How [Epstein/Obama U...] Columbia Ignored Women, Undermined Prosecutors and Protected a Predator For More Than 20 Years

https://www.propublica.org/article/columbia-obgyn-sexually-assaulted-
patients-for-20-years

For decades, patients warned Columbia about the behavior of obstetrician 
Robert Hadden. One even called 911 and had him arrested. Columbia let him 
keep working.

Laurie Kanyok was 38, a professional dancer on the cusp of retirement, 
when she learned she was pregnant. She had already suffered one 
miscarriage and had recently undergone a spinal treatment that she feared 
would increase the risk of birth defects. Kanyok booked an appointment 
with an obstetrician, Robert Hadden of Columbia University. She felt 
grateful to be in the care of someone who had spent his entire career at 
such a distinguished institution.

At first, Kanyok liked Hadden, who had a soft-spoken, fatherly way. With 
his prim, grayish beard and wire-rimmed glasses, he reminded her of “a 
skinny Santa Claus,” as she later put it. But there was one time when, 
heels in the stirrups, she thought she felt a flicker of something moist 
on her vagina. During another appointment, Hadden palpated Kanyok’s cervix 
with such force that his fingers lifted her from the exam table. She heard 
him moan.

If you need help, call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-4673 
or chat online at online.rainn.org.

Kanyok dismissed Hadden’s strange behavior, focusing on her baby. “You put 
yourself aside at that point, right?” she says. “You want to see a 
heartbeat. You want to know that the umbilical cord isn’t wrapped around 
the neck. And then you want to know that you’re going to get to the finish 
line, deliver and go home. That’s it.”

Six weeks after giving birth to a daughter, on a Friday in late June 2012, 
Kanyok returned to Columbia’s suite of offices on East 60th Street for a 
checkup. She looked idly at her phone as Hadden examined her. He assured 
her that all looked good, and the nurse chaperoning the exam left the 
room. Hadden started to follow her out. Then he paused, turned, and told 
Kanyok that he’d forgotten to check her stitches. He instructed her to lie 
down again.

Beneath the paper blanket covering her knees, between her legs, the 
assault this time was unmistakable. Kanyok jolted back and saw Hadden’s 
face surface, bright red. She froze as he chattered nervously and 
performed what he told her was a breast exam. She texted her boyfriend. 
“Dr Hadden just licked my vagina,” she typed. “I’m shaking And freaked 
out.”

Kanyok’s boyfriend ran to the street and handed $50 to a black-car driver 
for the short ride to Hadden’s office. He collected Kanyok and called 911 
twice, first on the drive back to their apartment and again once they got 
inside. He struggled to articulate what had just happened. “How do you 
even verbalize this horrendous act of an OB-GYN from a super-renowned 
place like Columbia?” he recalls. He told the 911 operator that his 
girlfriend’s doctor had “touched her orally.”

Soon, Kanyok and her boyfriend buzzed up two NYPD officers. As the police 
took their statements, Kanyok’s phone rang. It was Hadden. He left a 
voicemail, which Kanyok played for the group on speaker.

“Hi Laurie, it’s Dr. Hadden calling,” he said. “It’s like 4:30 on Friday. 
You know, I just got word that you called the office and you’re upset and 
you’re calling the police. What — what the heck happened? What’s going on? 
Please, can we talk? Um. If you can, please just give the office a call 
and, you know — or come back and talk face-to-face. I, I, I don’t — I 
don’t understand. I just know that — I just got word from the — first, 
from the secretary, and then from our office manager and the nurse. So I’m 
very upset. I don’t know what’s going on. So please, please call me back. 
All right. Take care.”

Listen to the voice message Hadden left Kanyok while she was giving her 
statement to the police.

The officers glanced at one another and then at Kanyok. “Fuck him,” she 
remembers them saying. “Let’s go get this pig.”

Hadden was arrested at his office later on Friday. Mary D’Alton, the head 
of Columbia’s OB-GYN department, went to the clinic when she heard police 
were on the scene. Meanwhile, a squad car took Kanyok to St. Luke’s 
Hospital for a rape-kit examination, then to meet with a prosecutor. She 
returned home around 11 p.m. After a long shower, she peeked in at her 
baby. “My daughter’s asleep,” she recalls thinking, “and I am safe. 
Everybody is safe.”

Kanyok didn’t know that Hadden had already been released from custody. On 
Saturday, police spoke with the department’s administrator, Jeanne 
Dellicarri. On Monday, Hadden received a hand-delivered letter from 
Columbia. “Dear Bob,” it began. “I write to inform you of the position of 
the University and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital with respect to the 
allegations against you currently being investigated by the New York City 
Police Department.” The letter said that if Hadden had a chaperone with 
him while examining patients, and if he complied with all university and 
hospital policies, he was free “to resume clinical activities.”

The document was signed by Hadden’s immediate supervisor, John Evanko. He 
CC’d D’Alton; Robert Kelly, then the president of NewYork-Presbyterian, 
the Columbia-affiliated hospital system in which Hadden was an attending 
doctor; and Lee Goldman, then the dean of Columbia’s medical school, where 
Hadden was a member of the faculty.

On Tuesday, Hadden was back in the exam room. Columbia let him continue 
practicing for another five weeks. Eight patients say he assaulted them in 
that time.

Columbia University — where Robert Hadden spent his entire medical career 
— has never fully accounted for its role in allowing a predator to operate 
unchecked for decades. To date, more than 245 patients have alleged that 
Hadden abused them, which by itself could make him one of the most 
prolific sexual assailants in New York history. But the total number of 
victims may be far higher. On any given day during his two decades of 
practice at Columbia, Hadden saw 25 to 40 patients. Tens of thousands came 
under his care. A baby girl he delivered grew up to be a teenager he 
allegedly assaulted.

Hadden, 65, was sentenced in July to 20 years in federal prison — the 
result of a long, arduous process that Columbia often undermined. One of 
the country’s most acclaimed private universities was deeply involved in 
containing, deflecting and distancing itself from the scandal at every 
step.

In agreeing to pay $236.5 million to resolve lawsuits brought by 226 of 
Hadden’s victims, Columbia admitted no fault, which is in keeping with 
public statements over the years placing the blame for what happened 
solely on Hadden. But the university’s own records show that women 
repeatedly tried to warn Columbia doctors and staff about Hadden. At least 
twice, the fact that Hadden’s bosses in the OB-GYN department knew of the 
women’s concerns was acknowledged in writing. They allowed him to continue 
practicing.

