Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2024

Crime Story Episode 21: Laura Beil

Host: Kathleen Goldhar

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: The following episode contains difficult subject matter, including references to sexual assault. Please take care.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I'm Kathleen Goldhar. This is Crime Story. Every week, a new crime with the storyteller who knows it best.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So my producers want me to start this podcast by talking about my visits to the gynecologist. I'm a mother of two, and I have been to the gynecologist lots and lots and lots of times. But the truth is I don't want to because going to the gynecologist is so profoundly personal. And that's what's so amazing about the story that I'm going to tell you about now. A bunch of women, really brave women, came forward to talk about their terrible violating experiences at their gynecologist. When I listened to this podcast by Laura Beil, it just really took my breath away. Laurie Kanyok was 38 years old when she became a patient of Dr. Robert Hadden, a gynecologist at Columbia University in New York City. Laurie felt lucky to be in Doctor Hadden’s care. He was well known and Columbia was an institution, but there were moments during her treatment where she wondered if Dr. Hadden was crossing a line. But then on a Friday afternoon in June of 2012, there was no mistaking it. Dr. Hadden was assaulting her. She told police that very day. But by the next Tuesday, Hadden was back at work, where he continued assaulting patients. Health reporter Laura Beil learned about Dr. Hadden years later at a medical conference and couldn't believe what she was hearing.

SOUNDCLIP

LAURA BEIL: I learned that he had been arrested, that he had faced prosecution and he was living as a free man. So one big question I had is how did that happen? How does a physician sexually abuse his patients and then get to go home and retire? And question number two is what was going on at Columbia? What was going on at Columbia?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Laura's investigation is now a podcast and a print story exposing one of America's most prolific sexual predators and the Ivy League institution that covered up his crimes. Laura joins me now to talk about Exposed: Cover up at Columbia University.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Laura, welcome to Crime Story.

LAURA BEIL: Thank you for the invitation.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: It's really nice to have you here. So the first person we do meet in your podcast is Laurie. Tell us about Laurie and what happens to her and then what she does.

LAURA BEIL: Yeah. So Laurie is probably the reason that we are having this conversation today because she was assaulted on a postpartum exam six weeks after her baby was born. And she immediately texted her boyfriend and he came to pick her up. And most importantly, he called 911.

SOUNDCLIP

OPERATOR: 911 operator 1520. Where’s your emergency?

LAURIE’S BOYFRIEND: My fiancee was at her OB-GYN, and he basically did something inappropriate to her.

OPERATOR: Did he arrest her, sir?

LAURIE’S BOYFRIEND: No. He basically touched her orally.

OPERATOR: Okay.

LAURA BEIL: And that 911 call set in motion a whole series of events which are still playing out today.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And you warn listeners, and I do want to warn listeners now that some of this information is pretty hard to hear. But very early on, we actually learned what he did, where he orally abuses her while her legs are in the stirrups. And I have to admit that even as a listener, when I heard that, I had this like moment of I wanted to knock my headphones off my head. I could not believe that this was happening to a woman who was, any woman, but in this situation. You've been covering medical stories for so long, medical abuse, medical crime. What was it like hearing what Hadden did to her?

LAURA BEIL: It was hard to hear. It was hard to hear because any sexual assault is horrific, but especially in this position of trust and vulnerability, because all of us make a decision when we go to a doctor, and you expose yourself to a doctor and you give a stranger permission to touch you. And that is a very unique situation, and you are uniquely vulnerable in that situation. And so that betrayal and violation of trust was just so profound.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

LAURA BEIL: And that's why we had a lot of discussion about how much detail do we include right at the outset? How much do you need to know, knowing that it would be traumatic and triggering? And it was not a decision we made lightly, but we did decide that it was important at the very beginning to know what he did. Because if you know what he did at the very beginning, then you understand how absurd it was that Columbia made certain decisions like letting him go right back to work.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah. So obviously, this podcast is one about what Hadden did, but it really is at its core about what Columbia didn't do. So can we talk about that? So Laurie calls her, excuse me, her fiancé calls the police. He does get arrested. What happens?

