Rubin Paterniti Gonzalez Rizzo Kaufman LLP continues its track record of success and great start to 2023 by obtaining a MAJOR VICTORY for another firm client who, along with numerous health care and other institutions throughout Nassau County, stood accused by 109 adult female plaintiffs of various acts of wrongdoing in what could be distilled to aiding and abetting the perpetration of child sexual abuse by a disgraced physician. Plaintiffs lodged theories of negligence, recklessness (including punitive damages), enabling sexual harassment, exploitation, civil sexual battery, child sex abuse, negligent hiring/retention and supervision; infliction of emotional distress; “failing to rescue”, among a litany of other theories. Broadly, plaintiffs represented 109 now adult women who in their infant years dating back to the 1960s through the late 2001, were allegedly sexually abused by a physician employed by one of the defendant institutions (not our client) and otherwise affiliated with the rest of the named defendants. The perpetrating physician allegedly committed numerous, heinous acts of sexual abuse in his off-campus basement office of his private practice against his then- pediatric patients.
As to the non-criminal defendants, including our client — a well-respected not-for-profit hospital with a long-standing reputation for delivering high-quality care to its patients — plaintiffs variously alleged that for decades, complaints about inappropriate conduct towards his pediatric patients were well known, such that a duty was triggered by the various institutions that either employed and/or affiliated with the perpetrating physician. Putting aside the in-artfully plead and totally disputed, putative “widespread” knowledge of the physician’s so-called propensity to harm his pediatric patients, and the fact that no actual knowledge was alleged, plaintiffs asserted that such “knowledge” required these various institutions to affirmatively do something, whether to pull the physician’s privileges, notify examining boards and law enforcement of the alleged conduct said to have been at least inferentially knowable by the institutional defendants, and otherwise take steps to keep him away from unnamed, scores of would-be pediatric patients within Nassau County, with a population well in excess of 1,000,000.
RPGRK’s team for this mass-tort consolidated litigation — led by partners Craig Rizzo, Juan Gonzalez and David Lafarga, with support and assistance from Partners Maria Massucci and Regina Sagesser, and Associates Julian Buffa, Kerrianne Russo, and Maria Stavrakis — quickly mobilized to develop an early aggressive strategy for defending our client’s interest in what could have been tremendous exposure in the realm of hundreds of millions of dollars in potential damages before a jury. Pre-answer, the team investigated each and every plaintiff, performed meticulous research and analyses of the numerous and convoluted theories and counts of liability asserted, and then prepared a detailed, complex pre-answer motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim under any conceivable theory within the complaints.
On January 11, 2023, the Honorable Leonard D. Steinman issued a lengthy and well-reasoned 13-page Opinion and Order that thoroughly considered each and every plaintiff’s claims and theories as to each defendant (except the perpetrating, defaulting physician), rejecting each in turn and determining that under no theory raised in any of the 109 complaints did any of the plaintiffs state a cause of action — specifically, a duty owed to them running from the moving defendants — upon which relief could be granted!
CONGRATULATIONS once again to Juan, Craig, David and the entire RPGRK Team that contributed to this impressive, critical win that chartered novel legal terrain and saved our institutional client potential exposure in the hundreds of millions of dollars!!!!!!!!!!