Once Hadden’s crimes became clear, Columbia worked to tamp down the 
crisis. It waited months to tell his patients that he was no longer 
working, and then sent matter-of-fact letters that omitted the reason. 
After police and local prosecutors began to investigate Hadden in 2012, 
Columbia failed to hand over evidence in its possession, despite subpoenas 
that compelled it to do so. The university also did not tell the district 
attorney when more patients came forward — witnesses who could have 
strengthened the case prosecutors were trying to build. The DA found 
Columbia’s conduct so concerning that the office launched a criminal 
investigation into the university itself, along with the affiliated 
hospital where Hadden had admitting privileges. The inquiry found that 
Columbia had, by neglecting to place document-retention holds, “intended 
to destroy” emails written by Hadden and his former colleagues who had 
left the university. The DA found the records because they were 
“inadvertently left on an old server.” (Columbia disputes this.)

The local investigation of Hadden ended in a 2016 deal that allowed him to 
avoid serving a single day in jail. Cyrus Vance Jr., who was DA at the 
time, says that if Columbia had fully cooperated, it might have made a 
difference in his office’s decision to accept a plea. “Obviously that did 
not happen,” Vance says. His former deputy, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, is 
more direct. Columbia, she says, “didn’t have clean hands here. If they 
didn’t know, it’s because they chose not to know.” Hadden remained free 
until his victims began to go public in such numbers that federal 
investigators took up the case in 2020 and secured his conviction.

https://img.assets-d.propublica.org/v5/images/hadden-mug-
shot.png?crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fm=webp&fp-x=0.5&fp-
y=0.5&h=939&q=80&w=1450&s=c743a4a8d5c5ed07fc4ed0fb5e4d435c
The mug shot from Hadden’s 2020 arrest Credit:Courtesy of the U.S. 
Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York

In recent decades, several university medical systems have provided cover 
for abusive doctors whose victim counts run well into the hundreds. 
Columbia’s failures stand out even in this grim company. Unlike at 
Michigan State — where Larry Nassar sexually assaulted young gymnasts 
under the guise of medical care — no Columbia administrators are known to 
have lost their jobs. Unlike at the University of Michigan — where an 
athletics department doctor abused mostly male students — Columbia never 
commissioned an independent investigation into what happened under its 
roof. Unlike at the University of Southern California — where a staff 
gynecologist’s abuse led to a billion dollar settlement— Columbia’s 
president, Lee Bollinger, did not resign when the enormity of Hadden’s 
crimes came to light.

Instead, Bollinger retired in June, celebrated by a university that 
continues to uphold itself as a place where eternal virtues are taught and 
practiced. The announcement of Bollinger’s successor, Minouche Shafik, 
noted that her most recent book is “What We Owe Each Other,” “in which she 
calls for a better social contract to underpin our economic system and 
challenges institutions and individuals to rethink how we can better 
support each other to thrive.” Meanwhile, in the Hadden case, Columbia’s 
pattern of defensive behavior is ongoing. The university still hasn’t 
informed patients that their former doctor is a convicted sex offender. 
And Columbia is aggressively fighting new lawsuits from victims, arguing 
in one case this year that it should not be held liable because Hadden’s 
actions were “outside the scope of his employment.”

Columbia has long been one of the most powerful and respected institutions 
in New York. It has a $13 billion endowment, it is one of the city’s 
largest private landowners and its board of trustees is stacked with 
titans of finance and government. But the university declined to make any 
of its leaders available for interviews. In emailed statements, an unnamed 
spokesperson wrote that Columbia was “profoundly sorry for the pain that 
Robert Hadden’s patients suffered as a result of his abhorrent 
misconduct,” before reemphasizing that he “purposely worked to evade 
oversight and engineer situations in which he would abuse his patients.” 
The statement continued, “We also deeply regret, based on what we know 
today, that Hadden saw patients for several weeks following his voided 
arrest in 2012.”

The disconnect between Columbia’s approach and its stated commitment to 
“the highest standards of ethical conduct” remains inexplicable to many 
people involved in the Hadden affair, including Agnifilo.

“I’m struggling for words because it’s actually head-scratching,” she 
says. “They are the best of the best. How could they put someone back the 
next day after she went to the police? It makes no sense to me. It would 
be one thing if they just said, ‘You know what, we talked to her — we 
didn’t believe her.’ But they didn’t even do that.” She is referring to 
the fact that Columbia’s internal investigation of Kanyok’s allegations 
failed to interview Kanyok herself.

We attempted to contact more than 100 of Hadden’s former colleagues. Only 
one doctor, Jennifer Tam, would speak openly. She is no longer practicing 
medicine. “I would like to think if I was still at Columbia, I would go on 
the record, but I could see how the threat of repercussions would keep 
people from speaking,” she says. She recalls being surprised to learn that 
Hadden had been arrested — and then thinking about how easily any concerns 
about him could have been rationalized in the workplace she had known. She 
says there was an ethos at Columbia of keeping quiet about anything that 
could reflect poorly on the university. “If there was something that 
wasn’t perfect, you better not talk about it,” she says. “We don’t want to 
ruin the reputation.”

“Strolling around Midtown, where I lived then — every time I saw a middle-
aged man on the street with a gray beard and gray hair and glasses, I 
froze. And I still do.”
LAURIE KANYOK
Patient: 2011 to 2012


“Even looking at pregnant people was so hard for me. Because I was robbed 
of all of that joy.”
ADINA
Patient: 2006 to 2011


“I kept thinking, I’m not going to mention anything to anybody. Who are 
they going to believe — a doctor from Columbia or me?”
ROSA MIOLAN
Patient: 1993 to 2012


“A lot of my experience with OB-GYNs was at local clinics in Brooklyn, 
whereas he was a Columbia doctor. So I felt safe, I felt protected.”
TSAHIA HOBSON
Patient: 2003 to 2012


“I was a freshman. It was my first exam. It wasn’t till much later that I 
realized that what he was doing was not normal.”
CRYSTAL ROSE
Patient: 1994


“Nobody’s going to believe me. They’re going to say, ‘Oh, you’re pregnant, 
you’re having hormone changes, you have stitches down there.’ I always 
blamed it on my body.”
LUISA SOLER
Patient: 1996 to 2007


“He was such an expert groomer. I trusted him more than I’ve trusted 
almost anybody.”
ROBYN BASS LAVENDER
Patient: c. 1992 to 2005

There was nothing particularly special about Robert Hadden that would make 
Columbia want to protect him. He wasn’t a prominent physician with a 
roster of elite clients. He wasn’t attracting millions of research dollars 
or in demand on the academic lecture circuit. He was one of dozens of OB-
GYNs employed by the university, outwardly unremarkable.

