New York City-based Weill Cornell Medicine resolved a yearslong federal criminal investigation into its handling of a former urologist’s sexual abuse of patients, federal prosecutors said July 27.
Weill Cornell has paid or agreed to pay victims more than $1 billion to settle civil claims to date. The agreement requires the system to commit an additional $30 million to create an Institute for Safe Patient Care and Patient Empowerment aimed at spreading sexual-misconduct prevention practices to other providers, according to a July 27 news release from the Justice Department.
Under the voluntary compliance agreement with the U.S. 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,” U.S. prosecutors said.
Dr. Paduch was convicted in 2024 on 11 counts of inducing patients — including boys as young as 13 — to travel for unlawful sexual activity, and he was 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 Dr. Paduch’s 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 Dr. 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 Dr. Paduch’s employment in 2018 by declining to renew his faculty appointment. The organization told his patients he was no longer practicing 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.
Going forward, 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 programs and certify its compliance semiannually.
The system said in a July 27 news release it has already expanded chaperone requirements, created a centralized process for reporting and investigating alleged sexual misconduct, and built new escalation protocols.
“This resolution is a significant step forward for us in addressing our former faculty member’s misconduct, which represented a profound betrayal of our mission and the trust that patients place in physicians and medical institutions,” Cornell University President Michael Kotlikoff, PhD, and Robert Harrington, MD, dean of Weill Cornell Medicine, said in a joint statement.
“No patient should ever experience abuse by a clinician,” they said. “Weill Cornell Medicine is a safer organization today than it was when these events occurred. As the U.S. Attorney has acknowledged, we have already implemented significant reforms to enhance patient safety and prevent future misconduct.”
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