The Oregonian | By Maxine Bernstein | April 27, 2021
Oregon Health and Science University has agreed to pay $585,000 to settle a federal lawsuit brought by a social worker who accused a former anesthesiology resident of sexually assaulting her and the school of failing to take action.
The university also issued an apology to the woman in a statement released Tuesday and said she will be invited to participate in former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s independent investigation of OHSU’s handling of sexual misconduct and discrimination complaints.
She alleged that Dr. Jason Campbell harassed her from January through March last year, sending her a pornographic photo of himself and sexually charged text messages and then creeping up behind her in her office and forcibly pressing against her so she could feel his erection.
Campbell had gained fame on social media, becoming known as the TikTok Doc for his dance videos in hospital scrubs that went viral during the pandemic.
“OHSU offers sincere apologies to the plaintiff and others who have been harmed,” the university’s statement said.
“OHSU recognizes the need to address systemic structures that allow inappropriate and damaging behavior to exist, and is committed to creating a safe and inclusive environment that is free of harassment and discrimination.”
The woman had complained to OHSU last April and provided a written summary of her allegations with screenshots of text messages exchanged with Campbell.
Later that month, the university instructed Campbell to have no contact with her, according to OHSU’s lawyers. By the end of the month, OHSU had removed Campbell from clinical duties and excluded him from campus, a university spokeswoman said.
The woman works at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center next to OHSU on the university’s Marquam Hill campus. Campbell was a second-year resident at OHSU and had a pass to access the VA center.
An OHSU investigation concluded last August that Campbell had violated its harassment policy and code of conduct with unwanted touching and inappropriate electronic and text messages, including an unsolicited picture of his erection through his scrub pants.
Campbell was referred for dismissal but resigned from his residency in lieu of discharge on Oct. 23, according to the university.
The social worker filed suit against Campbell and OHSU this past February in U.S. District Court in Portland, seeking $45 million in damages. She isn’t named in the suit.
The settlement, reached through mediation led by retired U.S. District Judge Michael R. Hogan, encompasses the suit’s allegations against both the university and Campbell.
John Kaempf, a former lawyer for Campbell, initially wrote to the plaintiff’s lawyers that Campbell denied liability and was deeply in debt, including about $367,000 in school loans, $17,500 in credit card debt with a total about $5,600 in the bank.
Since the lawsuit was filed, two more women have submitted sworn statements in court that Campbell also came up from behind them and forced his body against theirs at work in the fall of 2019. A third woman said Campbell followed her around during his rotation in her unit in 2019, asking her for free hugs.
The suit led to national fallout for TIME’S UP Healthcare, a group formed to combat sexual harassment in the medical field.
More than a dozen of its founding members resigned, criticizing what they said was the group’s inadequate response to allegations in the social worker’s lawsuit that another founding member, OHSU’s Dr. Esther Choo, failed to formally report the harassment accusations to the school’s Title IX coordinator.
Instead, the suit says, Choo offered to have a “sit down” with Campbell or have his manager do so.
Choo, through a spokeswoman, has said she wasn’t a mandatory reporter because the social worker wasn’t an OHSU student and Campbell wasn’t under her immediate supervision.
OHSU also denied that Campbell was acting “in the course and scope of his employment” as an OHSU doctor at the time of any alleged contact with the social worker.
Campbell left OHSU and was to start a residency at the University of Florida Health but the school then announced it was placing Campbell on paid leave pending its own investigation.
OHSU has hired Holder to examine how the university responded to the complaints against Campbell but also to do a broader review of other cases and his handling of sexual harassment and discrimination complaints.
The university’s statement said it “welcomes” the social worker’s “participation in the independent investigation, while acknowledging that doing so may be re-traumatizing.”
The investigation by Holder’s Washington, D.C.-based firm Covington & Burling is expected to last six months. Holder’s payment – he agreed to give OHSU a 10% discount on his $2,295 hourly rate — has drawn outrage from alumni, faculty and lawyers across the state.
Michael Fuller and Kim Sordyl, the attorneys who represented plaintiff “A.B.” in her suit, along with Karen O’Kasey, attorney for OHSU, and Courtney Angeli, attorney for Campbell, submitted a stipulated dismissal of the case to the federal court Tuesday morning.
The social worker who brought the suit said in a joint statement: “Plaintiff would like to thank those who supported her during this process.”
An Off-Duty Officer ‘Terrorized’ a Family Displaying a BLM flag, Police Drove Him Home Without Arrest
The Washington Post | By Katie Shepherd | May 10, 2021
Just after midnight on Halloween, a blaring car alarm and a loud banging sound startled Mirella Castaneda and woke her young son.
A man stood in her driveway in Forest Grove, Ore., slamming his fist into the Black Lives Matter flag draped over the metal garage door as the security alarm on the family’s pickup truck continued to beep.
Castaneda immediately called 911 — but when police showed up, they recognized the man as an off-duty officer named Steven Teets.
Instead of arresting Teets, though, one of the responding officers simply drove him home. Now, Teets and that officer, Bradley Schuetz, face criminal charges in the incident that Castaneda’s attorney says “terrorized” her family.
A grand jury has indicted Schuetz for official misconduct after an outside investigation by the Beaverton Police Department, the agency said in a statement Friday. Teets was arrested and charged with criminal mischief and disorderly conduct last year. A second responding officer, Amber Daniels, will not face charges, officials said.
