In Part One of the following investigative report, Manasseh Azure Awuni of The Fourth Estate reveals how a licensed health practitioner used his facility and practice as bait to sexually assault scores of women who went there seeking treatment.

The married woman who wanted a child

In 2018, a woman and her husband walked into Nature’s Hand Therapeutic Centre at Gbawe, in Accra, to seek the healing hand of a man.

Efua Baiden, a 34-year-old businesswoman (not her real identity), and her husband were optimistic about finding a solution to their problem. This solution, they hoped, would in turn enhance and give more meaning to their seven-year-old marriage. But they would learn—rather too late—that their move was an ill-fated exercise of faith because they swallowed a poisonous bait on their first date with the man they considered a specialist.

For the sake of her privacy and that of the man with whom she went to the health facility, Efua does not want to disclose the traumatic experience that preceded and necessitated their visit to the health facility. To her, the entire episode has come to represent a gothic monument of regret erected in the museum of her mind. She wishes to forever shut that museum out of her life, but she is too concerned to shut up because of the fear that more women might fall prey as she did.

To resolve this internal conflict and avoid resurrecting a past that affected other parties, she requested that certain details should not be disclosed in her story. These details include a traumatic loss that destabilised her emotionally, prior to the visit to Nature’s Hand Therapeutic Centre.

But these and other health details were not hidden from the man whose medical expertise they sought in 2018, for a woman in labour, it is said, does not hide her private parts from the birth attendant.

Efua was not in labour. They had hoped that Efua would be able to go to the labour ward nine months after that visit. It would have been the second time in her life.

But, in the end, she did not go to the labour ward. She was taken to court.

The Predator and his trap

The man whose expertise they went to seek, “Dr.” Jonathan Ohene Nkunim, is the CEO of Nature’s Hand Therapeutic Centre. He describes himself on social media as “a doctor by profession and a gosple [sic] minister by calling.”

There are videos of him singing in church, his ministration drawing worshipers to the altar to kneel and lift up their hands in total submission and supplication to God. Social media photos of Jonathan paint a picture of a loving husband and a doting father.

“Dr.” Jonathan’s professional profile is well promoted on his personal social media pages as well as the official page of Nature’s Hand Therapeutic Centre.

A Facebook photo of him sporting a white long-sleeved shirt, a black and silver waistcoat, and a navy-blue necktie and with a stethoscope around his neck, is captioned “Ordained to Heal.” On his Instagram page, the same photo is captioned, “I may be a Doctor but the worshipper in me is who I really am.”

A business card with the name “Dr. Jonathan Ohene Nkunim” describes him as a Neuromuscular Specialist. The services he provides at Nature’s Hand Therapeutic Centre, as stated on the card, are: “General Diagnosis, Neuromuscular Therapy, Physio Therapy, Detoxification, and Spine Straightening.” A notice at the entrance of his facility as well as the official Facebook page of Nature’s Hand Therapeutic Centre lists additional services as “Oriental Pulse Diagnosis, Herbal Options (Ghanaian and Chinese), Stroke Rehabilitation Therapy, Sports Massage, etc.”

In a letter he wrote in April 2021 requesting permission on behalf of a female client from her employers to enable her to undergo treatment, “Dr. Jonathan Ohene Nkunim” signed as the “head medical officer.”

Advertising his faith and celebrating his wife on social media present Jonathan Ohene Nkunim as a responsible family man in addition to his profession. But the image he portrays appears to contradict the true character of the man who varies his age depending on the age of the woman he’s dealing with.

The service Efua and her husband went to seek is among a host of other unnamed health remedies offered at Nature’s Hand Therapeutic Centre.

“I wanted to have a baby, so I was introduced to him,” Efua recalls, adding that she initially had her doubts but the encouragement from her husband and the dire need of a child eclipsed those doubts.

At the facility, she was diagnosed in a way she had never seen before. The “doctor” held her hand, touched the back of her palm with his fingers and told her everything that was wrong with her. She said there appeared to be some accuracy in what he said.

“I won’t say 100%, but some were kind of accurate,” Efua said.

Beyond telling the “doctor” about the most private aspects of their reproductive health, the procedure “Dr” Jonathan recommended to be performed on Efua involved further prying into her privacy—her most private part.

