Rapey Patel Faces Allegations from Former Employees

Abortion doctor
Naresh Patel

Recently I blogged about abortion doctor Naresh Patel after KATV Arkansas reported about his arrest for lying to patients by telling them they're pregnant when they're not then charging them $620 for abortion drugs.

Well, News OK is doing some actual journalism, looking into Patel's past. And what did they find? Employees suing him for sexual harassment.

In one recent lawsuit, former employee Kim Hauser, who had been hired by Patel in November of 2012 as a receptionist for a Holiday Inn he owned, came forward. She said that Patel made her work at his abortion clinic, performing the duties of a surgical technician and of a nurse. She also reported that he had frequently pressed her for sexual favors, and when she refused he made her perform disturbing tasks such as bagging up aborted fetuses.


Ms. Hauser said she needed the job to provide for her children. She finally quit in May of 2013, she told a judge, after Patel tried to rape her.

Another former employee, Tami Amsler, also filed suit against Patel, and accepted a confidential settlement. She, like Ms. Hauser, said that she'd begun working for Patel at one of his hotels, in her case the Staybridge Suites. She began working for him in January of 2013 and quit on March 15, 2013, because, she said, Patel “incessantly and inappropriately propositioned” her for sexual favors and engaged in sexually aggressive behaviors such grabbing her breasts. Her lawyer says that he has text messages from Patel that substantiate her allegations.

Each woman separately alleges that Patel offered her money in exchange for "marrying" a foreigner.

Patel's treatment of his employees, however, seems almost chivalrous in comparison to what his patients have reported.

Patient allegations. Click to enlarge.

In 1993, three of Patel's patients came forward reporting that he had raped them. Patient #1 was groggy, recovering from her abortion, when Patel put his penis in her mouth. Patient #2 was groggy from sedation for her abortion when Patel raped her orally, vaginally, and rectally. Patient #3 reported that he had raped her vaginally when she was on the procedure table. Somehow, in spite of ample evidence, including taped phone conversations in which Patel admitted to putting his penis in Patient #1's mouth, he was acquitted.

Patel's bad behavior, moreover, hasn't been limited to fraud, sexual harassment, and sexual assault.

In 1995, a patient sued him for putting a 6 cm. tear in her cervix and being unable to treat her for this injury because he had no hospital admitting privileges. Another patient sued him in 1994 after he had mangled her uterus and refused to call an ambulance until her family members demanded that he do so; she required an immediate hysterectomy to save her life. Another patient sued in 1994 when she began bleeding and expelling fetal parts after he'd discharged her from his clinic.

News clipping about fetus dumping.
Click to enlarge.

In 1992 he admitted to burning a bag of 60 aborted fetuses in an open field.

In 1990 he was reprimanded for disemboweling a 15-year-old abortion patient. His medical assistant saw him "pull out some tissue and take it in his hands." She then testified that Patel said, "That's her small intestine" before stuffing it back inside. The teen was rushed to a hospital, where surgeons found a hole in her uterus and a fetus floating in blood in her abdomen. She needed to have her fallopian tubes, ovaries, and portion of her colon removed due to injuries.

Redacted patient record recovered
from dumpster. Click to enlarge.

In 2013 Patel also disposed of confidential patient information in a dumpster, including patient consent forms,  financial information, and abortion documentation. He also dumped job applications that had personal information about the applicants. As if that's not enough, he also disposed of  biohazardous materials in the dumpster.

How many Patels and Gosnels must there be before pro choice Americans start to recognize that the abortion lobby protects the interests of abortion business, not the interests of the women who entrust their bodies and their lives to those people?

Blast From the Past: Max, Judy, Voodoo, and Abortion Fraud

IMPORTANT: Current status unknown: Dr. Judith Comeau-Samuel has changed her name to Dr. Judith Prophete and is listed on many web sites as practicing obstetrics and gynecology, family practice, and/or addictions treatment in Philadelphia and occasionally in New Jersey. The Pennsylvania Department of State web site lists her as having an active license to practice medicine, but also on one of its pages lists her address as the State Correctional Institution at Muncy, PA. The Pennsylvania Department of Corrections shows no inmate by that name. For public safety I think it's important that we verify where this woman is and what she is doing.