An attorney for Teets did not respond to a request for comment.
Steve Myers, who is representing Schuetz, told The Washington Post that his client had limited options after confronting Teets because the local center where police take intoxicated individuals had been closed and the county jail was not holding people charged with misdemeanors due to the pandemic.
Myers said Schuetz believed taking Teets to his nearby home was the best way to handle the unusual situation. He added that Schuetz knew an outside agency would be taking over the investigation, so he declined to interview Teets or write a citation to preserve the Washington County Sheriff’s investigation.
“It’s hard to believe that this grand jury could find probable cause,” Myers said, noting that a charge of official misconduct requires that an officer intended to benefit or intentionally harm another person
Teets has been on administrative desk duty since late last year, and Schuetz is on paid administrative leave, the Oregonian reported.
The charges raised questions about how police handled the investigation, including whether the officers involved treated Castaneda differently because of her support of the Black Lives Matter movement that has challenged police across the United States over fatal shootings and violent arrests. The Forest Grove Police Department has also recently drawn public scrutiny over the death of James Marshall, who died after police used a stun gun to subdue him as he was having an apparent mental health crisis.
An attorney for Castaneda provided The Post with a tort claim declaring her intent to sue the Forest Grove Police Department. The claim describes how police allegedly “worked in concert, either intentionally, or subconsciously due to implicit bias, to deprive Ms. Castaneda of her Constitutional rights” as they investigated the incident last October.
In a statement addressing the charges against Teets and Schuetz, Forest Grove Police Chief Henry Reimann said he could not release any information about the October incident until the criminal cases are resolved.
“Sharing such information at this time (or rushing to make decisions based on partial information) could do more harm than good and could potentially hinder the City’s ability to address these important issues,” he said in the statement. “Once the criminal process is complete for each of the officers, an outside law enforcement agency will evaluate if policy violations occurred.”
In the suburb about 30 miles west of Portland, Castaneda is one of the only homeowners who openly displays Black Lives Matter banners and signs, according to her claim. About 25,500 people live in Forest Grove; more than two-thirds of those residents are White, nearly 23 percent are Latino and fewer than 1 percent of residents identify as Black, according to census data. Castaneda is Latino
The signs allegedly attracted Teets’s attention in the early morning hours of Oct. 31, when he allegedly strode up Castaneda’s driveway, setting off the security alarm on the family’s pickup truck and pounding on a Black Lives Matter flag. Teets allegedly kicked the front door, shouted at the family inside the home and refused to leave.
“Officer Teets terrorized Ms. Castaneda and her family and yelled at them to fight,” according to the claim.
Fifteen minutes after Castaneda called 911, two Forest Grove police officers arrived at her home and identified Teets as he was walking in the street nearby, according to court records.
Investigators ultimately revealed that Teets appeared to be “highly intoxicated” when Schuetz and Daniels arrived on the scene, according to a memo reported by the Portland Tribune last month.
Teets allegedly “squared up” with the two officers, fists raised as if he wanted to fight them. He did not recognize his colleagues, the memo said.
The responding officers did not check Teets for weapons, according to Castaneda’s tort claim. Then, Schuetz drove Teets to his nearby home, “only blocks away from the Castaneda family,” according to the claim, and helped the intoxicated officer to his front door. The officers who interviewed Castaneda on Halloween did not tell her that they had identified Teets as the man who attacked her home, nor did they divulge that they had already taken him home.
“For my own sanity and my family’s, I just felt like I needed to know what happened,” Castaneda told the Tribune. “This really shook my sense of safety
Nearly three days later, officials finally disclosed Teets’s name and let a shaken Castaneda know that he had been arrested. Castaneda has alleged that officers violated department policy and Oregon law when they “failed to tell [her] that the suspect lived near her family and carried a firearm as part of his job as an officer.”
Even after providing Teets’s name, investigators did not tell Castaneda that he was a police officer. According to her claim, she discovered that Teets worked for the Forest Grove Police Department only after she searched for his name on the Internet.
Her lawyer, Michael Fuller, also alleged that police did not document the possible political motives at play when Teets targeted Castaneda’s home. The responding officers did not turn on body cameras during the investigation as required by department policy, nor did they note the existence of the Black Lives Matter flags prominently displayed on Castaneda’s property in their reports. (Myers said Schuetz simply forgot to turn his body camera on while determining how to handle the incident and noted that the Forest Grove Police Department had recently implemented the body-worn cameras in January 2020. He also said the victim’s Black Lives Matter flag had not been damaged.)
“The treatment of Ms. Castaneda as a second-class citizen based on her political viewpoint by the investigating officers added insult to injury, and further compounded the emotional trauma she and her family had experienced at the hands of Officer Teets,” her lawyer said.
The Forest Grove Police Department ultimately passed the criminal investigation over to the Washington County Sheriff’s Office, which brought charges against Teets in November. Reimann, the Forest Grove police chief, also requested an administrative investigation be done by the police department in nearby Beaverton, which charged Schuetz last week.
Fuller told The Post that the criminal charges have given Castaneda hope that the city will address the failures that may have inhibited the prosecutor’s ability to pursue more aggressive charges in the case against Teets.
“I honestly didn’t expect much to come from the internal review, certainly not a criminal probe of the police officers involved,” Fuller told The Post in an email. “The charge of official misconduct substantiates what my client and I have been alleging for the past six months.”
