A former New York doctor who was jailed for sexually assaulting a black woman has been freed.
David Newman served only two years after admitting to the act to the chagrin of the victim, Aja Newman, who said she has had to retell her story more than a dozen times.
In 2016, Aja went to the emergency room at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, complaining of shoulder pain. There, according to prosecutors, Dr. Newman sedated and molested her leaving on her so much semen.
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State Supreme Court in Manhattan sentenced Dr. Newman to two years in prison after he admitted to assaulting four women, including Aja, who had been his patients at Mount Sinai Hospital.
Prosecutors said that Dr. Newman had a penchant for targeting young minority women between ages 18 and 29 and that in each of the four cases, he had touched the women’s breasts for no medical reason.
The ordeal Aja went through in the hands of Dr. Newman etched a dark spot on her being.
“I have not been able to trust a doctor since, and I never will,” she told the Court during the sentencing.
In a recent interview with New York Magazine, Aja opened up on her disturbing experience, saying she felt Dr. Newman hastily moving the bed, wedged himself between the wall and the bed and masturbated while he molested her.
“I was in and out of consciousness, and one of the first things I felt was him groping my breast,” she recollected. “It wasn’t really real until I realized I couldn’t move. I can’t say I know my eyes weren’t open, but I couldn’t see.”
“I felt the bed move, and the groping was making me like, ‘Get off me,’” she added.
Aja said the former doctor wiped her roughly after molesting her with the bedsheet and called a “bitch”.
According to the New York Magazine, Aja couldn’t leave the emergency department until four hours after the attack, and when she did, she vomited on the half-mile walk to her sister’s house.
She carried a large plastic bag into which she had stuffed her hospital gown and bedding, to use it as forensic evidence.
During his sentencing, Dr. Newman said what he did was “awful and disgusting, and I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry to everyone involved. I’m sorry to physicians everywhere and patients everywhere.”
Justice Michael J. Obus called the doctor’s behavior “a gross violation of your position of trust.” However, he added that “I actually believe that you are sincere in your apology.”
Dr. Newman rose to prominence in the medical field as an advocate for emergency care reform. He wrote about the relationships between doctors and patients and other issues he confronted while working in hospitals, including in essays that were published in The New York Times.
