Atharva Joshi: So I am a family physician. I was previously based out of this tiny island called Molokai, Hawaii. Ever since the last two doctors died, Dr. Thomas and Dr. Luli, they haven’t had a single doctor on the island who could take care of everybody there. So for the last few years at least, there was no doctor. Molokai is a very small island in the middle of the Hawaiian Island chain. You get a nine-seater Cessna that comes about twice a week if you’re lucky and the weather holds. So I was really out there.
Kevin Pho: All right, so tell us about your story. What made you write on KevinMD?
Atharva Joshi: This story wasn’t about why me and my children’s mother were together or why we separated or what went wrong between two people, but it’s about what happens when a system decided that someone like me doesn’t deserve to be a father. Not because I caused harm, not because I was a danger, but because of how I was born, how I think, and what I refuse to kneel to. That’s the story I wanted to tell today. And everything else is really pretty irrelevant.
The gory legal details: I got a bunch of phone calls after I published, so I linked them in the comment section of the article, but this was never about my children’s mother. It’s about the system that handed her a loaded courtroom and a culture that told her it was OK to casually pull the trigger for an ultimatum.
The brief story is I was arrested by a SWAT team after a false shooting charge was filed. Charges were dismissed. No evidence. The window was created for abducting my children. Then I dealt with the initial rounds of criminal charges and arrest records manufactured with, again, no proof, some undeserved money paid to the state judiciary. Later, the government did me the favor of expunging its own mistakes.
Then I entered the family court system expecting restitution because the threat of erasing me from my children’s lives had been carried out. Along the way, of course, my home was destroyed. My dog was locked in a bathroom filled with broken glass, and risk-free defamation, slander, and libel was sprayed all over the internet.
Kevin Pho: So tell us what happened regarding your medical practice and how that interplayed with what you did professionally.
Atharva Joshi: So I basically got attacked on all six fronts simultaneously. They attacked me at my work. My investors pulled out. They attacked my culture. They attacked my spirituality and ethics. I got slandered publicly, and then they took my kids. As a result, I no longer have a home. I no longer have a practice. And that’s part of the reason I’m here in DC.
Kevin Pho: All right. And regarding some of the tactics they chose to attack you with, just from a professional standpoint as a physician, explain how they tried to attack you.
Atharva Joshi: It might be a little easier to start with how I struck back, and that might explain how I was attacked a little bit more line by line. At the end of the day, there’s that whole model minority script: sit down, shut up, save face. So I wrote a very restrained article, something publishable, something they couldn’t twist into “growling in the savage tongue” or “angry brown man,” because even in publishing, I still had to translate my fire into something palatable. Whereas the black coats and the black robes got to spit acid and call it procedure.
If you really want the details, this was taken well, well beyond me. This has everything to do with a court in Maui County accepting, for nine months unchallenged, the signed legal argument: “Petitioner’s false narrative regarding his caretaking lies his culture. Men did not babysit or care for children. That’s women’s work only.” Here’s the thing: I didn’t wear a Guan [assuming intended word] up to court. I wore scrubs or a suit, same as doctors Tom, Dick, and Harry.
So in one sentence, the Second Circuit court of Maui County entered the most ignorant precedent into law this century, erased my American identity, and rightly offended 1.3 billion people across two countries. That was the crux of their legal argument. They threw everything in the kitchen sink, attacked me on all those six fronts of functioning adulthood, and failing that, played the race card.
