Feeling isolated, and fearing no one would believe them because they’re undocumented immigrants, the women kept quiet at first about what they allege was done to them in their children’s doctor’s exam room.
Now they’re telling a jury.
"He gave me a hug, and he was rubbing my back. And, when he pulled away, he squeezed my breasts," one mom testified Tuesday in the trial of former Children's Healthcare of Atlanta pediatrician José A. Rios.
Another woman said Rios once touched her buttocks as she was leaving an exam room. Then he did it a second time, after Rios examined her son for stomach problems and she asked him to write a school excuse.
“He told me yes, but there’s a condition: that I give him a hug,” she testified in DeKalb County State Court. “When I gave him the hug, he again put his hand behind me and lowered his hand.”
Rios faces two misdemeanor sexual battery charges and two disorderly conduct charges in a case that has produced echoes of both the #MeToo movement and the ongoing immigration debate. During jury selection, State Court Judge Mike Jacobs and attorneys on both sides grilled potential jurors on those topics, trying to weed out anyone with inherent bias about sexual harassment, sexual assault or immigration fraud.
If convicted, Rios faces a maximum of four years in jail and $4,000 in fines. He rejected a plea deal calling for 60 days in jail, two years on probation and a psycho-sexual evaluation to determine if he should permanently lose his medical license, according to prosecutor Debbie-Ann Rickman.
Rios has agreed not to practice while the charges are pending.
The women who accused him in court Tuesday spoke through translators, sometimes demonstrating using a mannequin. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is not identifying them because they are victims of alleged sexual abuse.
One woman said she took her two small children to an appointment, and she asked Rios if he could check her, too, because she was having vision problems and headaches. She said he asked her to cover one eye, then he looked into her other eye with an otoscope, brushing her left breast with his arm. When he lowered the instrument, she said, he grabbed her breast.
“At that moment, my mind was blocked,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do or what to say.”
She said Rios also made comments to her such as, “Today you look sexier than you did the last time you came,” and after asking if the children slept with her or in their own rooms, “If I spent a night with you, I wouldn’t sleep the entire night.”
Dr. Rios, wearing a navy blue suit, listened stoically, showing little reaction. His defense team has pointed a finger back at his accusers, arguing the women made up the allegations so they could obtain special immigration visas for crime victims, and that a radio talk show host orchestrated it all to drum up business for an immigration law firm that advertises during the show.
“The only thing worse than sexual assault is a false accusation of sexual assault,” defense attorney Laila Kelly told the jury.
Rios’ trial comes more than two and a half years after his arrest, which rocked the Spanish-speaking community in Chamblee, where he was a popular pediatrician at a neighborhood clinic in the Plaza Fiesta shopping center. At least 33 women came forward to police, telling stories dating back more than a decade of the doctor sexually humiliating them while their children looked on.
In police reports obtained by the AJC, the women told detectives that Rios grabbed them from behind and groped them, squeezed their breasts as they breast fed their babies, propositioned them, and hounded them after hours with lewd phone calls. One woman said he thrust his crotch into her buttocks with her child in the room; another said he called her an illegal alien and threatened her family if she told anyone he had touched her.
His was one of thousands of cases examined by the AJC as part of its Doctors & Sex Abuse series in 2016, which found predator doctors often target vulnerable, voiceless victims, and that they often face little if any criminal repercussions.
With the passing of time, the case against Rios has grown more and more narrow in scope. It began with an arrest on two sexual battery charges, with Dr. Rios allegedly trying to bolt out a side door of the clinic when police came for him. While dozens of women came forward, most of their accounts were beyond the two-year statute of limitations and couldn't be prosecuted.
The DeKab County Solicitor General's Office originally accused him of 14 misdemeanor charges involving five women. Most of those charges have been dismissed because of difficulties prosecutors had obtaining corroborating records from Children's Healthcare.
Now, Rios faces four charges involving just two women, one of whom allegedly had sex with him in a hotel room for $200.
Rickman, the prosecutor, told the jury that Rios used a position of power “to turn his exam room into his own personal playground.”
But defense attorneys are zeroing in on how the victims came together, and who emboldened them to come forward. After finding out about one mom’s story, Brenda Bueno, host of “En Hora Buena” on Oxigeno Radio, alluded to Rios during a broadcast without naming him. More victims reached out to her, and she chatted with them on Facebook, encouraging them to go to police and putting them in touch with attorneys at Vazquez & Servi, an advertiser, who helped them apply for U nonimmigrant status as crime victims.
“There’s going to be evidence that Brenda Bueno is pulling strings behind the scenes while this is going on on the air,” Kelly told the jury.
The moms who testified denied concocting stories just to stay in the U.S., and Bueno, who also testified, said she only brought up U visas on the air “to calm the fears that most of the victims had about going to the police, because they didn’t have immigration status.”
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