LAURA BEIL: So he gets arrested in his office. And one of the big questions we had going in was how much did Columbia know about his arrest, why he was arrested? And we discovered that the chairman of the department, the head of the hospital, the dean of the medical school, they all knew. You know, within a few days, they knew what had occurred, that he was arrested on a Friday. On Monday, he gets a letter saying you can go right back to work. And importantly, it also said, we are aware that you are under investigation by the NYPD, which answered one of the questions we had was how much did they know? They knew exactly that he had been arrested and that he was under investigation by NYPD. And they said, as long as you have a chaperone, you're fine. But of course, he wasn't fazed by the chaperone policy.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And they also start the letter with dear Bob.

LAURA BEIL: Dear Bob. Yeah, it was so informal. We called it the dear Bob letter because it's just extraordinary that it would be that casual. Like I'm sure if they pass him in the hall, it's like, you know, hey, Bob. And he went by Bob…

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: But he was arrested for sexual assault.

LAURA BEIL: He was arrested for sexual assault, and you're going to be so casual as to say dear Bob.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: In an official letter.

LAURA BEIL: In an official letter allowing you to go back to work. I mean, yeah, dear Bob. There was something about the attitude that that conveyed that you would just say dear Bob.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And the dismissiveness of the woman.

LAURA BEIL: Yes, yes. And she says they never talked to her. They never talked to her to see like, to see what happened. And on Tuesday, he resumed assaulting women. It didn't even… it didn't… he was so pathological that even getting arrested didn't stop him even for a day.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So Laurie calls the police. He gets arrested from a Friday to a Monday. He comes back to work. There is an attempt to charge or to find him guilty of that. Is that right? Tell us what happens with that case.

LAURA BEIL: So Laurie then goes to… she's interviewed by Laura Mellindorf. She was the assistant district attorney on the case, and she decides she wants to go ahead and pursue a case. Now, at that point, she only knew about Laurie. She only knew that there was one victim and she still wanted to go ahead. And Laurie had had a rape kit done. There was DNA evidence, but the DNA evidence was inconclusive as to whether Hadden was the one who had assaulted her. The DNA evidence finds genetic material from Laurie and two males. One of the males was her partner and the other was unknown male. So in my mind, that's corroborative. But the DA's office at the time decided not to pursue the case. So then what happens is Laurie files a civil suit. And she had been very savvy about not filing a civil suit while the criminal case was under consideration because a defence attorney could come and say you just wanted money, that's why you did it. So she did not file a civil suit until the criminal case was dropped. She filed a civil suit. There was a little bit of coverage of the civil suit in one of the local New York tabloids with a horrible headline, a tabloid headline. But that suit got the attention of more women, and more women started to come forward. So then, a couple of years after Laurie's assault, the district attorney makes a decision to indict him again because now there were more witnesses, now there were more women. And he is indicted in 2014.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You were very careful in the podcast, and I want to be here too. I don't need this to be salacious, but I am wondering if you can give us a sense of what he did to the women. What were some of the ways in which he assaulted them?

LAURA BEIL: So this is one of the things that Laura Mellindorf, actually, as she began to research her criminal case, that she started to discover is all the ways that he would assault them. So in Laurie's case, he licked her during the exam. And that was common, but he had all kinds of other ways of touching women in ways that were not medical. And she talked about this.

SOUNDCLIP

LAURA MELLINDORF: Having younger women paraded around his office naked and calling that a skin check and telling them that that was how he would check their skin for melanoma, double handed breast exams with one hand on each breast while gazing into the eyes of the person, abusing pregnant women and lactating women, squeezing their breasts so that their breast milk came out, sometimes on his body or his face. So of course, these women are going to experience self-doubt about a crime that is really beyond the imagination of most civilized human beings. And so often, they would go back to their doctor.

LAURA BEIL: And I was glad that she did talk about it because in the podcast, again, we really had so much discussion and tried to take so much care with how much detail we went into. But Laura Mellindorf describing it in the podcast, one of the reasons we used that tape where she described it is because it gave a way to give a sense of the scope of what he was doing, but not have to ask women to describe what happened to them. And so she really did a good job of just explaining, explaining that. And also, one of my favourite pieces of tape, if you have room for it, we called it, we called it The Beautiful Mind tape. Have you seen that movie?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yes.

LAURA BEIL: Okay. So you know there's a scene in the movie when he, when he's realizing like the patterns, the mathematical patterns, and he's standing there and the numbers are spinning around, you know, on, you know, on the screen. And that was Laura Mellindorf talking about when she realized, when she said, you know, I started doing the math in my head. I started like thinking how many patients.

