She Told Police a Pediatrician Abused Her. Why Was He Never Charged?

A prominent pediatrician on Long Island lost his medical license after allegations emerged that he had sexually abused girls in his care for decades. But he never spent a day in court.

The doctor, Stuart Copperman, was never charged with a crime by local authorities. According to the Nassau County district attorney’s office, not one victim came forward within the statute of limitations for the crime.

A police report obtained by The New York Times, however, shows that on Dec. 21, 2000, a 17-year-old formally accused Mr. Copperman of sexually abusing her “on several occasions.”

She appears to have been well within the statute of limitations; at the time, state law allowed child abuse victims to press felony charges until their 23rd birthday, and until age 20 to press misdemeanor charges.

But the district attorney’s office closed the case five months later without contacting the accuser or her family again.

“Nothing came of it,” her mother recalled in a recent interview. “They told me they would keep in contact with me, and nobody did.”

The mother later called the police to ask for updates on the investigation. “They said it was pending and they couldn’t talk about it,” she said.

The accuser and her mother have not publicly identified themselves in connection with the case.

The handling of Mr. Copperman’s case has received new scrutiny after the passage of a state law called the Child Victims Act. It extends the statute of limitations for filing criminal sexual abuse charges, and gives victims more time to file civil lawsuits.

More than 50 women who claim they were abused as girls by Mr. Copperman during doctor visits have contacted Kristen Gibbons Feden, of the firm Stradley Ronon in Philadelphia, who is investigating a possible civil suit against Mr. Copperman under the new law. (Ms. Feden prosecuted Bill Cosby for sexual assault.)

Mr. Copperman declined to comment on the allegations. In the past, he has said that he examined the girls in accordance with standard medical practice.

The state medical board, which received repeated complaints over at least 15 years, investigated and revoked his medical license on Dec. 1, 2000. By then, Mr. Copperman was 65 and about to retire.

His accusers see the case as an example of a prominent professional evading accountability despite multiple accusations of sexual abuse.

“Copperman learned he could go on living his life, that the medical degree on his wall outweighed everything we said about what he did,” said Dana Marcus, 56, an administrator of the Victims of Stuart Copperman page on Facebook.

The woman who made the 2000 complaint, now 36, went to the local police precinct with her mother and her sister to file the report.

Her mother had read news reports about the revocation of Mr. Copperman’s license over complaints of sexual abuse by former patients. She told her two daughters, who had also been Mr. Copperman’s patients.

Her younger daughter said that when she went for doctor’s visits, Mr. Copperman frequently touched and rubbed her genitals. “I knew it felt weird and not right,” she said in an interview.

“The older one said, ‘Oh my God, I thought that was part of the examination,’” the mother recalled. “Thinking about it now, I’m so upset.”

Police detectives trained in investigating sexual abuse crimes recorded the complaints from both of her daughters, the mother said. But the older daughter was already past the statute of limitations.

A few days later, on Dec. 26, 2000, detectives faxed the 17-year-old’s police report to Toby Kurtz, chief of the sex offense and domestic violence bureau of the Nassau County district attorney’s office, according to a notation on the report.

The investigation was assigned to an assistant district attorney identified as “ADA Rose,” a reference to Kyle Rose, who now goes by her married name, Kyle Rose-Louder.

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But the office decided not to prosecute on May 10, 2001, according to another note in the report. There is no further explanation and no indication that an investigation was ever conducted.

Reached at her home in Texas, Ms. Kurtz, who is now retired, first said she had no recollection of Mr. Copperman's case and later declined to discuss it.

In an interview, Ms. Rose-Louder, now the deputy county executive for health and human services in Nassau County, said she also did not recall the allegations against Mr. Copperman.

County officials aggressively prosecuted sexual predators who abused children, she said. The practice of the Nassau County district attorney’s office was to take the family’s wishes into account when deciding whether to prosecute sexual abuse cases, she added.

“Prominence didn’t make us say ‘yea’ or ‘nay,’” Ms. Rose-Louder said. “It was the evidence in front of us, or the feelings of the people at the time.”

A spokesman for the office, Brendan Brosh, said an exhaustive search for files related to Mr. Copperman had come up empty.

Floods at a storage building had destroyed thousands of old paper records, he said, and records at the office were not digitized in 2000.

By the time the 17-year-old, her sister and her mother appeared at the police station that year, local prosecutors were already aware of the allegations against Mr. Copperman.

Not only had the case been covered extensively in the news media, but the state medical board had also worked closely with Ms. Kurtz of the county district attorney’s office, according to Silvia Finkelstein, who was a lawyer at the state Office of Professional Medical Conduct at the time.

She brought the charges that led to the revocation of Mr. Copperman’s medical license. The state board’s investigation turned up a number disturbing accusations, but it was not a criminal proceeding.

At hearings before the board during summer and fall 2000, six former patients recalled that Mr. Copperman had told them they were “dirty” and needed a “genital cleaning.”

He had them lie on their backs while he rubbed and scraped their genitals with his ungloved hands or finger, according to the women’s testimony.

The state and county jointly interviewed women during the medical board’s investigation, according to Ms. Finkelstein, who now works for the Nassau County district attorney’s office as director of immigrant affairs.

Still, local prosecutors did not file charges. The women were all in their 30s by the time they provided testimony to the state Office of Professional Medical Conduct, beyond the statute of limitations for criminal charges. (The medical conduct office does not have a statute of limitations.)

In any case, county prosecutors could have filed only misdemeanor charges against Mr. Copperman, because of the way sex crimes were defined under state law at the time, Ms. Finkelstein said.

“I can’t tell you how many women we contacted who didn’t want to cooperate, who didn’t want to be involved in a criminal case or their parents didn’t want them to be involved, when the maximum charges available were misdemeanors,” Ms. Finkelstein said.

The 17-year-old’s allegations of sexual abuse, however, appear to have met the legal requirements for prosecution. Even a misdemeanor conviction would have placed Mr. Copperman on the sex offender registry, requiring him to list his address on a public database.

Marci Hamilton, the chief executive of Child U.S.A., an advocacy group based at the University of Pennsylvania that is focused on child protection, said the failure to criminally prosecute prominent men who faced allegations of sexual abuse was all too frequent.

“If a man lost his livelihood, they think that’s the worst thing that could ever happen to him,” she said of local authorities. “But there’s absolutely no evidence that taking someone’s professional license away means they will quit preying on children — they just find children in other environments.”

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