GILROY
– For Dr. Raul Ixtlahuac and his supporters, there was an
outpouring of joyful relief on Wednesday.
GILROY – For Dr. Raul Ixtlahuac and his supporters, there was an outpouring of joyful relief on Wednesday.
For the women who accused the Gilroy Kaiser Permanente physician of sexually assaulting them during gynecological exams, it was instead a day for sadness and frustration. After deliberating for a little more than a day, a jury found Ixtlahuac (ISHT-la-wok) not guilty of five felony sex-crime charges that had threatened to send him to prison for more than a decade and ruin his medical career.
In March, a jury of the same gender makeup – eight women and four men – deadlocked on the charges, prompting this retrial, which began Oct. 6.
Ixtlahuac was emotionally overwhelmed when the verdict was read at about 11 a.m., according to his defense lawyer, Doron Weinberg. For the doctor, three years of intense turmoil is over.
“We are very, very relieved and very grateful to the jury,” Weinberg said. “It’s reassuring that a group of citizens could look at a case this complicated and this emotional … and they could understand that (Ixtlahuac) is innocent. … They understood that the witnesses may believe and may feel that something happened when in fact nothing happened.”
Ixtlahuac could not be reached for comment.
For the prosecution, it came as a hard blow to find that five women’s claims of sexual assault had not been enough to convince jurors.
“I’m terribly disappointed for the victims,” Deputy District Attorney Chuck Gillingham said. “They know what happened to them. But at the same time, I respect the jury’s verdict. They worked hard. They seemed like an intelligent group of people. But I’m incredibly disappointed.”
Also unhappy was Evelyn (last name withheld), one of Ixtlahuac’s five accusers.
“I got up there, told the truth, hoping that people would believe, not wanting this to happen to anyone in the future,” Evelyn said. “What happens if he goes back to practicing and, God forbid, this happens again? Are people going to come forward?
“You’re always told to tell the truth, and the system failed me,” Evelyn added. “It’s just not fair. … But I can put this behind me and move on. There’s nothing more I can do.”
Four of the charges were for unlawful sexual penetration, in which four women – including Evelyn – accused Ixtlahuac of putting his penis in their vaginas during pelvic examinations, with their feet up in stirrups and their view obscured by a drape. For the fifth charge, sexual battery, a woman said Ixtlahuac rubbed her clitoris sexually during such an exam.
Ixtlahuac consistently denied these charges. Weinberg argued that the women mistook Ixtlahuac’s standard medical procedures for sexual acts. Several women were under circumstances at the times that would have made them oversensitive, he argued. He also pointed out inconsistencies between some women’s statements to police and their court testimony. Weinberg claimed that the women’s initial discomfort and confusion evolved – under pressure by police and prosecutors – into a false certainty that they had been molested.
Kaiser Permanente officials were pulling for Ixtlahuac throughout the trial, according to company attorney Gary Dulberg, who showed up in court for several days of the doctor’s trial, admittedly in his support.
“We think it’s a great result, and we think it’s the right result,” Dulberg said from his Oakland office shortly after the verdict. “We appreciate the fact that the jury’s verdict was consistent with our own internal assessment that these allegations were not true.”
Ixtlahuac can now return to practice family medicine, but the question remains whether he will do so again in Gilroy or with Kaiser at all. The company had put him on paid administrative leave pending the trial’s results. The state suspended his medical license for a time but later restored it with the restriction that he could not see patients unsupervised. Nevertheless, he has not practiced since his May 2001 arrest.
Dulberg said Kaiser officials decided to “take one thing at a time” and wait for the verdict before discussing with Ixtlahuac his future with them. That still hasn’t happened yet, Dulberg said.
“We first have to give him some time to enjoy this moment … a few hours to a few days,” Dulberg said. “We were certainly hoping that we would have a chance to have that conversation, but as of yet that conversation has not taken place.”
The question could be asked, with little new evidence against Ixtlahuac, was it worth the people’s tax dollars to retry him?
Absolutely, said Assistant DA Karyn Sinunu, DA George Kennedy’s spokeswoman.
“A retrial is not done because there is new evidence,” Sinunu said Wednesday afternoon. “The majority of jurors believed he was guilty (in the first trial), so we don’t just walk away from the case. Our victims were willing to testify again, and we believe they were victims of a violent crime.”
The jury in March voted 10-2 in favor of guilty on two of the penetration counts and 9-3 in favor of guilty on the other three charges.
“The vast majority of the time, we win the second time,” Sinunu said. “This was a turnaround for us.”
Sinunu said her office could not determine the monetary cost of retrying Ixtlahuac but said it was “not extraordinary”: court expenses, plus the work time of Gillingham, who was handling other cases as well.
Each of Ixtlahuac’s accusers has sued both him and Kaiser Permanente in civil court, but the status of these were unknown as of press time.