SOUNDCLIP

LAURA MELLINDORF: I was trying to do calculations in my head, like how many patients does someone see in a day? Even if he only abused 10% of them, what are the sheer numbers of victims here? There were victims of all ages and backgrounds in clinics for people who had no insurance, and also in fancy offices on the Upper East Side. They were in every office, every age bracket, every ethnic bracket. I remember just being blown away by the numbers. I slowly came to realize that I was dealing with a sexual abuser of epic proportions, and I distinctly remember that when I started to say those numbers out loud, people looked at me like I was crazy.

LAURA BEIL: She became the first person to realize the scope of his crimes. And so we call that The Beautiful Mind.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: The Beautiful Mind. And there's just something so nefarious. And I know it's going to sound so obvious about a gynecologist, but it's like he almost chose that. I mean, you're already in such a vulnerable position. He's already touching areas where you… you… that are so personal. And, you know, I too have been pregnant. And especially your first one, you don't know what's going to happen.

LAURA BEIL: Yeah. He did tend to target women who didn't really have a baseline to think like, well, maybe he should do that. And also, first time pregnant, you're so much thinking about the health of your baby that you're not taking time to think, well, was that normal? Should he have done that? You know, did that happen? And so he did. He did tend to target women like that. Or the one, you know, woman who we talked to who said she was 16. You know, never been to, never been to an OB-GYN before. And she's scared and she's pregnant and he assaults her. Pretty, it was pretty… that's when there were a few moments recording the podcast, things that were just so hard to say even in the script. And describing her, what happened to her, that was very difficult to describe.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And it lives with these women.

LAURA BEIL: Yes.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: It's not something they can leave the office and let go.

LAURA BEIL: No.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So he's indicted. But what happens after that?

LAURA BEIL: So that was a big question we had, and the one person who knew the most when we started this was not talking to us. And that was the assistant district attorney.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And that's Laura Mellindorf.

LAURA BEIL: Yeah. So she was living and breathing this case. She was in charge of the prosecution. I knew that no one would know as much as she did, and she wouldn't. She wouldn’t talk. And there's a variety of reasons why she wouldn't talk. One is this case had traumatized her, essentially, I mean, because she had put her heart and soul into it. She believed the women she wanted, you know, she wanted to see him in prison and he wasn't. And then just the dysfunction in the office, all of this. And the other is that, you know, you report on, I mean, crime. There's a culture which I learned about. I didn't know. I'm a medical reporter. There's this whole culture that you just don't talk. Like in the criminal justice system, people just don't talk. You don't talk to the press and they never talk to the press. And that was ingrained in her because, you know, she couldn't abide by something that would be seen as wrong to do in the culture that she was in. So it took lots of time to get her to talk. We had some off-the-record conversations. It took probably 10 months of conversations to get her to trust us, to talk to us. And I told her two things. I said, one is you're a part of the story, whether you want to be or not, like whether you want to be or not. But this is a chance for you to tell your side of what happened, because her name had already been out there publicly as part of it. And nobody knows how you tried to fight for these women. Nobody knows that. So she ultimately agreed to go on-the-record. And she fought for a long time, but she was dealing with… this was pre MeToo. So that was part of the culture is there was a fear among her superiors that people just wouldn't believe the women. You know, even though there were so many of them, that they wouldn't believe. Now, I need to say, Laura Mellindorf did not believe that. She fully thought that they would make excellent witnesses. And she was later proven right in the federal case when a lot of these same women testified, and they were amazing witnesses. So that was one fear. But also, she was dealing with a defence attorney who really knew her stuff and really was super aggressive. And she was fighting that, you know, drowning her in paperwork and appealing to her bosses.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: I was going to say the defence attorney had a relationship with Laurie's boss.

LAURA BEIL: Yes, Cy Vance. Now, both the defence attorney and Cy Vance say that that relationship did not play into the decisions, and he recused himself from the case. But ultimately, the decision was made to just let him walk away. And I have to say, like the deputy district attorney, Karen Agnifilo, who made that decision, she now calls it the worst, you know, one of the worst mistakes of her 30-year career.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: They charged him with a misdemeanour. Is that right?

LAURA BEIL: One felony, one misdemeanour, but no jail time.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And he kept his license?