“He mentioned that I had a problem with my cervix so I needed to do a procedure which would help me to conceive once a therapy had been done,” Efua recalled.

To her, this was not too big a deal if that could get her to conceive. What made her uncomfortable was what “Dr.” Jonathan said must precede the procedure. He told her that she had to be sexually aroused before he could perform the procedure.

Fortunately, she went with her husband. Unfortunately for the couple, however, the environment was not conducive for romance and arousal.

Nature’s Therapeutic Centre is a single room on the ground floor of a two-storey uncompleted building at Gbawe CP. Apart from the fading signage scrawled in green, nothing gives the indication that it is a health facility. When it is closed with the roofing sheet-like roller shutter, it looks more like a garage or warehouse than a health facility.

Inside, it is partitioned into three compartments. A third of the compartment serves as the reception and the waiting area. If you stood in the reception area with your back to the entrance, there is a door to the left which opens to the doctor’s consulting room. In the consulting room, there is a compartment to the right with another door. It opens into the treatment cubicle.

Much of the space in the treatment area is taken up by the only massage table. If Mr. Nkunim isn’t playing loud music in his consulting room—which he often does— a footstep, a cough, or whisper from any of the three compartments could be heard by anyone inside the facility.

Due to the presence of workers and patients at the stuffy facility, Efua and her husband did not think there was the needed privacy to get her aroused before the procedure started. And they told the “doctor”.

That did not stop Jonathan Ohene Nkunim from continuing with the treatment. In fact, that response from women, with or without their partners, was not new to him. It was a trap he set often, and his prey almost always fell into it. It was his way of seeking their consent to intimately intrude and violate them.

Efua was not the first and would not be the last to fall into this trap.

“He inserted something like a probe—I don’t know what it was—into me and he kept doing his own thing there,” Efua recalled the procedure.

Efua said, at a point, “Dr” Jonathan sent her husband out of the facility to “go and buy an iced block or something and I realised, though he didn’t penetrate, it was more like he was trying to have sex with you. He was playing with me down there, getting me aroused and I wasn’t feeling comfortable. According to him, that was the procedure.”

Efua later told her husband that she was not comfortable with the procedure, but she could not bring herself to give him all the details. Her husband encouraged her to continue since she had already started.

“Once you’ve started a procedure, at least, try and finish. You might never know what would work for you,” Efua remembered her husband telling her. And she continued.

The procedure to enable her to conceive focused more on what appeared like foreplay, and Efua was convinced the doctor was up to something when he started sending text messages to her phone in-between her visits to his facility.

“He started sending me messages like, trying to make advances towards me and I was kind of like, I mean, where from this? I just came to your office for help,” Efua recounted her initial reaction.

While making sexual advances at Efua, Jonathan Ohene Nkunim gave her reason to believe she was at the right place and would conceive after the procedure.

“And, of course, he sounded convincing. He gave me all the facts I needed to know to prove that it would work,” Efua said.

The procedure did not work. What worked was Jonathan Ohene Nkunim’s alleged seduction. Efua said she lost her guard as the arousal and sexual advances continued.

She and Jonathan Ohene Nkunim later had an affair.

After the affair, her guilt-ridden conscience would not permit her to keep it away from her husband. When she confessed, her husband said he had forgiven her. However, Efua realised from his actions that his heart had forgiven her but his mind still battled with it. She was hoping he could overcome it but feared he might not.

Her fears were confirmed when a bailiff served her a divorce notice. The affair with “Dr” Jonathan Ohene Nkunim was the reason her husband wanted their marriage annulled.

And the court granted it.

Ohene Nkunim apologised to her, but she had wanted him to also apologise to her husband. She still thinks that might have helped to calm him down and perhaps save her marriage.

But he did not apologise to him.

“I don’t know whether he is a real doctor or a fake doctor…for him to take advantage of me and not even show any [remorse],” Efua said, regretting the decision to have subjected herself to the “treatment”. “It really affected me and as we speak, my marriage has broken down because of whatever happened with the doctor.”