Voodoo Made Me Do It

The recent arrest of Dr. Narash Patel for selling abortions to women who weren't actually pregnant isn't an isolated incident. Similar frauds, as uncovered by the Chicago Sun-Times, have been found across the country. But the oddest case by far must be a husband and wife team of New York abortionists.

When called before the medical board in 1986, Dr. Judith Comeau-Samuel admitted to practices endangering the health of patients at her abortion clinics, but claimed that she had only done so because she was dominated by her husband and manipulated by him via voodoo.

The report indicated that Comeau-Samuel and her husband would charge $75 for a pregnancy test. They would then tell the patient she was pregnant, then offer to apply the $75 pregnancy test fee toward the cost of an abortion. Authorities estimated that 25% of the abortions performed at Comeau-Samuel's facilities were done on non-pregnant women. The number of victims in 1985 was estimated at 2,400.

The whole scheme got exposed after a woman who had undergone a sterilization procedure was told that she was pregnant at one of the Comeau-Samuel facilities. The husband-and-wife team were arrested after a sting by two non-pregnant policewomen.

What was particularly alarming, in addition to the unnecessary emotional distress and risks of the procedures themselves, is that these "abortions" were done under general anesthesia in a substandard facility, placing these women at severe risk of debilitating or even lethal anesthesia complications.

Medical board documents indicate that the Medical Board, Commissioner of Health, Regents Review Committee, and Board of Regents all found Comeau-Samuel guilty of:

• 65 counts of "practicing the profession with gross negligence"
• 29 counts of "Permitting, aiding, or abetting an unlicensed person to perform activities requiring a license"
• 90 counts of "Practicing the profession fraudulently"
• 65 counts of "Practicing the profession with gross incompetence"
• 139 counts of "Unprofessional conduct" 

The charges related to the following violations at Comeau-Samuel's two abortion clinics:

• performing abortions on non-pregnant women
• failure to take medical history or perform examinations
• administering general anesthesia without ascertaining if patients had eaten
• administering general anesthesia without proper resuscitative equipment
• failing to monitor vital signs during general anesthesia
• failure to provide post-anesthesia evaluations
• failure to give adequate aftercare instructions
• failure to obtain informed consent
• failure to supervise recovery
• failure to test for Rh factor hence jeopardizing health and lives of future babies of Rh-negative patients
• allowing her husband Maxen Samuel to practice without a license
• falsely advertising that medical services would be performed by board-certified specialist when they were performed by non-certified Comeau-Samuel and non-licensed Maxen Samuel
• having pregnancy tests performed by untrained individual if they were performed at all

Comeau-Samuel was fined $19,500, and her license was revoked. Her husband was jailed for performing abortions on non-pregnant women and for practicing medicine without a license. Samuel was also disciplined for having food, coffee, and wine available to patients in the waiting room then not warning them of the danger of eating prior to general anesthesia.

Samuel's attorney said that Samuel admitted to operating without a license, but insisted that he had to do so because he needed the money. The judge reviewing the case ordered the couple to surrender their passports to prevent flight to their native Haiti.

 For more on the Voodoo Abortionists, see:

• Holtzman v. Samuel 130 Misc.2d 976 (1985)

                                                                     

 

 

 

 

Deaths After Phony Abortions? A Call For Information

Naresh Patel

Secular Pro-Life raises in interesting question in the wake of the arrest of abortionist Naresh Patel for selling abortions to women who weren't actually pregnant: "Have any women been injured or killed by complications from fake abortions?"

I know of two verified deaths of women who had been sold abortions when they hadn't actually been pregnant.

"Sandra" committed suicide in 1971 after an abortion sold to her when she hadn't been pregnant. Before ending her life she had expressed remorse about having "killed her baby."

In 1989, Synthia Dennard bled to death from a combination abortion/tubal ligation sold to her when she hadn't actually been pregnant.

There is a third possibility that I have been trying to verify. In 1979, Deloris Smith had been injured during an abortion about four months before her 15th birthday and died shortly after her birthday. I recall seeing a news clipping that said her mother was suing and claiming that the pregnancy test done at the National Abortion Federation clinic prior to the abortion had actually come up negative. If anybody has access to Atlanta news archives, or can do a docket search for the mother's lawsuit, please follow through and let us all know what you find.

Patel Shows: Abortion Practice Hasn't Changed, Abortion Journalism Has

Naresh Patel

I've blogged recently about Narash Patel, the rapey Oklahoma abortionist who got caught selling abortions to women who weren't actually pregnant. Patel is hardly a ground-breaker in that field, though.

