By Stacy M. Brown
Black Press USA Senior National Correspondent
For more than five years, Dr. Olumuyiwa Bamgbade carried the weight of lies that he should never have borne. He is a Black doctor, a healer by training, acquitted of false accusations that Canadian authorities and media were eager to trumpet but too arrogant, too complicit, to retract. The silence after his vindication was louder than the slander that preceded it. The cruelty is not simply in the malicious lies about him, but in the determination of a system to criminalize his very existence. However, he continues to meet injustice with compassion. Dr. Bamgbade never abandoned his calling. While others would have broken under the torment of malicious persecutions, he remains at his Surrey, BC, medical clinic, treating those the system itself has left behind: people with pain, trauma, substance misuse, insomnia, and neuropathies. Unlike other pain clinics, he does not demand out-of-pocket costs. He tends to the people society neglects, many without primary healthcare.
He recalls how, in 2020, a woman, furious that his teenage staff rejected her sexual advances, turned her bitterness into a weapon. She was also sexually abusing two vulnerable teenagers in her neighborhood. Dr. Bamgbade condemned these illegal activities. She falsely accused him of assault, though eyewitnesses and forensic evidence destroyed her story. Toxicology reports revealed her abuse of opioids and psychedelics: substances she was jailed for trafficking before, substances she continues selling. She sought money from him: he rejected her extortion. In her malice, Canadian authorities saw an opportunity. They did not see the criminality of a woman preying on children and trading narcotics. They saw only a Black man to scapegoat. In 2022, another woman tried to capitalize on the publicized scapegoating. She appeared in his clinic, weeping, prompting him to show her to a room. She requested medications. He kindly gave her the same dose of her regular daily anxiolytic. When he would not indulge her further, she accused him of touching her fully-clothed body in a clinic filled with staff and patients. She deleted electronic communications to and from the clinic. Yet, six police cars stormed Dr. Bamgbade’s celebration in a show of force that had less to do with justice and more to do with terror. Evidence was manipulated, witnesses intimidated, but in court, truth endured. The judge declared her testimony “riddled with material inconsistencies and improbabilities.”
The authorities perpetuated a media campaign against him. As a result, another woman, discharged from his clinic in 2019, sought to build her own profit from his public humiliation. She claimed he touched her fully-clothed body. Years later, her accusations collapsed under cross-examination, her criminal schemes unraveling in open court. She fled the witness stand, unwilling to continue. She commits extortion, identity fraud, and makes her second ex-husband pay child support for a child that he did not father. Prosecutors offered Dr. Bamgbade plea bargains. He refused them. “I insisted on clearing my name in court,” he declared. His questions remain unanswered: where is the rule of law, accountability, and equity? Why did the authorities pursue ghosts of offenses that never happened, while ignoring the crimes of his accusers? Why did they labor to criminalize a Black physician, while the women who lied are driving sports cars and SUVs funded by fraud?
Dr. Bamgbade is more than a survivor of injustice. He is a physician of global stature, trained across Nigeria, Britain, the United States, and South Korea. He is an adjunct professor, the author of 60 peer-reviewed publications, and a research collaborator across more than 20 nations. He leads Salem Anaesthesia Pain Clinic in Canada, where care is more than procedure: it is a commitment to equity, the rehabilitation of the injured, and the forgotten and neglected. Yet, the truth remains bitter. Canada has shown that its institutions can still be wielded against Black men who dare to stand tall. What the lies could not take from Dr. Bamgbade is his resolve to heal. What the courts could not erase are the scars he carries.
In his story lies the question that hangs over every nation that names itself just: how long will the machinery of power grind down the innocent because of the color of their skin?