Hadden grew up in Garden City, a suburb on Long Island, in an environment 
that a federal judge later described as traumatic. His family, the judge 
said, included a mother who had alcoholism, an absentee father and three 
siblings with whom Robert “shared a sexual dynamic.” At Skidmore College, 
in the class of 1980, he tended to shrink into the background. “Somewhat 
of a phantom,” recalls one of his classmates. Another says it were as if 
he had a Romulan Cloaking Device from “Star Trek” that allowed him to 
suddenly appear out of nowhere.

Hadden completed a graduate program in Florida before applying to medical 
school. Failing to get in anywhere in the U.S., he enrolled instead at St. 
George’s University in Grenada. He transferred to New York Medical College 
and, after graduating in 1987, continued his training as a resident 
physician in obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia.

Then, as now, the university played a leading role in a health care 
network that was vast and interconnected, from its medical school to 
Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital (the hospital was later renamed after a 
merger) to a system of clinics across the city, where doctors in a range 
of specialties treated thousands of patients. Hadden rose to chief 
resident of the OB-GYN department at Columbia’s main hospital campus in 
1990 and became a member of the medical school faculty. Tam, his former 
colleague, recalls him as someone who was generally quiet, if slightly 
awkward. Still, she says, he seemed popular with patients, some of whom 
traveled from other states because he seemed to offer unusually personal 
and thorough attention. Hadden’s friendliness also endeared him to his 
staff. “There was not one person who didn’t love Dr. Hadden,” says Willie 
Terry, who was then working with Hadden as a medical assistant at 
Columbia’s clinic in Washington Heights.

One morning, Terry later testified in federal court, she realized she’d 
forgotten her stethoscope in a room where she had been assisting Hadden. 
She knocked softly and opened the door. The patient was on the examination 
table with a sheet over her legs. Terry saw Hadden at the end of the 
table, one foot on the floor and the other on a step stool. His left hand 
pressed against the patient’s knee, holding her leg open, while the other 
hand moved under the sheet in a way Terry knew was not medical. Hadden’s 
eyes were shut tight. His face was red and turned toward the ceiling. 
Terry jumped back and shut the door.

“The man that I saw sent shock waves all over my body,” Terry says. “I 
said, ‘Dear God, what was that?’” She never reported what she saw. She was 
certain that her word would have little weight against a doctor’s, and she 
wasn’t the only person who felt that way. A labor and delivery nurse who 
began working for Columbia in the early 1990s later testified that she saw 
Hadden move his fingers sexually around the labia of women in labor every 
time he checked for cervical dilation. “I’ve watched porn and I’ve had sex 
and it seemed sexual to me,” she said. An attorney pressed her on why she 
had not blown the whistle. “Historically, there has always been a 
hierarchy between physicians and nurses, and I felt that I didn’t have a 
voice,” she said.

Early on, Hadden seemed to target patients who had little context for a 
normal exam, including women who had never seen an OB-GYN or who were 
pregnant for the first time. Those who did not realize that a breast exam 
is not required during every prenatal visit and is properly performed one 
breast at a time, swiftly, using only the pads of the fingers. Those who 
did not know that a “scoliosis check” or “mole check” while completely 
undressed is not standard care.

One such patient, a 16-year-old girl from the Bronx, went to see Hadden in 
1992. She was five weeks pregnant and had never seen an OB-GYN. She 
remembers Hadden conducting a prolonged exam that was “very rough,” and he 
did not stop even when she told him he was hurting her, according to 
federal court filings. A week later, her boyfriend’s mother brought her 
back to the clinic to file a complaint. A receptionist gave her a sticky 
note with a phone number. After calling several times, the girl finally 
reached a live voice and said that a doctor in the clinic had made her 
uncomfortable. She was transferred around and left a few voicemails. “No 
one seemed to care,” she says. She could never get anyone at Columbia in a 
position of authority to speak to her directly.

Columbia ignored older women with better resources, too. In 1993, Dian 
Saderup Monson was living in New York, pursuing her doctorate in American 
literature, when she became pregnant for the second time. She was looking 
for an obstetrician closer to her home, and a friend recommended “this 
newish doctor,” she recalls. “People think he’s very personable. He’s very 
warm.”

On an October morning, Monson went to her first appointment with Hadden, 
and they proceeded from a get-to-know-you chat in his office to an exam 
room. Monson knew immediately that the breast check, prolonged and whole-
handed, was not normal; she asked Hadden if he’d felt something 
concerning. She remembers that during both the breast and pelvic exams, 
the medical assistant turned her back to face the counter as if she had 
something to do there. But the counter was empty. As soon as Hadden left 
the room, Monson felt the assistant’s eyes boring into her. “I felt like 
she was telling me, ‘Don’t come back,’” Monson says. She did not fully 
process that she had been sexually assaulted until hours later, sitting 
alone on her sofa. “It was like a revelation,” she says. “I just suddenly 
knew. I was just sobbing. I understood what had happened.”

Monson and her husband ruled out calling the police. It would be her word 
against Hadden’s, and he could discredit her simply by saying that a 
chaperone had been in the room. But Monson realized that there was one 
thing she could do. She was a writer. If she created a document for 
Hadden’s personnel file at Columbia, she thought, more evidence would 
surely follow. “What is their threshold for acting on a complaint against 
a physician?” she remembers thinking. “Maybe it’s three people, maybe it’s 
four, but they’ll reach that threshold pretty quickly. And they will get 
rid of this doctor.”

Still, she dreaded the task and put it off for months. Just a week before 
her daughter was born, Monson dragged her bulky Hewlett-Packard laptop 
into her son’s room, sat at his student desk, and typed a letter. She 
chose impassive clinical language so she would not be dismissed as 
emotional. “I have never, until being examined by Dr. Hadden, been 
disturbed by the way a breast or pelvic exam was conducted,” she wrote. 
She described the sexual ways he touched her in detail. “It is not a 
pleasant prospect to describe on paper an incident that left me ultimately 
feeling violated. Despite my long delay in making this complaint, however, 
I continue to feel that Dr. Hadden’s conduct was improper, indeed, grossly 
so. I have tried to imagine any of my past or current physicians giving 
the exam he gave me, and I simply cannot.”

