Staff Reporter: Five women have finally filed a complaint against that lustful Dr Ferdous Khandker, a Bangladeshi expatriate from New York, on the basis of a complaint raised about a year ago. The case has been filed in the Queens Supreme Court on Friday (August 13) of New York by 5 women victims of Ferdous Khandker’s lust. Four of them are Bangladeshis living in Jackson Heights.
According to a class-action case filed in the court, Ferdous Khandker has sexually abused patients in the name of medical treatment at various times. He has sexually assaulted girls under the age of 14 in the name of unreasonable breast examination. Incidents of indecency in the name of testing female patients have been going on for almost twenty years.
Plaintiffs allege that Ferdous Khandker has sexually harassed dozens of women and girls for two decades in an effort to provide medical care. In these two decades-long incidents, he touched their breasts unnecessarily. Even when they went to her regularly for symptoms like sore throat. In some cases he even instructed them to partially undress.
For this reason, Ferdous Khandker is a serial sexual predator
filed a defamation suit against the three for 10 million last year after several victims reported the incident on social media to protest against such behavior. The court recently dismissed the case and directed Ferdous Khandker to pay the defendant’s lawyer’s fees. Susan Krumiller, the victims’ lawyer, said the case was filed against her in the wake of the incident.
“I believe he will regret that choice for the rest of his life because of how spectacularly it backfired,” said Susan Crumiller, an attorney representing the five women.
“It led to many of his survivors coming together and summoning the extraordinary courage required to speak out against a man like him: one who has cultivated a reputation of power and invincibility. Khandker must have truly believed that filing a lawsuit would successfully silence his victims. Instead, it did the opposite.” Neither Khandker nor his attorney could be reached for comment.
In legal documents in the defamation case, Khandker said that he does not sexually assault his patients, that he’s never molested anyone, and that he did “not give breast exams if the reason why the patient is seeing him does not require one.” Khandker has appealed the decision dismissing his defamation claim.
The class-action suit details multiple allegations against Khandker that the women say happened when they were ages ranging from 14 to 23. One woman described accompanying her mother to Khandker’s 37th Avenue office for an appointment. While at the office, the woman, then 23, asked Khandker if he could give her “a routine blood test,” according to the lawsuit She said she then entered an exam room with him, where he told her that he needed to perform a check-up prior to the test. He attempted to pull her shirt up, which she said she resisted, but he insisted and ultimately pulled her shirt up to her neck, according to the lawsuit. He then allegedly placed his stethoscope underneath her bra and commented on its padding and tightness.
The woman, now 24, said that Khandker stared at her chest, making her deeply uncomfortable. Then, she said, he touched her nipple with his fingers.
“This was beyond my imagination,” she told the media,“I pushed him harder. That’s when he realized I wasn’t OK with this.”
She said she left the room, shaken with fear. When she and her mother exited the premises, she told her mother what had happened but did not feel prepared to confront Khandker.
Later that day, the plaintiff posted about the alleged incident on her Facebook page, while describing it as a friend’s experience, the complaint reads.
“Education doesn’t really educate you or else every highly educated individual would be the most civilized human being ever,” the post read, according to the defamation suit. “One of my friends went for a regular checkup this morning and he tried to molest her. She was sooo in shock that she couldn’t take actions right away. This is so absurd and unacceptable if your doctor does that to you.”
Over the following months, the post garnered increasing attention. Others contacted the woman, offering similar accounts, she said. In June, the woman reposted her allegations and the anonymous stories of others on her social media.
Others circulated a change.org petition calling for Khandker’s medical license to be revoked. More than 4,500 individuals signed the change.org petition, which has since been removed from the website.
Khandker responded by suing the woman, and two other individuals who posted the allegations, for online harassment and defamation, seeking damages of at least $1 million.
“I know how difficult it is to walk around with this in your heart,” the woman told the media, adding that she was shocked that he sued her. “After seeing the lawsuit, I was kind of weak and this is what he wanted, to make me feel weak so i don’t fight anymore, but that’s not going to happen.”
