On September 9, the FBI and U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss announced the arrest of Robert Hadden, a former OB-GYN at Columbia University who is facing criminal sex abuse charges.
The federal indictment accuses Hadden of enticing 6 victims to travel to his offices in Manhattan to be sexually abused, including a teenage girl who he delivered as a baby.
Strauss called Hadden “a predator in a white coat” who “inappropriately touched, squeezed and even licked his victims.”
“[Hadden] used the examinations of his victims for his own sexual gratification, abusing dozens of victims over a nearly 20-year period, including multiple minor girls, one of whom Hadden had himself delivered.”
Dozens of women have come forward to accuse Hadden of abuses — including secretly licking patients’ vaginas, conducting extremely long and sexualized breast exams, using his ungloved fingers to penetrate patients’ vaginas and anuses without a medical purpose, and frequently talking about sexual topics without prompting from patients.
One of his most vocal critics is Evelyn Yang, wife of former presidential candidate Andrew Yang. She filed a lawsuit accusing Hadden of multiple sexual assaults while she was pregnant.
More than 70 women have filed lawsuits against Hadden, including at least two teenage girls. The lawsuits also claim that Columbia University “actively concealed, conspired, and enabled” his abuses.
CNN reported that a patient told officials at Columbia University that she was sexually abused by Hadden in 1994 — but the university never responded.
Hadden was previously arrested in 2012 in his office at Columbia when a patient told police that he licked her vagina during an exam.
Unfortunately, the arrest was voided, and Columbia allowed him to continue seeing patients without supervision. Six weeks later, he sexually assaulted Evelyn Yang during an exam.