The Story of the Woman Who Was Raped At Hacienda HealthCare Just Keeps on Getting Worse
LatestThe story of the incapacitated, bedridden woman who was raped and then gave birth at Hacienda HealthCare last December just keeps on getting worse—new documents allege that the woman had been repeatedly raped and had possibly been pregnant in the past.
More details, via CNN:
The Maricopa County Medical Center examined the woman after she gave birth and concluded she’d been “violated repeatedly,” the documents allege. Her giving birth was likely a “repeat parous event,” which means she may have been pregnant before, the documents say.
The new details were included in a claim, a precursor to a formal lawsuit, filed by lawyers representing the woman and her family. They’re seeking a $45 million settlement—$25 million for the woman and $10 million for each of her parents—within two months or the family’s lawyers will take the state of Arizona as well as Hacienda HealthCare to court.
According to the claim, her parents’ wishes that their daughter only be cared for by women working at Hacienda HealthCare were ignored. Instead, former Hacienda HealthCare nurse Nathan Sutherland, whose DNA matched that of the child born to the woman last December and who has since pled not guilty to charges of sexual assault and child abuse, was allowed to provide “unsupervised care for the victim over 1,000 times, including more than 800 times overnight.”
The claim also alleges that staff at Hacienda HealthCare missed dozens of opportunities to notice she was pregnant, from her growing belly to missed periods, resulting in the woman going “through her pregnancy without any proper care and in a state of malnutrition,” according to CNN’s review of the documents.
The woman’s family is also charging the state of Arizona with failing to provide adequate oversight of the long-term care facility. As they wrote in the claim, “The unspeakable atrocities … occurred as a result of systemic and individual misconduct and mismanagement at the Hacienda (facility) and virtually nonexistent oversight on the part of the state.”