A 64 year-old Manhattan gynaecologist was sentenced to 20 years in prison yesterday for sexually assaulting his patients – including pregnant women – during examinations. Robert Hadden received a federal conviction in January for abusing four patients after he enticed them to cross state lines to his clinic. But he has faced accusations from at least 245 former patients he treated at two of New York’s top hospitals for molesting them from the early 1990s until he was reported in 2012. In 2016, after being indicted on state charges, the Manhattan district attorney allowed Hadden to plead guilty to low-level felonies which meant he lost his medical licence but didn’t have to go to jail or on the sex offenders’ register. Federal Judge Richard Berman, who gave Hadden the maximum sentence, said this week the case was “like no other in my experience in terms of horrendous, beyond extraordinary, depraved sexual assault”. The hospitals where Hadden worked agreed in 2021 and 2022 to pay $236 million in civil settlements to more than 200 patients.
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