Columbia releases report on ‘institutional failures’ enabling Hadden’s abuse nearly two and a half years after launch
- Dignity 4Patients
- Mar 10
- 8 min read
By Tulasi Cherukuri and Michelle Barsoum- 10/03/2026- [Columbia, US]- [Robert Hadden]
Columbia released a report Tuesday outlining the findings of an independent investigation it commissioned nearly two and a half years ago into the “institutional failures” that enabled convicted sex-offender and former OB-GYN Robert Hadden to sexually assault more than 500 patients.
The 156-page report—conducted independently by investigators Joan Loughnane, Michael Levy, and Kathleen Carlson from the law firm Sidley Austin LLP—was released after New York Attorney General Leticia James, SIPA ’13, launched an investigation into the handling of allegations against Hadden by the University and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, collectively referred to as “the Institutions” in the report. Following the release of the report, two top administrators at the institutions who played a role in deciding to allow Hadden to continue seeing patients after his 2012 arrest will be exiting their positions.
The revelatory findings come after the University Senate’s student affairs committee has ramped up pressure for Columbia to release the report over the last few months. Several members of the student affairs committee criticized the report’s delay and read the testimonies of survivors in order to “take things into our own hands,” alleging that the investigator had still not reached out to many survivors, at the Feb. 27 University Senate plenary.
The report identifies three key factors which permitted Hadden’s abuse: the institutions’ ineffective assigning of staff observation during sensitive examinations and inadequate training for these observers, known as chaperones; obstacles which prevented patients and staff from reporting sexual misconduct; and the institutions’ failure to respond to reports it did receive.
Following the completion of the report, Dr. Mary D’Alton is stepping down from her role as chair of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center and Dr. Lee Goldman, former dean of the Faculties of Health Sciences and Medicine and chief executive of the medical center, will be retiring, acting University President Claire Shipman, CC ’86, SIPA ’94, and Katrina Armstrong, CEO of the medical center and former interim University president, announced in a Tuesday morning email to the Columbia community sharing the report. Both D’Alton and Goldman played a role in deciding to allow Hadden to continue seeing patients after his 2012 arrest, according to the report.
“We are clear about the institutional failures that allowed Hadden to exploit the system, abuse patients, and avoid detection for as long as he did,” Shipman and Armstrong wrote in the Tuesday email. “While we cannot undo the harm of the past, we are firmly committed to ensuring that nothing like this can happen again.”
D’Alton wrote in a Tuesday Office of Public Affairs statement that the completion of the investigation marked the “right time” for her to step down as chair of the OB-GYN department.
When deciding to allow Hadden to return to work following his 2012 arrest, multiple senior administrators, including former University President Lee Bollinger, Law ’71, remembered “placing great weight” on D’Alton’s assurances that Hadden was of “high character,” the report found. By this time, she knew the “full scope” of the allegation against Hadden, according to the report.
“That any physician would exploit a patient’s vulnerability in this way is an appalling violation of the trust at the heart of the doctor-patient relationship,” she wrote. “That these acts were committed by a doctor in our department, including while I was Chair, pains me deeply and always will.”
D’Alton added that she has worked to implement changes to protect patients from any similar kind of abuse and that she participated “fully, openly, and honestly” in the investigation.
In the report, the investigators stated that their mandate by the University “did not extend to events that occurred after Hadden stopped seeing patients, such as the Institutions’ involvement in any civil litigations or criminal prosecutions.”
“This report explicitly avoids examining survivors’ claims of the institutional cover-up we believe Columbia engaged in for years after Hadden was finally removed,” activists and Hadden survivors Marissa Hoechstetter and Evelyn Yang, GS ’05, wrote in a Tuesday statement to Spectator on behalf of a “broad coalition of survivor advocates.”
Over the span of 25 years, Hadden worked at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital, sexually assaulting more than 500 patients. He was first arrested in 2012 on sexual assault charges but continued to work at the medical center for another five weeks. A federal jury convicted Hadden on federal charges and a federal judge later sentenced him to 20 years in prison in 2023. Columbia and its affiliates have agreed to pay over $1 billion in civil cases against Hadden, following a $750 million settlement over an institutional negligence and fraud lawsuit that was launched against the University in 2025.
“What Columbia has released today offers the bare minimum accountability for failures that should have been addressed years ago,” Hoechstetter and Yang wrote. “It confirms the systemic breakdown that allowed Hadden to operate. But it stops short of examining the cover-up culture that survivors experienced firsthand once the abuse came to light and the most important questions remain unanswered.”
James is investigating Columbia specifically for how it handled allegations against Hadden immediately following Hadden’s 2012 arrest. University officials allowed Hadden to return to work for five weeks after his arrest, during which at least eight patients reported being assaulted by him, according to a ProPublica investigation. The report identifies the lack of a centralized record keeping system between Columbia and NewYork-Presbyterian as a significant reason why officials allowed him to return to work. It states that the reports which were made by the time of Hadden’s arrest were either not in available records or “reflected only in ways that obscured the scope of what had been alleged.”
The report spans four parts and 10 chapters, outlining the background and details of Hadden’s abuse, “factors that permitted Hadden’s abuse of patients to continue,” and the University’s “Changes and Commitments” following the investigation. The investigators spoke with more than 120 witnesses but stated they “did not initiate communications directly,” instead providing “mechanisms for survivors who wished to contact” them. About half of the witnesses were survivors, and the other half were current or former employees at Columbia and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital.
