Stop Talking About Robert Hadden

Over 1,000 patients were sexually assaulted by a Columbia OB/GYN. Who benefits from forgetting about it?

By Iris Eisenman

Illustration by Iris Pope

Every fall, the language of renewal and progress floats around campus as a new class of students enters the Columbia community. The lull of summer brings a possibility of the past school year’s advocacy grinding to a halt. This loss of momentum combined with fresh faces in the administration is a perfect storm for long-fought issues to be swept under the rug. 

New University President, Jennifer Mnookin, has already voiced her commitment to forward-thinking action. “I don’t intend to look backwards and reopen things that have gone through a significant process,” Mnookin stated at her first appearance in July’s Plenary, the University Senate’s most public forum. 

Mnookin’s seemingly innocuous response cannot be divorced from its preceding question. Helen Han Wei Luo, a University Senator and Philosophy PhD candidate, asked about how the new administration plans to address Columbia’s role in one of the largest sexual abuse scandals of the twenty-first century. For decades, Columbia OB/GYN Robert Hadden sexually abused more than 1,000 patients at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and New York-Presbyterian Hospital. Hadden was initially arrested in 2012 but released and allowed by CUIMC and NYP to continue practicing medicine. In 2016, he pleaded guilty to assaulting 19 patients and took a plea deal that allowed him to serve no prison time. In 2023, he was federally convicted and sentenced to twenty years in prison. 

The enduring damage of Hadden’s crimes persists beyond his conviction. A 2023 Pro-Publica investigation brought survivors’ stories to the forefront and renewed calls for institutional reform and reparations. Though his initial arrest took place over a decade ago, Columbia did not conduct an investigation into the institutional failures and actors who enabled, or may have concealed, Hadden’s abuse. This March, after years of pressure, that investigation finally culminated in the Hadden Report. But demands for the University administration to take accountability that even pre-date its release remain unmet. Widely perceived issues with the document’s blind spots remain unaddressed. The financial consequences of the enormous survivor settlements are opaque. Community members and current patients cannot yet rest assured that the systemic loopholes that allowed for Hadden’s rampant abuse have been eliminated. By any of these metrics, the Hadden investigation is anything but a closed case, despite the rhetoric from the highest echelons of Columbia.

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Mnookin’s administration wants to move on from the Hadden situation, but this particular fight has stood the test of years of institutional turmoil. The initial Senate commission for the Hadden Report came three University Presidents ago during Minouche Shafik’s tenure in 2023. The issue was initially brought to the forefront by organizing activity from a historically unexpected population on campus: medical students. 

“Medical students don’t really have the best reputation for being politically active,” Simon Ogundare, CC ’24, an MD/PhD student at Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and University Senator, put succinctly. Senator Nasser Odetallah, GS ’25 and School of the Arts MFA student, another figure working alongside Ogundare, explained the common notion that generally with medical students, “it’s not a normal thing for them to be involved in protest movements, especially on the scale that Columbia operates on. And so it is really unusual on [the] uptown campus because it’s physically segregated. Anything that’s physically affecting downtown just literally doesn’t hit them.” Framed as “proper students” as opposed to the “ideological radicals” on the Morningside Heights campus, Odetallah claims that this division of the student body in the minds of administrators led to much of their surprise when medical students advocated for Hadden’s survivors. When encountering the medical students’ Hadden-focused protest march in 2023, Ogundare remembers being, “very shaken … seeing how a med school that at the time I had been really excited about potentially attending was also part of an institution that was so complicit. But also at the same time, [I] was very encouraged by the peers that I saw, medical students that were organizing.” He attributes this engagement with protest as part of his motivation for adopting his Senate role that brought him further into the Hadden discussion. 

After connecting with medical students and Hadden survivors, the Commission on the Status of Women, Student Affairs Committee, and four other University Senate committees called for an investigation of Columbia’s complicity in the events before and after Hadden’s arrest. Hadden may now be behind bars, but fundamental questions remain about what CUIMC administrators like then-OB/GYN Chair Mary D’Alton, and Columbia more broadly knew, what they allowed to happen, and why Hadden was permitted to continue treating patients after his 2012 arrest.

