A Black New York City woman drugged, molested and left with a white doctor’s semen on her said she had to retell her story 13 or 14 times and still felt like police didn’t believe her.
Two years after the initial incident in 2016, the former star doctor David Newman is free, living in New Orleans near his ex-wife and kids, New York Magazine reported in an article published Oct. 14.
The New York State Supreme Court had sentenced him to only two years, and the judge presiding over his sentencing commended the former doctor when he called his own actions “disgusting.”
Aja Newman told her story in New York Magazine and explained in detail how the doctor left her with so much semen on her that the definitive match leading to his conviction was from a spot near her right eye.
To do so, he drugged her.
And the case against the ex-doctor included three more young women of color, all poor — “who said David Newman had touched or grabbed their breasts when they came to the ED in the last half of 2015” — according to New York Magazine.
“One of the women had come in for a cold, another for a rash on her eyebrow, a third for a headache,” the magazine reported.
Aja Newman, 33, told New York Magazine she checked into Mount Sinai’s Emergency Department when pain she was experiencing in her shoulder had gotten so severe she felt tingling in her hands on January 12, 2016.
She was initially given anti-inflammatories by Andy Jagoda, the head of the Emergency Medicine Department, and later handed off to David Newman, who ordered four milligrams of morphine and later said the patient needed another dose, according to hospital records the magazine obtained.
When Newman objected, she said “he plunged a syringe into her IV port,” causing her skin to burn and told her, “don’t jump,” the magazine reported.
The woman told New York Magazine the doctor later molested her.
“I was in and out of consciousness, and one of the first things I felt was him groping my breast,” she told the magazine. “It wasn’t really real until I realized I couldn’t move. I can’t say I know my eyes weren’t open, but I couldn’t see.”
She said she “I felt the bed move, and the groping was making me like, ‘Get off me.’”
Aja Newman said after the molestation the doctor wiped her roughly with the bedsheet and called her a “b—-.”
Aja wasn’t able to leave the emergency department until four hours after the attack, and when she did, she vomited on the half-mile walk to her sister’s house, according to New York Magazine.
She was carrying a large plastic bag into which she had stuffed her hospital gown and bedding, to use it as forensic evidence, the magazine reported.
Her sister called police, and when a detective showed up to the door of the doctor’s $1.2 million house around 9 p.m. on Jan. 12, he started offering explanation authorities would later prove to be false, New York Magazine reported.
“I am embarrassed because I whacked off in the lounge, and it was possible that the ejaculate may have gone from my hands to the woman’s blanket,” he said. “Semen may also have transferred from my hand to her face during the time I treated her. I can’t believe this is happening. My explanation doesn’t make sense.”
New York Magazine also reported he said: “She may be mistaken about me ejaculating on her face, because she was on morphine. I gave her a second dose of morphine myself.
“Is she alleging that I raped her?” he asked.
When it came time for Aja to have the bag of evidence she had collected sprayed with Luminol and inspected under a UV light, she demanded a technician also spray her, New York Magazine reported.
“It was all over my face, all over between my breasts like I told her. I remember she started crying, and she was like, ‘Aja, don’t move,’” the woman said. “And she took the samples off my face. I believe that’s the only thing that caught him.”
Uché Blackstock, an emergency medicine doctor, said in a tweet Tuesday she knew David Newman but still believed Aja.
“You deserved to be protected the most,” Blackstock said. “I’m so sorry you had to go through this, but we are fighting to make sure this never happens again.”
Colleen Farrell, another doctor tweeted Tuesday that before David Newman lost his license and went to jail, “his colleagues in medicine defended him.”
“They said it wasn’t possible,” Farrell said. “That he would never and she was crazy.”
The ex-doctor later apologized in court, according to The New York Times.
The newspaper reported that Aja, unmoved by the admission, said during her victim impact statement, “I believe you’re only sorry because you got caught.”
The hospital, who for three years has been fighting Aja in court, gave this statement to New York Magazine: “We are so sorry that Ms. Newman was the victim of this horrible criminal act.”
When the former doctor was convicted, he reportedly offered to pay Aja a $30,000 settlement in cash.
“The nice Aja says, ‘No, thank you, sir,’ ” the woman told the magazine.
“But all I completely felt was ‘Eff him,’” she said.