LAURA BEIL: No, no, no, he did have to relinquish his license, which was one part of it, you know, that they did fight hard for. And that's why they thought, oh, the women are going to be happy. You know, the women are going to be happy. And the women we talked to were like, what the hell? I mean, they couldn't believe that he was allowed to go free, but the reason he was allowed to go home is so complicated it took an entire episode of podcast to explain it. So it's more than I can say here, but it took a long time to sort of unravel all the forces that went into that decision. But he was allowed to go. He was allowed to go free. And if it were not for the survivors, he would be still at home today.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Which is exemplary of the problem, like you said, and what happened with MeToo, which allowed finally for the cultural societal sort of pushback against these stories to loosen up, because this idea I think at its core is that it's him against her. You know, you can't really believe, you might not believe her.

LAURA BEIL: Yes.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And I feel like MeToo pushed just a little bit past that. So that kind of response to it isn't there anymore. And then now there is… it is easier to move those cases forward.

LAURA BEIL: It is. All that is true. But I have to say that Laura Mellindorf always believed that the women would be credible. Like even pre MeToo, she was like, these are such good witnesses and they would be fine on the stand. And she knew that it was a really, a really powerful defence attorney who would go after them, who would go after their credibility, as is her job. But she thought that they would be able to withstand that.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: But she worked in the culture of it not being… not enough people like her believing that.

LAURA BEIL: Right.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah.

LAURA BEIL: Right. And I have to say, the person who made the decision on this plea deal had not talked to the women. And she says one of the mistakes is not allowing the women to make the decision for themselves. Like yes, I want to testify. I want to go forward with this. She made the decision for them, and she has a lot of regret for that.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And can we talk a little bit more about Columbia now? Because what we hear about in the podcast, and you do a lot of work to uncover Columbia's role in this and their role to kind of keep it quiet.

LAURA BEIL: Yes.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So can you tell us about, and there's especially one moment where we meet one of the victims from many, many years even before you understood it, from the 1990s, where she presents you with information that actually shows that Columbia had known about this for decades.

LAURA BEIL: Yeah. This was an extraordinary thing. One of the survivors was Evelyn Yang, the wife of Andrew Yang, who ran for president of United States in the 2020 election.

SOUNDCLIP

ANNOUNCER: Please welcome Andrew Yang. Hey.

ANDREW YANG: Hello, America. I'm Andrew Yang. You might know me…

LAURA BEIL: And Evelyn had not spoken about what happened to her publicly. She had not spoken about her assault. And at the time that she decided to go public, only one other person had decided to publicly reveal her name, and that was Marissa Hochstetter. And she went public after Hadden’s district Attorney case. Evelyn had seen what Marissa was trying to do, and seeing that Marissa really wasn't getting anywhere with trying to draw attention to the case, with trying to ask questions about what was going on at the district attorney's office that allowed this man to go free. And so right after that, Evelyn's husband decides to run for president of the United States. And Evelyn's assault had occurred in 2012, after Hadden had been allowed to go back to work after his arrest. So as her husband's profile is rising and her profile is rising, she meets women on the campaign trail who she's very moved by, like survivors of other kinds of trauma. And she realizes the support that comes from realizing you're not alone. And so she goes public, mainly just to try to help other women. She wasn't thinking beyond like what could this mean? She just wanted women to know this happens. You're not alone. And she decides to give an interview to CNN.

SOUNDCLIP

EVELYN YANG: What happened to me should have never happened. He was arrested in his office, and he was let back to work. And that's what's very painful, is knowing that actually, what happened to me could have been prevented.