After the affair and the collapse of Efua’s marriage, Ohene Nkunim told her that was not his nature. With Efua, however, he said he did not know what had come over him. He could just not resist her, the “Dr” gushed over his client. But Efua does not believe he is the person he claims he is. She suspects others may have fallen prey to the same predatory traps.

“He claimed he liked me and it just happened. But apparently, I’ve heard cases—I mean it’s a rumour I heard,” she said.

“I think I’m not the first victim, according to the rumour I heard. I believe that it is something he probably does to innocent women or wives, people who come seeking medical attention. I think it’s something he does to take advantage of vulnerable women in the name of the medical profession,” she explained her reason to open up two years after her experience.

Efua was not wrong. She is one of three female clients of Jonathan Ohene Nkunim The Fourth Estate spoke to in the course of this investigation. He had made sexual advances at all three. He succeeded in sleeping with two, including a suicidal woman he allegedly raped. It happened on the massage table in the facility. This happened a few feet away from where his wife worked as the administrator of the health facility.

Stephanie Nortey, the prey who became the predator

“Dr” Jonathan Ohene Nkunim was expecting a client—a special client. The client had visited the health facility three times, and the fourth was more significant to Jonathan than all the previous ones.

Stephanie Nortey, for that, was the name of the client, was visiting to continue treatment for “lumbar spondylosis”, which Jonathan Ohene Nkunim had diagnosed.

But that was not the reason he eagerly looked forward to her visit that morning. She owed Jonathan Ohene Nkunim a response to a love proposal he had made when she last visited.

He had wanted a response by the close of the day he proposed, but he didn’t get it. Stephanie had requested some time to think about it. She wanted to get to know him better before deciding whether or not to be in a love relationship with the man whose lasciviousness was not masked the very moment she had met him.

On the morning of Friday, April 16, 2021, however, Jonathan Ohene Nkunim received a WhatsApp message from the phone number through which he had often communicated with Stephanie. It was on that number that Stephanie had first called him and complained about her excruciating back pain. The pain stretched from her neck and increased in severity at her lower back, she had said. He had asked whether she had taken an X-Ray or MRI scan, and Stephanie had said no.

“Can you try touching your toes right now?” he had requested.

“Like I should bend?” she asked.

Stephanie was lying on a couch while making the phone call and did not make any attempt to even sit up. But she told him she did and felt the pain intensifying in her lower back.

“It looks like you are suffering from lumbar spondylosis,” he said and recommended treatment when she first visited the health facility the following day, March 23, 2021.

Stephanie was supposed to have the treatment session twice a week for a month, but the first visit alarmed her. Besides the part of the treatment which sounded weird—a trick  Ohene Nkunim often used to trap unsuspecting and desperate female clients—he “rubbed his erect penis” against Stephanie’s buttocks when she lay on the physiotherapy table to be treated. He placed her sideways so that her butts faced his zip.

When Stephanie later drew his attention to this in a WhatsApp chat, Jonathan asked whether she had liked it. He then apologised profusely when she said she was uncomfortable with it. But that apology would not end his sexual advances towards her. In fact, Stephanie was not the first recipient of that profusely remorseless apology. Remorseless, because he had done worse things after such apologies in the past.

After Stephanie’s second visit to the health facility, Jonathan Ohene Nkunim suggested that the next treatment be held at a resort in Lapaz, a suburb of Accra. He had said the treatment for lumbar spondylosis required sexual arousal, and despite touching Stephanie sensually during treatment, she did not “respond”. He then concluded that the setting was not conducive and therefore recommended what he said had worked for some clients in the past.

The resort in Lapaz, Jonathan Ohene Nkunim said, was where he often went to relax and read when he was not working. Treatment there would come at no additional cost to Stephanie. If she wanted a different hotel or guest house aside from the one in Lapaz, he was prepared to explore that.

Stephanie said she wasn’t comfortable with going with him alone to a hotel room outside the facility. He then offered a “special session” with Stephanie as the only client for the day and Jonathan as the only worker on duty. This happened on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, this year.

It was on that Saturday that he expressly proposed a love after the caressing and sexually touching Stephanie did not yield any results.

In subsequent WhatsApp conversations that travelled into the heart of the night, Stephanie, in her bid to know Jonathan Ohene Nkunim before accepting his proposal, extracted as much information as possible from him, some of them incriminating.

