Upper East Side doctor convicted of sexual abuse

An Upper East Side urologist was convicted last week in Manhattan federal court of sexually assaulting eight male patients, including six young boys, during medical appointments between about 2015 and 2019.

A jury found Darius A. Paduch, 56, a former doctor at NewYork-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center and Northwell Health, guilty of numerous felony sexual abuse charges brought last year by the New York attorney general’s office. According to the New York Post, he faces up to 60 years in prison. Sentencing is scheduled for August 22nd.

Paduch’s attorney, Michael Baldassare, told the New York Post that his client will appeal the convictions. He also faces civil lawsuits from hundreds of former patients over alleged sexual assaults dating back to around 2006, according to the New York Times.

According to the Justice Department’s federal indictment, Paduch, who specialized in male infertility and male reproductive health, “abused and assaulted multiple victims, including minor victims who went to Paduch for medical care.”

“Paduch did this as part of the purportedly necessary and appropriate medical treatment of these victims. During appointments, “Baruch claimed that he had to touch victims in certain ways to facilitate medical treatment, when in reality Paduch sexually abused and assaulted these victims without legitimate medical purposes and for his own sexual gratification,” the indictment states.

The assaults that occurred when Paduch was alone with victims in exam rooms included having his patients masturbate with his hands or using a sex toy, instructing them to masturbate, showing him pornography while watching the victims, how they masturbated at his direction, as well as the groping and caressing of his victims. He pressed himself against her and, among other things, penetrated her rectum with his ungloved fingers. He also asked his victims to talk about their sexual activities, talked about their physical appearance and the size of their penis, and discussed his own sexual activity and history.

Following the convictions, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, who prosecuted Paduch, described the outcome as justified.

“As a unanimous jury found, Darius A. Paduch used his position of trust as a physician for his own perverse gratification. For years, patients seeking urgent medical care, many of them children, left his practice as victims,” Williams said in a press release following the sentencing. “I commend the prosecutors in this office for bringing this important case to a just conclusion.”

According to the New York Times, Paduch’s medical license was suspended by the state Department of Health last year and will now be permanently revoked.

Mallory Allen, an attorney representing the victims, said in a statement to the Post that justice has been served.

“For nearly twenty years, patients who trusted him with their medical care and treatment were instead brutalized by his degrading, sexually abusive and medically unfounded actions, while the hospitals where he worked looked the other way,” Allen said.

Paduch, of North Bergen, New Jersey, has been in prison since his arrest in April 2023. He also faces civil lawsuits from hundreds of former patients over alleged sexual abuse and allegedly performing unnecessary medical procedures under anesthesia. Many are also filing lawsuits against the hospitals where he worked.

Anthony T. DiPietro, a lawyer who represents more than 200 of his victims in civil suits, told The New York Times: “We are all grateful that Darius Paduch will never be able to help a single patient in New York state or anywhere else to do something like that.” otherwise never again.”

According to the New York Times, many of Paduch’s patients came from all over the country.