Hundreds of victims are seeking to hold prominent hospitals in New York City accountable after they allege their doctors sexually abused them – and the medical institutions knew about it, but failed to protect them.
The onset of the #MeToo movement in 2017 brought heightened scrutiny to men using their positions of power to perpetuate abuse. It also brought new focus to the institutions that either failed to investigate allegations or actively sought to conceal them from the public. But advocates said the medical industry, cloaked in prestige, hasn’t seen a similar reckoning.
In the cases of the three doctors – Robbert Hadden, Darius Paduch and Zhi Alan Cheng – scores of survivors said the arrests and conviction of the individual men, while important, would do little to address the institutional negligence that allowed the sexual abuse to carry on for years. But institutional accountability has proved to be elusive.
Criminal complaints and a conviction
Hadden, a former New York-Presbyterian/Columbia gynecologist, first pleaded guilty to sexually abusing patients when he was prosecuted in Manhattan in 2016, but evaded prison time. It wasn’t until his victims went public that federal prosecutors picked up the case in 2020, eventually securing his conviction in January on four counts of encouraging patients to cross state lines, and sexually assaulting them. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Prosecutors said he developed sophisticated techniques to carry out his abuse throughout his decades-long career.
In April, Paduch, a former New York-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center urologist, was arrested and federally charged in the Southern District of New York with four counts of inducing patients, including underage boys, to cross state lines so he could sexually abuse them at their appointments. According to federal prosecutors, Paduch allegedly used his position to repeatedly sexually abuse patients while performing medical exams, and convince them…
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