An attempt to dismiss and seal a massive sex abuse class action lawsuit against criminally convicted former urologist Darius Paduch— with nearly 300 male plaintiffs — has failed, a Manhattan Supreme Court judge ruled Thursday.
Judge Suzanne J. Adams ruled that the class action suit against the doctor and the medical institutions which employed him should move forward, and demanded that Paduch finally produce a reply to the complaint later this summer.
“I’m so grateful the judge took this seriously and came down the right way,” said lawyer for the nearly 300 victims, Anthony T. DiPietro.
The class action suit has grown from 58 victims when it was initially filed in August 2023 to a staggering 278 former patients as of Thursday
DiPietro has previously won nearly $250 million in lawsuits related to former Columbia gynecologist Robert Hadden, and he says this case might be even larger in scale, noting that a number of new victims had joined the suit just this week.
He exclusively told The Post that the civil suit is perhaps “our only opportunity to hold these institutions accountable for the role they played in this massive cover up.”
“Every one of these cases where you see this happening have one thing in common — a billion dollar corporation covering up the abuse for them.”
Anthony T. DiPietro
Lawyers for Paduch and the top hospitals where he worked for two decades — Weill Cornell Medicine, NewYork Presbyterian Hospital, Northwell Health and Columbia University — attempted to use a precedent set by rulings in sexual abuse cases involving the Catholic Church to keep “scandalous” accusations from the public record, and to dismiss the case entirely.
Paduch’s abuse included making them masturbate in front of him or masturbating them himself — sometimes insisting they get on all fours so he could “stimulate” or “milk” their prostate gland, the filing claims.
DiPietro estimates that roughly 20 percent of the nearly 300 former patients who are part of the class action were victimized as minors, he told The Post.
Paduch also “performed unnecessary surgical procedures on patients, often without any anesthesia, in an effort to inflict pain [on] the patients,” the suit claims.
Then he “dispensed copious opioid medication in an effort to get his patients addicted so that he could better manipulate, control, exploit and abuse them — all without any basis in actual medical standards of care,” the filing alleges.
DiPietro said that the sexual criminals of the medical world, like Paduch, Hadden and former USA gymnastics coach and convicted rapist Larry Nassar “are actually not the problem.”
“They’re a symptom. The problem [is] these institutions that cover this up, gaslight and lie to patients and keep exposing more and suspecting patients to a known serial sexual predator,” he said.
Paduch was criminally convicted by a federal jury in May on 13 counts related to the sexual abuse of eight patients.
The disgraced doctor also faces a slew of litigation from dozens of other victims in unrelated sexual abuse suits, including a former intern who said he was just 16-years-old at the time of his abuse.
A spokesperson for Weill Cornell said that they are “heartbroken for these survivors” and that the institution has “implemented enhancements to our policies and training requirements, and launched new patient safety programs, to minimize the risk of such abhorrent conduct occurring in the future.”
Lawyers representing Paduch, NewYork Presbyterian, Columbia and Northwell Health did not immediately reply to a request for comment.