In Utah, 217 women have now sued an OB-GYN for alleged sex abuse. One says he assaulted her after he agreed to stop practicing.

Note to readers • This story describes explicit details of an alleged sexual assault.

Since the Utah Supreme Court revived a lawsuit filed by 94 women against their Utah OB-GYN, more than 100 additional women have joined the case claiming that they, too, were sexually assaulted by David Broadbent.

There are now 217 women listed as plaintiffs in the civil suit, including one woman who claims Broadbent gave her an exam and then sexually assaulted her in fall 2022 — when he was not legally allowed to be practicing medicine.

Months earlier, Broadbent had agreed with state officials that limits would be placed on his license while Provo police investigated sexual assault allegations against him. According to the stipulation, Broadbent committed to “not practice as a physician in any way or manner.”

The woman alleges in the amended lawsuit that Broadbent saw her during her first pregnancy appointment and licked her vagina during the exam. She alleged that he also asked to take a photo to document the genital warts she had been experiencing, and said she refused after Broadbent “pulled out his personal cellphone.”

The woman said she told Broadbent that she was going to tell the clinic about what he had done, according to the civil lawsuit, and she said the doctor responded by saying, “Go ahead, they won’t believe you.”

By the fall of 2022, sexual assault allegations against Broadbent had been public for months. Her appointment was in October or November 2022, according to the amended filing — just weeks after a judge dismissed the original lawsuit filed by the 94 women, based on a legal point.

The judge had determined in September 2022 that the women’s claims fell under the state’s medical malpractice law instead of a civil sexual assault statute, which meant they had faced — and missed — tighter filing deadlines. (The Utah Supreme Court reversed that decision earlier this year.)

It is not clear from the lawsuit whether this woman reported her allegations to police or state licensers.

The state Division of Professional Licensing said in a statement Thursday that it has not received any complaints alleging Broadbent continued to practice after he signed the stipulation agreeing he would not do so, noting that the agency primarily relies on complaints from the public to guide its investigations.

DOPL spokesperson Melanie Hall said the agency monitors professionals like Broadbent who have limitations on their licenses and staff “work closely with law enforcement while ensuring that we do not interfere with or impede ongoing criminal investigations.”

“If we receive information suggesting that a respondent is engaging in conduct that violates a stipulation or order — such as unlawful, unprofessional, or criminal behavior — DOPL collaborates with representatives from law enforcement and the Attorney General’s Office to take all necessary measures to protect the public,” she said.

Many of the women allege in the amended lawsuit that Broadbent inappropriately touched their breasts, vaginas and rectums during exams — often without warning or explanation, and in ways that they say hurt them and made them feel violated. They are suing Broadbent and two hospitals where he worked, Timpanogos Hospital and Utah Valley Hospital, alleging the facilities received complaints about him and did nothing. In a separate suit, 20 other former patients have made similar allegations against the two hospitals; their litigation is still pending.

Broadbent’s civil attorneys did not respond to a request for comment for this article, nor did Intermountain Healthcare, which owns Utah Valley Hospital. MountainStar Health, which operates Timpanogos Hospital, said in a statement that, to its knowledge, “there were no allegations of inappropriate conduct reported to our facility regarding this physician, and as such our position since this lawsuit was filed has been that we were inappropriately named in the suit.”

Both hospitals in previous statements have emphasized that Broadbent had privileges at their hospitals, but was not an employee.

An attorney for Broadbent previously has denied the accusations in the original complaint, saying they were “without merit.”

Utah County prosecutors have charged Broadbent, now 77, with two felonies, accusing him of sexually assaulting a patient twice during two separate exams in 2020. If convicted, Broadbent could face a potential prison term of up to life in prison.

Cara Tangaro, Broadbent’s criminal defense attorney, has asked a judge to throw out the charges against the doctor, arguing that there is not enough evidence for the case to move forward.

She argued that the woman was not credible, saying that the patient’s account has become more detailed in the years after the 2020 appointment, especially in written statements made after she began working with a civil attorney. The woman is one of the plaintiffs in the civil lawsuit filed against Broadbent, and Tangaro said she has a “direct financial motive” for a judge to find wrongdoing in criminal court.

