A leading New York medical school, Weill Cornell Medicine, has resolved a years-long federal criminal investigation into its handling of a former urologist’s sexual abuse of patients, and agreed to pay victims more than $1bn to settle civil claims – and to build a mega-million-dollar safety institute, reports Becker’s Hospital Review.
The Justice Department said last week’s agreement requires Weill Cornell to commit an additional $30m to create an Institute for Safe Patient Care and Patient Empowerment aimed at spreading sexual-misconduct prevention practices to other providers.
Under the voluntary compliance agreement with the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, Weill Cornell acknowledged that its policies during the tenure of Darius Paduch, MD, were “inadequate to detect, prevent and respond to the sexual abuse of patients”.
Paduch was convicted in 2024 on 11 counts of inducing patients – including boys as young as 13 – to travel for unlawful sexual activity, and sentenced to life in prison. He abused patients from at least 2009 to 2019, prosecutors said.
Federal authorities first charged him in 2023.
The deal was struck under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Prosecutors invoked the ADA because the victims had genetic conditions and sexual and erectile dysfunction, making the abuse a form of discrimination by a place of public accommodation.
The agreement traces a series of governance failures.
Weill Cornell delegated the authority to investigate complaints to its then-chair of urology, who in 2015 and 2016 received two physician reports that Paduch had sexually abused patients but did not escalate those reports, prosecutors said.
A March 2018 complaint was assigned to an employee with no training in investigating sexual abuse allegations, and the chair did not disclose the earlier reports to that investigator, according to the Justice Department.
Weill Cornell ended Paduch’s employment in 2018 by declining to renew his faculty appointment. The organisation told his patients he was no longer practising, without giving a reason and, when a second institution that later hired him inquired, did not disclose why he left or the patient complaints, prosecutors said.
The abuse continued at the second institution.
Federal authorities have ordered that Weill Cornell must self-report to prosecutors any evidence of a criminal violation involving sexual misconduct, maintain a chaperone requirement with compliance monitoring, conduct three internal reviews of its prevention programmes, and certify its compliance semi-annually.
The system said that it has already expanded chaperone requirements, created a centralised process for reporting and investigating alleged sexual misconduct, and built new escalation protocols.
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