Doctor accused of groping, harassing 22 women let off easy by Texas law, critics say
Sunny Woodall says she knew something was wrong as soon as her cardiologist started a breast exam.
For starters, cardiologists do not generally conduct breast exams; that job is for gynecologists.
When Dr. Dennis Doan grabbed Woodall’s chest and roughly massaged her breasts, Woodall instantly felt pain, according to police testimony at a medical board hearing. Woodall is a breast cancer survivor who had a double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery.
While Doan massaged her breasts, Woodall says, she felt his erection on her side. When he left the room, another doctor noted he was “walking funny,” according to medical board testimony.
“It was completely sexual from the beginning,” Woodall said. “I knew what was going on. He hurt me.”
Woodall, 46, rushed out of the Heart Center of North Texas office in Weatherford that day in January 2018. She felt shocked and ashamed, she said. The next day, she called the practice to report what happened. An employee urged her to call the police, she said.
Woodall’s call to Weatherford police began a string of events that led 14 other patients and seven Heart Center employees to report that Doan had sexually assaulted or harassed them, according to a lawsuit filed against Doan and the Heart Center of North Texas. All the patients had “alarmingly similar” accounts of Doan’s behavior, according to the lawsuit.
Woodall’s report also started a three-year legal process that has left her and others angry and frustrated. About Texas laws that relegate sexual groping — even by a medical professional — as a minor infraction. About a health care practice that, according to the lawsuit, failed to take action on complaints against Doan that date as far back as 2013. About a plea deal that could leave Doan with a clean record and able to practice medicine again.
“If he gets to practice again, I will stand outside with a sign saying ‘sexual predator,’” said Woodall. “I don’t understand why the state doesn’t protect us better than this.”
Now, five of the women are left to seek justice through a civil lawsuit, while two of the women have joined advocacy groups to lobby the state legislature to strengthen the law. According to the lawsuit, the Heart Center failed to protect its female employees and patients from Doan’s “reign of compulsive and repetitive sexual assault and workplace and patient harassment.”
Texas law prevented the Parker County Attorney’s Office from pursuing a felony against Doan, said Natalie Barnett, the assistant county attorney who worked on the case.
“I believe that doctors who take advantage of their patients in this way, they need to be held accountable to something that is higher than a misdemeanor,” she said.
Doan’s attorneys said in a prepared statement that the plea bargain was the result of lengthy investigation. “In the end, all allegations involving assaultive conduct and sexual impropriety were abandoned by the Parker County Attorney’s Office,” the statement from defense attorneys Christy Jack and Letty Martinez, of the law firm Varghese Summersett, said.
Once Doan completes his probation, “there will be no finding of guilt, the case will be dismissed and he will not have a conviction on his record,” the statement said.
The Star-Telegram does not typically identify alleged victims of sexual abuse. The women identified in this story gave permission for their names to be used.
Advocates cite problems in Texas law
Texas law limited the way Doan could be held accountable for his alleged actions because, at the time, it did not qualify the groping Woodall and others say they experienced as sex crimes. The law has since been updated, but such abuse remains only a misdemeanor sex offense, and there is no way to upgrade the charge when the crime is committed by a doctor against a patient.
“Anyone from the outside looking in would say, ‘That’s terrible, and a doctor should not be groping women,’” said Kim D’Avignon, head of the Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Office Adult Sexual Assault prosecution team. “But then we don’t have a law to fix it.”
At the time of Woodall’s case, if someone groped a person’s breasts, the most the person could be charged with was assault by offensive contact, a class C misdemeanor and the legal equivalent of a traffic ticket. The punishment is no jail time and up to a $500 fine.
To upgrade the charges against Doan from class C to class A misdemeanors, Woodall’s case was filed as assault causing bodily injury, while two other women’s cases were charged as violations of the Texas Medical Practice Act, also a class A misdemeanor. Class A misdemeanors can carry sentences of up to a year of jail time and a $4,000 fine. A fourth case resulted in a Class A misdemeanor charge of assault on the elderly because of the woman’s age.
