SHE’S DR. FEELY GOOD
Shamed NYC cop-ram surgeon is
DR. Rachel Wellner, her surgical scrubs soaked with her own urine, lay in a dank jail cell at the The Tombs, spooning with a large woman named Patricia, who protectively stroked her hair while mumbling incoherently.
“She came right up to me, she was big, not mentally intact, but super,” Wellner, 41, recalled of her harrowing 20 hours behind bars a year ago following her arrest for accosting a cop over a parking ticket.
“She kept me warm, and I kept still. There were near 30 people around, and I just tried to fall asleep. Another woman said, ‘If you want to survive in here, go to sleep.’ ” Unable to get a second bathroom visit approved by cops, she had wet herself.
“First night in the clink and she gots to go gay,” a cellmate zinged.
How the high-and-mighty had fallen. Twelve hours earlier, on Feb. 18, 2016, the renowned Montefiore Medical Center breastcancer surgeon had left work early, at about 9:45 a.m. She pulled her 2006 Volvo to the curb at West 55th Street and Eighth Avenue, just a block from home, so she could duck into the Vitamin Shoppe for a minute. But she parked in the crosswalk.
It was a mistake anyone could make on a bad day, but this one would change her life forever, making her unemployable as a doctor and forcing her to flee the Big Apple and reinvent herself.
Now Wellner, who has turned her attention to writing a semi-autobiographical erotic novel, is ready for her New York comeback.
“I’m discovering my best self, my happiest self by finding my creative voice,” she says.
IN the official NYPD account of the incident, two cops came over as she was leaving the store to write her a ticket for blocking the walkway.
“I’m a doctor,” she allegedly sniffed. “I have patients that are dying. I have to go.”
As the confrontation escalated, she allegedly uttered the words that would make her a front-page headline the next day: “I’m the hero, the cops are not. I don’t accept the summons.”
She allegedly launched into a homophobic tirade: “All women who are cops are dykes.”
The cops tried to cuff Wellner, who was now seated in the car, screaming, “Help! Police are assaulting me!”
Wellner then hit the gas and allegedly struck Officer Niguel Vega in the legs. She was charged with reckless endangerment and resisting arrest. She would eventually plea-bargain to disorderly conduct.
Wellner, the Ivy League-educated daughter of a Connecticut internist, tearfully admits, “It was a very disrespectful move, one that I’m not proud of.”
But she also insists most of the NYPD’s version of events is fiction. In September she filed a $30 million federal civilrights suit against the city and the cops who busted her.
According to her own version, which she lays out in her complaint, she woke up that day at her usual 4 a.m. but feeling “tired” and “a little groggy.”
“Normally when I go to the operating room I get dressed up, but that morning I didn’t feel like it, so I just put on my scrubs,” she recalls. She spent 2 ¹/2 hours performing two biopsies and, with nothing else scheduled, opted to work the rest of the day from home.
The standoff with the two cops became “a runaway train,’’ she says.
“Here I was, trying to defuse a situation, offering to move the car, apologizing. I got the feeling I was being prejudged. The optic was, ‘Here is a doctor who thinks she can do anything she wants.’ ”
She claims she asked for the ticket: “I don’t want to fight, I just want to get the ticket. I have patients I have to get to, and I assume you guys have more important places to get to.” Vega snapped, “Don’t rush me.” Wellner claims Officer Nicolett Davodian called her a “despicable bitch” as soon as she saw the ille- gal park. Vega, now trying to arrest her, punched her in the chest and grabbed her around the rib cage, near her breasts, and wouldn’t let go, Wellner says.
When Vega finally released her, Wellner maintains, she retreated to her car and tried to close the door, but Vega kept the door open by wedging his body in. She hit the gas because she feared for her life, she said.
“I definitely didn’t hit a police officer,” she said.
Wellner denies uttering the infa- mous “I’m the hero” statement. In fact, it was Vega who used the term. “Yeah we know you’re like a big doctor, you’re like a hero,” she claims Vega said.
“‘No, I don’t think I’m a hero. I just try to play for the same team as you guys,’ ” she says she replied.
