PORTLAND, Ore. (CN) – A male nurse sexually abused a very ill woman, who has since died, her widower claims in Multnomah County Circuit Court.

     G. W, personal representative of the estate of J. W. (who used their own names in the suit) sued Kaiser Foundation Health Plan of the Northwest and Northwest Permanente, P.C., for sexual abuse and breach of fiduciary duty. 

     While [J. W.] was hospitalized, a male nurse responsible for catheter care, “in the course of providing necessary medical evaluation and treatment, examined and touched [J. W.] in her vaginal area in a manner unnecessarily tactile and intrusive,” the lawsuit states.

     G. W. says he complained to Kaiser about the alleged incident not long after his wife told him about it.

     “Shortly after [G. W.’s] wife died, a Kaiser Senior Director of Patient Safety wrote a letter that stated they had conducted a thorough investigation of his complaint. The letter stated that they did not know who the male nurse was, and that the ‘unknown male nurse did not act inappropriately’ and followed ‘nursing standards of care.’ The letter further stated that the male nurse that they could not identify ‘was no longer employed with Kaiser.’ The Kaiser Senior Director of Patient Safety who wrote the letter was in charge at the time when Alex Woolner, who was convicted of numerous sexual crimes at Kaiser over a period of time in 2016 became ‘no longer employed with Kaiser’ due to being put in jail. After G. W. retained a lawyer, Kaiser represented that they now know who the male nurse was and identified the nurse as Tyler Hine, R.N.,” the complaint states.

     Neither Woolner nor Hine is a party to the lawsuit.

     “The male nurse knew that [J. W.] trusted him and exploited the opportunity that arose from his training, status, employment and agency in order to touch plaintiff in places and ways, including in the vaginal area, in which she would not ordinarily allow a stranger to touch her, and part of the motivation for his acts at least initially was to do the professional work that he was hired to do, and so was in service to the defendants, and part of his motivation was to gain Mrs. [W.’s] trust and control of her body in order that he might violate her sexually, and to do so for his own personal gratification, and all acts of sexual violation described herein were an outgrowth of and the result of acts of the kind that the male nurse was hired to perform, and all acts prior to the sexual violation were motivated, at least in part, by a desire to serve the corporate defendants in a professional manner,” the complaint states.

     “The above-described touching was intended to be in violation of plaintiff’s right to be free from unlawful sexual touching, was intended to be offensive, and was perceived as offensive, and consent was obtained by the exploitation of plaintiff’s status,” the complaint states.

     G. W. seeks punitive damages, costs, disbursements, and $750,000 in non-economic damages. He is represented by Mark McDougal, Gregory Kafoury and Jason Kafoury of Kafoury & McDougal in Portland.