LAURA BEIL: So she gives an interview on CNN and it was very difficult for her. And it's very difficult for her if you consider the stakes at the time as well, because, you know, her husband's campaign was still active and she didn't know how the media was going to react to this. And it was an extremely brave act to go public, to take a big risk. And this whole story has so many series of incredible coincidences and events. And one of them occurred during Evelyn's interview. So as it's airing on CNN, there is a woman watching who just happens to turn it on halfway through. She doesn't hear the name of the doctor, and she's listening to this. And her husband turns to her and says, that sounds like that doctor you saw in 1993. And her name was Dian Monson, and Dian had been assaulted by Hadden in 1993 during her first and only prenatal visit to Hadden. And Dian had done something extraordinary. She was a writer. She was working on her PhD, and she decided, well, if I tried to complain, no one would believe me because there was a chaperone in the room. So they would just say, well, there was somebody else in the room. This couldn't have happened. But she writes a very detailed letter describing in excruciating detail what Hadden had done. There was no doubt. It wasn't just Hadden made me uncomfortable. It was detailed about what he had done. She sends a letter to the chairman of the department at Columbia at the time. She sends this letter. She sends one letter there. She sends one letter to the risk management department. She gets a reply back from the chairman of the department that says, you know, I'm sorry to hear this. You know, I'll look into it. I'll get back with you in a couple of weeks. She never heard anything again. But the extraordinary thing for this story is that she still had copies of those letters, which is extraordinary. In a box in her basement, she still had them. So she immediately Googles up, who's the attorney for Evelyn Yang? And she calls him and says, I have information that is important to your case. And he was like, I could get on a plane now and go look for that letter. But what a coincidence. Like if she had not happened to turn that on, who knows if she would have ever known?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And it was because of this that things really then started to turn for Hadden too, right?

LAURA BEIL: Yes, on two fronts. So what happened, actually, Evelyn's interview was the turning point in the story for Hadden. Two things happened. One is that other women started coming forward. Like droves of other women came out of the woodwork. And I think at the time of Hadden's criminal case at the Manhattan district attorney, there were maybe 20, 21 known survivors. Evelyn's attorney had maybe 30 clients. Within two more months, he had like 90. So the scope of his crimes became known. The other thing that happened is Dian's letter came to light, and Dian's letter provided documentation that he had a long, long history of doing this. And I think from Evelyn's telling, like that helped to provide probable cause to the feds. The FBI started looking in and he was ultimately recharged in federal court.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And when was he recharged?

LAURA BEIL: He was charged in September of 2020.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And what happens?

LAURA BEIL: So after his federal indictment, then he was ultimately tried in federal court in January of 2023, and he was found guilty.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER: Emotional day inside a Manhattan federal courtroom as a former gynecologist accused of sexually abusing dozens of patients was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

LAURA BEIL: Now, here's the tricky thing, is that he couldn't be charged with sexual assault.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Why not?

LAURA BEIL: One is that they had to charge him with a federal crime. But the other is as part of his plea deal, it was stipulated that he could not be charged in the district attorney's office on the basis of any crime to any survivor known to the district attorney's office at the time. So any of his victims known to the DA's office in 2016 when he got off, he could not be recharged on those crimes. Now, I'm not a legal scholar, so I don't want to speak exactly how much that played into it. But I do know overwhelmingly, the reason he was not charged with sexual assault is because he did need to be charged with a federal crime, and they chose enticement for that. And it was basically like you can't lure someone across state lines for criminal sexual purposes. And so that's how they were able to charge him is from luring patients across state lines. So New York, you know, there were patients who came from, you know, new Jersey, Connecticut, even one who flew in from Nevada, who had been his former patient. But she thought he was such a good doctor that she continued to come to him for her care. So that's how they were able to charge him and try him. But it was a really tricky case because I had thought before the trial, I had thought, you know, how can he not be found guilty? Like that was my… And then I understood more about the case. And so enticement, you had to prove intent. So they had to prove… at the moment that he said to a woman, come back in six months or come back in a year or whatever the time period that he was having them come back, that at that moment, he intended to assault them. It couldn't have been just, you know, in the moment he saw opportunity, it was a spontaneous decision. And I thought, well, how do you prove intent at that moment?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Yeah, how did they prove that?

LAURA BEIL: Well, that's known only to the jury. But one juror who was interviewed later said that it was the grooming. Like he groomed these women for so long to build their trust, to lower their defences too. And so one interview that I saw with a juror afterwards said, if he didn't intend to assault them, why did he take pains to groom them? And he would. He would like be personal with them, and he would ask personal questions and share personal information, and this idea that I care about you, you know, which is not uncommon for sexual predators. It's people you trust. It’s people you trust who are some of the most prolific sexual predators.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And he was so good at it. You actually heard from women later who told you even how long it took them to recognize that they had been sexually assaulted themselves.

LAURA BEIL: Yes, yes. And one woman who read a statement later in federal court said even after he was arrested, she didn't believe it. And this is how good a groomer he was. So based on these interviews with a jury, again, I don't know. I haven't spoken with any of the jurors, but I would say that that had… that they cited the grooming. Like if he didn't intend to assault them, why did he groom them?