Monson’s husband put two envelopes in the mail. One was addressed to the 
risk-management department at Columbia, and the second was sent to Harold 
Fox, the acting head of the OB-GYN department at Columbia-Presbyterian. 
The risk office never responded. But Monson received a prompt reply from 
Fox, who said he would investigate and follow up in two weeks. “I was 
gratified,” she says. “I was like, ‘Hey, get a load of this!’ to my 
husband. ‘Can you believe this? They’re actually taking it really 
seriously.’”

This is the extent of the investigation Fox conducted: He asked the 
medical assistant whether she had seen anything inappropriate. The 
assistant said no, and Fox let the matter drop. Fox later testified to a 
grand jury that Sterling Williams, who was then the vice chairman of the 
OB-GYN department, had agreed that this effort was adequate. Monson never 
heard anything from Fox again.

Hadden’s assaults continued. A medical assistant who worked with him at 
the time recalls questioning, along with her colleagues, why Hadden would 
often direct them to move on to the next patient before he had completed 
the exam in progress. Even so, after leaving her position, she returned in 
1996 to see Hadden as a patient. She says that as she was lying on the 
examination table, Hadden rubbed his erect penis on her arm. Stunned and 
shaken, she told a receptionist that Hadden was a pervert. She recalls 
that the receptionist replied, “I know” and “I’m sorry.”

By 2000, Hadden’s personnel file included a formal write-up for what was 
vaguely described as “inappropriate use” of a computer. It was signed by 
Rogerio Lobo, who was then the head of the OB-GYN department. Within 
Columbia’s bureaucracy, warning signs both subtle and glaring failed to 
have any effect. In 2004 or 2005, Katia Herman, a 27-year-old yoga 
instructor, received a referral to see Hadden from her Columbia 
obstetrician, Katarina Eisinger. At their first appointment, Hadden 
assaulted her, she says. Herman returned to Eisinger for her care and 
eventually decided to tell her what had happened.

“I said, ‘You know, Dr. Hadden was really inappropriate with me and made 
me extremely uncomfortable,’” Herman says. “She looked at me. She kind of 
waved her hand. And she was like, ‘That’s just Dr. Hadden.’” Herman left 
the appointment feeling like her concerns had been shut down. “I just 
remember being like, Wait, what the fuck?” After giving birth, she stopped 
going to Eisinger and Columbia.

Patients at the Washington Heights hospital where Hadden delivered babies, 
the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, also tried to complain. Eva 
Santos Veloz was 18 when Hadden assisted her emergency delivery in 2008. 
During her 18-hour labor, she recalls, Hadden touched her in ways that 
made her uncomfortable, sometimes while not wearing gloves. Santos Veloz 
and her mother complained, but they spoke limited English and couldn’t 
find anyone who spoke Spanish. After the delivery, they informed a 
bilingual social worker, who took notes and offered information about 
postpartum depression. No one ever followed up, Santos Veloz says.

Her mother encouraged her to file another complaint about Hadden with the 
hospital, but Santos Veloz says she was too scared. Both women were 
undocumented, and she thought no one would believe them. “For years, 
honestly, I thought that I was making this up in my head,” she says. 
“Because at the time that I did try to speak up about it, in the hospital, 
it was just like, ‘Nothing really happened,’ and I was just overreacting 
because I was in pain.”

Complaints fell on deaf ears in a myriad of ways. Another former patient, 
Christina Arethas, tried to tell two of Hadden’s colleagues about him. One 
was Jennifer Tam, the sole doctor who agreed to an interview. Arethas 
recalls saying to her that Hadden was “creepy” and that she did not want 
him to deliver her baby if he was on call when she went into labor. Tam 
doesn’t remember the conversation; she is devastated that she could have 
missed warning signs about the doctor. “I feel absolutely terrible knowing 
what we know now,” she says, beginning to cry. She says she might have 
assumed Arethas simply didn’t care for Hadden’s personality. “I could 
never imagine that somebody that I practiced with could be doing this 
behind closed doors.”

Records show that at the time, Columbia had no clear policy for 
documenting patient complaints or guidance for faculty about how to handle 
them. In 2007, Columbia circulated a policy requiring chaperones during 
exams, but several physicians later told the district attorney that they 
did not recall ever seeing it. In October 2008, another patient made a 
complaint against Hadden. An administrator named Brenda Cruz sent multiple 
emails about it and spoke with John Evanko. (None of the Columbia 
personnel mentioned here responded to detailed questions.) He was still 
Hadden’s boss four years later, when he signed the letter authorizing him 
to immediately return to work after the incident with Laurie Kanyok.

“I think his gynecological practice was basically a front for being able 
to have access to women’s bodies in a medical setting.”
DIAN MONSON
Patient: 1993


“He spent a lot of time with each patient, pretending like he cared. He 
asked us about our families, which eventually translated into more 
personal questions.”
DAWN W.
Patient: 1997 to 2011


“I don’t take care of myself as a woman because it’s just so traumatic for 
me to go to the doctor.”
EVA SANTOS VELOZ
Patient: 2008


“Having worked at Columbia, I knew that they were a powerhouse and that 
they were going to stand behind their physician.”
AMY
Patient: 1999 to 2012


“When Hadden said the things he said to me and did what he did, a part of 
me was shocked. And another part of me accepted it as normal — what women 
had to endure from powerful men.”
CHRISTINA ARETHAS
Patient: 2003 to 2004


“It’s this weird feeling — like I was sexually assaulted in my sleep — 
because I was that unaware that it was happening. It is incredibly 
violating.”
DAYNA SOLOMON
Patient: c. 2002 to 2012


“I feel like I was targeted because of my situation — him knowing it was 
my first visit and that I was queer.”
ELLIOT MAFFEI
Patient: 2009


“It’s emotional abuse, as well as sexual abuse, when your predator is not 
scary or seemingly dangerous because your guard is down. You squash your 
instincts.”
TOBI PILAVIN-WEINSTEIN
Patient: 1992 to 1994

When the NYPD arrested Hadden in June 2012, Columbia acted swiftly to find 
him a lawyer. That weekend, Helen Cantwell, an attorney representing the 
university, called Isabelle Kirshner, a prominent defense counselor who 
had developed what she calls a “niche practice of men behaving badly.” She 
agreed to represent him. But even Kirshner was puzzled by Columbia’s 
stance toward Hadden. “I was a little surprised that they let him go 
back,” she recalls, letting out a chuckle of disbelief. “I have no idea 
how that came about.”

