ATLANTA _ The same week that Dr. Larry Nassar's abuse of young gymnasts made national headlines _ with one victim after another coming forward to publicly describe his sexual abuse _ a former Georgia doctor sat in a courtroom hundreds of miles away.
Like Nassar, Dr. Paul Harnetty was facing charges involving the way he touched patients during medical exams.
The ob-gyn was practicing in remote Casper, Wyo., when a number of patients reported him to police. After hearing the accounts of six women, who described what Harnetty did when they were naked and vulnerable, the jury found the doctor guilty of sexually assaulting two of his patients. He was acquitted on six charges.
What the jury didn't hear, however, was the long trail of allegations that surrounded Harnetty before he even arrived in Wyoming. It turns out that the ob-gyn, like the gymnastics doctor, escaped public discipline for years.
The Georgia Composite Medical Board heard plenty about Harnetty when it investigated him while he practiced in Georgia, according to records obtained by Wyoming investigators. More than a dozen nurses who had worked with the doctor for years told a board investigator the doctor routinely inserted his finger into the anuses of pregnant women while they were delivering babies _ something that they did not see other doctors do. He also marked the charts of attractive patients with smiley faces and tried to make sure he was in line to deliver their babies.
That was just part of what came out.
But Georgia's medical board never publicly disciplined Harnetty and kept its investigation strictly confidential. A Georgia hospital also refused to say why Harnetty gave up his hospital privileges in 2010.
Harnetty left Georgia with a clear public record, quickly gaining a license to practice in Wyoming in April 2012.
Once there, his behavior led to another series of complaints, and, by 2015, a criminal investigation. It also prompted a Georgia woman to report that in 2011, the doctor had sexually assaulted her.
"There had been red flags on this guy forever," said Michael Blonigen, the district attorney in Wyoming whose office prosecuted Harnetty in last month's jury trial. "I think it's a fair question _ how does it get this far without somebody saying, 'Wait a minute. What's with this guy?'"
The answer seems to be the broken system that shields and forgives sexually abusive doctors in all 50 states, as documented in 2016 by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Doctors & Sex Abuse investigation.
