BR was 27 years old and suffering from groin pain when he began seeing a renowned New York urologist, Dr. Darius Paduch , in 2006. What took place in the examination room haunts him to this day.
Paduch told him to masturbate in front of him and proceeded to examine and photograph his erect penis, BR said. Paduch also showed BR photographs he had taken of other men’s penises as well as hardcore porn on a computer in his examining room, according to BR. “Some things were clearly over the line,” said BR, who asked to be identified by his initials.
Still, he did not initially report Paduch to anyone at the hospital. “He had reasons to touch me,” BR said, “so it was hard to say with certainty that this is wrong.” But about 12 years later, spurred in part by the rise of the #MeToo movement , BR filed a complaint with the New York Health Department.
He also emailed it to the associate general counsel at the hospital where Paduch worked, NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell in Manhattan. Yet Paduch continued seeing patients at the hospital for one more year and remained employed until March 2020. And he continued seeing patients at the hospital he joined that same year, Northwell Health on Long Island, even after at least one person reported to management that Paduch had abused him years prior under the guise of medical care.
Paduch was only terminated in April 2023 when he was arrested and ultimately charged with sexually abusing seven former patients, including five boys under age 18. The urologist was convicted in federal court in May after a 10-day trial that left a crucial question unanswered: How was he allowed to practice for so long? “There’s a litany of evidence that this was going on,” BR said, speaking out for the first time. “Why would an institution tolerate this kind of behavior?” He is among hundreds of men who have filed lawsuits accusing the hospitals of enabling and failing to stop Paduch from sexually abusing patients in his care.
(In court filings, the hospitals have denied allegations of negligence or misconduct.) The suits have yielded evidence that shows employees of Weill Cornell, where Paduch worked for 17 years, were made aware of sexual abuse complaints far earlier than previously known. Between 2006 and 2018, at least five complaints were made by patients and employees of Weill Cornell, accusing Paduch of a range of inappropriate behavior and sexually charged remarks, according to interviews with patients and lawyers as well as a review of hundreds of pages of court documents.
“This is not a man who was able to abuse hundreds, if not thousands, of patients in a vacuum,” said Mallory Allen, a Seattle-based attorney who represents 140 men, including BR. She called Paduch “sadistic” and a “sexual predator” who leveraged being a doctor to victimize his patients. “He did so under the banner of the institutions where he worked,” Allen added.
Paduch, 57, was sentenced Wednesday to life in prison for sexually abusing the seven former patients between 2007 and 2022. Spokespeople for Weill Cornell and Northwell Health declined to answer specific questions related to Paduch, citing the ongoing litigation. “Darius Paduch betrayed the sacred trust of a caregiver, caused profound harm to his patients, and lied to the Northwell Health community,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
“Providing the best care to our patients comes first at Northwell which is why we were appalled by the deeply disturbing revelations that came out during Dr. Paduch’s criminal trial.” A spokesperson for Weill Cornell Medicine said the hospital has enhanced its policies “to minimize the risk of such abhorrent conduct occurring in the future.
” “We launched expanded chaperone policies and training in September 2023, which also included new requirements for clinical practices, such as prominent signage in exam rooms and additional documentation procedures,” the statement said. Azza AbuDagga, a health services researcher for the consumer rights advocacy group Public Citizen, said it’s not uncommon for abusive doctors to avoid repercussions in part because of who is responsible for deciding whether to take action. “Who regulates doctors? Doctors,” said AbuDagga, speaking generally based on research she conducted for two reports on the sexual abuse of patients by physicians in 2016 and 2020 .
“I call it a conspiracy of silence.” She said hospital executives also have a strong incentive to keep such allegations quiet to avoid negative publicity and the prospect of losing a profitable doctor. “There should be zero tolerance for this kind of problem,” she said.