President Shafik had a “vested interest in honoring the original resolution,” according to Odetallah, who remembers her, “treating the issue as seriously as the Senate did.” With that initial resolution under her purview, there was hope among senators that the commissioned investigation would lead to a document that was “constructive” and “healing” for survivors and current OB/GYN patients. But Hadden was soon sidelined by the Gaza Solidarity Encampments in spring of 2024 as the high priority item in the Senate, especially as the protests spurred questions over university governance—the Senate itself was thrown into question when a review committee was proposed by acting President Claire Shipman in May of 2025. Amidst these and other university-wide crises, it was over a year before there was enough bandwidth in Senate discussions to bring focus back to Hadden’s crimes. 

Institutional accountability for Hadden’s crimes was brought back into focus in the summer of 2025 with the news of massive settlements issued to many of his survivors. “The scope of the problem was becoming bigger and yet at the same time the administration was not releasing the report,” Odetallah said. Medical students were still insistent upon reform, authoring a letter with over 400 signatures demanding an update on the delayed external investigation into Hadden.

The near-unanimous support for justice and clarity was a rare moment in an often contentious Senate. Odetallah recalled that when three student senators read survivors’ statements at the February 2026 Plenary, even the students’ most frequent detractors felt that the testimonies, “brought them back to understanding what this was really about … it was about harm done to people,” It was an obvious cause to champion in the Senate. They faced pushback nevertheless.

According to Odetallah, the statements’ reading was far from welcomed by the administration. In conversations following that February Plenary behind closed doors, Odetallah shared that the three senators who read the survivor statements were asked to formally “take back” the reading because of its “traumatizing” and “inappropriate” content in an email to the Senate. Once again, the response baffled senators, as the statements were publicly available documents anyone could find online. “You would have thought that [they] were being accused of leaking insider trading from the way that I was told there was such animosity towards that action.” Despite the initial request, that “disavowment” email was never sent. Still, the sentiment behind it remained: attention was shifting from the perpetrators and enablers of sexual misconduct to the students who dared to spread awareness of the issue. 

“After many, many, many pushes and assurances that the board of trustees was not interfering in the timeline and/or content of the report, it took student senators reading the victim testimonies … alongside the [New York] Attorney General launching an investigation into the Columbia administration and board of trustees for corruption around the Hadden affair. Then the Hadden Report was finally released,” Odetallah explained in summary of the long-winded years of the Senate’s Hadden initiative. The Hadden Report was nowhere near what CSW, SAC, and survivors had hoped for. The Senate resolution responding to the report stated that it fell “significantly short in addressing accountability and responding to questions from the community.” They demanded more extensive investigation regarding trustee involvement and the independence of the report, clarity on how the settlement funding decisions were made, and updated procedures for evaluating ethical concerns. This resolution was anything but controversial among the student and faculty senators, passing 58-0-1. 

Aside from the desired accountability for justice for Hadden’s survivors on an institutional level, Columbia has also been hesitant to address the financial implications of the survivor settlements. To date, over 1.2 billion dollars has been paid to survivors, and that figure will only grow given the vast number of Hadden’s victims. Confusion in the Senate around this sum of money lies in the way it seemingly has had no discernible or reported effect on the University. When compared to the sweeping changes and financial panic in response to the 400 million dollars of research funding withheld from the University by the Trump administration, the two sums of money have caused irreconcilably disproportionate impact. How does 400 million dollars hurt Columbia but over a billion dollars get treated as nothing more than a drop in the bucket? 

Odetallah and other senators observed this first-hand. “The monetary problem made no sense as to why it was being treated as such a calm issue … We were thinking really extensively about financial issues and [were] told that there is not money to fund food on campus, for example. And yet we settle a billion dollars for Hadden. And so we started asking these questions on an objective level, and even those answers then were shockingly defensive and vague to us,” Odetallah said. 

Whether the focus is on financial liability or the ethical responsibilities of the University, the message to the student senators is the same: stop talking about Hadden. Separate conversations with survivor and uptown medical campus connections continuously reveal issues that they believe should warrant Senate attention. Yet, Odetallah shared how they have felt “targeted as if the student senators having a voice, especially on this issue, is actually a violation of our role … that I don’t have the authority to to talk about something that students care about because the faculty or admin are the ones who hold the knowledge.”

