The doctor who cut a Harlequins rugby player’s lip to cover up a fake-blood injury scam said on Tuesday she is ashamed she succumbed to pressure.
Winger Tom Williams bit into a blood capsule during a 2009 Heineken Cup quarterfinal against Leinster to enable a specialist kicker to be brought on as a so-called blood replacement.
But as the deception unravelled after the match, which Harlequins lost, Williams asked Dr Wendy Chapman to cut his lip.
“I was very ashamed that I gave into the pressure,” Dr Chapman said on the second day of her disciplinary hearing.
Asked how she felt in the changing room, Dr Chapman replied: “Distressed, ashamed, horrified. I just wanted out of there.”
Dr Chapman could now be banned from practising by the General Medical Council, which has accused her of bringing the profession into disrepute by being dishonest.
She admits most of the GMC charges, but contests that she told match officials that Williams had a loose tooth in order to deceive them. The accident and emergency consultant was suspended on no pay from Maidstone Hospital, south-east of London, and has since left her post.
Unprecedented fine
Quins were fined an unprecedented €300 000 by a European Rugby Cup (ERC) panel in October 2009. Dean Richards left as Harlequins director of rugby and was banned for three years after being held responsible for the incident.
Dr Chapman, who was cleared of any wrongdoing by the ERC panel, said she first realised something was amiss with Williams when she gave him a piece of gauze to put on his lower lip.
“The fluid going on to the gauze was the wrong colour and the wrong texture for blood,” she said. “I had never seen it before and I just did not know what was going on. I was still looking for an injury.
“In my naivety I could not understand why someone would come off with no injury at all.”
As she was about to look into Williams’s mouth, he asked her to cut him.
“He was absolutely desperate. He said, ‘You have to cut me, I have got to have a real injury’,” she recalled. “I was horrified.
That means he has not got one [an injury] … that they cheated.”
The GMC panel was told that Dr Chapman has since been diagnosed with depression. — Sapa-AP