A woman who was sexually assaulted by her Manhattan gynecologist offered searing testimony at a City Council hearing Thursday why she should be allowed to remove the doctor’s name from the birth certificates of her twins.
“I’m still haunted about what he did to me while I was unaware,” Marissa Hoechstetter said of pervy gyno Robert Hadden, who agreed to a no-jail plea deal in 2016 for sexually abusing six patients.
“The assaults poisoned the memories of my pregnancy. I felt like a failure as a woman for not turning him in.”
She saw the doctor from 2009 to 2012💟, and eventu♉ally summoned up the courage to report him in 2015.
During visits, Hoechstetter said Hadden had his hands all over her and made crude comments, including one cring💜e-inducing exchange after she gave birth in 2011 where he 🔥exposed one of her breasts and said “You look like a porn star.”
She said she’s certain even worse things happened.
He “undoubtedly sexually assaulted me,” she told before City Council’s Committee on Health.
Seventeen of Hadden’s 20 victims are suing Columbia University and its affiliated hospitals for allegedly covering up the a💜buse while he worked at its facilities.
Hadden was forced to surrender his medical license, but otherwise enjoyed “the nauseating guarantee of immunity,” because Manhattan DA Cy Vance agreed “not to charge him for additional conduct that turned up in the course of the investigation,” Hoechstetter said.
The DA’s office did not have an immediate response.
“I share all this to say how empty the experience of coming forward le🌺ft me. I did ‘the right thing’ in coming forward … Instead I was discarded. My C-section scar makes me sick,” she said.
“The worst part of all is that he w♑as the first person in the entire world to touch mﷺy children. Those are the same hands that abused me.”
The committee is considering a bill that would allow patients to have redacted from birth certificates “the name of physiꦜcians whose license has been suspended, surrendered or revoked.”