by Neil W. McCabe

A woman, who now lives in Somerville, filed a report today with the Cambridge Police Department charging a Somerville doctor with raping her during a visit to her Cambridge apartment, while she was taking new medication prescribed for seizures and after drinking tequilla he brought with him to the apartment.

The woman said she was attacked in May, but was reluctant to go through the emotional strain of reporting a sexual crime. She is coming forward now, so other women will not be victims. “This is a big step for me.”

In addition to making her report, the former patient gave Cambridge Police the tequilla bottle to be tested for fingerprints and an analysis of the contents, she said.

The woman met the doctor in the Cambridge Hospital emergency room, where she was treated for a relapse of complex partial seizures, she said.

As she rested on a curtained-off bed in the emergency room, she said the doctor asked her sexually inappropriate questions and whether she had a boyfriend. “When I told him I had a boyfriend, he said he was upset by that and that I should get rid of him. He said it in a jokey, shy way.”

“Then, when the nurse would come back, he started writing on his clipboard and talking about something else,” she said.

“I remember noticing that he kept giving me large doses of Adavin in my IV, and when I had been treated for seizures before I was usually given Klonopin,” she said. “One time, as he gave me a dose, he said, ‘A lot of people pay good money for this stuff.'”

The women was admitted to Cambridge Hospital for further treatment, and the doctor requested to be the attending physician, she said.

He continued to hit on her and gave her his cell phone number, she said. He told her he was new in town, he did not have a lot of friends and they should go out for coffee.

After the woman was discharged, the woman told her a female friend about the doctor and his advances. The friend while staying with the woman at her apartment, on her own and for her own reasons, found the doctor’s number and invited him to visit the apartment, she said. It was two days after her discharge.

The woman said she remembers the friend making the call, but she was heavily medicated and not in a condition to fully understand what was happening, or what would happen next.

When the doctor arrived he produced a bottle of tequilla and poured three shots, two large ones for the females and one very small one for himself, she said. After drinking the shot, the woman immediately blacked out.

The rest of the night, the woman said she remembers as flashes in and out of consciouness. “It was like snapshots.”

She said remembers images like a slide show: watching the doctor take off her friend’s shorts, realizing that her own clothes were off and then waking up to watch the doctor assault her. “I could not move. I could not talk. All I could do is watch. It was like I was frozen.”

“When he got up to leave, I stood up, but I fell on the floor right away. He just looked at me and left,” she said.

The next day, the woman called the doctor on his cellphone to ask him what had happened to her, she said. “He said he was too drunk to remember what happened, and he kept asking me, like six times, ‘Are you recording this? You’re not recording this, are you?’

“I just wanted to know what happened. I was worried about getting a disease or being pregnant,” she said.

“I told him to give me a prescription for the plan b pill, which you can take up to two days after having sex,” she said. “Finally, he said he would bring me the pill. I met him outside my apartment, and he handed it to me. It wasn’t in a bottle or anything. Then, he told me to throw the bottle of tequilla away.”

When the two women compared their recollections, the friend wanted to go to the police at once. But, because the woman would not go with the friend, nothing was done, she said. “With my seizures and everything else, I wasn’t emotionally prepared to go along.”