Bianca Fortis and Laura Beil, ProPublica and New York Magazine, How Columbia University Ignored Women, Undermined Prosecutors, and Protected a Sexual Predator For More Than 20 Years. For decades, patients warned Columbia about the behavior of obstetrician Robert Hadden. One even called 911 and had him arrested. Columbia let him keep working. Tuesday, 12 September 2023: “Columbia University — where Robert Hadden spent his entire medical career — has never fully accounted for its role in allowing a predator to operate unchecked for decades. To date, more than 245 patients have alleged that Hadden abused them, which by itself could make him one of the most prolific sexual assailants in New York history. But the total number of victims may be far higher. On any given day during his two decades of practice at Columbia, Hadden saw 25 to 40 patients. Tens of thousands came under his care. A baby girl he delivered grew up to be a teenager he allegedly assaulted. Hadden, 65, was sentenced in July to 20 years in federal prison — the result of a long, arduous process that Columbia often undermined. One of the country’s most acclaimed private universities was deeply involved in containing, deflecting and distancing itself from the scandal at every step. In agreeing to pay $236.5 million to resolve lawsuits brought by 226 of Hadden’s victims, Columbia admitted no fault, which is in keeping with public statements over the years placing the blame for what happened solely on Hadden. But the university’s own records show that women repeatedly tried to warn Columbia doctors and staff about Hadden. At least twice, the fact that Hadden’s bosses in the OB-GYN department knew of the women’s concerns was acknowledged in writing. They allowed him to continue practicing. Once Hadden’s crimes became clear, Columbia worked to tamp down the crisis. It waited months to tell his patients that he was no longer working, and then sent matter-of-fact letters that omitted the reason. After police and local prosecutors began to investigate Hadden in 2012, Columbia failed to hand over evidence in its possession, despite subpoenas that compelled it to do so. The university also did not tell the district attorney when more patients came forward — witnesses who could have strengthened the case prosecutors were trying to build. The DA found Columbia’s conduct so concerning that the office launched a criminal investigation into the university itself, along with the affiliated hospital where Hadden had admitting privileges. The inquiry found that Columbia had, by neglecting to place document-retention holds, ‘intended to destroy’ emails written by Hadden and his former colleagues who had left the university. The DA found the records because they were ‘inadvertently left on an old server.’ (Columbia disputes this.) The local investigation of Hadden ended in a 2016 deal that allowed him to avoid serving a single day in jail. Cyrus Vance Jr., who was DA at the time, says that if Columbia had fully cooperated, it might have made a difference in his office’s decision to accept a plea. ‘Obviously that did not happen,’ Vance says. His former deputy, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, is more direct. Columbia, she says, ‘didn’t have clean hands here. If they didn’t know, it’s because they chose not to know.’ Hadden remained free until his victims began to go public in such numbers that federal investigators took up the case in 2020 and secured his conviction.”
How Columbia University Ignored Women, Undermined Prosecutors, and Protected a Sexual Predator for More Than 20 Years
Harvey Weinstein’s Complicity Machine
Megan Twohey, Jodi Kantor, Susan Dominus, Jim Rutenberg, and Steve Eder, Harvey Weinstein’s Complicity Machine. The New York Times, 5 December 2017. “Harvey Weinstein built his complicity machine out of the witting, the unwitting and those in between. He commanded enablers, silencers and spies, warning others who discovered his secrets to say nothing. He courted those who could provide the money or prestige to enhance his reputation as well as his power to intimidate. In the weeks and months before allegations of his methodical abuse of women were exposed in October, Mr. Weinstein, the Hollywood producer, pulled on all the levers of his carefully constructed apparatus.”
From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Hollywood Producer Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories
Ronan Farrow, From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Hollywood Producer Harvey Weinstein’s Accusers Tell Their Stories. The New Yorker, 10 October 2017. “Since the establishment of the first studios a century ago, there have been few movie executives as dominant, or as domineering, as Harvey Weinstein. As the co-founder of the production-and-distribution companies Miramax and the Weinstein Company, he helped to reinvent the model for independent films, with movies such as ‘Sex, Lies, and Videotape,’ ‘The English Patient,’ ‘Pulp Fiction,’ ‘The Crying Game,’ ‘Shakespeare in Love,’ and ‘The King’s Speech.’ Beyond Hollywood, he has exercised his influence as a prolific fund-raiser for Democratic Party candidates, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Weinstein combined a keen eye for promising scripts, directors, and actors with a bullying, even threatening, style of doing business, inspiring both fear and gratitude. His movies have earned more than three hundred Oscar nominations, and, at the annual awards ceremonies, he has been thanked more than almost anyone else in movie history, just after Steven Spielberg and right before God. For more than twenty years, Weinstein has also been trailed by rumors of sexual harassment and assault. This has been an open secret to many in Hollywood and beyond, but previous attempts by many publications, including The New Yorker, to investigate and publish the story over the years fell short of the demands of journalistic evidence. Too few people were willing to speak, much less allow a reporter to use their names, and Weinstein and his associates used nondisclosure agreements, monetary payoffs, and legal threats to suppress these myriad stories. Asia Argento, an Italian film actress and director, told me that she did not speak out until now—Weinstein, she told me, forcibly performed oral sex on her—because she feared that Weinstein would ‘crush’ her. ‘I know he has crushed a lot of people before,’ Argento said. ‘That’s why this story—in my case, it’s twenty years old; some of them are older—has never come out.’
