It Took Me Decades to Realize My Doctor Was a Predator

Editor’s Note: This piece contains references to sexual assault, which may be distressing to some readers. If you or someone you know has been affected, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-4673 or visit rainn.org for confidential support.

My name is Gwen Whiting. I am a serial entrepreneur, exited founder, mentor, and advisor. And I am Jane Doe #443.

I found out I was molested by my gynecologist from a TV commercial.

It was a Saturday afternoon in January 2023. I was lying in bed, nursing a pounding headache, the news murmuring in the background, when a commercial cut through: "If you were a patient of Dr. Robert Hadden, Columbia University is liable for knowingly employing him. Call this number." I opened one eye, grabbed my phone, and snapped a photo before the number disappeared.

A few days later, I called. I hadn’t rehearsed what to say—I just told the woman on the line that I’d been a patient. She took my information. Another woman called back, brash but kind, and laid out the legal landscape: Hadden had pleaded guilty in 2016 to a felony sex crime and misdemeanor of forcible touching, surrendering his medical license but serving no prison time. A federal case for inducing patients to travel for sexual abuse was still pending. Columbia had already paid more than $236 million to settle claims from over 200 women, and more women were coming forward under the new Adult Survivors Act.

That call pushed me to become Jane Doe #443, one of many women in a third wave of lawsuits.

The truth, however, had been trickling in for years. Ever since the first articles about him surfaced in 2014, I’d been exchanging shocked, horrified texts with other women I knew who also saw Hadden. Every exchange ended the same way: with us silently reassuring ourselves we were lucky not to be “one of those women” in the stories. We kept believing we’d had upstanding care—until we couldn’t anymore. Today, the words “my gynecologist was a sex offender” are part of my medical intake form for every new provider I see—a permanent entry on my record, both medical and emotional.

And yet, even now, I hear the same dismissive line from other women: Ew, I would never go to a male doctor, as if that choice makes all the difference. It’s a way to dodge discomfort, but it keeps shame and blame in place. I was in a place I was supposed to trust, under the care of a respected professional. Why would I question the protocol? That’s the point: none of us are taught to. This can happen to anyone. My silence all these years didn’t help; I hope my voice now will.

Misplaced Trust

For ten years, I saw Hadden. He was my first real adult doctor. I’d found him myself, through co-workers, and proudly used my own insurance card from the job I’d worked so hard to get.

Hadden was particularly convenient because his office was in the same building as mine. The commute was efficient; the waiting room was not. He was always wildly behind schedule. Now we all know why our appointments were so long. He’d take an extra half hour to perform what I’ve come to think of as his “abuse dance”—a finely orchestrated routine disguised as care.

At each visit, he moved in and out of the room while nurses and assistants came and went. Paper gowns and privacy sheets came on and off, as he maneuvered the naked patient from stirrups, to standing, to bending. The final act was always in his office, where I could see his framed degrees and photos of his kids—including his young daughter in a ballerina outfit. Then came the invasive questions about my sex life, bikini wax, and partners; unsolicited “feedback”; and, as I left, a three-month supply of birth control from his candy drawer.

He had me and my colleagues coming in four times a year, an unusually frequent schedule I never thought to question. At the time, I believed his diligent style of examination meant I was being well taken care of.

My final appointment with him was in May 2012, when he performed a DC procedure after a miscarriage. After that, he vanished. No follow-up, no message from the hospital or the OB/GYN practice, just silence. For years, I didn’t understand why.

When the first major stories broke—Evelyn Yang’s 2020 CNN interview, the lawsuits, the Columbia settlements—I recognized the name, the charges, the scale of it. But I kept my distance from the details, holding them at arm’s length as if they belonged to someone else’s story.

That changed in May 2022, at a hiking retreat in Malibu. Over dinner, I mentioned, almost offhand, that my gynecologist had turned out to be a sex offender. A woman across the table looked at me: “Yeah, Hadden? Me too. He delivered my first child. And did you get the full-body skin checks, ‘since you’re fair’?”

“Yes,” I said. “Every time.”

She told me her new doctor said those checks were completely inappropriate. That conversation unlocked something. Without it, I don’t know if I would have recognized what he’d done—or picked up the phone when I saw that ad months later.

Reckoning

After my call with the lawyer, I found the manila envelope of medical records I’d requested after Hadden vanished in 2012. The records showed the pattern in black and white. Confronting it on paper made it impossible to ignore.

I spent the rest of that week leaving voicemails for my other Hadden-patient girlfriends: “So the bad news is we were molested. The good news? At least we can get paid for it.” Crass, maybe, but humor was how I mustered the courage to break the news. I continued to make the hard calls, share the difficult details, liaise with the legal team, and report back to my friends who had also experienced Hadden’s abuse.

I’m now one of 576 former patients included in the latest settlement over Hadden’s abuse, bringing the total paid by Columbia and its affiliates to more than $1 billion. This is a privilege. So many survivors never receive acknowledgement, let alone justice. We were only heard because of our numbers, and I hope this settlement serves as a warning to both the predators who hide behind power and to the institutions that protect them. Still, I wish Columbia could have spent that money on something better—research, education, access—not atonement.

Once the settlement was finalized, we received a document outlining the “tiers” of abuse, itemizing the various acts in each. It was the first time any of us had seen the full list of Hadden’s crimes, and it was excruciating to read. Until then, my husband had clung to the notion that Hadden merely did “creepy things.” This was the first time he learned the exact details of my experiences, in stark legal language, and fully grasped the magnitude of what I and so many others had endured.

Meanwhile, I was confronted with a disturbing new possibility: what I’d once considered a gift from Hadden—his fast-tracking me to a DC—was also my last appointment with him, under anesthesia. While I was unconscious, he could have committed any of the acts listed in the settlement.

Reverberations

I was unprepared for how difficult this whole process would be. None of the Jane Does in my friend group had any idea of the emotional toll that revisiting this chapter would take. Gradually, we began sharing stories from our twenties, trusting in the safe space we created together, yet still avoiding memories too disturbing to say out loud. Now, two and a half years on from becoming Jane Does, our conversations blend humor and tears.

As I move forward, I think about all the earlier instances of sexual abuse I’d simply filed away as “just another day in the female experience.” In 1994, at 18, the older man next to me on a plane slid his hand toward my leg and later tried to pin me in the bathroom. In 1998, at 22 in Egypt, a tour guide pushed me against a wall and tried to kiss me. In 2004, at 28, a prominent New York investor invited me to what I thought was a business meeting, only for it to turn into an appraisal of my breasts and whether I’d consider augmentation surgery. In each situation, I walked away in disbelief, angry at myself for staying quiet and not protecting myself better.

There are so many stories like this, stories rarely shared with mothers, sisters, and friends, let alone brothers, boyfriends, and husbands. No woman seems exempt from this club.

When this is published, it will be the first time my own mother learns of my experiences. When one of my oldest friends read a draft of this essay, it was the first time she’d learned of my experience. She, in turn, shared hers. We’ve been friends since we were four years old, and had never spoken a word of our experiences to each other until now.

I can’t claim satisfaction. I can’t claim justice, redemption, or closure. I can only claim gratitude for the friends with whom I can share this pain. I think of all the other Jane Does in the world, now and then, and I know there is power in speaking our different, but similar, stories. The more we speak out, the more power we have.

I hope you’ll share this article with the women in your life, and use it as a catalyst to harness our collective power.