“You will rarely find a hospital that adopts that standard.” ‘Completely dismissed’ Paduch was a leading figure in the field of urology. A graduate of the Medical Academy of Lodz in Poland, he specialized in male infertility, publishing dozens of medical articles and attracting patients from all over the country.
But behind closed doors, Paduch preyed on the men and boys who sought him out. Manhattan lawyer Thomas Giuffra said that in 2006, one of his clients complained to two doctors at Weill Cornell — one male and one female — that Paduch masturbated him. “They both told him he misinterpreted it, that he imagined it,” said Giuffra, who has filed a lawsuit on behalf of the man.
“He was completely dismissed.” Urologist patients are uniquely vulnerable to abuse, experts say, because of the intimate nature of the medical care and the lack of general knowledge about what falls outside the boundaries of standard procedure. Two urologists testified at Paduch’s trial that it’s never appropriate to manually stimulate a patient.
One of the men who filed a lawsuit against Paduch had medical training himself but said he still didn’t realize until many years later that it was abuse. The man, a neuroscientist who had a fertility issue, said Paduch forced him to masturbate in front of him and grabbed his penis to show him the “correct” technique. “If this can happen to me, it can happen to anybody,” the man said.
In an interview, BR said he first reported Paduch’s conduct to another Weill Cornell urologist in 2011, but he doesn’t believe it was taken seriously because nobody followed up with him. It was seven years later, after Harvey Weinstein was arrested and the #MeToo movement was taking off, that he went online and saw other patients had complained about Paduch. BR decided to file an official complaint with the New York Health Department’s Office of Professional Medical Conduct.
“During a series of office consultations,” BR wrote, Paduch “engaged in a number of abusive and inappropriate actions, including “requiring that I masturbate in front of him so he could examine my erect penis” and “photographing my erect penis.” BR also emailed a copy of the report to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital’s associate general counsel in March 2018, according to a copy of the email viewed by NBC News. But he said he didn’t hear back from the state Health Department or the hospital for months.
Paduch, meanwhile, continued to see patients. ‘Shocking and embarrassing’ By then, Weill Cornell had already received at least two complaints about Paduch from its own employees, going back more than a decade. In December 2007, a clinical technician said in an internal email that Paduch’s use of humor with some patients was “very inappropriate, shocking, and embarrassing” and that Paduch’s use of language with patients was “very sexual and at times demeaning,” according to court filings.
Then in 2012, another employee — a male nurse who worked with Paduch — wrote a letter to human resources laying out several examples of what he described as Paduch’s inappropriate behavior, according to court filings. Paduch once said that a patient was so hot that he wanted him to “drop to [his] knees.” Then he made a gesture indicating oral sex, according to the letter.
It also stated that Paduch had previously gotten into trouble with HR for telling a patient that it looked like he “has cum in [his] hair.” About nine months after BR contacted the state Health Department and Weill Cornell, a hospital employee acknowledged in an internal email that Paduch had been the subject of unspecified complaints over “events” stretching back a decade. “Several events have occurred over the past 10 years and were handled at the departmental level with faculty counseling,” read the email, which was sent to a hospital administrator in December 2018 and has since been filed in court.
The employee sought the administrator’s participation “in evaluation of a faculty member” — identified as Paduch — “who has had several patient comments or complaints regarding his interaction with patients.” The details of the complaints were not provided, and Weill Cornell did not respond to a request for additional information. BR said he was interviewed by someone in human resources at Weill Cornell around December 2018, the same time the internal email was sent, but there was no follow-up.
He said he heard from an investigator with the state Health Department’s Office of Professional Medical Conduct a few months earlier. The investigator said in the call that he probably couldn’t pursue the case because there was no unequivocally sexual behavior, according to BR. A spokesperson for the New York Health Department said in a statement that its investigations are confidential but that it “takes instances of potential medical misconduct seriously and acts appropriately to protect the health and safety of patients.
