‘I felt defeated’
Brooke, another plaintiff who alleges Dr. Broadbent groped her, remembers feeling sick on the June day she watched the attorneys arguing. She asked to be identified by only her first name for this story.
She alleges Dr. Broadbent violated her in December 2008 while she was hospitalized after experiencing complications with her first pregnancy.
The nearest hospital to her rural town didn’t have a special unit to take care of premature babies, and her doctors feared she might need to deliver her son 6 weeks early. So Brooke had been rushed by ambulance over a mountain pass in a snowstorm to Utah Valley Hospital.
Brooke and her husband were terrified, she said, when they arrived at the Provo hospital. Dr. Broadbent happened to be the doctor on call. With Brooke’s husband and brother-in-law in the room, Dr. Broadbent examined her late that evening, she said, listening to her chest with a stethoscope.
The doctor then suddenly grabbed her breasts, she recalled – his movements causing her hospital gown to fall to expose her chest. She recounted this experience in her lawsuit, saying it was nothing like the breast exams she has had since.
“It was really traumatizing,” she said. “I was mortified. My husband and brother-in-law – we just didn’t say anything about it because it was so uncomfortable.”
Brooke voiced concerns to the nurse manager, and she was assigned a new doctor.
She gave birth to a healthy baby a little more than a month later, at the hospital near her home.
Hearing the judge’s ruling 14 years later, Brooke felt the decision revealed how Utah’s laws are broken.
“I was frustrated,” she said, “and I felt defeated. … I thought justice is not on our side with this.”
If the Utah Supreme Court rules that these alleged sexual assaults should legally be considered health care, the women will likely refile their claims as a medical malpractice lawsuit, said their attorney, Adam Sorensen. But it would be a challenge to keep all 94 women in the case, he said, due to the shorter filing window. Only two women in the lawsuit allege that they were harmed within the last 2 years.
The legal team for the women would have to convince a judge that their claims should still be allowed because they only recently discovered they were harmed. But based on previous rulings, Mr. Sorensen believes the women will have a better chance to win that argument if the civil suit remained a sexual assault case.
Regardless of what happens in their legal case, the decision by Brooke and the other women to come forward could help change state law for victims who come after them.
Recently, Mr. McKell, the state senator, introduced legislation to clarify that civil lawsuits alleging sexual assault by a health care worker do not fall under Utah’s Health Care Malpractice Act.
“I don’t think it’s a close call. Sexual assault is not medical care,” he said. “I know we’ve got some bizarre rulings that have come down through our courts in Utah.”
Both an association of Utah trial lawyers and the Utah Medical Association, which lobbies on behalf of the state’s physicians, support this reform.
“We support the fact that sexual assault should not be part of health care medical malpractice,” said Michelle McOmber, the CEO for the Utah Medical Association. “Sexual assault should be sexual assault, regardless of where it happens or who’s doing it. Sexual assault should be in that category, which is separate from actual health care. Because it’s not health care.”
MountainStar doesn’t have a position on the bill, Ms. Glas said. “If the laws were to change via new legislation and/or interpretation by the courts, we would abide by and comply with those new laws.”
But lawmakers are running out of time. With only a short time left in Utah’s legislative session, state senate and house leaders have so far prioritized passing new laws banning gender-affirming health care for transgender youths and creating a controversial school voucher program that will provide taxpayer funds for students to attend private school.
Utah lawmakers were also expected to consider a dramatic change for other sexual assault victims: a bill that would remove filing deadlines for civil lawsuits brought by people abused as adults. But that bill stalled before it could be debated.
Brooke had been eager to share her story, she said, in hopes it would help the first four women who’d come forward bolster their lawsuit against Dr. Broadbent. She later joined the case as a plaintiff. She read in their lawsuit about one woman who complained about him to the same hospital 7 years before she did, and about another woman who said Dr. Broadbent similarly molested her 2 days after Brooke had expressed her own concern.
“That bothered me so much,” she said. “It didn’t have to happen to all these women.”
Brooke doubts she’ll get vindication in a courtroom. Justice for her, she suspects, won’t come in the form of a legal ruling or a settlement against the doctor she says hurt her years ago.
Instead, she said, “maybe justice looks like changing the laws for future women.”
This story was originally published on ProPublica. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive the biggest stories as soon as they’re published.