‘He Was Very Convincing’: Over 600 Mostly Black Women Sterilized and Cut Open for No Reason, Lawsuit Claims — Now Virginia Hospital Faces $6B Lawsuit
More than 600 women who claim they were subjected to medically unnecessary surgeries, including C-sections and hysterectomies, over a decade by a now-imprisoned OB/GYN doctor are suing a Virginia hospital and its top executives for $6 billion. The lawsuit filed on Dec. 29 in Chesapeake City Circuit Court (and obtained by Atlanta Black Star) alleges that Chesapeake Regional Medical Center (CRMC) negligently provided surgical privileges to gynecologist Javaid Perwaiz despite numerous warnings from staff and insurance providers about his reckless practices that compromised patient safety. Plaintiffs Shantel Boone (left) and Niki Murray (right) are among 604 women suing Chesapeake Regional Medical Center in Virginia for the harm they allegedly suffered at the hands of Javaid Perwaiz (center), a former gynecologist convicted of performing unnecessary surgeries and of health fraud in 2020. (Photos: WTKR screenshots, WAVY screenshot). The plaintiffs, most of whom are Black, are each seeking $10 million in damages. They accuse the hospital, its current CEO James Reese Jackson and four former senior executives of enabling Perwaiz “to perform unnecessary, harmful, invasive, unlawful, and life-altering gynecologic medical procedures on them and other women, for nearly a decade, at Chesapeake Regional Medical Center, despite repeated reports and clear evidence of Perwaiz’s prior misconduct in his obstetrics and gynecology practice.” Perwaiz, who lost his medical license and was convicted of health care fraud in 2020, is currently serving a 59-year federal prison sentence for conducting irreversible hysterectomies, improper sterilizations, and other medically unnecessary procedures, reported WTKR. He misled women about their health, telling some women they had cancer when they did not, and had others sign consent forms for procedures when they were under anesthesia. Shantel Boone, who was among 94 additional women who joined the lawsuit last week, said she received an unnecessary hysterectomy from Perwaiz in 2017. It left her unable to have any more children and forced her into early menopause in her early 30s. https://www.tiktok.com/@coastalcurr3nts/video/7593075415338601742?is_from_webapp1&sender_devicepc “No. I do not have a uterus. … Night sweats, hormonal mood swings, just feeling depressed. And, I lost my husband. So when you think about starting over, I don’t have that option if I wanted to,” Boone said. Plaintiff Dracena Holloway, 42, a mother of seven in Portsmouth, told The New York Times that Perwaiz induced labor in her four times, resulting in all four of her newborns spending time in intensive care and experiencing developmental delays. When she went into labor with twins in 2011, she said the doctor performed a C-section and tubal ligation that sterilized her without her consent or knowledge. Perwaiz operated on her repeatedly over a six-year period, falsely telling her she had fibroids and stomach cancer. He removed her uterus and did abdominal surgery, leaving her with a large scar on her belly and chronic pain that limits her mobility. “He made me feel very comfortable, like I was in good hands,” Holloway told the Times. “When he told you that you had to have surgery, he said, ‘Here, Dr. P will take care of you.’ He was very convincing.” Many of Pervaiz’s patients had babies who were admitted to the neonatal intensive unit in disproportionate numbers, according to a federal criminal indictment charging the hospital with health care fraud that was filed on Jan. 8. Prosecutors allege that CRMC allowed Pervaiz to work there from 1984 to 2019, despite being aware that his medical privileges had been terminated at Maryview Medical Center in Portsmouth for performing unnecessary surgeries, including irreversible hysterectomies, on about a dozen patients. Last week, a federal judge dismissed the hospital’s motion to dismiss the criminal case, reported WTKR. In 1996, the Virginia Board of Medicine revoked Perwaiz’s medical license after he pled guilty to felony tax fraud. Among the fraudulent conduct he admitted to was falsely claiming a Ferrari luxury sports car as an ultrasound machine so he could write it off as a business expense, the indictment says. CMRC’s then-president Donald S. Buckley wrote and submitted a letter of support for Perwaiz’s sentencing, calling the discredited doctor his “personal friend.” After Perwaiz served four months of home confinement, the hospital CEO filed another letter of support to help him regain his medical license. His letter included a physician profitability analysis indicating that in 1995, CRMC charged over $760,000 for Perwaiz’s surgeries, resulting in a hospital profit of $400 per case. The civil lawsuit contends that the hospital’s longtime relationship with Perwaiz, who remained “a top 10 earner” for RCMC, led to safety concerns and abnormal practices involving the former doctor being ignored by staff, and that Chesapeake Regional Medical Center continued to credential and offer privileges to him “based on financial motivation rather than patient safety or quality standards.” From 2010 to 2019, the hospital reportedly received about $18.5 million in reimbursements from Medicaid and other healthcare benefit programs for surgeries performed by Perwaiz, the complaint says. During his tenure, hospital leadership ignored repeated concerns about Perwaiz raised by medical and administrative staff. That included his performing hysterectomies and other invasive surgical procedures classified by Medicaid as “inpatient only” and then reporting them as outpatient procedures for billing purposes, the lawsuit says, in order to avoid the documentation and greater scrutiny that health care benefit programs require for inpatient procedures. For years, the medical and administrative staff at CRMC complained about Perwaiz falsely reporting his inpatient surgeries, as well as performing some procedures, such as sterilizations, without obtaining the required patient consent at least 30 days in advance. Unlike nearly all other surgeons at the hospital, Perwaiz did not use photography or videography in the operating room that would allow others to see what procedures he was performing. One surgical technologist refused to continue working with him because she could not see what he was doing and informed the CRMC operating room manager of her concerns, according to the indictment. In 2014, Perwaiz performed an abdominal hysterectomy on a patient identified as M.M. as planned. But he also removed her fallopian tubes and ovaries, procedures not included on her signed consent form. A surgical nurse who testified at his criminal trial said he added the procedure to the consent form after the patient was already under anesthesia. “I feel as though we performed an assault on the patient,” the nurse said. A post-arrest analysis by health care benefit programs Anthem and Optima compared Perwaiz’s surgery rates with those of his peers, and concluded that from 2015 to 2019, approximately 80 percent of his surgeries were medically unnecessary. “There were not only red flags, they were sirens being alarmed, and the hospital completely turned a blind eye to what he was doing, solely for monetary profit and with complete disregard for patient safety,” Victoria Wickman, an attorney representing the women in the civil suit, told the Times. “And it seems to be the majority of women who were targeted were African American women, all of them poor and on Medicaid, who believed everything he said,” she added. In a statement, Chesapeake Regional Medical Center said, “The allegations that form the primary basis for this lawsuit were made by Dr. Javid Perwaiz, who has never been an employee of Chesapeake Regional Healthcare (CRH). His actions, for which he is now serving a lengthy prison sentence, occurred without the knowledge of this organization. CRH strives to provide the best care to its patients, including through its medical staff physicians. Unfortunately, privacy laws prohibit us from commenting further on these allegations.” The hospital and five individually named defendants have 21 days after being served with the complaint to file a response in Cheseapeake City Circuit Court.