“You sound like a detective,” he once said in a WhatsApp message after series of probing. He would, on a later date, call Stephanie “Madam detective”.

By that Friday of April 19, 2021, Stephanie had known enough, and Jonathan expected a response.

In the WhatsApp message that morning, Stephanie asked whether he was in the office. When he said he was, Stephanie said she was sorry she could not make it because she was busy at the office.

That message to Jonathan Ohene Nkunim was typed in a car parked outside his health facility. Three minutes later, the owner of the hands that typed the message entered Nature’s Hand Therapeutic Centre, where Ohene Nkunim was busy in his consulting room.

A fair young lady in a black T-shirt over a pair of blue jeans was leaving the facility. A few minutes later, a man in his late thirties or early forties laboured, with the support of a walking stick, out of the consulting room into the reception area. He was recovering from a stroke, Jonathan Ohene Nkunim would later confirm. As he sat in the reception area and made a phone call, a woman in her late forties entered to see the specialist.

She would not emerge until after an hour.

At the small counter in the reception area, a young man called Eben and a young woman, in green uniforms, were welcoming clients and dispensing medication to those who had seen the “doctor”.

“Are you here to see the doctor?” the lady asked.

“Yes.”

“Have you been here before or this is your first time?”

“I’m coming for a different issue, not for treatment,” said the person who had sent the WhatsApp message in the vehicle asking if Jonathan Ohene Nkunim was at work.

Six minutes later, Ohene Nkunim emerged from the consulting room, wearing a dark blue uniform. His two last names, “Ohene Nkunim”, were amateurishly embroidered with a white thread across the right shoulder of his uniform. He called the next person and led the way back to his consulting room.

In the consulting room hung a number of certificates, including two licenses from a state regulatory agency, which he used to legitimise his illegal operations.

“My name is Manasseh Azure Awuni, a journalist with The Fourth Estate,” I told him after he beckoned me into a chair where his clients sat for consultation.

Ohene Nkunim had asked the woman who had entered before I was called in to undress and wait on the physiotherapy table in the treatment cubicle. He wanted to attend to me quickly and go and work on her. But she would lie there for more than an hour, and I would be invited to see her half-nakedness twice before leaving the facility. It was an intrusion to her privacy, which was without her consent.

I had been investigating Jonathan Ohene Nkunim and his facility for months. My undercover agent, Stephanie Nortey (not her real name) had met him on three occasions. With the phone Stephanie first used to contact him, I got Jonathan, in extensive WhatsApp chats, to contradict a number of things he told Stephanie in the undercover recordings. As I met him that morning, he still thought the “detective” he had been chatting with was Stephanie Nortey.

When I confronted him and pointed the issues to him, he confessed to some after initially denying them outrightly. The denials he still stood by were not helpful to him. There was strong and abundant evidence to the contrary.

The suicidal woman raped on the first day

By the time Esi, a 28-year-old banker (not her real identity) was introduced to Ohene Nkunim in 2020, she had been contemplating suicide. She had gone to hospitals but could not find a remedy for her sustained back pain.

She feared she might be paralysed but it was the unbearable pain that told her that ending her life was a better option.

“When I take the pain killers, it’s like I haven’t taken any medication at all. The pain is so severe you cannot bear it. Coupled with that I couldn’t move. My body was giving electric shocks and it had gotten to the point that I didn’t understand why I should bear this pain. So, I was considering committing suicide,” Esi recounted.

Two days after she first thought about taking her life, someone gave her a lifeline—Jonathan Ohene Nkunim’s hotline.

“She only told me that he is a neuromuscular specialist and that he is also good at these things so I should go and try it,” Esi said a former female client of Jonathan’s had told her.

Six days after she first called him, Esi was driven by a male friend to Nature’s Hand Therapeutic Centre in Gbawe.

“The day I got there, to be honest with you, I still couldn’t walk, so I was held on both sides before I could painfully move a leg. So gradually, I got there. And when I got there, he saw me and assured me that I will be better so I shouldn’t worry and that he was going to do his best to ensure that I got better.”

