sly and deceptive”, claimed to have memory problems but uncharacteristically admitted, “I made a mistake which cost her her life.”
But all this is of no consolation to Carolyn, who has only contempt for the man who whispered into her ear “I’m going to take your clitoris too” just seconds before she slipped under a general anaesthetic. “I don’t hate him,” she insists, defiantly. “He is beneath me.”
At court, nevertheless, she wasn’t prepared to compromise on her hope for a life sentence. Her grim response on hearing of Reeves’ suffering: “Great”. And if he doesn’t live long enough to be let out of jail? “He should be worried about where he is going when he dies because we can’t undo what he has done.”
Carolyn’s anger isn’t directed solely at Reeves. She feels the justice system has failed her too. When Judge Greg Woods sentenced Reeves in 2011, he cited the defendant’s academic excellence at leading NSW school James Ruse Agricultural High as a mitigating factor. To Carolyn, raised in the UK and Paris by a naval commander-turned-diplomat father and socialite mother, this is bewildering. “I went to a top school for the children of naval officers,” she says. “I came top of my class two years running. So what if Reeves went to a good school?”
Nor does she consider his sentence for maliciously inflicting grievous bodily harm with intent – plus separate charges of indecent assault and fraud – adequate. All up, Reeves will spend three and a half years in jail if granted parole (although he could face a future manslaughter charge over McAllister’s death, which has been referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions). “It’s not bloody good enough,” says Carolyn. “If a man had his penis chopped off, the doctor would probably get several life sentences.”
At the heart of the sentencing, she believes, is an assumption that as an older woman she isn’t a sexual being. Although Judge Woods acknowledged that she had lost “a source of comfort in the absence of physical contact” with her late husband, Carolyn hadn’t ruled out meeting someone else and continuing to enjoy an active sex life. When she was wheeled in for what should have been minor surgery to remove a half-fingernail-sized lesion from her labia, she was a young widow at 58. Yet when Reeves was queried by a nurse over the extreme amount of tissue he was excising, he replied, “Her husband is dead so it doesn’t matter anyway.”
Carolyn agrees with Australian of the Year Ita Buttrose’s recent declaration that older people enjoy an active sex life as much as the young. “When Reeves came to see me after the operation, which bloody near killed me, I was stunned – these were the words he said to me: “Oh, the fun bits always bleed a lot but you can still have sex.” In court, Reeves admitted to performing about six such vulvectomies in his 29-year career.
To give evidence about the full impact of Reeves’ crime, Carolyn had to be open about details of her sexuality in court. Despite being a naturally private person, she spoke out with her head held high. “I have got nothing to be ashamed of,” she says stoically. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
The NSW Government and medical regulatory bodies missed countless opportunities to stop Reeves over the years as he left a trail of botched surgeries, humiliating injuries, suspicious deaths and alleged indecent assaults from Sydney and Hornsby to Pambula and Bega. His 500 known alleged victims may only be the tip of the iceberg. After McAllister’s death, he was banned from obstetrics and ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment. But he evaded detection for another seven years – and even then was only struck off for breaching his ban. “How do these bureaucrats take our money and not do anything to protect us?” asks Carolyn indignantly. She doesn’t believe legislative changes, such as mandatory reporting of impaired doctors, are enough and wants more sweeping reforms to protect patients.
Victims also need greater assistance, she says. When Carolyn first consulted a lawyer, she says she had to sign a document accepting the case could cost her up to $100,000 – a sum that would deter most from continuing. Not her, though: “I couldn’t just sit back and let it happen – I couldn’t have lived with myself.” And although her civil case against Reeves in 2007 was successful, she didn’t receive the ordered $164,000 compensation payout because he’d been declared bankrupt. She eventually received a similar sum in compensation from the NSW Government – but much of this was absorbed by her out of-pocket-costs and legal bills.
A year before Reeves picked up his scalpel on August 8, 2002, Carolyn’s beloved French husband Michel had died from lung cancer. They’d had a whirlwind romance, getting engaged within two weeks of meeting and later moved to the Bega Valley in southern NSW to build their dream home and B&B. “My husband and I had a beautiful relationship,” says Carolyn, her eyes brimming with tears. “We were of different nationalities, languages, ages, religions, cultures and backgrounds and yet we were one. For 20 years, we had a magical time. He died in his own bed at home with me beside him. We had a passionate, loving relationship – sexually, emotionally and everything. After he died, I would masturbate to bring back that wonderful, warm, protected feeling. Of course Reeves cut all of that out so instead of being a happy, sexually active woman, I have been utterly desexed.”
Despite this, Carolyn counts herself lucky that she knew true love. And it’s her memories of life with Michel – travelling, entertaining, gardening, swimming and talking into the night over a bottle of wine – that have helped her through her most harrowing moments. Like when the portion of her genitalia cut out by Reeves – roughly the size of a pack of cards – was described as a “specimen” by a pathologist in court. “My body became surgical waste – did it go into landfill or an incinerator?” she wonders sadly. “Michel loved me – he loved that part of me too.”
If Michel had survived to see what Reeves had done, says Carolyn, “he would have killed him”. But Reeves was calculating: he’d established that she was on her own, with no relatives nearby, at their first consultation.
Carolyn has shown formidable strength to get Reeves put behind bars. But at what personal cost? “It has taken over my life,” she admits matter-of-factly. And although she refuses to be defeated by Reeves, his brutal actions have come to define her. Not a day goes by that she isn’t researching, reading, planning or thinking about her case. She also speaks at gynaecological awareness events. “I was never politically motivated or a feminist before this,” she says. “It has switched on a cog that I’d never used before. Now I follow politics, buy the newspapers, get involved in local community action – and I’m fighting for women.”
She has support from a tight-knit network of friends and her midwife daughter Rachael has also been by her side in court, while her granddaughter Lucy, now 14, turned to her after Reeves was found guilty and said, “Grandma, you are my hero.”
In truth, it seems unlikely Carolyn ever will be able to move on with her life. But in a way, she doesn’t want to. On a physical level, she has daily reminders: she has been robbed of her sexual identity and even going to the toilet has its complications. So she has harnessed her anger to take on this battle not just as a personal vendetta against Reeves but on behalf of all mutilation victims.
So why does Carolyn, now 68, feel she still needs to stage such an all-consuming campaign at this point in her life? Part of it is her finely-tuned moral compass and dogged determination. But there’s another reason: for years, no one spoke up against Reeves. Carolyn doesn’t blame them: she was shocked into silence for two years before she mustered the courage to turn whistleblower. By going public with her story in the media, she opened the floodgates and hundreds more victims came forward. Today she still feels a responsibility to use her voice to prevent injustices from happening to anyone else. And so she refuses to give up, vowing, “I will keep on fighting until my last breath.”