Investigative Journalism

While I was looking for something specific about abortionist Ulrich Klopfer, who is in trouble now for failing to report the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl, I went digging through the Chicago Sun-Times series, "The Abortion Profiteers." This series ran from November 12 through November 28, 1978.

Assisted by members of the Chicago Better Government Association, Sun-Times reporters Pamela Zekman, Pamela Warrick, and Ellen Warren completed a five-month investigation into Chicago abortion businesses. Volunteers went under cover, getting jobs at the clinics and telling the journalists what they saw.

I was looking, as I said, for something specific about Klopfer. I'll blog that later when I find it. What I did find quickly was an article I'd forgotten had even been in the series: "Pregnant or not, women given abortions," published on November 22.

I'll quote just a few key passages; you can read the whole thing for yourself on PDF if you follow the link above.

[W]orking undercover at the Water Tower Reproductive Center, ... BGA investigator Minda Trossman counted 81 abortion procedures performed on women with negative pregnancy test results. That was 12 per cent of all the women who received abortions during the two months Trossman worked there.

The article then goes on to report on Biogenetics, Ltd.:
During a five-month investigation ... we witnessed some of these painfully needless abortions and saw the aftermath. Women innocently underwent abortions they didn't need and, as a result, suffered massive infections, bruises, wrenching cramps, severe bleeding.

Observing Dr. Arnold Bickham:

Trossman watched once as Bickham turned what was supposed to be a simple examination into a fast abortion on a woman with no apparent signs of pregnancy. ....

"Am I pregnant?" the patient asked.

Bickham ignored her question. Let me examine you," he said. After a brief examination, Bickham turned on the suction machine and started the abortion.

Only then did he answer. "Yes," said Bickham, "definitely pregnant. Definitely pregnant ... but not any more."

The report then goes into a then-popular procedure for doing very early abortions called "menstrual extraction." The method fell out of favor because the embryo is so small very early in the pregnancy that the abortion is often unsuccessful and the woman needs to go through a second, later procedure if she still wants to abort the pregnancy.

Most women who undergo extractions aren't pregnant in the first place. Unless patients are carefully screened, as many as 80 per cent of the women who undergo extractions do so needlessly. .... Many doctors consulted by the Sun Times said they would not even consider performing a menstrual extraction on a woman with a negative pregnancy test. Yet, at the Water Tower and Biogenetics clinics, it's the women with the negative tests who are most often sold the extractions.

Same Old Same Old

Selling abortions to women who only believe they are pregnant isn't something that vanished after "The Abortion Profiteers" and then resurfaced recently with Patel. In March of 1995, I was at Life Dynamics and we were  working on Lime 5, a book about abortion malpractice and its enablers. We got a call from one of Diane Sawyer's assistants. Ms. Sawyer, we were told, had heard rumors that some abortion facilities were selling abortions to women who were not, in fact, pregnant; they just thought they were.

We told Ms. Sawyer's assistant that this was a slow news day kind of story that local journalists would often do: send female reporters to abortion clinic with male reporter's urine specimens, and then document being told that they were pregnant and the attempts to sell them abortions.

We supplied the assistant with what he asked for -- a list of abortionists who were still practicing even after having been caught selling abortions to women who were not pregnant.

Lawson Akpulonu

Though selling abortions to women who weren't pregnant was still a thriving practice, journalism wasn't. Ms. Sawyer's assistant said that she'd reviewed the information we'd sent her (along with additional information we'd sent her about appalling quacks who were still practicing, including a scoop on a California abortionist who was raping patients) and decided the whole thing was "a non-story."

Abortion practice hasn't changed, but abortion-related journalism has. Gone are the days of reporters investigating abortion clinics and informing the public about dangerous or fraudulent practitioners in their midst.

Why Has Journalism Changed?

Why has this changed? The attitudes of the journalists toward abortion hasn't changed. When Ms. Zekman,  Ms. Warrick, and Ms. Warren wrote "The Abortion Profiteers," they weren't anti-abortion reporters seeking to besmirch abortion providers. They were staunchly pro-choice reporters seeking to protect women from unscrupulous and dangerous practitioners. But when we provided Ms. Sawyer with a rogues gallery of Gosnellesque quackery, alerting women to unscrupulous and dangerous practitioners was no longer a priority. And as we saw with the media coverage of Kermit Gosnell and other deplorable abortion practitioners since he was exposed, alerting women to unscrupulous and dangerous practitioners remains a non-priority, just as Ms. Sawyer considered those practitioners to be a non-story.