Jonathan Ohene Nkunim has confirmed Esi was in a very bad state when she first visited. He told me she couldn’t get out of the car on her own. Her condition had deteriorated so badly that he had even contemplated rejecting her.

Esi said after tapping the veins at the back of her palm, Jonathan Ohene Nkunim’s diagnosis matched the results of her X-rays and scans. She had told him about the scans and X-rays when he enquired about her medical history on the phone. Esi’s treatment that same day.

“He actually came to assess me and started his therapy, mainly massage… He said all he needed to do was to manipulate my bone, my spinal cord to be back in shape so that the part of the spinal cord that was pressing on my nerves could be released,” she remembered him describing the treatment.

Esi had gone there to treat back pain and she had not been told that she had any problem with her reproductive system. That was, perhaps, what aggravated her shock when the “treatment” started.

“I noticed that he actually was massaging my buttocks and inserting his fingers into my vagina. The next I knew, it was his penis, and then at that time, I was at a point of desperation. I was in pain. I couldn’t shout. I couldn’t stop him actually because I didn’t know what he was doing,” she said.

Esi said she was too shocked to discuss what had happened with the specialist after the session. Later that day, she sent a WhatsApp message to Ohene Nkuhim to complain and ask for an explanation of what had happened.

His first reaction when Esi made reference to the therapy was to apolgise, “Awwww…sorry for being too pushy ok.”

He then sent Esi an article on pelvic floor physical therapy, to which Esi asked what that had got to do with her. All she knew was back pain and nothing else. He said, in her case, he was “treating 2 different things here dear…pelvic floor disorder and sciatica due to spondylosis.”

He then went on to explain that there were four different treatment options — “vaginal dilation by dilators, electropulse therapy by sending pulses to stimulate the muscles, kelgy [sic] exercises to manipulate the muscles, and hands-on stretching and insertion by hand into either the anus or vagina to trigger nerve endings.”

This was new to Esi because they did not come up before Jonathan asked her to take off her clothes and lie on the massage table.

“I don’t know if I’m ever going get some closure about this. How do I explain that to my partner?” she told him in the WhatsApp chat.

His response was that her condition had deteriorated so badly that she risked being paralysed if it was not urgently dealt with. He said his therapy—the sex—was meant “to stimulate the sexual sensory nerves to enhance heavy blood circulation to allow bone and muscular manipulations.”

The WhatsApp conversation started at 4 p.m. and at 8:46 p.m., Esi told Jonathan Ohene Nkunim the major concern about her nightmare of that day. “I needed you to have given me the opportunity to opt for the requirements of the procedure.”

“Yes,” Jonathan agreed. “I should have sensitized you more. I was just in a rush to at least save the situation when I noticed it and was at the same time trying not to show my fear in my voice.”

According to section 98 of the Criminal and Other Offences 1960 (Act 29), rape is having carnal knowledge of a female of not less than sixteen years without her consent.

When Jonathan Ohene Nkunim was having sex with Esi without her consent, his wife was six feet away. She worked as an administrator at the facility. They were separated by the wooden boards that partitioned the room into three.

But for loud music, which Jonathan Ohene Nkunim often played when consulting with her female clients or having sex, Jonathan’s wife would have heard the rhythmic squeaking of the massage table as her husband began his weird treatment.

“I felt so bad your wife was in the next room,” Esi told him.

“I do understand,” Jonathan said. “The plan was not to go too personal like that…but to put you in the mood and get it done. I just went overboard. Am[sic] sorry I lost control.”

“How she was nice to me without, not knowing what had gone on,” Esi was still concerned about the innocent woman, a fellow woman whose husband had had sex with her almost in her presence.

“Yes, I get you,” Jonathan agreed. You did nothing wrong. I did.”

That night, Jonathan Ohene Nkunim apologised to Esi and told her, “It won’t happen again. I can promise you that.”

But when Esi lay on the physiotherapy table on her next visit, Jonathan repeated what happened the first time. She said Jonathan had sex with her “every day of the treatment. Just once or twice that there were a lot of people around, so he didn’t have the chance to have sex. I think I’ll just count twice.”

“And how many times did you go for his session?” I asked.

“It was an entire month. And in a week, I could go for three sessions, a minimum of three sessions,” she explained.

