After decades of sex abuse complaints, NY paediatrician ordered to pay $1.6B to over 100 women

MERRICK, N.Y. (AP) — Starting in the 1980s, New York law enforcement and health officials fielded sexual abuse complaints from the young patients of a respected paediatrician who ran his practice out of a basement office in his home on Long Island.

But Stuart Copperman was never charged with any crime, and it was only as he approached retirement in 2000, at the age of 65, that he was stripped of his medical license over the complaints.

Now, 25 years later, more than 100 of his former patients have some vindication in their yearslong fight: a court has ordered him to pay a total of $1.6 billion.

The Rev. Debbi Rhodes, who was awarded $25 million, says the completion of the litigation in late March in state Supreme Court brought a mix of relief and frustration.

“I’m not sure if he’s facing justice. He kind of got away with it for all these years,” the 63-year-old Episcopal priest in Las Vegas said by phone. “But to have a court say, definitively, ‘I believe you.’ To hear that -- that’s heavy medicine right there.”

A Manhattan lawyer who has represented Copperman over the years didn’t respond to multiple messages seeking comment in recent days.

Copperman has steadfastly denied the allegations, suggesting he was simply being “thorough” in his examinations, which his former patients say were typically conducted after he had ushered their parents out of the room.

Some of the women filed complaints with local police and medical boards over the years, but no criminal charges or disciplinary actions were ever imposed, according to Rhodes’ lawsuit and others. Then a state medical board revoked his license after hearing from six accusers.

Statute of limitations laws, however, prevented Copperman’s accusers from filing lawsuits until passage of New York’s Child Victims Act, a 2019 law that temporarily allowed people to file suits over sexual abuse they suffered long ago as children.

The Catholic Church and other major institutions have reached huge settlements to resolve sexual misconduct claims, but lawyers for the women say their litigation has resulted in one of the largest cumulative awards against a single individual in the U.S.

“For decades, these women were silenced and dismissed,” said Kristen Gibbons Feden, a Philadelphia lawyer representing the women. “Now, they cannot be ignored.”

The Long Island court ruled for the women because Copperman never responded to the litigation. But some of the special referees, in assessing damages, said they believed the women.

“The psychological scars from the abuse suffered by Plaintiff are profound and permanent,” wrote William Bodkin in awarding $27 million to a woman identified as “Jane Doe T.A.” in April 2024.

“Here, there can only be outrage at Copperman’s reprehensible conduct,” he wrote in Rhodes’ $25 million judgment in December 2024.

The last of the 104 awards were handed down March 28, with amounts ranging from $500,000 to $32 million, according to Michael Della, a Long Island-based attorney also representing the women.

The women also sued local hospitals and health care networks, but those claims were dismissed.

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