On Tuesday, Hadden’s first day back at work, he saw a patient who is 
identified in court as Victim 53. “I was sexually assaulted by a known 
sexual offender, known by his peers and all levels of hospital management 
as a sexual predator, literally just 4 days after he was arrested in his 
medical office and escorted by police out of the building,” she later 
wrote in a victim-impact statement. “Robert Hadden was actually permitted 
to RETURN to his medical office and sexually assault me just FOUR days 
after being arrested for LICKING a patient’s genitals.”

Over the next several weeks, Kanyok asked friends to call Columbia to 
check if Hadden was still seeing patients. “I used the words ‘prank call,’ 
for lack of a better term,” she says. “They told me, ‘I can make an 
appointment.’ And we would go, ‘Motherfucker …’” In addition to her 
outrage, she was mystified by Columbia’s passivity — the way it didn’t 
seem to worry about reputational risk. “Wouldn’t you want to cover your 
ass?”

Columbia suspended Hadden five weeks after his arrest, when he would not 
cooperate with an internal investigation. He took a leave of absence in 
September, and at the end of the year, the university chose not to renew 
his appointment. Hadden essentially retired, living at home in New Jersey 
with his wife, Carol, and their son, who has disabilities. He maintained 
access to his Columbia email address and used it for years.

The university notified patients that Hadden was gone in a mass mailing in 
April 2013. “Dear Valued Patient,” the letter began. “We regret to inform 
you that Dr. Robert Hadden has closed his private practice at Columbia 
University Medical Center.” The letter offered no explanation. It was 
signed by Katarina Eisinger — the doctor who Katia Herman says dismissed 
her concerns eight years before. She was now the chief of Columbia’s 
General Obstetrics and Gynecology division.

Meanwhile, the Manhattan district attorney opened an investigation into 
Hadden. Laura Millendorf, a prosecutor who had grown up in a family of 
doctors, volunteered to take the case, appalled by Hadden’s profound 
breaches of trust. “This was horrific enough that it was worth pushing 
forward as aggressively as possible,” Millendorf says. She suspected that 
if Kanyok’s story checked out, there would be more victims. “It didn’t 
make sense to me that somebody would graduate immediately to licking the 
vagina of a patient — in that position of power, at that age — from never 
having done it before,” she says.

The key evidence in the case would be Kanyok’s testimony. “She struck me 
as somebody who would make an excellent witness,” Millendorf says. “She 
was poised, smart, well spoken, confident, tough. An incredible memory for 
detail.” But there was a problem. Police records show that while analysis 
of Kanyok’s rape kit found genetic material from two males — one of whom, 
naturally, was her boyfriend — the lab could not determine whether the 
second sample belonged to Hadden. The DA’s office decided to shelve the 
case. Millendorf called Kanyok to break the news in early 2013. “The main 
thing I remember is saying I was sorry,” Millendorf says. “That stands out 
because it was not the culture at that time to say that kind of thing. The 
expectation was to be ‘Just the facts, ma’am’ — very stiff and almost cold 
towards your victims.”

Kanyok replied, “Well, what do we do? He can’t practice medicine.” She 
thought a civil suit might achieve some measure of justice and serve as a 
warning for other women. One day, pushing her daughter in a stroller 
through the Columbus Circle mall, she took a call from an attorney she 
knew. “He goes, ‘You definitely have a case, but you can’t fight Columbia. 
You can’t. Just be realistic about what you’re doing.’”

Kanyok, along with a friend who had also been a patient and realized she’d 
been assaulted, sued the university and Hadden anyway in April 2013. A 
couple of months later, the New York Daily News published a short item 
about their lawsuit on the bottom corner of page 10. Some of Hadden’s 
former patients spotted it and came forward. In July, a longer story 
appeared, this time with a large photo of Hadden and the headline GYNO IS 
SICKO.

That morning, a doctoral candidate named Laurie Maldonado boarded a 
crowded subway car and saw the tabloid. Overcome by panic, she was still 
fighting to breathe when she left the train. She had been a Hadden patient 
for nine years, according to civil filings. She recalls that during a 
dilation check two days before her son was born, in 2011, Hadden had 
examined her cervix with such force she cried out in agony. “The pain that 
he inflicted on me was more severe than delivering birth,” she says. “And 
I gave birth naturally.”

Other women saw the Daily News articles and began to approach the DA’s 
office. Millendorf phoned Kanyok to say the case was being reopened. 
“There were numbers now,” Kanyok says. “It wasn’t just me.”

Evelyn Yang was among the new witnesses. She had been seven months 
pregnant with her first child when, she says, Hadden assaulted her in July 
2012, in the window when Columbia allowed him to see patients after his 
arrest. Yang did not report what happened or even tell her husband, 
Andrew. She thought that it must have been a onetime incident that had 
something to do with her. But she immediately found another doctor to 
deliver her baby.

Yang did not see Columbia’s “Dear Valued Patient” form letter until she 
was going through a stack of unopened mail months later. “As soon as I 
read that, I got goose bumps all over my body,” Yang says. “I could feel 
all the little hairs stand up. The room started to spin. I remember 
thinking very clearly, Oh my gosh, could it be that he did this to someone 
else?” She Googled Hadden and found the Daily News articles. The next 
thing she put into the search bar was “What to do if you’re assaulted by 
your doctor.”

Among the results was a legal forum. Most of the responses from attorneys 
were in legalese, but one struck Yang as compassionate. His name was 
Anthony T. DiPietro, a malpractice lawyer who operated a one-person firm 
in a shared office. Yang, not even sure what she wanted, called and told 
him her story.

DiPietro believed her instantly. “What woman would go to an OB-GYN for 
seven months when she was pregnant with her first child and then just have 
to leave?” he says. Yang wanted to force more information about Hadden 
into the open. DiPietro arranged for her to give a statement to the DA and 
filed a civil suit on her behalf, identifying her only as a Jane Doe. He 
held a mini press conference in his office and posted about the case on 
his blog in August 2013, writing, “Columbia and NYP Hospital nurses and 
staff members have information about Hadden which has been kept secret for 
decades.”

