Thoracic Park: The Doctor Was A Spy

The Connecticut Appellate Court has affirmed a $2 million judgment against a medical doctor for his surveillance of the woman for whom he had left his wife and nine children.

She was a physician’s assistant; he was her supervisor.

The parties flirted with each other, but when the defendant expressed his interest in exploring a relationship with her, the plaintiff indicated that she would not consider dating a married man unless and until he moved out of his family’s home. In April, 2001, the defendant moved out of that house and into an apartment. The parties then began a personal relationship that lasted for years. The plaintiff testified that she fell deeply in love with the defendant. The two talked about getting married and having children together, while shopping for engagement and wedding rings and selecting children’s names. At the same time, the plaintiff ‘‘was very frustrated that [the defendant] was still married [because] that wasn’t in accordance with the value system that [she] wanted to be living.’’

During the relationship, she moved into her dream home and gave the doctor a set of keys. It proved to be a mistake.

The relationship had began in 2001 and ended in 2007 when the doctor (a cardiovascular and thoracic surgeon)  left her for a nurse.

By February, 2007, the defendant had begun dating a nurse at the hospital without the plaintiff’s knowledge. On February 12, 2007, the defendant returned his set of house keys to the plaintiff. At that time, he explained that he was preoccupied with starting his own medical practice and finalizing his divorce. The plaintiff was devastated. When he ended their relationship,the defendant never informed the plaintiff that he had installed surveillance equipment in her home, computer and vehicle, or that he was dating another woman. The defendant testified that, in the months that followed, he continued to receive daily e-mails documenting everything that the plaintiff wrote on her computer and that the surveillance equipment in the plaintiff’s home continued to broadcast and record from therein.

Thereafter, the surveillance was discovered

the plaintiff hired a plumber to repair a broken faucet on her property. In order to do so, the plumber entered the crawl space in her basement and discovered the defendant’s surveillance equipment. At the plumber’s urging, the plaintiff contacted the police. Members of the Bloomfield Police Department responded to her residence and discovered both the recording equipment in the basement and the two clock radios in her bedroom containing spy cameras. The plaintiff immediately realized that the defendant had been spying on her. As she testified, ‘‘I was devastated. I knew exactly how they had been—flashback in my head [to] him handing them to me.’’ Realizing that the defendant had been spying on her for years, the plaintiff felt ‘‘betrayed, alarmed, betrayed, humiliated, controlled. I didn’t feel like a person. I felt like I was just a—I don’t even know, something that he—just like a toy of his, like I just didn’t count.’’ When she called the defendant and confronted him about the surveillance equipment, the defendant offered an ‘‘empty apology’’ and did not deny that he had spied on her over the course of their relationship. Notably, the defendant did not inform the plaintiff that he also had monitored her computer with a spyware program or that he had monitored her vehicle with a GPS device. At that time, the plaintiff declined to press charges against the defendant.

He continued to hound and frighten her in person. 

The extent to which he spied on her is set forth in the court’s opinion.

In December, 2004, the defendant gave the plaintiff a laptop computer as a Christmas gift. Unbeknownst to the plaintiff, the defendant had installed a spyware program on the computer that discreetly forwarded to him, via e-mail on a daily basis, a copy of everything composed thereon. A few months later, the defendant purchased an air purifier for the plaintiff. That would be the first of several gifts given to her by the defendant that secretly housed wireless spy cameras. After unsuccessfully attempting to install spy cameras in the ceiling above her bed, the defendant gave the plaintiff two clock radios and a television, which all contained spy cameras and were positioned in her bedroom in the direction of her bed. The air purifier likewise was positioned in the direction of her bathroom shower

The court

Viewed in a light most favorable to sustaining the verdict, the present case involves a plaintiff irreparably damaged any sense of privacy and security, even in her own home. The record does not indicate that the jury predicated its award on an improper basis, but rather that it sought to compensate the plaintiff for the injuries that resulted from the defendant’s intentional conduct. We, therefore, conclude that the court did not abuse its discretion in denying the defendant’s motion for remittitur.

(Mike Frisch)