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Reports the Kentucky doctor dragged off a United Airlines flight for not relinquishing his seat has a troubled past has sparked a debate on social media and beyond.

Since video of the incident became public, news organizations have been trying to identify the man who was forcibly pulled from a Louisville-bound flight at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on Sunday to free up a seat for an airline employee.

On Tuesday, he was identified as David Dao, 69, a physician from Elizabethtown, Ky., who told Louisville news station WLKY   that he was recovering in a Chicago hospital after “everything” was injured and he was not doing well.

It took no time for the hometown paper the Courier-Journal to point out Dao, a father of five and grandfather who went to medical school in Vietnam, had his medical license suspended for about 10 years for illegally prescribing painkillers, including to a patient in exchange for sex. It’s all a matter of public record.

#BREAKING David Dao, the Elizabethtown doctor yanked from the United flight, has a troubled past in Kentucky https://t.co/pzkLLonJLG pic.twitter.com/FuZYCaLOEl

— Courier-Journal.com (@courierjournal) April 11, 2017

TMZ reported that while his medical license was suspended, Dao “made a killing” as a World Series of Poker player, earning a total of $234,664.

There is no getting around Dao’s history now that it is public but the reports raised the ire of those on social media who quickly pointed out that Dao’s background shouldn’t matter and that it appeared to be another case of blame the victim.

@lisa_fletch @ABC7News Seriously? An “investigation” of the doctor’s “troubled past” as if it justifies him being assaulted on a plane? This is just gross.

— Bryan Luhn (@bryluhn) April 11, 2017

So reports of the doctor’s ‘troubled past’ are surfacing and none of that matters. What @united and those cops did was 100% wrong

— Michael Martin (@Bizarro_Mike) April 11, 2017

I don’t care who the doctor is or what kind of past he’s had, he is still a human being who had his head smashed by the airline #United

— David Kwong (@davidkwong) April 11, 2017

In a post for Forbes, aviation writer Christine Negroni said, “Before the next news cycle begins to trash the Louisville doctor, David Dao for his past brushes with the law, I hope reports of his criminal conviction in 2004 will be put into perspective and that the debate will expand to include whether United’s was even justified in removing Sunday, four passengers on a flight from Chicago to Louisville.”

The situation has also caused an uproar in China, where many wondered if Dao was removed because of his ethnicity.

The video has been posted on China’s Shina Weibo, a Twitter-like site, and viewed more than 210 million times by late Tuesday, the New York Daily News reported.

Another Chinese social media site, We Chat, called for a boycott of United Airlines, the paper reported.

All of this has created a huge headache for United Airlines, which saw its stock drop as a result and finds itself trapped in a public relations nightmare.

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