“So, each time he met me,” she went on, “he’d have sex with me and it wasn’t like sex that involved my input. He always made me [lie] face down and he’ll be having sex with me. He starts by massaging you and insert his entire hand in my vagina. And sometimes, I felt his hand in my womb. Then, he’d start having sex with me because he said I was too tensed and he needed to relax my muscle before he started the treatment.”

I asked Esi why she continued to go to the facility when she knew Jonathan Ohene Nkunim would not repent beyond his profuse apologies and promise not to have sex with her during treatment.

“I was at the point of desperation,” she explained. “I was in a suicidal mode because the pain was unbearable … I just made up my mind that if that’s what it will take for me to get back to my feet, I’d have to endure it and be with the consequences.”

“It’s either I walk again or I get paralysed, because that’s what he told me when he met me. I was at the point of paralysis,” explained her decision to endure the sexual abuse.

But she could not endure forever. She truncated the treatment because she could not cope with the mental and emotional stress that came with having sex with someone she did not love or did not willingly consent to.

“I felt psychologically stressed or more burned that I came. Physically, I felt I was better than I came, but, psychologically, I felt way down,” she said o. “I feel my fidelity is now being questioned because I am in a relationship and my partner too doesn’t know that this is what I go through during treatment or during the therapy.”

When Esi stopped the treatment, her condition was still bad despite a marginal improvement. She went to a physiotherapy facility in Accra to continue the treatment, where she said the therapists were quite professional. At no point did anyone talk about arousal or touching her beyond the treatment area, Esi revealed.

That treatment got her back to her feet, but she would carry the burden of Jonathan Ohene Nkunim a bit longer. She had begged Ohene Nkunim to use a condom even if he would not stop the sex. But he mostly had sex with her without a condom or any form of protection.

When her menstrual cycle was delayed, she feared she might be pregnant. Ohene Nkunim, on the other hand, said her cycle might have changed because of the drugs she was taking alongside the treatment at Nature’s Hand Therapeutic Centre. He prescribed the drugs.

Eventually, they agreed that she take a pregnancy test. The results, to her relief, came out negative. But there was something else.

She contracted a serious infection in her vaginal region and the doctor who diagnosed her at a different health facility was worried about the possible cause. The doctor was convinced that such an infection was very much likely to have resulted from sex. She was also convinced that sex was practically impossible for a woman in such enormous pain for a long time and could hardly walk.

Esi decided to help the puzzled doctor. She finally broke down and shared her ordeal at Ohene Nkunim’s facility with the doctor. That doctor and the writer of this story are the only two people she has had the courage to tell her ordeal at Nature’s Hand Therapeutic Centre.

“If it were to be true, I should be in jail by now”

When I broached the allegation that he sexually abused women, Jonathan Ohene Nkunim did not respond immediately. He opened his mouth, but no word escaped from it. He turned in his swiveled chair, looked at me, and stared at the ceiling. He exhaled before he whispered his response.

He had been whispering since I entered his consulting cubicle. He had connected his phone to a Bluetooth device and the music drowned our discussion from the woman waiting in the treatment cubicle and his assistants and guests in the reception area.

This was what he did while discussing his therapy with his victims or while having sex with them in the facility. I politely asked him to pause the music because, even without it, I could barely hear him. He obliged but lowered his voice further.

He would speak but, he would not allow me to record him. He warned me against secretly recording him because that would violate his “human rights”.

On two occasions, he asked if it was okay to call or inform his lawyer about my interview. I told him I was okay with it, but he elected to continue without making the call.

His initial response was a complete denial that he sexually abused any woman. Without the consent of the woman waiting on the massage table for treatment, he invited me inside. The patient was in her underwear— pantie and brassier.

He started to massage her and asked me to observe the procedure. After a couple of minutes, he led me back to the consulting table and explained that the treatment often involved touching, which could sometimes be uncomfortable.

“She has a spinal cord problem, so if I have to work on her… I have to touch her,” he told me, pointing to the woman.

He said, in rare circumstances when he had to treat pelvic floor disorders, it required inserting of the hands into the vagina or anus. Because of this, he often explained to his clients and asked them to sign a consent form.