THE next day, the busty blonde, the senior breast surgeon at Montefiore, became an instant workplace pariah. She was
placed on administrative leave and ordered to not contact anyone at the hospital.
Humiliated, she couldn’t muster the courage to leave her $4,500-amonth Midtown apartment for weeks — and even contemplated suicide.
“I’m not going to lie and say I didn’t think about ending my life that year. I had no purpose to go on, and I felt so hated,” she said.
In July she was officially fired, a week before taking a plea deal that included 10 days of commu- nity service picking up litter in city parks. “I e-mailed them and begged them, please don’t do this,” she says through tears of her termination.
Every time the media ran an update on her court case, hateful posts would roll in on social media. She says the most hurtful were the ones who said she should not be allowed to be a mother. One troll branded her the “face of overprivileged America.”
Wellner said her parents were devastated by the episode and her father, Murray, 65, still a practicing doctor, was “the most heartbroken.”
Her life in shambles, Wellner feared driving. She was so distraught, she couldn’t bear to get on a plane until January, when she finally bolted Manhattan for South Beach, Miami, where she lives with her 65-year-old mother, Susan, in a condo overlooking Biscayne Bay. Neighbors in the 44floor tower include Donald Sutherland, Anna Kournikova and model Ingrid Casares.
Wellner says she sought surgical posts at a dozen hospitals in five states but was turned away once they “Googled me.”
“One unfortunate moment of my life — a moment I couldn’t have conjured up in my wildest imagination — erased everything I had worked so hard for and changed the course of my life,” Wellner says. “This has been the most devastating year of my life.”
BUT Wellner says the devastation also brought a ggift — “time for introspection and creative freedom.” “I’m not just this doctor. I’m a human being. I have flaws and assets. There is something inside of me that has been repressed for a long time — my artistic side, my sense of humor,” she says. “I love my parents, [but] they gave me one option: to be a doctor.” Wellner has co-written a female buddy-movie screenplay that “channels ‘Animal House,’ ‘Legally Blonde’ and ‘Grey’s Anatomy.’ ” Set in New York City, the plot pits two blondes who start out as pals, become frenemies, engage in medical prank wars and then team up to “take down a sleazy, sexist and corrupt figure.” She’s also working on a series of children’s books about a kangaroo — “Doctoroo” — whose medical equipment is stored in a magical pouch. Each book features a villain who carries an illness. The surgeon is also an unlikely stand-up comedian, taking the stage at open-mic nights.
“Scary is cutting off the wrong organ,” she says of her lack of stage fright. “The worst thing that can happen onstage is they boo you.”
But Wellner is most proud of the 400-page “erotic romance thriller” she has written and is now shopping around. It “combines ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ and ‘ER,’ ” she beams.
The untitled opus — which she started in 2014 — features “hot and heavy relationships, threesomes and taboo affairs with married men, older men and younger men.”
Wellner said the work is 5 percent autobiographical in that she once had a brief relationship with an “Amir-like” guy but “embellished like crazy for the book.”
What she had been writing as a romance novel turned into a murder mystery after her brush with the law, she says.
The surgeon says the book tapped into her “wild child” and she frankly confesses that she has “tried just about everything” sexually, including two threesomes.
“Having a lot of interesting and different sex experiences shape you and let you know what you want.”
Wellner, who is single, is now ready to emerge from her nightmarish cocoon. Though she’s enjoying writing, jogging, yoga and dance classes, she yearns to “be back in an operating room.”
“I dedicated my life to helping people, and I am passionate about helping people on their journey to wellness,” she says.
But the medical field is “an unforgiving culture,” especially for women, she laments.
“I was on a trajectory. I advanced my career four or five times,” she says.
She remembers receiving calls of support immediately following “the incident,” but soon her phone fell silent.
“I had one colleague tell me, ‘You’re done,’ and another said, ‘She’s finished,’ ” Wellner recalls.
Wellner plans to return to Manhattan next month, her medical career in doubt but with a new self-awareness.
Having cast off her Dr. Wellner honorific for now, she tells The Post: “I’m loving being called Rachel.”