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So how did he manage, or I want to talk a little bit about the chaperones, because there's always this idea that there's a safety in having a nurse in the room, or that he was obviously able to either not have the nurses see, or as we heard in your podcast, even nurses who had suspicion or plainly saw it were not believed or didn't feel they could say something. And this isn't the first time in any of your investigations where you've spoken to nurses who don't feel that they have the power to say something or to do something about what they're seeing is wrong. So talk to me about that, that dynamic.

LAURA BEIL: Yeah. So we talked to one nurse Who went public for the first time, you know, on-the-record for the first time, and told us that she was a medical assistant. Well, we call them nurses because that's, you know, what we think of them as. But she was a medical assistant, and she was a medical assistant for a clinic in the early 90s. And she walked in on Hadden abusing a patient, and she decided at the time not to immediately go and report. And this is a complicated thing, but I understand it is that she thought it would be, you know, her word against Hadden’s. And you have the word of a medical assistant against a physician on, you know, a faculty physician. So who were they going to believe and who has the power in that situation? So she decided not to report, but she kept hoping that the woman herself would say something. And what she told us is, I kept hoping that she would come forward and I would be there to back up her story. But as far as, you know, we know she didn't. She did not come. She did not come forward.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: There's one woman in the podcast that you talk about who does try to come forward, who even goes to… she has another doctor that she says Hadden touched me inappropriately. And there's the famous post-it note. So can you tell me about that story?

LAURA BEIL: Yeah, the post-it note, another document that we were just so happy still existed. So a patient named Sandra Abramovich comes forward. She also did not quite process that she had been assaulted. And that's one thing I hope we make clear in the podcast is, you know, the question becomes, well, how could women not know if they were assaulted? Why didn't they report at the time? And it's such a complicated complex dynamic of self-doubt, of, you know, not wanting to believe something you trust. Or if you do believe it, you think this only happened to you and it must have been something about you. It's a very complex set of feelings. So Sandy had been assaulted, but she kept going to him. And she was one of these people who said, you know, the part of me that thought he cared was greater than the part of me that thought he could do something like this. So she keeps going to Hadden. She gets a letter in the mail one day from Columbia that says, oh, Hadden's no longer practicing. And it just said, dear valued patient, doctor Hadden's no longer practising. It doesn't give any reason.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Is this when he was finally arrested?

LAURA BEIL: This is when Columbia finally got rid of him. You know, this was in… this was… this letter went out in April of 2013, so it was some time after they'd gotten rid of him. The letter didn't say why he had left. It kind of sort of made it sound like maybe he had retired. We've talked to women who said they asked and they said, well, he's just leaving for personal reasons. Gave no hint at all. And they could have even said, you know, he hadn't been charged with sexual assault. So I understand that maybe they couldn't have said, you know, he was charged, but they could have done what, for example, there was a similar case that's going on right now in Boston at Brigham and Women's, and I'm told that in the letter they sent out, they said, this doctor is no longer practicing. If there is something about his care that you would like to discuss, here is a number to call. Which gives a signal like there might have been something fishy about his, you know, it doesn't say anything about the doctor, but they did. Columbia didn't even do that. So the first time Sandy tries to ask a faculty member what happened to Hadden, the faculty member immediately changes the conversation. I don't know anything about that and looks away. So she's like, okay, you know, we're done. We're not going to talk about this. Then later on, Sandy has a panic attack when she realizes that, because Sandy is a survivor of childhood sexual trauma. She has a panic attack. She realizes fully that something was wrong. She immediately calls her current doctor and says, I need to talk to you right now about something. She had a question of whether the ways that Hadden touched her were all medical. That was her question. He did these things to me. Is there any medical basis? The physician says no, there was no medical reason for him to do these things to you.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And this doctor is also at Columbia.