Hollywood Producer Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades
Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, Hollywood Producer Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades. The New York Times, 5 October 2017. “An investigation by The New York Times found previously undisclosed allegations against [Hollywood producer] Mr. [Harvey] Weinstein stretching over nearly three decades, documented through interviews with current and former employees and film industry workers, as well as legal records, emails and internal documents from the businesses he has run, Miramax and the Weinstein Company. During that time, after being confronted with allegations including sexual harassment and unwanted physical contact, Mr. Weinstein has reached at least eight settlements with women, according to two company officials speaking on the condition of anonymity. Among the recipients, The Times found, were a young assistant in New York in 1990, an actress in 1997, an assistant in London in 1998, an Italian model in 2015 and Ms. O’Connor shortly after, according to records and those familiar with the agreements. In a statement to The Times on Thursday afternoon, Mr. Weinstein said: ‘I appreciate the way I’ve behaved with colleagues in the past has caused a lot of pain, and I sincerely apologize for it. Though I’m trying to do better, I know I have a long way to go.’ He added that he was working with therapists and planning to take a leave of absence to ‘deal with this issue head on.’… Dozens of Mr. Weinstein’s former and current employees, from assistants to top executives, said they knew of inappropriate conduct while they worked for him. Only a handful said they ever confronted him. Mr. Weinstein enforced a code of silence; employees of the Weinstein Company have contracts saying they will not criticize it or its leaders in a way that could harm its ‘business reputation’ or ‘any employee’s personal reputation,’ a recent document shows. And most of the women accepting payouts agreed to confidentiality clauses prohibiting them from speaking about the deals or the events that led to them…. Most women who told The Times that they experienced misconduct by Mr. Weinstein had never met one another. They range in age from early 20s to late 40s and live in different cities. Some said they did not report the behavior because there were no witnesses and they feared retaliation by Mr. Weinstein. Others said they felt embarrassed. But most confided in co-workers.”
Statement from Harvey Weinstein, The New York Times, 5 October 2017. “Harvey Weinstein sent The Times … [a] statement in response to our story about his treatment of women in Hollywood. (Read the original investigation.) In the article’s aftermath, actresses spoke out, politicians distanced themselves and an adviser called his behavior ‘gross.'”
Update: Harvey Weinstein Is Fired After Sexual harassment Reports. Megan Twohey, . The New York Times, 8 October 2017. “The Weinstein Company fired its co-founder Harvey Weinstein on Sunday, after a New York Times investigation uncovered allegations that he had engaged in rampant sexual harassment, dealing a stunning blow to a producer known for shaping American film and championing liberal causes. The statement announcing the firing said the decision had been made ‘in light of new information about misconduct by Harvey Weinstein that has emerged in the past few days.’ In an interview, Lance Maerov, one of the company’s four board members, said it had been brought to their attention that Mr. Weinstein had violated the company’s code of conduct at some point in the past week, but he would not specify what the violation was. Mr. Maerov said Mr. Weinstein had been notified of his termination by email Sunday evening. The action was taken by Mr. Maerov, Bob Weinstein (Mr. Weinstein’s brother), Richard Koenigsberg and Tarak Ben Ammar. A fifth board member, Paul Tudor Jones, resigned on Saturday. The firing was an escalation from Friday, when one-third of the company’s all-male board resigned and four members who remained announced that Mr. Weinstein would take a leave of absence while an outside lawyer investigated the allegations.”
Innocents: El Salvador, where pregnant women have more to fear than Zika
Rachel Nolan, Innocents. Harper’s, October 2016. “There are six countries in the world that prohibit abortion under all circumstances, without exceptions for victims of rape or incest or for cases in which the pregnancy threatens the life of the mother: El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Chile, Nicaragua, Malta, and Vatican City. In the United States, even the most fervent antiabortion groups maintain that women who have abortions are victims, instead directing their attacks at doctors. Earlier this year, when Donald Trump suggested that if Roe v. Wade were reversed, women who choose to terminate a pregnancy should be subject to “some form of punishment,” he was denounced across the political spectrum.
That scenario already exists in El Salvador, a country of 6.3 million, where an active medical and law-enforcement system finds and tries women who are suspected of having had abortions. Public prosecutors visit hospitals to train gynecologists and obstetricians to detect and report patients who show “symptoms of abortion.” Doctors are legally obligated to be informants for the police.”
