How Hulda Clark's publicist and an allied radio host organized coordinated complaints, a false police report, and public defamation against a critic — 2000
In August 2000, Hulda Clark's publicist Tim Bolen and radio host Christine McPhee organized a coordinated letter-writing campaign to Ontario's medical regulator, falsely accusing Dr. Polevoy of stalking, mental instability, and professional misconduct — using identical language across dozens of submitted complaints. A parallel false police report was filed and found baseless by investigating detectives. The regulator's own investigation, completed in April 2001, found nothing to substantiate the claims.
The campaign began with a series of emails sent from Tim and Jan Bolen's address to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) on August 12, 2000. Four days later, on August 16, 2000, a letter arrived at CPSO headquarters from Christine McPhee — using, according to Dr. Polevoy's records, exactly the same wording as the Bolens' emails.
McPhee had recently been removed from her Saturday afternoon program, The Touch of Health, on Talk 640 in Toronto, following complaints about the content of her broadcasts — which had included a March 2000 interview with Bolen himself, promoting Hulda Clark's theories.
Bolen's September 19, 2000 post laid out an explicit five-point campaign for supporters, published on quackpotwatch.org and still online today. It instructed readers to file simultaneous complaints with the CPSO, the CRTC, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, individual radio station owners, and Ontario members of provincial parliament — using specific inflammatory language provided in the post itself.
The post specifically instructed supporters to accuse Dr. Polevoy of "stalking" Christine McPhee, to emphasize that his internet service provider had taken down his website, and to suggest that his conduct raised questions about his "mental state" — explicitly asking regulators whether the CPSO had "an obligation to protect the public from those in a state of mental disorder."
Three years after the original 2000 campaign, Bolen returned to the attack in a February 2, 2003 essay, archived on this site, laying out an explicit strategy for the broader "Health Freedom Movement" to discredit and "destroy" critics of alternative medicine. The essay frames the conflict as an organized conspiracy by regulators and critics — while itself demonstrating exactly that kind of coordinated, strategic campaign against named individuals.
The essay sets out a five-part plan Bolen attributes to his opponents — a "central propaganda center," control over regulatory prosecutions, influence over Medicare and insurance decisions, harassment of practitioners, and demoralization through "the viciousness of the campaign" — the same structure his own documented conduct followed against Dr. Polevoy and others.
The essay also attacks Dr. Stephen Barrett's credentials at length — while separately, in the same piece, describing a delicensed, non-board-certified NCAHF figure as the movement's "chief propagandist," without apparent awareness of the inconsistency.
Christine McPhee filed a report with the Waterloo Regional Police alleging that Dr. Polevoy had stalked her. On March 17, 2000, two detectives completed their investigation, including an in-person interview with Dr. Polevoy at his home, and concluded there was no basis for the complaint.
The underlying claim — used repeatedly in subsequent complaints and public posts by Bolen and McPhee — was that Dr. Polevoy had followed McPhee to broadcast locations. Dr. Polevoy's own account is that any presence at a public radio broadcast site, one that anyone could attend or listen to live over the internet, does not constitute stalking.
After months of review, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario rendered its final decision on April 6, 2001. The regulatory record does not support any of the core allegations advanced by Bolen, McPhee, or the coordinated wave of complaints that followed their initial submissions.
NOW Toronto covered the fallout from McPhee's show being pulled from Talk 640 in a November 22, 2000 feature by Colman Jones, describing the program as functioning largely as a weekly infomercial for unproven remedies, and noting the "nasty accusations flying on both sides" between McPhee and Dr. Polevoy.