LAURA BEIL: Yeah, also at Columbia. That doctor after this conversation with Sandy says, oh, we've been told what to do. We've been told where to refer patients like you, Patients of… former patients of doctor Hadden’s. So the doctor leaves the room and she comes back with a post-it note with a name and number on it. Here, here's the person that you need to call, you know? And the name and number was for the Columbia General Counsel's office. So they were referring women to their lawyers. Now, there's one important thing I need to say about the timing of this. Sandy went to her doctor a couple of months after Hadden had been indicted in criminal court at the Manhattan DA's office. So Columbia knew at this point that there was a criminal investigation going on of his behaviour at the DA's office. Sandy could have been a witness in that case, and yet she was never referred. Sandy wasn't even aware that there was a criminal investigation. She was never told that there was a criminal investigation going on of Hadden, which is extraordinary, because you could maybe think… you could justify it by saying, well, they didn't know or they didn't get the signal, but they clearly knew when Sandy came forward that this man quite likely committed criminal activity under the guise of medical care. And yet, Sandy was never referred. But Sandy still had the post-it note. And she when we interviewed her, she had kept that post-it note in her wallet for years, and she never called the number. She never called the number, but she had the post-it.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Incredible.

LAURA BEIL: Yeah.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Did you try to talk to Columbia? Did you try to get them to explain?

LAURA BEIL: Many times.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So where did you go? How far did you get?

LAURA BEIL: Nowhere. Nowhere. And we tried a lot. So we did. My co reporter Bianca Fortas and I, we investigated it for a few months, and so we had enough material and questions for Columbia. So we approached them and said, we have a lot of questions for you about this case. And we first thought maybe they would talk to us, but then they didn't. And so periodically, we would come back to them and say, well, here's more questions that we have. And one time, when we were getting near publication of our print story and the release of the podcast, we sent them one list of questions that was seven pages long, like, please help us understand this. Explain to this. You know, why was a patient referred to your general counsel's office, and the district Attorney's office is never notified during a criminal. You know, just all kinds of questions we had. All we got in response was carefully worded statements that were just a few paragraphs long.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: But there is a difference between Columbia's administration and the students.

SOUNDCLIP

[people chanting ‘you protected Robert Hadden’]

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Because part of the podcast near the end talks about these medical students and their response to it, and it's very heartwarming.

LAURA BEIL: It is. And, you know, like I can be a little bit of a crier, and I have a hard time like talking about these students without tearing up, because after our podcast came out, we made very clear Columbia's complicity as far as we knew in what had occurred. In fact, the last episode of the podcast is called Willful Blindness, which probably sums it up. And again, like we didn't hear from anyone currently at Columbia about it except for the students. And the students decided to have a demonstration on the day of the new president's inauguration.

SOUNDCLIP

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I'm a second year medical student, and we're here to spread awareness about what's happened with Doctor Robert Hadden and the cover up that Columbia has perpetuated for the past several decades. It's honestly disgusting, and we're here to demand accountability by our institution and to show that as future medical professionals, we will not stand for this, and we want to make our voices heard.

LAURA BEIL: So these medical students were demonstrating in their white coats during the inauguration. And their bravery is so astounding, you know, that they would do that, because they have the least amount of power in the medical hierarchy, and they are dependent on the faculty for, you know, their future careers. And they are out there and they have such amazing moral clarity in this, and they are just inspiring. And one of the women who, see, I'm tearing up now, one of the women, the survivors who was there during their inauguration said, this is the first time I might trust a doctor again, Is seeing these students and seeing how they recognize what is right.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: And how many women do you think there could be? You looked back at the years and the amount of women that went through his office.

LAURA BEIL: I mean, we know over 500 have come forward, and that's just through word of mouth. That's just through word of mouth. So I tried to do a little of the math. And if you consider a 25-year career and the number of patients he saw, he saw during that time, and we figured on the low end, there were maybe 80 or 90,000 patient visits in that time. And you're talking about someone who was so pathological that an arrest didn't stop him from this behaviour. So I think there could be thousands. I think there could be thousands of women, and they either haven't processed what happened to them or they think it was just them, they think they're alone, they think it couldn't have been, all of these issues that plagued women for so long. And I wouldn't be surprised if there were thousands.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: There's a part of me that doesn't want to ask this question, because I feel like this needs to be about the women and getting accountability from Columbia. But what do you know about Hadden himself? You did a little bit of looking into who he was and where he came from.

LAURA BEIL: We did, and it's very dark. We don't know much. We knew he grew up in a kind of well-to-do suburb of New York City called Garden City. We know that his mother suffered from alcoholism pretty severely, and she would pass out during the day. We know that there was sexual abuse among Hadden's siblings during this time. And we know that at some point, according to the court documents, his mother tried to take his own life. So he had a very traumatic childhood. And we tried to talk to, you know, former high school classmates, and no one would. No one would talk. I don't know if it's just because they didn't know anything because he wasn't exactly, you know, it wasn't like he was, you know, pretty prominent in school. Like when I looked up his yearbook, there was nothing listed, which is in itself, it doesn't mean anything, but it just means that he wasn't, you know, captain of the debate team or, you know, people, you know, out there.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: He wasn't as charismatic.