The election of student senators rests on the premise of inviting informed students to represent the concerns and priorities of their peers across Columbia’s schools. Recent proposals before the Senate offer an independent example of changes that student senators argue would weaken their role. In April of 2025, SAC co-chairs voiced their concern over the President and Trustees’ interest in reviewing shared governance and overstepping an established balance of power. Just over a year later, after the March release of the Hadden Report, the results of the University Senate Review were shared in April. Many of its proposals discreetly kneecap student governance. In the document’s very inception, before even considering the numerous amendments proposed, the Review turned a blind eye by neglecting to include students in the very committee that created it.

Beyond that innate blindspot of the report, multiple blows to student participation unavoidably tie into the Hadden affair. The Review recommends that the Executive Committee, the body of the Senate that most directly interfaces with the board of trustees and University President, “should have the ability to convene without its student members,” effectively giving the Committee the power to exclude students. The Review also recommends a requirement for submitting all Plenary agenda items in advance. With that in place, the negatively received February survivor statements’ reading could have been blocked by a simple policy. Though the proposals seem small in scope and largely procedural, they collectively debilitate an essential channel of communication in the Senate. 

Ogundare described this process that occurs out of the public eye. “We try to internally address the issue, or at least we try to reach out to the administration and come together to find some sort of productive solution. And sometimes there are delays in when we hear responses or if we hear responses at all from them. And that’s when we will go public with certain things … it’s important that we get these answers.” If the committees, especially the Executive Committee, are the frontlines of addressing University issues, the Plenary is at times that last-ditch effort to force progress and dialogue. If senators had to gain approval of Plenary agenda items in advance, there are fewer safeguards against the suppression of senators’ concerns in that final public forum. “Having been around the Senate for many years, I’ve never seen such intense hostility towards students,” Odetallah said. This year in particular, with the releases of the Hadden Report, Epstein files, and Senate Review, “there has been a somewhat disturbing trend on the Senate that number one, the students are the issue.” 

Simply declaring the topic a closed issue does not make it so. CSW, SAC, and student senators like Odetallah and Ogundare vowed to not stop advocating for survivors and institutional accountability. “We can’t move on because we’re still paying all the debts morally, ethically, fiscally,” Ogundare said of the continued need for transparency. With a primary charge of the Trustee position being fiduciary responsibility over the University, that 1.2 billion dollars of settlement money remains a monetary black box. Despite being specifically asked for this information, the Trustees have provided little to no transparency about where the money is being pulled from and what the consequences of this financial knockout will be. Ogundare pointed out how the opacity of Columbia’s financial workings led to speculation among his peers. He claims that many attempts have been made in the Senate to understand the distribution of how the Hadden settlement funds were compiled, but to no avail. Little information about the breakdown of the settlements is given beyond the answer that the Senate’s Budget Committee is working on a general statement that will not delve deeply into the confidential aspects of such financial decisions. 

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In the same July Plenary in which Mnookin pledged to look only towards the future, she assured her audience that if any more information were to come to light about Robert Hadden in the future, administrators would investigate further. At the same time, CSW’s resolutions continuously request further information from administration about the nature of the report and the time after Hadden’s 2012 arrest that is not provided. Those who know the most information are at the same time unwilling to share or investigate it. Mnookin was sure to rebuke Hadden’s horrific actions, but made no attempts to engage directly with questions about what will not just be said about the matter, but done about it. 

The Senate is still in a precarious position after the Senate Review, even more so now that they will have to gauge the movements and priorities of a new University President. Despite much of their treatment in the recent past, student senators remain dedicated to the project of the Senate. One particular Hadden survivor had shared in personal conversations with Ogundare that she believed the student senators’ work was the only reason the issue was being made aware of again and the Hadden Report came out. “Perhaps others are a little more jaded,” Ogundare said about faculty and administration on the Senate. “So I think oftentimes this idea that students are naïve and they don’t understand is often used as a disadvantage, setting up the argument that students should not be on the Senate. But I think sometimes having that perspective is a really big asset, and it's the only way that we can have any hope towards moving forward.”