The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
NO REPORT, NO JUSTICE
Doctors avoid criminal penalties as regulators fail to notify police
Her doctor was making her uncomfortable. He wouldn’t explain why she needed a breast exam. He didn’t give her a gown. He just told her to lie back and lift up her blouse.
In minutes, her physician became her abuser. He felt her breasts under her bra repeatedly, making a sound of pleasure and saying they felt “excellent.” When he backed away, she could see a bulge in his pants. “It made me feel so dirty,” the woman recalled later.
Yet nothing in the Maryland medical board’s public records shows it did anything to stop Raafat Y. Girgis when it got the complaint. Nor did the agency inform law enforcement about a possible sexual offense.
Medical regulators say they have an ethical duty, and some have a legal requirement, to alert law enforcement when a doctor may have committed a sex crime against an adult patient.
But The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s examination of thousands of cases found that regulators failed to consistently live up to that responsibility.
Instead, regulatory agencies, often dominated by physicians, can and do find reasons to avoid notifying police.
The result is that some abusive doctors can continue practicing and harm other patients, and others are allowed to quietly retire, without a full investigation into whether they committed crimes that could mean jail time for those in other walks of life.
“Too often, I think, it’s cronyism,” said Pauline Trumpi, whose book, “Doctors Who Rape: Malpractice and Misogyny,” describes how her psychiatrist drugged and raped her in 1963. “It takes a lot of money and it takes a long time to become a doctor. So they feel empathy for the doctor rather than the victim.”
In case after case, medical panels can decide that a doctor won’t offend again if he gets rehabilitation and refresher courses. That if a victim doesn’t want to talk to police,
there’s no point in letting police know what’s been alleged. That there’s nothing in criminal law that covers what the doctor did. That a case can’t be pursued because it’s only a he said/she said.
“The last thing we want to do is unjustly accuse a physician of something,” Wyoming Board of Medicine Executive Director Kevin Bohnenblust said. “We’ll certainly go after them if they screw up, but we don’t want to perpetuate something if it’s really, truly a miscommunication or something like that.”
It’s impossible to know how many crimes by doctors go unreported because many cases are handled privately. But the AJC’s investigation revealed alarming cases in which medical agencies were aware of possible misdemeanor or felony sexual offenses, with trails of victims, yet never passed along the information to law enforcement.
That left accused doctors free to keep their doors open to other patients, such as the ones who kept going to Girgis in Catonsville, Md.
A second patient eventually came forward, alleging that in back-to-back appointments the doctor rubbed his groin against her, kissed her and fondled her breast. “I was kind of numb,” she would testify years later. “It (took) a while to realize what happened.” The medical board still didn’t act. Then a third woman reported that during an exam for a skin rash, Girgis fondled her breasts, put his finger inside her without wearing gloves and kissed her on the mouth. The medical board finally revoked his license.
Girgis never faced so much as a police interrogation. He is now retired in Florida. In a brief conversation with the AJC, he said the allegations were false and called the medical board “a bunch of animals.”
Across the country, it is legal for medical panels to act as gatekeepers. Thirty-nine states and the District of Columbia do not have laws requiring medical regulators to notify police or prosecutors about potential criminal acts against adults, the AJC found. Georgia is among them. Nationally, laws requiring reporting of child abuse are nearly universal.
Even in states that require reporting of adult victims, regulators still hold back. Maryland has such a law but didn’t follow it in Girgis’ case, the AJC found.
“It’s deplorable, for heaven’s sake,” said John Banja, a medical ethicist at Emory University’s Center for Ethics. “One of the things that you’re going up against here is the historical, traditional sensibility of doctors to protect one another — to give their peers an excessive benefit of the doubt.”
One jailed, one not reported
When doctors are reported to police, the investigation may differ dramatically.
While it took the Maryland medical board six years to take action against Girgis, it took Louisville, Ky., police just hours to have neurologist Ghias Arar in handcuffs after Tara Batrice reported him.
Batrice, who suffers from a degenerative bone disease, was attacked the first time she saw Arar. First, the doctor moved her walker to another part of the room, stranding her on an exam table. Then, as she tried to fight him off, he ripped off her bra, kissed her breasts, fondled her, masturbated and ejaculated on her.
She left the office terrified, driving aimlessly until she called her parents and pulled into a shopping center. Her stepfather called a rape crisis center, and a victim advocate met her at the hospital. Arar’s DNA was still on her sweatshirt.
Two days later, Batrice told her story to a TV news station and made a plea for any other victims to speak out. Within a week, four other patients told police they were victimized.
Arar is now serving a three-year sentence and will have to register as a sex offender.
“I knew he’d done it before,” Batrice said. “I was willing to do everything I could in my power to make sure this doctor never ever touched another victim, ever.”
While Kentucky prosecutors put Arar in prison, the Kentucky Board of Medical Licensure allowed Mitchell E. Simons to continue as a pain management doctor after allegations he fondled patients.
Records show a patient told the board in 2003 that Simons had her stand with her back toward him, then lifted her bra from behind and rubbed her breasts. He pulled his hips to her, the woman alleged, and asked if she could feel him, saying, “I am aroused by this.”
He also put her hand on his crotch and kissed her, she alleged.
Another patient alleged Simons rubbed her breasts while smiling and asking her about breast implants.
Simons still practices in the Cincinnati area on both sides of the Ohio River. He did not respond to phone messages or certified letters seeking comment.