Lawyers for NewYork-Presbyterian objected vigorously, sending a cease-and-
desist letter to take down the blog post and issue a retraction. They 
threatened to sue for libel and to approach the state bar for professional 
discipline. In court documents, Hadden’s attorneys characterized DiPietro 
as overzealous, “engaging in hyperbole and distortion,” and said his “true 
agenda is publicity for himself.” They also accused him of trying to 
“single-handedly destroy Dr. Hadden and strip him of any of his rights.” 
Lawyers representing Columbia professed outrage that DiPietro was “using 
his unknown client to look for ‘victims’ and ‘witnesses.’”

Columbia also embarked on a campaign to force Yang to reveal her identity. 
In one filing, university lawyers argued that they were in a worse 
position than she was: “If the alleged offense is so stigmatizing that 
plaintiff can be allowed to sue anonymously, does it not follow that 
merely being accused of having committed the act is as stigmatizing or 
worse? The accusations alone will cause indelible harm to the hospital and 
university’s reputation.”

As Millendorf pressed the criminal case, she became convinced that Hadden 
had abused far more patients than the handful that had come forward. “I 
slowly came to realize that I was dealing with a sexual abuser of epic 
proportions,” she says. “I was talking to victims and learning of victims 
and witnesses that went back to the ’90s. I was just doing the math in my 
head. And I remember thinking, These are only the ones I know about. I was 
trying to do calculations in my head like, How many patients does someone 
see in a day? Even if he only abused 10% of them, what are the sheer 
numbers of victims here? There were victims of all ages and backgrounds — 
in clinics for people who had no insurance and also fancy offices on the 
Upper East Side. They were in every office, every age bracket, every 
ethnic bracket. I remember just being blown away by the numbers. I 
distinctly remember that when I started to say those numbers out loud, 
people looked at me like I was crazy.”

The strongest evidence in the case would be the victims’ testimony. “Most 
of them had some sort of hook, some sort of specific detail that made 
their story ring true,” Millendorf says. “The way that they knew that he 
had just put his mouth on their vagina, the way that they knew that it was 
a tongue they were feeling. These were awkward things to discuss, 
difficult things to discuss. But they were all really good at it.” By June 
2014, Millendorf had gathered enough evidence to indict. Kanyok, Yang and 
several others testified to a grand jury. Hadden was charged with five 
felonies and four misdemeanors involving six women.

A successful prosecution would rely in part on Columbia’s cooperation, 
including complying with demands for documents and alerting the government 
to important new witnesses. Instead, the university’s conduct helped the 
case against Hadden to collapse.

Not long after the indictment, in August 2014, a former Hadden patient 
named Sandra Abramowicz had a panic attack. She was at work in a cardiac 
research lab — at Columbia, coincidentally. She entered an equipment 
closet and thought of an exam with Hadden, a memory she had grappled with 
and tried to put aside: The sense of being frozen while on the exam table, 
unable to move. She suddenly began gasping for breath. “An incredible 
feeling that something horrible is going to happen,” she says. “I can’t 
stop crying. I felt trapped. Very, very trapped.”

Abramowicz began to reevaluate other memories. She had started going to 
Hadden in 2011, and at her first visit, he offered to perform a full-body 
mole check, which she declined. During another exam, Hadden offered 
graphic, unsolicited advice about sex, gesturing at different positions. 
“I remember looking at the nurse that was there like, ‘How do we stop this 
going on?’” Abramowicz recalls. “And she just looked down and sort of to 
the side. And I just felt then like, OK, I’m alone here.” Abramowicz also 
remembered getting the “Dear Valued Patient” letter about Hadden’s 
departure and asking another Columbia gynecologist about it. “She very 
abruptly looked down, avoided my eyes, looked at something on her desk, 
and said, ‘I don’t know anything about that,’” Abramowicz says. “I 
thought, That’s weird. Because he was working in the same department. How 
could you not know why he left?”

After her panic attack, Abramowicz met with a different Columbia doctor 
and asked if there was any medical explanation for the way Hadden had 
touched her and spoken to her. It was by now clear to Abramowicz that she 
had been assaulted. The doctor left the room briefly and returned, saying 
that physicians in the practice had been instructed where to refer 
patients with complaints about Hadden. The doctor handed Abramowicz a 
yellow Post-it note with a name and number.

Columbia knew that the district attorney had an open investigation. But 
the name on the Post-it was not Laura Millendorf, and the number was not 
the public hotline that the DA had set up for patients looking to report 
sexual assaults. It was Patricia Catapano, Columbia’s deputy general 
counsel, and her direct line.

https://img.assets-d.propublica.org/v5/images/post-it-toned-scan-
5.jpg?crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fm=webp&fp-x=0.5&fp-
y=0.5&h=1516&q=75&w=1450&s=171e76b1b3beae5d68670eaa630e6ad4

When Sandy Abramowicz told her doctor that Hadden had assaulted her, she 
was given the phone number for Patricia Catapano — who was then the deputy 
general counsel at Columbia — rather than getting contact information for 
the district attorney’s office that was investigating Hadden. 
Credit:Courtesy of Sandy Abramowicz

Abramowicz tucked the Post-it inside her wallet. “The fact that she said, 
‘This is where they’re referring former patients of Dr. Hadden’ told me 
I’m not the only one. And Columbia knows that I’m not the only one. And 
then the thing that hits me is — if she represents Columbia and I’m Sandy, 
whose interests is she representing here?” Abramowicz carried the Post-it 
for years but never called the number. (Reached by email, Catapano wrote, 
“I am retired from Columbia and have no interest in responding to this 
inquiry.”)

Columbia also didn’t alert prosecutors to the existence of other survivors 
who might have strengthened the criminal case. And it neglected to make a 
report to the Office of Professional Medical Conduct, the state medical 
board, as required.

For almost two years after Hadden’s indictment, Millendorf built her case, 
taking witness testimony and poring over thousands of medical records. But 
inside the DA’s office, she felt there was an aversion to the case, which 
was complicated and challenging. Prosecutions of sexual violence were 
often chosen on the basis of how easy they would be to win. In 2015, Vance 
passed on prosecuting Harvey Weinstein.