I think what has happened is that journalists have been developing a deepening sense of unease about what goes on behind the doors of America's abortion facilities. Nobody likes to get bad news about people they respect and trust. We want to continue to think the best of them. And pro-choice journalists, being human, want to be able to respect and trust the abortion-rights organizations they depend upon for nearly everything they write about abortion. Nobody wants to learn that they've been duped, lied to, and used.

The unquestioned presumption that "safe and legal" is the status-quo can not stand under the weight of too much evidence of appalling wrongdoing inside American abortion practices. That evidence must be avoided at all costs, even if it involves averting one's eyes from the Gosnells and the Patels at the cost of women's well-being and even their lives.

Rapey Abortionist Arrested for Fraud

Abortion doctor
Naresh Patel

KATV Arkansas is reporting about the recent arrest of abortion doctor Naresh Patel for lying to patients by telling them they're pregnant when they're not then charging them $620 for abortion drugs. This is a triple-whammy to the patients, who lose their money, needlessly take drugs that can cause fatal infections, and go through the emotional trauma of believing that they have aborted their babies.

Patel has a long history, though, of willingness to endanger and traumatize patients. It's staggering that, like Kermit Gosnell in Pennsylvania, he was free to practice after all the deplorable things he'd done.

Patient allegations. Click to enlarge.

In 1993, three of Patel's patients came forward reporting that he had raped them. Patient #1 was groggy, recovering from her abortion, when Patel put his penis in her mouth. Patient #2 was groggy from sedation for her abortion when Patel raped her orally, vaginally, and rectally. Patient #3 reported that he had raped her vaginally when she was on the procedure table. Somehow, in spite of ample evidence, including taped phone conversations in which Patel admitted to putting his penis in Patient #1's mouth, he was acquitted.

In 1995, a patient sued him for putting a 6 cm. tear in her cervix and being unable to treat her for this injury because he had no hospital admitting privileges. Another patient sued him in 1994 after he had mangled her uterus and refused to call an ambulance until her family members demanded that he do so; she required an immediate hysterectomy to save her life. Another patient sued in 1994 when she began bleeding and expelling fetal parts after he'd discharged her from his clinic.

News clipping about fetus dumping.
Click to enlarge.

In 1992 he admitted to burning a bag of 60 aborted fetuses in an open field.

In 1990 he was reprimanded for disemboweling a 15-year-old abortion patient. His medical assistant saw him "pull out some tissue and take it in his hands." She then testified that Patel said, "That's her small intestine" before stuffing it back inside. The teen was rushed to a hospital, where surgeons found a hole in her uterus and a fetus floating in blood in her abdomen. She needed to have her fallopian tubes, ovaries, and portion of her colon removed due to injuries.

Redacted patient record recovered
from dumpster. Click to enlarge.

In 2013 Patel also disposed of confidential patient information in a dumpster, including patient consent forms,  financial information, and abortion documentation. He also dumped job applications that had personal information about the applicants. As if that's not enough, he also disposed of  biohazardous materials in the dumpster.


Patel's appalling background didn't stop the University of Oklahoma from entering in an agreement with him in 2013 to be part of a nursing training program.

Sections of agreement between
Patel and U of OK.
Click to enlarge.

If forced to acknowledge this situation at all, the abortion lobby will dismiss Patel as a fluke, just as they dismissed Kermit Gosnell and Robert Alexander and Abu Hayat and Steve Brigham and Hillview Women's Surgical Center and scores of others as flukes. It's not just abortion doctors and abortion facilities, after all, that commit quackery and endanger and kill patients. While that is true, those other doctors don't have a dedicated group of lobbying organizations that enables their quackery under the guise of ensuring access to safe medical care to women. Other doctors don't have political organizations that claim to have their patients' well-being as their number one priority but who in fact put forth lobbying and public-relations campaigns asserting that efforts to close down these quacks will  hurt patients.

I'm not asking prochoice groups and citizens to convert to a prolife stand and join us in attempting to abolish abortion. I'm asking them to put women's safety first by at least checking up on practitioners before referring women to them and to stop derailing efforts to put quacks like Patel out of business.