“Sexual assault happens in so many forms and varieties, and we need laws to help us prosecute.” D’Avignon said. “We’re headed that direction in Texas, but we have a lot of ground to make up.”
Because the charges were misdemeanors, many of the other women who said Doan abused them could not press charges due to statutes of limitations. The statute of limitations for misdemeanor assault and violation of the Texas Medical Practice Act is two years. If the charges had been classified as sexual assault, the statute of limitations would have been 10 years.
John Forrest, the county attorney in Parker County, said the county had never seen a case like Doan’s and changes to Texas sexual assault law “are long overdue.”
“It was a huge problem with how the law was written,” he said. “That an individual could have her breasts touched, but it would not rise to the level of a jailable offense.”
In December, Doan was offered a plea deal in which he was convicted of one count of violating the Texas Medical Practice Act, which is part of the Texas Occupations Code and encompasses rules and regulations for various medical professionals. He received two years of probation, and his record will be cleared at the end of 2022 as long as he stays out of legal trouble.
‘Molesting me the whole time’
After Woodall’s report to Weatherford police, Doan was charged with assault causing bodily injury, a misdemeanor, on Feb. 15, 2018. Weatherford police also issued a call to the public — had anyone else been molested by this doctor?
When Stephanie Jones, 52, saw the Weatherford police post on Facebook, she said she realized she was not alone in being assaulted by Doan. The next day, she made a statement to police.
Jones was referred to Doan in April 2017 after she had a heart problem.
At her first two appointments, a nurse had been in the room. But during her third appointment, on July 13, 2017, Jones told police, she and Doan were alone in the examination room.
Doan asked her when she last had “her lady parts checked” and asked her to stand up, Jones wrote in the police statement. Doan lifted the back of Jones’ shirt and felt along her bare back, Jones told police. He asked her to unhook her bra, moved in front of her and grabbed both of her breasts, she told police. She froze as it went on, until she pushed her arms down, and Doan moved away, she said.
At appointments in September and October 2017, Doan fondled her again, Jones told police.
She sat in her car after each appointment, feeling violated and trapped. She wondered if her condition would go unchecked and worsen if she stopped going to appointments.
At her next appointment, on Jan. 24, 2018, a little over a week after Woodall made a report to police, Jones said she begged a nurse to stay in the room with her. The nurse sat in a chair in the examination room, and Doan did not do a breast exam or touch her underneath her clothes, she said.
“I knew at that point that he had basically been molesting me the whole time,” she said.
Pat Wagner, 78, said she had similar experiences with Doan. Doan did not touch her breasts when her husband accompanied her to her appointments. But in August 2016, Wagner went to her appointment alone. Doan pulled her shirt up to her chin, grabbed both of her breasts and asked, “Are you taking care of them?” according to her testimony for the lawsuit.
Wagner never went back to Doan’s office. Like the other women, she did not know about the other allegations against him until his arrest in February 2018.
In Wagner’s case, Doan was charged with assault on the elderly, a Class A misdemeanor.
Other states have tougher sex assault laws
In September 2019, the Texas legislature passed a bill addressing groping and other non-penetrative forms of sexual abuse. The bill added indecent assault to the penal code — actions such as touching someone’s breasts, anus or genitalia fall under the charge, though it is a Class A misdemeanor.
When Texas passed the indecent assault bill in 2019, it was among only five or six states that did not have a law that addressed non-penetrative sexual assault, said Katherine Strandberg, senior policy adviser with the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault.
And while the bill represented progress, Texas sexual assault laws are still outdated, Strandberg said.
Texas does not have a law that upgrades non-penetrative sexual assault of an adult to a felony, even if the perpetrator is a physician. But in New Mexico, for example, intentional touching of someone’s unclothed intimate parts — including breasts — without the person’s consent is considered criminal sexual contact — a fourth-degree felony.