Out of Balance: An IndyStar investigation into USA Gymnastics
Marisa Kwiatkowski, Mark Alesia, Tim Evans, Robert Scheer (Photographer), and Steve Berta (Editor), Out of Balance: An IndyStar investigation into USA Gymnastics. The Indianapolis Star, This series began on Thursday, 4 August 2016. “In March 2016, IndyStar began investigating USA Gymnastics – one of America’s most prominent youth sports organizations, and the governing body for the U.S. Olympic team. The investigation revealed that USA Gymnastics has followed a policy of not reporting all sexual abuse allegations against its coaches. That practice has enabled coaches to continuing preying on children despite repeated warning signs. IndyStar also has revealed a culture within the gymnastics community that has allowed coaches to shift from gym to gym, again despite warnings of inappropriate behavior. The investigation also provided the first comprehensive look at the pervasiveness of the problem, revealing that at least 368 gymnasts have alleged sexual abuse over the past 20 years. IndyStar also brought to light accusations of sexual abuse by the former team doctor [Larry Nassar] for USA Gymnastics. That doctor has since been arrested on charges of criminal sexual conduct and child pornography. USA Gymnastics has hired an attorney to examine its internal practices. That review is ongoing.” Update: Christine Hauser and Maggie Astor, The Larry Nassar Case and What Comes Next, The New York Times, Thursday, 25 January 2018. “Lawrence G. Nassar, the former physician for the American gymnastics team, was sentenced on Jan. 24 to 40 to 175 years in prison for sex crimes. It capped more than a week of victim impact statements by young women and teenagers who described how, as aspiring athletes, they were sent to Dr. Nassar at gymnastics camps, gyms, his home and the Michigan State University clinic. For decades, he molested athletes under the guise of medical treatment.”
Missing and Murdered: The Trafficked (in Canada)
Tavia Grant, Missing and Murdered: The Trafficked. The Globe and Mail, 10 February 2016. “Indigenous women and girls are being exploited by gangs and other predators with little being done to stop it. Missing and Murdered: The Trafficked: The story behind our investigation into the exploitation of indigenous women and girls, by Tavia Grant, 10 February 2016: “The Trafficked project sprang from an ongoing Globe and Mail investigation into missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada. In the course of that reporting, the issue of human trafficking surfaced as a factor that puts some aboriginal women at even greater risk of disappearing or being killed. The Globe and Mail spent three months investigating the subject, dedicating one reporter full-time to delve into who the victims are, how the crime is committed, what the long-term impact is and how the federal government has responded.”
An Unbelievable Story of Rape
Ken Armstrong and T. Christian Miller, An Unbelievable Story of Rape. The Marshall Project (Ken Armstrong) and ProPublica (T. Christian Miller), 16 December 2015. “An 18-year-old said she was attacked at knifepoint. Then she said she made it up. That’s where our story begins.” “‘An Unbelievable Story of Rape’ is the account of a failed police investigation and the trail of hurt and humiliation that followed. This 12,000-word piece tells the story of a young woman who reported being raped at knifepoint in her apartment, only to be disbelieved by police, and later prosecuted for lying to the authorities. Years later, two relentless female detectives in Colorado arrested a man suspected of raping a series of women and discovered that the original victim was telling the truth all along.”
Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting.
Winner of the 2015 George Polk Award for Justice Reporting.
How Killing Elephants Finances Terror in Africa
Bryan Christy, How Killing Elephants Finances Terror in Africa. National Geographic, 12 August 2015. “…[T]he African elephant is under siege. A booming Chinese middle class with an insatiable taste for ivory, crippling poverty in Africa, weak and corrupt law enforcement, and more ways than ever to kill an elephant have created a perfect storm. The result: Some 30,000 African elephants are slaughtered every year, more than 100,000 between 2010 and 2012, and the pace of killing is not slowing. Most illegal ivory goes to China, where a pair of ivory chopsticks can bring more than a thousand dollars and carved tusks sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Update: Paul Steyn, African Elephant Numbers Plummet 30 Percent, Landmark Survey Finds. National Geographic, 31 August 2016. “An unprecedented census gives a sobering baseline for managing what’s left of Africa’s elephants.” The finding of the Great Elephant Census, a continent-wide wildlife survey, is worrying: “Africa now has 352,271 savanna elephants left in 93 percent of the species’ range. The aerial survey covered 18 African countries. In 15 of those, where information on previous populations existed, 144,000 elephants were lost to ivory poaching and habitat destruction in less than a decade. The current yearly loss—overwhelmingly from poaching—is estimated at 8 percent. That’s about 27,000 elephants slaughtered year after year…. The census was funded by Microsoft founder Paul G. Allen and took just under three years to complete. Led by the nonprofit Elephants Without Borders, which is based in Botswana, the survey involved a team of 90 scientists, six NGOs, and two advisory partners: the Kenya-based conservation organization Save the Elephants and the African Elephant Specialist Group, made up of experts who focus on the conservation and management of African elephants.”
Update: Edward Wong and Jeffrey Gettleman, China Bans Its Ivory Trade, Moving Against Elephant Poaching. The New York Times, 30 December 2016. “China announced on Friday that it was banning all commerce in ivory by the end of 2017, a move that would shut down the world’s largest ivory market and could deal a critical blow to the practice of elephant poaching in Africa.”