In addition to practicing medicine in Queens, Khandker also regularly posts videos on his YouTube channel, where he describes himself as a “renowned” physician specializing in internal and geriatric medicine. In his lawsuit, he alleged “irreparable harm” to his personal and professional reputation.
A year after Khandker filed the defamation suit, the judge tossed it and ordered the doctor to pay the defendants’ attorneys fees. Khandker has appealed the decision.
Several women filed complaints with the New York Office of Professional Medical Conduct, according to Crumiller. Jeffrey Hammond, a spokesperson for the Office of Professional Medical Conduct, said that the agency does not comment on or confirm investigations.
The five plaintiffs brought the class action suit against Khandker “on behalf of the class of patients who were too young to know what was happening, too traumatized to act sooner, or too scared to come forward against a powerful offender,” the complaint reads.
Their stories, as outlined in court papers, are similar. Most allege they went to see him for cold symptoms and respiratory issues, were asked to take their shirts off and then were touched inappropriately. Some of the plaintiffs told the media, that they were paralyzed with fear and shock.
Dr. Furman McDonald, a senior vice president at the American Board of Internal Medicine, said that while there “certainly are conditions which it’s appropriate” for a doctor to screen a patient for breast cancer, administering breast exams to patients who sought treatment for respiratory issues like sore throats and colds was “unusual.”
The eldest of the plaintiffs charged Khandker abused her in 2003, when she was 14 years old. She said she arrived at Khandker’s office with her mother to seek treatment for her asthma. In the examination room, the complaint alleged, he asked the plaintiff if she knew how to perform a breast self-exam.
He then instructed her to partially undress and performed the exam, according to court papers. A month later, after experiencing an asthma attack, the plaintiff returned and he touched her bare breasts again, the complaint reads.
Another plaintiff, described an incident to media that she said occurred a decade ago when she was also 14. Recapping the allegations in the complaint, the plaintiff said that she went to the doctor to assess her flu-like symptoms. During the exam, he placed his stethoscope on her bare breast and touched it, she said.
She doesn’t recall Khandker asking her about her health or recording her vitals.“I had nightmares for days, I didn’t know how to tell my mom,” she said. “I was young enough to not know how to speak up, but I was also not naive. I knew this was not how a doctor tests you. I knew something happened to me.”She said she wasn’t ready then to share her account.
“I can advocate for myself now, I am stronger. I know who I am,” she said. “Now I’m speaking up and a lot of people are speaking up.”
The five women are seeking compensatory and punitive damages for allegations that include false imprisonment at his medical facility, emotional distress, gender violence and discrimination, medical malpractice, lack of consent, and sexual violation of minors.
Meanwhile, the New York expatriate Awami League leader, who did not want to be named, complained that Ferdous Khandker, a well-known doctor who claims to be a medical expert, treats all kinds of diseases. Allegations of sexual harassment of female patients are long-standing. When you open YouTube and Facebook, you can see that there are different types of videos. What’s not in his video? Starting from sexual therapy to the recent corona treatment, he went from house to house, made videos in the name of treatment and spread them on social media and became a hero overnight. Go to the country to become a front fighter in the treatment of Covid-19 in Bangladesh. He returned to New York after two weeks of surveillance. The resigning Deputy Press Secretary of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s office took his home by showing greed to create the post of Health Director for him.
He asserted himself as a specialist doctor by becoming a little primary care physician and has already established himself as a fraudster in the community. Ferdous Khandker, a Pakistani passport holder, sought to cover up his Jamaat-e-Islami involvement in Bangladesh in the United States. At one time the former president of the United States Awami League in exchange for money. He became the advisor of the United States Awami League holding the hand of Siddiqur Rahman. Recently another organization named Sheikh Russell opened. Ferdous Khandker is the president and Al Amin Babu is the general secretary of the organization. The news of the filing of a complaint against the Bangladeshi lustful doctor Ferdous Khandker in the court has spread among the expatriates and there is a storm of discussion everywhere.
BP/SM