Tangaro also argued that prosecutors, under criminal law, needed to show evidence that Broadbent’s specific intent was not medical, but instead that it was his “conscious objective” to either cause his patient harm or to gratify someone’s sexual desire.

“In most sexual assault cases, there is no reasonable justification for acts like inserting an item into a vagina or touching breasts,” she wrote. “But Dr. Broadbent is a medical doctor who specialized in gynecology and obstetrics. It is literally his job to touch the genitals and breasts of his patients; it is the reason his patients come to him.”

When contacted this week about the new allegations in the civil lawsuit, Tangaro said that her client always had a chaperone in the room with him during exams and that he “adamantly denies ever sexually abusing any patient.”

Addressing the report of the woman who alleges Broadbent licked her in a 2022 appointment, Tangaro said that “it is curious that a patient would now come forward after years of civil litigation and a lot of media attention and have the most egregious claim yet.”

In the amended lawsuit filed by the 217 women, more than a dozen allege that Broadbent told them that their husband or partners were “lucky” to be able to have sex with them. Nineteen women claimed that he did either breast or vaginal exams without wearing gloves.

Several said Broadbent chastised them for violating the beliefs of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by having sex outside marriage and becoming pregnant — including one woman who alleged the doctor induced a miscarriage when he violently pushed his hands together, with one hand in her vagina pushing up and the other hand on her abdomen pushing down.

The earliest patient who sued him sought care in 1977, the most recent in 2022. Their allegations include:

• A woman in 2020 who went to Utah Valley Hospital’s emergency room because she was miscarrying. She was referred to Broadbent, the on-call OB-GYN. At the hospital, she alleged, Broadbent insisted on conducting a Pap smear, which she found painful. She also felt him put a finger in her rectum, she alleges in the lawsuit. She said Broadbent also insisted on doing a breast exam, and reached his hands under her sweatshirt and “palmed both of her breasts.” “Feeling violated and disgusted, and with her miscarriage having just occurred, [she] went home to grieve,” the lawsuit reads. “Everything was tangled in a messy ball of emotions, and she thought it was best to put it all out of her mind.”

• Another woman said she saw Broadbent in 2018 for her first pregnancy. She said in the lawsuit that just before the doctor conducted a Pap smear, she grabbed a nurse’s hand and asked Broadbent to wait a moment so she could try to relax her body — knowing that the exam can be invasive and painful. “Oh, you need a minute to get ready to be assaulted?” the woman recalled Broadbent saying, before proceeding with the exam. The lawsuit doesn’t say whether or not Broadbent seemed to her to be attempting to joke.

• One patient was 14 years old and was eight months pregnant in 2009 when she went to Broadbent. She recalled in the lawsuit that she didn’t see Broadbent for many appointments in that pregnancy, but said “Broadbent made a point of putting his hands on her breasts, massaging them, and explaining that was how she should massage them after she had her baby.” She went to him again in 2011 during her second pregnancy, when she said he made inappropriate comments while giving her a pelvic exam.

• Another patient first went to Broadbent in 1986, and recalled in the lawsuit how he made her feel uncomfortable by making comments about her “tan line” after she had undressed. Then in 2007, she was hospitalized at Utah Valley Hospital during her sixth pregnancy. There, she said, Broadbent was the on-call OB-GYN, and at one point during her stay, he put his hand up her gown and said, “Let’s do a breast exam.” She alleges in the lawsuit that Broadbent ran his hands across her breasts a few times, then removed his hands from inside her gown and said, “We probably don’t need to do a breast exam at this point.” She complained to a nurse, according to the lawsuit, and sometime in the next few days, another doctor visited her to talk to her about her complaint and agreed to give Broadbent a “peer reprimand.”

Most of the former patients who are suing Broadbent described in the lawsuit how they dismissed their discomfort during the exams, reasoning that he was a doctor and he knew what he was doing. Many were young college students, and it was their first time seeing a gynecologist.

They began to describe their experiences as alleged sexual assaults after one woman, Stephanie Mateer, spoke out on the podcast “Mormon Stories,” in December 2021. She described the painful way she said he had examined her years before and how it left her feeling traumatized. After listening to the podcast and reading subsequent media coverage, many women said they realized there were other patients who had similar experiences.