I’m sure white racism is to blame.
Jyllene Wilson is still wary of doctor’s offices and public restrooms, and whenever she’s away from home, she uses a smartphone app that can help detect hidden cameras to ensure she is safe from prying eyes.
Joshulyn L. Brown harbors a deep-seated distrust for many white-collar professionals, especially doctors and lawyers. Stazi Simmons-Gomez gets panic attacks when a male doctor enters a room to examine her, and one of Simmons-Gomez’s daughters fell into a spell of depression and began cutting herself.
The four have one thing in common: They were each patients of Nikita Levy, a Johns Hopkins gynecologist whose warm demeanor won over the trust of thousands of women, many of them poor and black. In February 2013, police discovered that Levy had been taking sexually explicit photos and videos of his patients during appointments using cameras hidden in pens and elsewhere in his exam room, and found a trove of videos and images. Levy, who began practicing with Johns Hopkins in 1988 and had served thousands of women, committed suicide days later, penning an apology note to his wife and slipping a bag of helium over his head.
Levy’s patients — 8,344 of them — filed a class-action lawsuit against Johns Hopkins, which settled in July 2014 for $190 million. The women say the impact of the trauma is nearly immeasurable, the nightmares and lost sleep, the distrust that has driven them away from regular checkups, the panic attacks that strike out of nowhere. It is only within the past month that they learned what the settlement may entitle them to.
Who was Nikita Levy?
