IB TIMES
A prosecutor urged a New York jury Monday to convict a former Columbia University gynecologist of federal sex trafficking charges after he sexually abused patients for decades.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jane Kim described the evidence against 64-year-old former gynecologist Robert Hadden as “devastating” and “damning” as she narrated the testimony of nine victims and two nurses who worked with Hadden during his career, which spanned from the late 1980s until 2012, Fox News reported.
She said Hadden, of Englewood, New Jersey, tried to “hide behind his white coat” and the prestige of Columbia University as he won over vulnerable patients before sexually abusing them.
“He donned his white coat and took the oath all doctors do to ‘do no harm’ and then he did the exact opposite,” Kim told the Manhattan federal court jury.
“The defendant had a plan, a strategy,” she added. “This wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing.”
Hadden would ask patients about their sex lives and would conduct lengthy breast examinations that should only last 30 seconds to a minute during the visits of some women, according to the prosecutor. He “hid behind the cover of gynecological exams … to keep pushing the envelope, to see how far he could go,” Kim said.
Defense attorney Kathryn Wozencroft acknowledged that the “harm” some of Hadden’s patients endured at his hands “is real” and insisted that “we’re not challenging what happened in the exam rooms.”
However, she stated that Hadden’s guilty plea to charges in New York state court seven years ago was for all of those reported abuses. The lawyer insisted that it would be wrong to convict the doctor of the new charges based on those same crimes.
After his guilty plea, Hadden surrendered his medical license but was not required to serve any time in prison.
According to Wozencroft, the sex trafficking charges require that the doctor knew that the four patients the charges pertain to were traveling over state lines and that he enticed them to do so because he wanted to sexually abuse them.
Hadden’s lawyers said during the trial that the doctor wasn’t aware of where his clients were traveling from or the roster of his appointments each day.
The indictment against Hadden states that the doctor sexually abused patients for decades while working at two Manhattan hospitals, Columbia University Irving Medical Center and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. The institutions agreed to pay more than $236 million to settle civil claims by more than 200 former patients.
Hadden has remained free on $1 million bail since his 2020 arrest.
A former patient testified that in 2008, when she was pregnant, Hadden suddenly penetrated her with his fingers, ABC News reported. She described it as painful and felt like a lifetime.
“He said he was trying to feel the baby’s head,” she said, adding that he performed oral sex on her.