He said he “was a bit taken aback” when I mentioned sexual assault because he explained the procedures to those he treated, and they understood, agreed and signed a consent form.

In Esi’s case, his WhatsApp message confirms he did not seek her consent before he administered that treatment. In the case of Stephanie, she signed the consent form, but that consent did not include sexual advances.

“So, are you saying it’s not true?” I asked him.

“Arrrrhh! If it were to be true, I should be in jail by now,” he declared.

“If it were true that you sexually assault your patients, you should be in jail by now? Is that what you’re saying?” I wanted to be sure I had heard him right.

“If I have done it,” he started after a little hesitation. “If somebody comes [and tells me] ‘you did this, did this to me, and I explain and things are not in the right way, the person can take me on.

“I will not say that things like that have not come up. We’ve had people come and say, ‘I really do not understand this and this and this is against how it is done’. I explain to you or you can go for a second opinion to see if I did something out of my jurisdiction,” he explained.

“Did the person say I fingered her, or how?” it was his turn to ask me.

“Yes, fingered, tried to have sex. One even alleged that you had sex with her here in your facility. Is it true or false?

“False!”

“So, you’ve never had sex with anyone here?”

“This is a personal question,” Jonathan Ohene Nkunim protested.

“If it’s your wife or girlfriend, I don’t have any problem [with that], but I’m just asking in relation to your clients,” I reminded him. “Have you ever had sex with your clients here, during treatment?”

“Never!”

“And you’ve never handled any of your clients in a way that suggests sexual assault?”

“If there’s anything, then it is what I have explained.”

“A lady came here,” I told him about Efua and her husband’s visit in 2018. “They wanted a child. You eventually had sex with her and it led to a divorce.”

“It’s not true. I have not heard anything like that. If there’s anything like that they should come forward,” he challenged.

“They should come forward. With evidence?” I wanted to be sure.

In fact, Efua still has text messages between the two. The day I interviewed Efua, I asked her to text Ohene Nkunim just to confirm whether he would still admit his role in Efua and her husband’s divorce.

“I’m still wondering what made you sleep with me though you knew I was married,” Efua’s WhatsApp message in October 2020 said.

“I wish I knew,” Jonathan Ohene Nkunim replied. “I was soo [sic] attracted to you and didn’t know why. I have never been the same since.”

He went on, “I just don’t know why. Even when I realized things have[sic] gone far I just couldn’t stop myself. I naturally run away from such desire, but with you, all I tried failed. It was my toughest battle yet and I failed miserably.”

“So how do you feel knowing that I’m divorced because of you?” Efua asked.

“Soo guilty and broken. Have not been myself and always praying for forgiveness. The inability to tell anyone is the most difficult. I have come soo[sic] close to telling Ohemaa [his wife] so many times but I know the end results will be devastating. I’m suffering in my conscience…” he claimed.

When I mentioned Efua’s real name and told him that I had spoken to Efua and there was evidence that he had slept with her, Jonathan Ohene Nkunim admitted the affair. He, however, explained that he had known her before she came to his facility and that the affair happened after the treatment, not before or in the course of the treatment.

“It hit me hard,” he told me after admitting the affair.

Ohene Nkunim often appeared remorseful when the women he sexually violated at his facility complained about how they felt. He often said he had regretted and would not do that again. But it was not true.

He had had sex with Esi two years after his affair with Efua resulted in Efua’s divorce. And a year later, he was keen on sleeping with Stephanie Nortey, the undercover agent The Fourth Estate sent to the facility.

Complete denial of sleeping with Esi, and the sex video

Jonathan Ohene Nkunim admitted sleeping with Efua. He admitted he liked Stephanie Nortey, who was still going for treatment and who he had proposed to.

When I mentioned Esi’s name, he said he remembered he treated her and even went to her house to treat her on a number of occasions. He, however, denied ever sleeping with Esi, either at her home or in his facility.

He confirmed what Esi had told The Fourth Estate; that her condition was so bad that the last thing that would cross her mind was sex.

“It was almost impossible for her to have sex,” Jonathan Ohene Nkunim told me. “Even if she did, orgasm was going to be painful.”