LAURA BEIL: He wasn't as charismatic. And so, you know, maybe he… and we did talk to… I talked to college classmates who said he just would kind of fade in the background, and some of them didn't even know. And he went to like a small liberal arts college that was mostly female, so they weren't a lot of men. And they were like, was he in my class? Like they had to look up their yearbook. So he did kind of fade into the background. And, you know, we know that he… so he went to college. He had a little trouble getting into medical school at first. He went to St George's, which is on… it's in Grenada. He went there for a year, then he transferred, and then he got this residency at Columbia, and he was at Columbia from the start. Like he was at Columbia residency and he never went anywhere else. And we know from the people we've talked to that his residency ended in 1990, and the earliest victim we talked to was 1992. So he was abusing patients pretty early on.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Wow.

LAURA BEIL: You know, and he might have been doing it through residency. We just don't know. But the earliest that we talked to anyone was 1992, and she was a 16-year-old girl at the time.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So decades and decades.

LAURA BEIL: Yes.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: So, as I've mentioned before, I mean, you are a medical reporter. You have incredible podcasts. You've obviously been paying attention. And we know you from Doctor Death and from all your other wonderful podcasts. What did you take away from this story? How has it affected you?

LAURA BEIL: I think the women affected me the most because I've never… I've done stories, certainly, of medical system failure for a long time, but I've never done a project where that involved talking to person after person who’d been sexually assaulted. And their bravery is just something that, again, I'm a crier. Their bravery is something I will take away and their willingness to trust us with their stories. You know, this is incredibly painful for them to talk about, and they have to talk about it over and over again. You know, some of these women, like Evelyn and Marissa, Laurie, Dian, you know, they've been talking about this for a long time, and they keep having to talk about it. And I'm sure they want to get to the point where they don't have to talk about it anymore. And yet, here we are. Talk to us again. And I admire that so much in them. And we couldn't have done this story without them. And frankly, there would not have been justice without them. And I hope that we were able to do something for, you know, accountability in this case. But if it wouldn't have been for them, we wouldn't have been able to do it. So all the credit goes to them.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Well, credit goes to you too. It was great. And you really did open up that world to us and show us where accountability needed to be, so thank you for your work.

LAURA BEIL: Well, I do want to thank them. And, you know, the reason we do these things is not just to hold Columbia accountable, which is a big thing, and the failures of the criminal justice system accountable. But I hope that if there's another institution somewhere that has somebody just like this, that they make different decisions, that they learn from this and they make decisions that fall on the side of protecting women, not just keeping silent. Circle the wagons. You know, we're going to… we're going to fight this.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Let's hope.

LAURA BEIL: Let's hope. Let's hope.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Thank you so much for this.

LAURA BEIL: Oh, thank you. I enjoyed talking about it.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: Good.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: After Laura and I spoke, Columbia University did issue a public apology. And it announced it would be notifying more than 6000 former patients of Hadden's of his conviction and sentencing. They also announced a third party investigation and the creation of a $100 million settlement fund that would be open for one year, starting in January 2024. To date, Columbia has paid out more than $200 million in civil suits and is facing another civil case launched by more than 300 victims of Doctor Hadden.

KATHLEEN GOLDHAR: You've been listening to Crime Story from CBC Podcasts. We drop a new episode every Monday. You can get our next episode a week early on CBC Podcasts’ YouTube channel or by subscribing to the CBC Podcasts’ true crime channel on Apple Podcasts. In addition to Early Access, subscribers to our true crime channel also listen ad free. Crime Story is written and hosted by me. Our producers are Alexis Green and Sarah Claydon. Sound design by Graham MacDonald. Our senior producer is Geoff Turner. Our video producer is Evan Aagaard. Our YouTube producer is Jon Lee. Executive producers are Cesil Fernandes and Chris Oke. Tanya Springer is CBC Podcasts’ senior manager, and Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

Back To Top »

Provide Transcript Feedback

CBC would like to acknowledge the support of the Broadcasting Accessibility Fund.

Transcript: Crime Story, Episode 21

More Stories Like This