In February 2016, Hadden’s attorney, Kirshner, came to the DA’s office at 
1 Hogan Place to put the case to bed. Kirshner knew the department well. 
She had previously worked as a prosecutor there and was so close to Vance 
that she’d asked him to preside at her wedding. Meeting with his deputy, 
Agnifilo, Kirshner agreed to a deal: Hadden would plead guilty to one 
felony and one misdemeanor, be added to a sex crimes registry, and 
surrender his medical license. He would serve no time behind bars or even 
perform community service. The agreement also stipulated that he could not 
be prosecuted in the future for any similar crimes then known to the DA’s 
office.

Millendorf, who had not been at the meeting, was directed to tell Hadden’s 
victims that the deal was a “win.” Devastated by the weakness of the plea, 
she wrote up talking points for herself — a list she called “Reasons Why 
Plea Good” — to keep herself on-message as she dialed.

Kanyok was in the middle of holding a ballet audition when she got the 
call. “I was numb. I was absolutely numb,” she says. “That’s all? That’s 
all you get?”

Agnifilo thought at the time that the plea was a good one and that the 
survivors would be happy to be spared the agonies of a trial that might 
not have turned out the way they wanted. Today she feels differently. “It 
was just a wrong decision,” she says. “I can’t even make excuses for it. 
And I don’t even want to try.”

Two years after the plea, in February 2018, Kanyok was tired of fighting. 
After a grueling day of mediation with Columbia’s lawyers, she agreed to a 
settlement in her civil suit. She received $475,000 and signed a 
confidentiality agreement. After the settlement, Kanyok went out for a 
halfhearted celebratory martini, went home and wept. The next morning, she 
broke down again, standing in her kitchen.

She pulled herself together, walked her daughter to school and hugged her 
goodbye. Outside, alone and spent, she collapsed on the sidewalk of Fulton 
Street. “I can make myself strong when I need to be strong. I can buck up 
to the best of things,” Kanyok says. “This was a breakdown like I have 
never in my life experienced. This was worse than Hadden.” When a friend 
tried to help her up, Kanyok — thinking of the agreement she’d signed — 
could not say what was wrong.

“I told him it was my first OB-GYN visit. And he says, ‘Oh, that’s great. 
I’ll make you comfortable.’”
LAURIE MALDONADO
Patient: 2003 to 2012


“The abuse happened at every appointment.”
WENDY JOSEFSBERG
Patient: c. 2000 to 2004


“There’s no way Columbia can claim that they didn’t have a hand in him 
assaulting me.”
EVELYN YANG
Patient: 2012


“He is the first person in the whole world who got to touch my children.”
MARISSA HOECHSTETTER
Patient: 2009 to 2012


“I immediately started rationalizing it. Something must be wrong with me 
for being uncomfortable because he’s a doctor.”
SANDY ABRAMOWICZ
Patient: 2011 to 2012


“I remember staring at him. I’ll never forget — I wanted to say the words, 
make them come out of my mouth. And I literally couldn’t speak. I couldn’t 
speak.”
LIZ HALL
Patient: c. 2002 to 2012


“He did it to me and to my body, but really he did it to us. My husband 
held my hand while Hadden molested me.”
BELKIS HULL
Patient: 2005 to 2010


“You have the men in their tower up there saying, ‘We’re just going to let 
him go back.’ And, ‘Those women are crazy.’ They’re just as guilty.”
LINDSEY POWELL
Patient: 2011 to 2012

When Evelyn Yang’s husband, Andrew, announced his presidential campaign in 
2017, she was so private she didn’t have any active social media accounts. 
She remembers the internet trying to figure out her identity. “They would 
be posting these pictures of him with random women, captioned with my 
name, and I would laugh, like, ‘Ooh, another decoy!’” One day in 2019, as 
the campaign was attracting national attention, Yang received a 
disconcerting piece of mail from Columbia: a subpoena for a deposition by 
her husband. She thought it must be a mistake. Legally, she was still a 
Jane Doe; Columbia wasn’t supposed to know her identity yet. “And then I 
thought, ‘Oh. They’re trying to send me a message — that they know who I 
am and that they know who my husband is,” Yang says. “It felt like a 
threat. Like, ‘We know who you are, and be careful, because we can out 
you.’”

On the campaign trail, Yang had been sharing candid stories about her 
son’s autism. Voters responded by revealing their own trials. “There’s one 
letter I got in particular about a woman who stood up to sexual harassment 
at her job,” Yang says. “I was really moved by her bravery, and I started 
to reflect on my own #MeToo story.” She began to wrestle with whether to 
go public about Hadden in hopes that it might help others coping with 
similar trauma. (Looking back, it isn’t lost on her that the move would 
also rob Columbia of the power to expose her. “They would never expect 
that I would do this,” she says, “and that was satisfying.”)

After months of agonizing, Yang contacted Dana Bash, a CNN anchor she’d 
met on the campaign trail, and gave an interview that aired on the evening 
of Jan. 16, 2020. More than 2,000 miles away, in Provo, Utah, Dian Monson 
was propped up in bed, working. Her husband brought up some dinner and 
suggested they watch the news. He switched on CNN. After a few minutes of 
watching Yang’s interview, he said that the doctor she was describing 
sounded a lot like the OB-GYN Monson had seen. She immediately searched 
the internet to learn more. “I had seen him in 1993, and she was assaulted 
by him in 2012,” she says. “Where was Columbia during all of that time?”

After Yang aired her story, dozens more Hadden victims began to speak out, 
and the scale of his crimes caught the attention of the U.S. Department of 
Justice. Monson’s letters helped to provide evidence of his crimes going 
back decades. A promising path to conviction lay in charging Hadden with 
enticement — persuading women to cross state lines to engage in illegal 
sexual activity. In September 2020, acting U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss 
announced his indictment at a press conference, calling him a “predator in 
a white coat.”

Millendorf had quit the Manhattan DA’s office by then. On the day of 
Hadden’s arraignment, chatting by phone with a former colleague, she 
learned that the DA had opened a criminal investigation into Columbia’s 
conduct. The official reason was the volume of new victims coming forward. 
But, of course, the politics of sexual abuse had undergone a sea change. 
Prosecuting it was more popular, and enabling it was considered more 
villainous.