He continued, “She couldn’t move from the car. She couldn’t walk at all. I took the risk to work on her. Her problem was pelvic floor disorder? There’s something called spondylosis,” he went on with his lecture on spondylosis and invited me again to the woman who was still lying half-naked in the treatment cubicle for close to an hour while he tried to ward off all the allegations.

Esi said she knew Ohene Nkunim’s sex with her without her consent was wrong. She also knew that if she ever mentioned it one day, he would deny it. So, when she went for treatment one day, she decided to record the session.

She said that was a typical treatment session Jonathan Ohene Nkunim offered her at Nature’s Hand Therapeutic Centre.

The one-hour and 19 minutes video starts with loud background music in the treatment area. Ohene Nkunim plays is heard singing along Michael Bolton’s How Am I Supposed to Live Without You?

Esi is wrapped in a white towel that covers her breasts down to her thighs. Her brassier, as per the protocols of the treatment, is off.

She lies on the massage table with her face down. Jonathan Ohene Nkunim enters, wearing a multicoloured shirt and a black pair of trousers. He is wearing blue hand gloves, and his Covid-19 face cloth mask is lowered to his neck. He lowers the towel towards Esi’s waist so that her buttocks and the upper part of her thighs are covered by the towel.

Her breasts would have been exposed but for the fact that she is lying facedown and cups them with her hands.

Ohene Nkunim sprinkles massage oil on her back and begins to massage Esi’s spinal cord in the third minute since the beginning of the video. He stands at the end of the massage table, facing Esi’s head, while still singing along the loud music playing.

At 7 minutes, 50 seconds, of the video, he moves to the side of the table and massages Esi’s shoulders and upper back. A minute later, he lowers himself onto her back and begins to rub her sideways gently. From there, he moves to stand in front of Esi’s head and massages her briefly before kissing her back and sliding his hands under the towel on her buttocks.

He then pushes his right hand down her buttocks, towards the space between her thighs. He uses his left hand to unzip his trousers before a voice from his consulting cubicle signals that the two bottles of Voltic mineral water he ordered are ready. As he leaves the treatment area, he tries to zip his trousers. He returns briefly with the water and gives one to Esi while tearing the plastic seal around the lid with his teeth before drinking it.

Esi drinks hers and continues to lie face down. Jonathan continues the treatment. He lifts the towel, massages her thighs and butts for about a minute and inserts his hand into her pantie from behind and tickles the area between her thighs.

At 22 minutes, 53 seconds of the video, Jonathan notices Esi’s apparent response to the work his hand is doing between her thighs, he lowers Esi’s pantie to her knee, adjusts her, lifts one of his legs across the table and begins to have sex with her from behind.

His trousers and shirt are both on.

At 25 minutes, 49 seconds of the video, he pulls out of Esi and takes off his shirt, singlet, trousers, underwear and face mask. He is completely naked now, apart from his pair of striped socks.

He is wearing a condom and a whitish substance, like semen, is visible at the pointed tip of the condom. After undressing, he pulls down Esi’s pantie completely, throws it on the floor, mounts her from behind and continues to thrust again.

At 30 minutes38 seconds, he withdraws again. His right hand is still between Esi’s thighs while he takes off the condom from his penis with his left hand.

He enters her again from behind, the third time since the video started and begins to have sex. At 36 minutes, 48 seconds, he pulls out and begins to massage Esi’s thighs with a hand-held electric machine.

All this while, he’s still naked and has one hand between Esi’s thighs until 42 minutes 30 seconds of the video.

Jonathan Ohene Nkunim continues the rest of the treatment completely naked until a minute later when he picks Esi’s pantie from the ground, puts it on her before continuing the treatment.

He picks his own blue underwear, puts it on and moves to lower himself on Esi’s back and cuddles her before returning his hand into the area between her thighs.

At 52 minutes, 25 seconds, he leaves the treatment table to put on his trousers while his shirt is still on the floor.

The rest of the video is shared between dressing up, fidgeting with his phone and the treatment of Esi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: PART TWO of this story, explores the false qualifications Jonathan Ohene Nkunim claims to have, how he got three licenses from a state regulatory institution as well as how his facility was closed and reopened by that state institution even after The Fourth Estate brought to its attention the anomalies with “Dr” Jonathan Ohene Nkunim and his facility.