by Neil W. McCabe

A Somerville doctor who is an emergency room physician at Cambridge Hospital is the subject of a criminal review by the Middlesex County District Attorney’s office and the Cambridge Police.

The doctor is being investigated, but there has been no indictment or charges filed, said Melissa T. Sherman, a spokeswoman for Martha Coakley, the district attorney.

The doctor, Christo C. Courban, is a 1996 graduate of the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center.

Courban is also affliated at other Boston hospitals, including Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was a resident from 1999 to 2002.

The Somerville News has learned that the doctor is the same physician accused of sexual assault by a former patient he met when she came to the Cambridge Hospital for complex partial seizures.

The woman said the doctor was inappropriately forward with her during their conversation at the emergency room, and the doctor visited her in her room after she was admitted to the hospital.

Courban told the woman that they should go out and he gave her his cell phone number, she said.

Two days after her release, the accuser said her friend found the phone number and for her own reasons, called the doctor and invited him to the accuser’s apartment.

The accuser’s friend said Courban told her that he was in his car and had to go to his apartment first.

The doctor arrived 30 minutes after the phone call. Sitting together on the floor, the doctor poured the two women shots of tequila, she said.

Both the accuser and her friend said they blacked out after drinking from the tequila.

The friend said she woke up, naked from the waist down and was on the couch.

The accuser said she was fading in and out, and remembers waking up to see the doctor undressing her friend. Then, she remembers waking up with Courban assaulting her. Her final memory was waking up to watch Courban leave.

The next day, the accuser called the doctor, and although he told her he was too drunk to remember what happened, he agreed to get her a morning after pill, she said. Later that day, she met him outside her apartment and he handed her a single pill and asked her to throw the tequila bottle away.

Answering the cell phone number provided by his accuser, Courban told The Somerville News he knew nothing about attack.

“I am sitting here and I am dumbfounded. Is this a joke? It is so bizarre and strange,” he said. “Can people just do this?”

Courban confirmed that he works at Cambridge Hospital, which he said was a matter of public record, but he does not practice as a patient physician, so could not have attended to the woman when she was admitted to the hospital for treatment.

“I don’t give my cell phone number to patients,” he said.

Courban said he was not sure what he should and should not say, since he had just now heard about the charges.

When the woman’s story was recounted to him, the doctor said he knew nothing about it and that none of the events or persons were remotely familiar to him. He then said he was confident that he would be cleared of any wrongdoing.

In addition to a bottle of tequila that was turned over to the Cambridge Police, this paper has learned the accuser Sept. 10 turned over to detectives a pillow case and sheets to be tested for residual DNA.

“Cambridge Health Alliance has not received any formal inquiry or complaint from any outside institution, or individual, around this allegation. Nevertheless, we’re taking this matter seriously and are looking into it,” said Linda Chin, a spokeswoman for the Cambridge Health Alliance, the owner of the Cambridge Hospital.

“We called the Middlesex County DA’s office who confirmed that they are in very preliminary stages of an investigation of a physician on our medical staff,” Chin said.

Chin said she had no knowledge of the subject of the investigation and was unaware of patient’s name or any circumstances beyond the statement from the district attorney.

The Somerville News did not offer the accuser’s name to the hospital.

“Physicians are bound by a Code of Ethics and are licensed by the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine,” Chin said.

“Also, ER physicians do not have admitting privileges but it is not unusual for an emergency physician to check on a patient after he/she is admitted,” she said.