“Having such crimes labeled as a felony can work as a deterrent and have severe consequences,” said Elena Rubinfeld, legal director of the New Mexico Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs Inc.
Texas should have a law that automatically defines sexual contact between a physician and patient as sexual assault, D’Avignon, of the Tarrant County Adult Sexual Assault team, said. Instead, prosecutors have to navigate Texas consent laws to prove the sexual contact was sexual assault, even if the physician penetrates the victim.
If a perpetrator sexually assaults someone, prosecutors have to prove the perpetrator made the person participate in the sexual act by such things as force or threat. If there was no physical threat, prosecutors have to prove the perpetrator caused the person to participate in the sexual contact by exploiting the person’s emotional dependency.
In the case of doctors, however, patients give their physicians access to their bodies for medical purposes. If the physician uses that access to sexually assault them, prosecutors still have to prove emotional exploitation took place, D’Avignon explained.
“It doesn’t make sense with what it is,” D’Avignon said. “The party relationship should be the reason they’re guilty.”
Other states have passed such laws. In Georgia, a licensed health care professional who “engages in sexual contact” — including groping a woman’s breasts — with a patient can be charged with improper sexual contact. The charge is a misdemeanor, but can be upgraded to a felony if the person has a second or subsequent conviction.
Patient says doctor groped her at least 7 times
One year after the first reported complaint about Doan, the doctor sexually abused Jan Williams for the first time, the 64-year-old said. Williams learned about the other accusations against Doan when police issued a call to the public.
In 2012, Williams was referred to Doan after she was rushed to the hospital with chest pains. The first two years of his care were normal, and she trusted him, she said.
But he used that trust against her, Williams says.
In 2014, Doan asked her to lie back on an exam table and reached into her bra to massage her breasts, she said. He asked her in-depth questions about her breasts. She did not question the interaction, assuming that he was doing some sort of check-up.
The breast groping happened at least seven times over the next few years, she said. She started to get a sick feeling in her stomach about the interactions.
When her husband went to an appointment with her in 2017, Doan did not touch Williams’ breasts. The feeling in Williams’ gut was confirmed.
“My trust was violated, as well as my body,” she said.
Williams removed herself from Doan’s care. In February 2018, she was watching the evening news with her husband when an anchor mentioned the accusations against Doan.
“It was like one of those moments where you gasp in so deeply with air and you can’t really breathe,” she said. “And I said, ‘He’s been doing this to other women.’”
She eventually filed a criminal charge against Doan. Her accusations were described in a Texas Medical Board complaint filed against Doan on Jan. 29, 2021.
In 2019, Williams, Jones, Woodall and two other women filed the civil suit against Doan and the Heart Center of North Texas accusing the practice of negligence for failing to protect patients.
“Everybody turned a blind eye to this guy,” Jones said.
Doan was officially removed as a partner from the Heart Center on Feb. 27, 2018, according to testimony at a medical board hearing from Weatherford police Detective Jason Goff.
Accusations date back to 2013, lawsuit says
Jones’ last appointment with Doan was 12 days after Woodall went to police. Doan was the subject of a criminal investigation, but Jones had no idea. After Woodall told the Heart Center what happened on Jan. 11, 2018, Doan was permitted to continue seeing female patients unchaperoned for at least one week, said Rhiannon Kelso, an attorney working with the five women who have filed the lawsuit.
The accusations of patient abuse against Doan go back to 2013, and employees reported sexual harassment on Doan’s part from 2015 to 2017, according to the lawsuit. But the Heart Center of North Texas failed to report the allegations to police or the medical board for five years, the lawsuit says.
The Heart Center of North Texas, which also has locations in Fort Worth and Granbury, denied all claims of wrongdoing in a petition filed in response to the lawsuit. When the Star-Telegram asked about the allegations, an attorney for the Heart Center said the center cannot comment on pending litigation.
