New York doctor ordered to pay US$1.6 billion to more than 100 women in sex abuse case
‘It feels good to know that someone heard us. People now understand the magnitude of what he did,’ one of Stuart Copperman’s victims says
Starting in the 1980s, New York law enforcement and health officials fielded sexual abuse complaints from the young patients of a respected paediatrician who ran his practice out of a basement office in his home on Long Island.
But Stuart Copperman was never charged with any crime, and it was only as he approached retirement in 2000, at the age of 65, that he was stripped of his medical licence over the complaints.
Now, 25 years later, more than 100 of his former patients have some vindication in their years-long fight: a court has ordered him to pay a total of US$1.6 billion.
The Reverend Debbi Rhodes, who was awarded US$25 million, said the completion of the litigation in late March in state Supreme Court brought a mix of relief and frustration.
“I’m not sure if he’s facing justice. He kind of got away with it for all these years,” the 63-year-old Episcopal priest in Las Vegas said by phone. “But to have a court say, definitively, ‘I believe you.’ To hear that – that’s heavy medicine right there.”
A Manhattan lawyer who has represented Copperman over the years did not respond to multiple messages seeking comment in recent days.