Millendorf was infuriated to discover how much evidence Columbia had 
failed to turn over — or possibly even lost — during her investigation. 
The DA found that the university “expended little or no effort to preserve 
documents” and put in place no record-retention holds until April 2020 — 
an elementary step when an organization is involved in litigation. The 
university did not give prosecutors emails from Brenda Cruz documenting 
the patient complaint in October 2008 and noting that it had been 
discussed with John Evanko, nor an email exchange in October 2013 about 
another incident. Columbia also did not turn over critical pieces of 
Hadden’s personnel file, including his censure for inappropriate computer 
use and the letter from Harold Fox to Dian Monson.

In a letter to investigators, Helen Cantwell, an attorney for Columbia, 
acknowledged that they should have produced certain documents in response 
to subpoenas. But she argued a technicality about the Fox-Monson letter 
and the computer-use note. Cantwell wrote, “On their face, neither 
document describes a complaint of patient abuse: one is an internal memo 
related to alleged inappropriate use of a computer which does not involve 
a patient in any matter and the other is a letter acknowledging receipt of 
a patient’s concern, but the nature of the concern is not discernible.”

Cantwell’s letter also outlined steps the university has taken to improve 
patient safety, including updating its chaperone policy, adding signs in 
exam rooms, and establishing a hotline and database to track complaints. 
She also claimed, contrary to evidence, “the University’s overwhelming 
record of cooperation throughout both investigations.”

No one at Columbia was ever charged with a crime. “I think there was the 
sense that we could not demonstrate that the conduct was intentionally 
purposeful,” says Vance, who left office at the end of 2021. He offers an 
apology for his office’s handling of the original investigation. “I am 
very sorry for the way our office managed this case and how the survivors 
felt they were not listened to,” Vance said. “That was unacceptable.”

In December 2021, Columbia agreed to a $71.5 million settlement with 79 
patients who had filed civil suits; a second settlement, for $165 million 
with 147 other victims, came the next October. The university did not 
accept responsibility or apologize for any dereliction of duty. More 
litigation could be coming: DiPietro says he plans to file cases on behalf 
of another 250 patients.

After abusive doctors were discovered at UCLA, USC, Michigan and Michigan 
State, those universities underwent reviews of systemic failures that 
allowed the misconduct to persist. Michigan State issued a formal 
statement of apology for its failures in the Larry Nassar case. Two 
university administrators faced criminal charges: The case against former 
president Lou Anna Simon was dismissed, but she resigned her position, and 
the dean of the school of osteopathic medicine was convicted of a 
misconduct charge. At Columbia, no administrator above Hadden at the time 
he was arrested has been fired or disciplined in any way that is known.

In January 2023, Laurie Kanyok sat in the witness box at the Southern 
District of New York courthouse to testify at Hadden’s trial. A prosecutor 
asked her what navigating the justice system had been like. “It’s been a 
long time,” Kanyok said through tears, raking her thick blond hair behind 
one ear. “My daughter is 10 years old. I called the police when she was 6 
weeks old.”

Over the course of the two-week trial, witness after witness told stories 
of grooming and abuse as Hadden sat next to his state-appointed attorneys. 
One survivor, an Orthodox Jewish woman using the pseudonym Sara Stein, 
testified while wearing a headscarf, according to the tradition of married 
women. A prosecutor asked why she covered her hair that day, even though 
she was now divorced. “It was a part of my body that he had never seen, my 
hair,” she said. “And I wanted to keep it that way.”

On Jan. 24, the day of the verdict, a dozen women filed into two wooden 
benches and gripped each other’s hands. The judge asked the foreperson for 
the jury’s verdict on the first charge. “Guilty,” she said. The women 
audibly gasped. After the second “guilty” many began softly crying. Hadden 
was convicted on all four counts he faced.

There was one more affront to endure. The judge announced that Hadden 
would be permitted to go home with his wife and son, both of whom have 
chronic medical conditions, pending another hearing. From the back of the 
courtroom, one of his former patients, a woman named Adina, rose to her 
feet: “Could I just say one more thing? He’s a sexual predator and we’re 
allowing him to go home to two disabled people and care for them? That 
doesn’t really make sense to me.” Hadden’s wife, Carol, who had attended 
every day of the trial, turned to face her. “Excuse me,” she said. “I am 
his wife, and there is no problem.” (Robert and Carol Hadden did not 
respond to requests for interviews.)

A week later, after hearing statements from survivors, the judge ordered 
Hadden detained. Eyes wide, he turned to face his wife as U.S. Marshals 
approached him with handcuffs. Three decades after his assaults began, he 
spent his first night behind bars on Feb. 1. On July 25, Hadden returned 
to court for sentencing and received the statutory maximum sentence of 20 
years for each of the charges against him, to be served concurrently. 
Standing at the defense table, facing the judge, between sobs, he said, 
“I’m very sorry for all of the pain I have caused.”

Some of Hadden’s former patients, including Yang, called legislators to 
push for the passage of the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law that 
opened a temporary window for victims of abuse to file civil suits against 
their abusers, even when a statute of limitations has expired. The window 
will close on Nov. 23. Because Columbia refuses to notify them, an untold 
number of Hadden’s patients remain unaware that he has been convicted.

One of them might have been Belkis Hull, a former Hadden patient, if she 
hadn’t happened to see his mug shot while scrolling Instagram last winter. 
For more than a decade, she had dismissed her own experiences with Hadden, 
believing them to be in her head. Learning the truth felt validating, she 
said. “It’s pathetic and it’s so infuriating,” she said. “How can you 
trust an institution anymore? An institution that is as prestigious as 
they were. The only reason I went there was because it was Columbia.”

Do you have information about Columbia or NewYork-Presbyterian that we 
should know? Visit propublica.org/tips to get in touch securely.

Laura Beil is a journalist in Texas who covers health care, and she is a 
recipient of the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science 
Reporting. She also writes and hosts the podcast “Exposed” about this 
story.

Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

Design and development by Anna Donlan.

New York Magazine blurred some of the photographs held by Hadden’s former 
patients to emphasize the survivors.


-- 
We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that 
stupid people won't be offended.

Durham Report: The FBI has an integrity problem.  It has none.

No collusion - Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III, March 2019.  
Officially made Nancy Pelosi a two-time impeachment loser.

Thank you for cleaning up the disaster of the 2008-2017 Obama / Biden 
fiasco, President Trump.  

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the 
The World According To Garp.  Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood 
queer liberal democrat donors.

President Trump boosted the economy, reduced illegal invasions, appointed 
dozens of judges and three SCOTUS justices.