Hoechstetter previously told Spectator that no communication had been given to survivors regarding the investigation, and no external investigators have reached out to interview her or the dozens of other survivors she has spoken to.
Simon Ogundare, CC ’24, M.D.-Ph.D. candidate at the Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and a student senator, told Spectator that he is in contact with a survivor who confirmed that “hundreds” of survivors she was in contact with had never been contacted by the investigator.
He told Spectator that he finds it “shocking and deeply concerning” that the investigators only interviewed around 60 survivors, asking, “Who would be an ideal population to interview other than that?”
“They released a good amount of information, but it’s still a partial story, and it doesn’t account for the ways that the institution and the survivors are hurting,” he said.
In making the findings, the investigators reviewed more than 120,000 documents including personnel files, patient records, and court documents filed against Hadden, according to the report.
The report states that the presence of medical chaperones was not initially required during Hadden’s early years at the hospital. Though Columbia and NewYork-Presbyterian instituted a policy in 2007 requiring the presence of a chaperone for certain examinations, the report states the institutions did not enforce it “in any systematic way.” It reports that the institutions did train chaperones to effectively identify and report signs of abuse, adding that the “hierarchal professional environment” of the hospital prevented chaperones from raising concerns, fearing retaliation.
The report cites several obstacles, including a lack of patient complaint-reporting policy and Hadden’s “crafting of a positive image”, “hindered Columbia’s ability to receive and address patients’ complaints” and “reduced the opportunity for the Institution to identify and act on information about Hadden’s abuse.”
The report outlines failures to respond “effectively” to the few reports that did reach physician leaders, stating they “resolved the complaints ad hoc.” Almost none of the reports that were received were placed in Hadden’s personnel files, allowing Hadden to continue seeing patients after his arrest while Columbia and NewYork-Presbyterian leaders “incorrectly believed based on a review of Hadden’s files that Hadden had a clean record.”
The release of the report came just two weeks after members of the University Senate’s student affairs committee Eli Baum, CC ’26, Liane Bdair, CC ’28, and Elizabeth Adeoye, CC ’27, and vice chair Helen Han Wei Luo, a fourth-year doctoral candidate in philosophy, read out the testimonies of survivors and called for increased transparency from Columbia at a Feb. 27 University Senate plenary.
The five anonymous testimonies spanned across several years, were sourced directly from several New York district court files acquired by the student senators, and included narrative descriptions of the assaults the survivors endured as patients of Hadden.
In an interview with Spectator, Luo criticized the report for discussing “lower-level failures” like inadequate chaperoning procedures rather than examining the role of upper administrators in facilitating Hadden’s abuse.
“The framing is that individuals responsible … made an error of judgement in allowing Hadden to return to work because they assumed that the police report that resulted in initial arrest was the first of its kind,” she said, adding that she does not believe this to be true.
She pointed to the report, which states that Hadden’s patients have filed complaints about being sexually abused since the 1980s.
Luo wrote in a Tuesday statement to Spectator that the timing of the report’s release indicates “the effectiveness of public pressure both within the University and from outsiders.”
“This should have happened two years ago,” Baum wrote in a Tuesday statement to Spectator regarding the release. “It shouldn’t have taken petitions, confrontations in plenary, and a New York State Attorney General investigation to get this released.”
District 65 Assembly member Grace Lee wrote in a Tuesday news release that the investigation was “strikingly narrow,” criticizing the investigation for not examining events after 2012. She added that she spoke with Shipman on Tuesday to express that the report “cannot be the end of Columbia’s action on this issue.”
“After more than two years, the findings read less like a full investigation and more like a book report — largely summarizing information that was already public while leaving unanswered the central questions about the decades of inaction and institutional failures in the years that followed Robert Hadden’s removal from the university,” Lee wrote.
Hoechstetter and Yang called on the University to investigate the role of Columbia’s senior leadership and board of trustees after Hadden stopped seeing patients.
“Survivors and the public at large have spent more than a decade rightfully demanding the truth about what happened at Columbia,” Hoechstetter and Yang wrote. “We are still waiting.”
In a Tuesday statement, the board of trustees wrote that they are “truly sorry” for the suffering Hadden’s patients endured. They expressed their gratitude to the patients who shared their experiences for the investigation, adding that several reforms have been implemented to increase the trustees’ oversight of the medical center.
“We remain committed to this vital work and doing what’s necessary to earn and restore trust in our institution,” they wrote.
They wrote that Columbia and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital each formed a “special committee of independent and disinterested trustees” to facilitate the investigation, neither of which included anyone who served as a trustee when Hadden saw patients. They added that no current trustee served in that capacity when Hadden saw patients.
If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this article and were abused in state run medical and health facilities, you can contact Dignity4Patients, whose helpline is open Monday to Thursday, 10am to 4pm.
Dignity4Patients Commentary: This case highlights how thoroughly the abuse was enabled by institutions. This was not a matter of individual oversight, but a system that consistently failed at multiple points:
Failing to enforce chaperone policies
Failing to train staff to recognise and act on misconduct
Failing to create safe and credible reporting pathways
Failing to respond meaningfully when concerns were raised.
Information was fragmented, complaints were handled informally or not recorded at all, and decision-makers appear to have relied more on professional reputation and personal assurances than on emerging patterns of risk.
In such an environment, accountability becomes diffuse and easily avoided, while perpetrators are shielded by hierarchy and institutional failings to act. Cases like this demonstrate that institutional failure is rarely passive; it actively shapes the space in which misconduct continues unchecked.