” A Weill Cornell spokesperson declined to comment on BR’s case, citing pending litigation. It’s unclear what, if anything, Northwell Health executives knew about the complaints at Weill Cornell when they hired Paduch in the spring or summer of 2020. But not long after he landed his new job, a handwritten letter arrived at the Long Island hospital from a former patient of Paduch’s.
‘Obscenely close’ Tucker Coburn was still in high school when he started seeing Paduch at Weill Cornell in 2015 to get treated for Klinefelter syndrome, a genetic condition that can affect testosterone levels and cause other issues. He says Paduch fondled him during medical exams when he was 17. And then in 2016, after he turned 18, he says Paduch grabbed his penis and started masturbating him while pressing his own penis into Coburn’s arm.
“I didn’t feel like I had the ability to say no,” Coburn said. “I was lying on a bed and he was standing over me. It was very physically daunting, and he was my doctor.
” Coburn continued seeing Paduch — because he was among the only doctors in the region known for treating Klinefelter syndrome — but the abuse stopped. Then in January 2017, Coburn got an unexpected call. He says another patient of Paduch’s reached out saying a concerned nurse at Weill Cornell had suggested they connect because he was “having issues” with Paduch and the nurse thought Coburn did as well.
Coburn says the man proceeded to tell him that Paduch had sexually abused him. For more than a year, the two men spoke often and helped each other process their trauma, Coburn said. In 2020, Coburn decided he was ready to come forward.
He filed a police report with the New York Police Department and sent a handwritten letter to Northwell Health where Paduch had recently been hired, detailing his own experience. Coburn’s hands shook as he recently read the letter aloud: “I sincerely hope that Dr Paduch no longer assaults his patients. But hope isn’t enough,” he wrote.
“Please, before one of your patients is assaulted or abused by this man, investigate his prior actions, and consider taking appropriate measures.” Northwell Health conducted an investigation that found both Coburn and Paduch to be “credible,” according to an internal September 2020 memo filed in court. While the claims of sexual assault were not substantiated, the memo notes that the department had recently hired a male nurse practitioner to serve as a chaperone during sensitive medical examinations whenever possible.
Paduch continued seeing patients, and about two months later, an ultrasound technician, Katie Price, saw him manually stimulating a patient, she testified at Paduch’s criminal trial. Price told the court that she turned toward her computer screen “in shock,” left the room and reported the incident right after it happened, according to a transcript of her testimony. Northwell once again launched an investigation but could not substantiate that Paduch manually stimulated patients, according to a March 2021 Northwell Health memo filed in court.
Other allegations that Paduch was using inappropriate, often sexual, language in front of staff and patients were found to be substantiated. Paduch was allowed to continue treating patients. Around the time the memo was sent, a man from Queens arrived in the emergency room of Northwell’s North Shore University Hospital complaining of severe testicular pain.
The man, James O’Connell, said Paduch put his face “obscenely close” to his genitals and fondled them. He reluctantly saw the Northwell urologist a couple more times ahead of a surgery performed by Paduch. “I was under general anesthesia with this man for two hours,” O’Connell, now 38, said.
“I will never know what happened in that room.” Paduch was arrested two years later, in April 2023, just four months after a 16-year-old former patient and intern filed a lawsuit accusing the doctor of sexually abusing him from 2015 to 2017. After news of the arrest broke, O’Connell said he found himself reliving his encounters with the doctor and concluding that the conduct was beyond the pale.
“Every time I talk about this, the first thing that comes to mind is this should never have happened to me,” O’Connell said. “How was this guy practicing medicine? How was this guy hired?” Those aren’t his only questions. “How many people like me are there who went through this because they didn’t do their due diligence, didn’t follow up on allegations and, as far as I’m concerned, didn’t take it seriously?”.
Politics
A star urologist preyed on men and boys. Why didn't his hospitals stop the abuse?
Dr. Darius Paduch was convicted in federal court in May after a 10-day trial that left a key question unanswered: How was he allowed to practice for so long?