Dawn Marie Basham froze because that’s what she had always done.
A million thoughts rushed through her mind and then stopped. As she lay stiff on her side, her thoughts drifted some place else, some place safer.
She froze when a friend of her mother’s molested her at age 4. She froze again when a family member took his turn. And now, as Dr. Manuel Abreu was forcing her skirt into her crotch, Basham froze, remembering all the other times she had been sexually abused as a child.
Act as if nothing is happening, she told herself. Pretend you’re fine.
“That was always how I survived,” Basham said.
Among the biggest mysteries about sexual abuse is why victims don’t report and why they sometimes return to vulnerable situations, like going back to an abusive doctor.
Basham’s story might hold some of the answers. Chief among them is many victims fear no one will believe them, because the abuser is a person authority or is viewed with high regard in the community.
What’s clear is the exploitation and abuse of patients is forbidden by every code of medical ethics. Doctors who ignore that, doctors who cause harm, should be punished.
Moments after removing a cyst from her leg, Basham said Abreu went from wiping her knee to her upper thigh and to finally wiping her crotch.
“I was shocked,” she said. “The entire time he’s doing this, his voice never changed. He kept talking like everything is completely normal.”
When the nurse returned to the exam room, Basham said, Abreu rubbed her knee as if to offer comfort and told her he’d need to see her in a few days for a follow-up.
He accompanied her to the front desk and then walked off.
Basham asked to see the office manager at Personal Physician Care and told her what happened.
“That doesn’t happen here,” the woman told her.
It was happening again. Every time she had ever told, her confidant believed she was lying, that she was just making it up.
Basham was ushered into a back office, where she lifted her skirt. Unless there were iodine stains there, she reasoned, there was no reason for Dr. Abreu to wipe that area of her body.
The officer manager suggested she go home and rethink what had happened, write it down and email them her account.
No one at Personal Physician Care in Delray Beach would comment about Abreu or the allegations against him.
Basham had spent the last 15 years as an anti-bullying motivational speaker. When she wasn’t helping kids, she sang for a living but the cyst had made it almost impossible to stand for long periods of time.
When she returned that fateful day to Personal Physician Care in Delray Beach, it wasn’t to see Dr. Abreu. It was to see her primary care physician who then suggested Abreu remove the cyst.
On the afternoon of April 28, 2014, Basham, still wearing the black skirt she wore to the doctor that morning, drove to the Delray Beach Police Department and filed a complaint.
A detective told Basham to come back and bring the clothes she was wearing.
She left feeling hopeless. Her only consolation was this time she’d told. In the event other victims came forward, police would know how to contact her.
Basham would soon find out that three other women, including a nurse and a pharmaceutical rep, had come forward. Abreu’s partners at Personal Physician Care had agreed he should see a psychologist, according to court documents. Abreu, however, insisted the allegations were just the stuff of an overactive imagination. A misunderstanding.
A year later, after Basham and six other women filed lawsuits against Abreu, accusing him of touching them inappropriately, Abreu was arrested and charged with sexual battery. Ten others came forward but the statute of limitation for criminal charges had ran out, said Adam Horowitz, the attorney representing the women.
“I burst into tears,” she said.
But in May, a year after a 46-year-old Abreu was charged with sexually assaulting Basham and another patient during office visits, state prosecutors dropped the charges against him. The trial judge questioned the credibility of some of the witnesses that prosecutor’s wanted to testify.
Four of the six civil lawsuits filed in Palm Beach County Circuit Court against Abreu and his former practice, Personal Physicians Care, have been settled. Two others are pending, as are three others filed against Abreu in Pinellas County, Fla., where the doctor once worked.
At home, Basham telephoned her aunt and ex-husband and told them what happened, hoping for comfort.
“Why didn’t you scream?” her aunt asked. “Why didn’t you kick him?”
“That was stupid,” her ex told her. “Why did you go back to him?”
They were the same questions she’d been asked as a little girl.
Why didn’t she scream? Basham had been asked that question a thousand times. Her response is simple: She was too afraid.
We’re programmed with the fight-or-flight instinct that’s supposed to kick in during threatening situations, right?
But freezing is as natural a response to high stress situations as fleeing, said Angela Williams, who specializes in child sex abuse trauma and is the founder of Voice Today, a Marietta based non-profit with a mission to break the silence and cycle of child sexual abuse.
The scientific name for the freezing response to trauma is “human tonic immobility” or “rape-induced paralysis.”
Most of the women didn’t stop seeing Dr. Abreu or working for him after their alleged attacks. Williams said that’s not particularly unusual either.
“When you face such trauma you go into anemic state where you separate from the trauma in your mind,” Williams said. “They may or not remember. They may repress the memory and go into a trance. They may feel at fault for the assault. They feel guilty. They feel very much ashame. And quite frankly, victims often feel they may not be believed over someone with such a high stature in the community.”
Basham said no one ever thinks a doctor will do anything to harm them.
“I certainly didn’t,” she said. “You put your doctor on a pedestal. They’re so smart. They understand things I could never understand about the human body. You assume that whatever they do is for a good reason. I didn’t feel like I had a right to question. Who am I? I’m just me.
“They have the degrees on the wall, but what if they’re not a good person?” Basham asked.
What if they aren’t, and no one ever holds them accountable.
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