NEW YORK (AP) — Prosecutors on Monday asked a New York jury to convict a doctor of federal sex trafficking charges. He countered that an acquittal was appropriate because he was being punished by
U.S. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jane Kim has described the evidence against former obstetrician-gynecologist Robert Hadden, 64, as “devastating” and “horrifying”, citing nine victims and a death sentence in the late 1980s and early 1980s. From late 2012.
“He put on a white coat and did the exact opposite after taking the ‘do no harm’ oath that all doctors do,” Kim told a federal court jury in Manhattan.
She said she tried to hide her fame “behind the white coat” and Columbia University because she persuaded vulnerable patients before sexually abusing them.
“The defendant had a plan, a strategy,” Kim said. “This was not momentary.”
She said he asks patients about their sex lives and conducts lengthy breast exams, as long as 30 seconds to a minute, at each visit for some women. Then he “hiding behind gynecological exams… kept pushing the envelope and seeing how far he could go,” she said.
Defense attorney Kathryn Usencroft said what some of Hadden’s patients had endured at his hands was “disgusting and horrifying”, an act that made it appropriate for the doctor to lose his medical license. agreed with
“The damage they’ve suffered is real,” she said, adding, “We’re not disputing what happened in the testing room.”
But she said his guilty plea, indicted in New York state court seven years ago, was for all these abuses, and that it would be wrong to convict him on a new indictment based on the same crime. After that plea, Hadden of Englewood, New Jersey waived his medical license, but was not required to serve time.
Wozencroft said the sex trafficking charges required Hadden to know that the four patients involved in the charges were traveling across state lines and wanted to sexually abuse them. So I tempted them to do so.
The defense argued that Hadden was unaware of his client’s departure location or daily appointment roster during the two-week trial.
According to the indictment against Haden, the doctor sexually abused patients from 1993 to at least 2012 while working at two prestigious Manhattan hospitals: Columbia University Irving Medical Center and New York-Presbyterian Hospital.
Healthcare providers have already agreed to pay more than $236 million to settle civil claims filed by more than 200 former patients.
Among the former patients who have spoken publicly was Evelyn Yang, whose husband, Andrew Yang, failed to run as a Democrat for the 2020 presidential election and for mayor of New York City in 2022.
In 2020, she said Hadden sexually assaulted her eight years ago, even when she was seven months pregnant. I was there.
The Associated Press generally withholds the names of sexual abuse victims from articles unless they decide to make their stories public, as Yang and others did .
Hadden has been released on $1 million bail since his 2020 arrest.
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