“The practice that he was working at was really on notice that he was a predator,” said Jay English, an attorney representing the women in the lawsuit. “And they just didn’t do the things that they needed to do to prevent him from hurting anyone else.”
Doan completed his medical residency at the University of Texas-Houston in 2007. From there, he did his fellowship at a hospital in Detroit for four years before he returned to Texas and became a partner at the Heart Center of North Texas, according to a public records database on medical professionals. He worked primarily at the Weatherford clinic, but had hospital privileges at Baylor All Saints and Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital in Fort Worth, North Richland Hills Hospital, Lake Granbury Medical Center and the Plaza Medical Center in Weatherford, according to the database.
English said that between 2013 and the time of Doan’s arrest, there were “a ridiculous number of red flags” about his behavior.
Employees said Doan grabbed their breasts, slapped their buttocks, commented on their sexual activity and once mooed at and called a breast-feeding employee “chubby,” according to the lawsuit. The earliest reported employee complaint was in 2015, the suit says.
The earliest recorded complaint from a patient against Doan was in August 2013 — two years after Doan started working at the Heart Center of North Texas, according to the lawsuit. A woman and her husband contacted the center and told staff that Doan had squeezed and massaged the woman’s breasts during an appointment, according to court documents. The center told them she had “imagined the incident,” according to the lawsuit. The center provided no evidence that Doan was disciplined or counseled in response to the complaint, the lawsuit said.
Texas law requires physicians and health care entities to report a physician who “poses a continuing threat to the public welfare through the practice of medicine” to the Texas Medical Board. The Heart Center has not provided any evidence that it reported complaints about Doan to the medical board, Kelso said.
Plea deal gone wrong?
After feeling failed by their cardiologist, the practice where he worked and Texas law, the four women who filed criminal charges hoped Parker County prosecutors would hold Doan accountable on those charges. When the women met with the prosecutors in the summer of 2018, they said, they were unanimous with what they wanted: a trial or a guilty plea to all charges.
The women asked for Doan to receive the maximum sentence of one year of jail or two years of probation, sex offender therapy, guilty pleas to all charges and no chance for deferred adjudication — the process that allows a conviction to be removed from someone’s record. The attorneys told them if Doan would not accept those terms, they would demand a trial, the women said.
For over a year, the women said, they did not hear anything from the Parker County Attorney’s Office. The week before Christmas 2020, one of the prosecutors, Barnett, the assistant county attorney, called the four women and said Doan and his attorneys accepted a plea deal. She said he was pleading guilty, but did not specify what he was pleading guilty to, the women said.
Later that night, Jones texted Barnett and asked what the guilty plea was for. Barnett replied the conviction was for one count of violation of the Texas Medical Practice Act, a misdemeanor, and the other charges were dropped — contrary to what the women had requested.
“It was so disingenuous,” Jones said. “It was like they tried to slip that past us at first.”
Doan was sentenced to two years of probation, which would include drug testing, along with a $4,000 fine and 10 hours of community service. In exchange for his guilty plea, he will be able to apply to have his record cleared when he finishes the probation in December 2022.
“A $4,000 fine and pee in a cup,” English said. “And it will all be over for him in two years.”
The Medical Board is not required to revoke or suspend Doan’s license for violating the Texas Medical Practice Act. If he had been convicted of a felony, or misdemeanor assault, the board would be required to take action against his license, according to the Texas Occupation Code.
The women worry Doan has been treated lightly by the Texas Medical Board because of the charge of which he was convicted. On March 1, 2018, the Texas Medical Board suspended Doan’s license for two years. A hearing about what would happen next to his license was scheduled for March 29, but the Texas Medical Board reached a settlement with Doan on March 18. The details of the settlement are not yet public.
