Mother of alleged sexual abuse victim testifies son 'changed' during treatment by Dr. Darius Paduch

The mother of an alleged teenage victim of Dr. Darius Paduch, the former Long Island physician on trial in Manhattan federal court on charges of sexually abusing eight patients, testified Monday that her son's personality changed after he started treatment with the suspended urologist.

“He stopped smiling,” the mother, who testified under a pseudonym, Krista Bevin, told the jury. “He had a really beautiful smile. He was just different.”

Her son Luke Bevin, who also testified under a pseudonym, said the urologist manually stimulated him and touched other private areas. A sexual health expert for the prosecution testified earlier in the day that such touching constituted a sex act and wasn't appropriate care.

Bevin, who raised six children in suburban Maryland, said she met the doctor at a conference at Johns Hopkins University in 2015.

That year, her son, who was 14, was diagnosed with Klinefelter syndrome, as a result of being born with an extra X chromosome. Men diagnosed with the affliction tend to be very tall and infertile.

Bevin said she frantically searched for help for her son, who was 6 feet tall at the age of 12, and was grateful to find that Paduch, now 56, would take her son as a patient.

“The genetic condition can’t change, but the symptoms that come with it can be mitigated so that he would be able to have children,” she said.

The family made a trek to NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, where Paduch worked until 2019, for the treatment.

The doctor prescribed her son testosterone gel, acne cream and other medication. Paduch also performed surgery, extracting tissue that could be cryogenically frozen and used later for reproduction.

The doctor gave Luke Bevin his cellphone number and encouraged him to text him whenever he had questions. The family would make frequent visits back and forth from Maryland.

At one point during the seven years that he was his doctor, Paduch offered the teen what he told the mother was a highly selective summer internship in his office and said that the boy could live in the doctor’s house for the duration of the internship. It was unclear, from Monday's testimony, whether the boy took the internship.

Bevin also said that her son’s demeanor changed after he started getting treatment from the doctor. 

“He would say, ‘Please don’t make me go,’ and I said, ‘I’m really sorry, but with your condition …’ It was like a dentist appointment. He didn’t want to go.”

He referred to Weill Cornell as the “zombie hospital,” she said.

She said that the family would drive up from Maryland and leave New York as soon as the doctor's visit was over.

“We would get to the car as fast as possible,” she said. “He would get his blanket and get in the back seat.”

Bevin said that her son, now in his mid-20s, continued seeing Paduch when he went to Northwell Health on Long Island in 2019. She said she was surprised when Paduch texted her that he was no longer seeing patients because of a heart condition.

It was only when she went online to look up his address to send him flowers that she found out that he had been arrested on charges of sexually abusing patients.

Federal prosecutor Marguerite Colson showed the jury texts back and forth between the young man and the doctor in which Paduch asked him about his sexuality and in one exchange asked him to send a photo of his genitals if a condition worsened.

Other texts show that Luke’s mother used her son's cellphone to invite the doctor to go fishing in Maryland. She called him, in another text she wrote on her son's phone, “the best doctor in the world.”

Paduch’s defense lawyer, Michael Baldassare, later cross-examined Luke Bevin about the text.

“Did you think that Dr. Paduch was the best doctor in the world?” he asked.

“I did,” the young man said on the witness stand.

Baldassare also asked about civil litigation that Luke Bevin, and hundreds of other patients, have filed against Northwell Health on Long Island and Weill Cornell, alleging the health systems did not properly monitor Paduch.

He questioned Bevin as to why he did not tell his parents about the alleged abuse.

“It was too personal to tell them,” he said.

In the afternoon, Paduch’s former medical secretary, Jasmin Alvarez, testified about a lie the doctor would tell his patients about being married to a woman and having children.

“He was married to a man, not a woman,” she said. The doctor had no children of his own, but eventually adopted a boy.

When asked why she thought he lied, she said, “He didn’t want them to feel bad about being seen by a gay physician.”

The trial continues Tuesday with expert testimony from a forensic psychologist.