The doctor wore an unusual pen around his neck. It was really a concealed camera, and for years he secretly recorded women at some of their most private moments, during pelvic exams.
On Monday, Johns Hopkins Hospital agreed to pay $190 million to more than 7,000 women for the gross violation of doctor-patient trust in what experts said was one of the largest medical malpractice cases of its kind.
Dr. Nikita A. Levy, a gynaecologist and obstetrician for Johns Hopkins Community Medicine in Baltimore, was fired in February 2013 after a female colleague reported her suspicions of his penlike device. Ten days later, he committed suicide.
He had not shared itInvestigations by the police and the FBI ended without criminal charges being filed, concluding that Levy had not shared the more than 1,000 videos and images he had stored on computers at his home.
But a class-action lawsuit against the hospital accused Dr. Levy of harmful and offensive sexual contact with patients. Jonathan Schochor, a lawyer for the patients, said women were devastated to learn of the filming.
They feel an extreme breach of faith, breach of trust and betrayal, he said.
Many former patients have dropped out of the medical system, he said, adding that they now refuse to see doctors or take their children to paediatricians out of mistrust.
Emotional distressThe civil suit charged the hospital with invasion of privacy, emotional distress and negligence in its oversight of Dr. Levy, who practiced in a community clinic in East Baltimore run by the giant hospital system.
In a statement on Monday, the hospital said it hoped that the settlement, along with law enforcement findings that the images were not shared, helped those affected achieve a measure of closure.
The statement from the hospital, one of the nations leading academic centers of medicine and a large community health care provider, added: “We assure you that one individual does not define Johns Hopkins. Johns Hopkins is defined by the tens of thousands of employees who come to work determined to provide world-class care for our patients and their families.”
Initially, the hospital identified nearly 12,700 patients Dr. Levy might have seen in his 25 years as an employee. Investigators estimated that he began recording patients with tiny cameras hidden in a pen or a key fob around 2005.
“Words cannot describe how deeply sorry we are for all this has affected,” two top officials of Johns Hopkins wrote to former patients last year. We are terribly sorry this has happened and for the distress you must be feeling. — New York Times News Service