When a physician is convicted of a misdemeanor, the Texas Medical Board is authorized to revoke or suspend their license if the misdemeanor is related to the physician’s job and shows “moral turpitude,” according to the Texas Administrative Code. But there is no requirement that the Medical Board do so, and no parameters on how long a license should be suspended in such a case.
If a physician is convicted of a felony, there is no need for the board to prove the crime shows “moral turpitude” to suspend or revoke the physician’s license.
In response to questions from the Star-Telegram, Barnett said in an emailed statement that she believes “Dr. Doan’s admission of his guilt sends him the message that his behavior will not be tolerated.”
Victims are informed of plea negotiations in all cases, including this one, she said. The terms of the plea deal were discussed and follow-up questions were answered with the four women, Barnett said. Once the plea agreement was reached, “additional phone conferences were held,” with the women, she wrote.
Jones, Woodall and Williams contest this.
“They sold us out,” Jones said. “Chopped us off at the knees. No word for over a year. No consulting us, no heads up, nothing.”
At Doan’s plea hearing, Jones and Williams were not given the chance say anything, but when the agreement was read, Jones stood up in protest. Williams stood with her.
The women’s attorneys for the lawsuit, English and Kelso, question the way Doan’s case was handled by Parker County.
“I’m not trying to disparage them,” Kelso said. “But they did screw us with the criminal case.”
In response to questions about the women’s feelings on the plea deal, Barnett said “victim frustration with the criminal process is often compounded when there is a simultaneous civil case pending.”
“We are proud of these victims,” she said. “They bravely came forward and stood tall for all of the victims that came before them in the hopes that there would be no more victims after them.”
Texas legislature will consider changes
Two of the women who filed the lawsuit and charges against Doan — Jan Williams and Stephanie Jones — have met with representatives of the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault to discuss raising awareness about the need for changes in Texas law. Two bills are up for consideration in the Texas legislature to address physician assault and indecent assault. If those laws had been in place in 2018, a doctor who groped a woman’s breasts could have been charged with a felony.
In Texas law, a physician must have emotionally exploited a patient in addition to assaulting them involving penetration for an act to be considered sexual assault. Strandberg, of the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault, called this a “loophole” in the law.
Senate Bill 945, or the Larry Nassar bill criminalizes sexual assault on a patient — regardless of emotional exploitation — if a physician sexually assaulted the patient and the patient believed it was part of the medical procedure. Nassar was a doctor for the USA Gymnastics Team. Hundreds of women testified that he had sexually abused them, mostly under the guise of medical treatment.
English Law PLLC, the firm representing the women in the civil suit against Doan and the Heart Center of North Texas, drafted the other bill, House Bill 2987, which Texas legislator Julie Johnson (D-Dallas) sponsored.
The bill would upgrade indecent assault misdemeanors to felonies if the perpetrator is a medical professional who assaulted a patient in his or her scope as a physician. This would apply regardless of whether an assault involved penetration.
Both bills have been assigned to a committee and are awaiting presentation to the legislature, which D’Avignon said is “finally taking sexual assault very seriously.”
A voice for abused women
Shame is the underlying emotion that Jones, Williams and Woodall still battle. Jones and Williams said they wonder if they could have spared others if they had reported their abuse sooner.
“I had a few people say, ‘Stephanie, you should have known better, why didn’t you do something?’” Jones said. “That was a kick in my gut every time someone said that to me. It’s not like I didn’t already feel that way. I don’t think they realized the twisting of the rusty knife they stuck in my stomach.”
The women’s goal is to make sure Doan’s license is revoked and he never practices again. They are sure if he does, he will abuse other women.
Countless other women may have been abused by Doan, Jones said. By speaking out, the women hope they can be the voice for people who have been sexually abused.
“I will not let them silence me,” Jones said. “The Medical Board, Parker County, whoever. They’re not going to silence us. I will be the voice of the women who feel like they don’t have one.”
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, help is available. Call 1-800-656-HOPE(4673) to speak with a crisis support service at RAINN.
