A former BC massage therapist has been disciplined for launching a “retaliation campaign” against a woman who posted a negative review about him online and then repeatedly insulted staff at her professional association after an investigation was launched into her behavior.
Jeremy Jakobsze, of Maple Ridge, about 37 kilometers east of Vancouver, has already renounced his license during the course of the College of Massage Therapists of British Columbia (CMTBC) investigation. Now, he will also have to pay $12,000 in fines and costs, receive a formal reprimand and face a 10-month suspension if he decides to return to the profession, according to a new report. university public notice.
The sanction decision follows an earlier determination of a university disciplinary panel that Jakobsze committed misconduct when he contacted a potential patient’s employer, filed a complaint with his professional regulator and called the RCMP in response to her negative Google review.
“Engaging in a campaign of retaliation against a prospective patient as the defendant did would reasonably be considered by members of the profession to be dishonorable, disgraceful and unprofessional,” the three-person panel said. wrote in July.
Jakobsze also engaged in misconduct in his exchanges with university staff, including an email in which he referred to one of them as “someone with mental retardation,” the panel concluded.
“He insulted and ridiculed them repeatedly while they were simply [fulfilling] its statutory functions,” says the July decision.
In an email to CBC on Wednesday, Jakobsze accused the university of being biased against men.
“CMTBC is criminally [liable] for being complicit in human rights violations,” he wrote.
He alleged that the university “publicly shamed” him in retaliation for filing a complaint alleging that staff violated his privacy rights during the investigation.
Jakobsze objected to the fact that an investigation report was sent to his home by post, without the need for a signature. The disciplinary panel rejected those arguments in its July decision, calling them “irrelevant” to the case at hand.
Jackobsze also told CBC he only took the actions he did because he believed the potential patient was a danger to the public. The panel disagreed, saying he had “absolutely no basis or justification” for those claims and only intended to punish her.
He said he plans to launch a petition calling on Health Minister Adrian Dix to overturn the disciplinary findings, dismiss the university’s board of governors and executive and then resign from his cabinet position.
‘He was relentless in his campaign against her’
The saga began in June 2020, when a potential patient visited Jakobzse’s office, according to a September 19 penalty decision. The patient is referred to as AA in university documents.
AA was not wearing a mask (they were not mandatory provincially at the time) and claimed that Jakobsze was unnecessarily aggressive in response.
He didn’t treat her, she went home and posted a negative review on Google.
AA is a dental hygienist, Jakobsze confirmed. After she posted her review, the decision says he filed a complaint with his professional association alleging fraud and “gender-based harassment,” contacted his employer to say he was having mental health issues and called the RCMP to accuse her of hate crimes.
“He was relentless in his campaign against her, forcing her to respond to a complaint to her regulator and forcing her to endure the embarrassment of having her mental health questioned in communications to her employer,” the sanction decision says.
Jakobsze’s complaint was dismissed by the College of Dental Hygienists of BC, which found the matter to be “fundamentally a commercial dispute” and unrelated to AA’s work, according to a summary of findings published by the Health Professions Review Board. The board also rejected Jakobsze’s request for review because it was not submitted within the required time frame.
Once the university’s investigative committee began its investigation into Jakobsze’s actions, he exchanged a series of emails with staff that went “far beyond a legitimate challenge” to his actions, the panel found.
Among a series of other inflammatory comments to university staff recounted in university documents, Jakobsze called the director of research and discipline “someone mentally retarded.”
In a November 2020 email to the same official, he wrote: “I don’t know who touched you when you were 12 or what boy didn’t like you in high school, but it’s not my fault that someone hurt you earlier in life.”
He went on to accuse her of “a vendetta against me” and suggested that she was “harassing me and my family to satisfy her own sexist motives.”
In a message to the university’s lawyer, Jakobsze called the investigation process a “kangaroo court” and told them: “You can be a criminal if you want. Ask yourself if it’s worth it.”
In the sanctioning decision, the panel notes that Jakobsze has received several warnings from the university about his conduct over the years.
The university wrote him a warning letter in 2016 after he failed to obtain informed consent from a patient. In 2017, she was advised to take remedial classes after some “inappropriate and unprofessional communications” with WorkSafeBC staff.
Then in 2018, Jakobsze received another warning about “sexual content” in his communications with a patient, according to the decision.
