Emergency room doctor charged with sexually abusing patients

A prominent emergency room doctor at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan was arrested Tuesday and accused of drugging, groping and masturbating on a female patient and groping another in separate episodes several months apart, the authorities said.

The charges against the doctor, David H. Newman, 45, a proponent of reforms in emergency care who has written widely about improving doctor-patient relationships, describe him targeting young women for abuse when they sought medical treatment.

In one case, a 29-year-old woman called the authorities Jan. 12 and said she had gone to the emergency room at Mount Sinai on the Upper East Side for shoulder pain, where between midnight and 2 a.m. that day she was assaulted by Newman, the police said.

Nurses initially gave the woman pain pills and a morphine shot before taking her in for an X-ray, a law enforcement official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a continuing investigation. Then Newman came into her room and gave the woman another shot of morphine, even after she told the doctor that she had already received one.

She told investigators that she began to slip in and out of consciousness. The woman, wearing a hospital gown, felt Newman grab her breasts and then ejaculate on her body, the official said. She told investigators that the drugs had incapacitated her.

story_article_left1

She later put the gown, which she told the police had Newman’s semen on it, into a plastic bag in a hospital bathroom, apparently to preserve evidence, the official said.

Newman was charged with sexual abuse and forcible touching, the police said.

After news reports emerged about those accusations, a second woman came forward on Saturday and told the police that Newman had abused her during an examination. The woman, 22, had gone to the emergency room with a cold around 6 p.m. Sept. 21 when, she told investigators, Newman groped her breasts, according to a criminal complaint. He has been charged with sexual abuse in that episode.

In a statement, Mount Sinai said Newman “has been suspended from Mount Sinai pending the outcome of the investigation, and we continue to cooperate fully with the appropriate authorities.”

The statement added: “He has not provided care to patients at Mount Sinai since the investigation began. We take the nature of these allegations very seriously and continue to conduct our own extensive internal inquiry.”

Newman appeared in court Tuesday night, and a judge ordered him held on $50,000 cash bail or $150,000 bond. His defense lawyer could not be reached for comment.

Online biographies describe Newman as the director of clinical research in the department of emergency medicine at the hospital’s medical school and say that he worked in a combat support hospital in Baghdad as a major in the U.S. Army Reserve. In 2008 he published a book, “Hippocrates’ Shadow: Secrets From the House of Medicine.”

The back cover says that Newman “sees a lack of candid communication between doctors and patients” and that the book exposes “the patterns of secrecy and habit in modern medicine’s carefully protected subculture.”

-(c) 2016 New York Times News Service