Upper East Side Doctor Convicted of Sexual Abuse

An Upper East Side urologist was convicted in Manhattan federal court last week of sexually assaulting eight male patients, including six young boys, during medical appointments from approximately 2015 to 2019.

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A jury found Darius A. Paduch, 56, a former doctor at New York-Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medical Center and Northwell Health, guilty on numerous felony counts of sexual abuse brought last year by the federal attorney general’s office in New York. He faces up to 60 years in prison, according to the New York Post. Sentencing is scheduled for August 22.

Paduch’s attorney, Michael Baldassare, told the New York Post his client would appeal the convictions. He also faces civil suits from hundreds of former patients for alleged sexual assaults that date back to approximately 2006, according to The New York Times.

According to the federal indictment brought by the Justice Department, Paduch, who specialized in male infertility and male reproductive health, “abused and assaulted multiple victims, including minor victims, who went to Paduch for medical care.”

“Paduch did so in the course of providing these victims with purportedly necessary and appropriate medical treatment. During appointments Baruch claims that he needed to touch victims in certain ways to provide medical treatment, when in fact, Paduch sexually abused and assaulted those victims for no legitimate medical purpose and for his own sexual gratification,” states the indictment.

The assaults, which took place when Paduch was alone with victims in exam rooms, included masturbating his patients with his hands or using a sex toy, instructing them to masturbate, showing them pornography while watching victims masturbate at his direction, groping and caressing his victims, pressing himself against them, and penetrating their rectums with his ungloved fingers, among other actions. He also asked his victims to discuss their sexual activity, talked about their physical appearance and size of their penises and discussed his own sexual activity and history.

Following the convictions, U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, who brought the charges against Paduch, called the outcome a just conclusion.

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“As a unanimous jury has found, Darius A. Paduch leveraged his position of trust as a medical doctor for his own perverse gratification. For years, patients seeking needed medical care, many of them children, left his office as victims,” Williams commented in a press release after the conviction. “I commend the career prosecutors of this Office for bringing this important case to a just conclusion.”

Paduch’s medical license was suspended last year by the state Department of Health and is now expected to be permanently revoked, according to The New York Times.

Mallory Allen, a lawyer representing the victims, said in a statement to the Post that justice has been served.

“For nearly twenty years, patients who trusted him for their medical care and treatment were instead brutalized by his degrading, sexually violating, and medically unfounded acts while the hospitals where he worked looked the other way,” Allen said.

Paduch, of North Bergen, NJ, has been in jail since his arrest in April 2023. He is also facing civil lawsuits filed by hundreds of former patients for alleged sexual abuse and for allegedly performing unnecessary medical procedures with anesthesia. Many are also filing lawsuits against the hospitals where he worked.

Anthony T. DiPietro, a lawyer representing more than 200 of his victims in civil suits, told The New York Times, “we are all grateful that Darius Paduch will never be able to do this to a single patient in New York State or any place else ever again.”

Many of Paduch’s patients came from all over the country, according to The New York Times.