Robert Hadden was a trusted ob-gyn who assaulted hundreds of patients during his 25-year career at Columbia University. But as the first eleven minutes of this podcast make clear, Exposed is not his story. It is the story of the breakdown of not one, but two institutions; a health care system that failed to protect the public, and a district attorney’s office that failed to deliver justice.
Exposed unfolds largely chronologically, starting with a fateful 911 call after a survivor’s routine postpartum examination. The main voices are the survivors. Almost all of them had never spoken publicly, or never granted extensive interviews — and none felt that Columbia had reckoned with its role in their trauma. This series revealed that even when the scope of Hadden’s crimes was undeniable, Columbia deflected responsibility, refused to notify patients that their former doctor was a sex offender, and failed to conduct an independent investigation.
This six-part Wondery series, and the accompanying story reported with ProPublica, changed that trajectory.
In Spring 2019, during a conference of state medical boards, reporter Laura Beil met Marissa Hoechstetter. At the time, Hoechstetter was the only Robert Hadden survivor who had publicly revealed her identity. Beil was surprised to learn that, despite Hadden being arrested and indicted by the Manhattan DA’s office, he was comfortably retired. He had never spent a single night behind bars.
At that time, there were about 20 known survivors, but Hoechstetter suspected there were many more. But no one had ever investigated how Hadden, arguably the most prolific sexual offender in NY history, managed to abuse so many women over the course of his career, or the collapse of justice that had allowed him to go home following both his arrest and indictment.
Beil teamed up with ProPublica reporter Bianca Fortis in early 2022 for an investigation that would span nearly two years. They immediately hit walls: Columbia is a private university, which shields it from public information requests. Beil and Fortis also had to navigate a district attorney’s office not known for transparency. The prosecutor at the center of Hadden’s case had never spoken on the record; she only agreed to after 10 months of background conversations to earn her trust.
The reporting for Exposed involved more than 50 hours of taped interviews and 3,000+ pages of documents, including court filings, responses to FOIA requests, and confidential memos. The reporters wanted to find all the women who had tried to report Hadden’s behavior to someone at Columbia and had to build a relationship with the survivors. Throughout the investigation, the women controlled how much they spoke about their trauma. Beil and Fortis made careful decisions about how much of their stories to include, based on details that served the public interest.
During reporting, Beil and Fortis learned about a confidential memo from the DA detailing Columbia’s problematic conduct. Eventually, the bombshell document was leaked to them. It stated, among other things, that Columbia had planned to destroy many of Hadden’s emails during the investigation of his case.
Columbia was contacted multiple times during the reporting period and given the opportunity to respond, including a seven-page list of questions just before the podcast’s release. All requests were denied, as well as repeated attempts to interview Hadden’s former supervisors, who would not speak to their decisions that put women in harm’s way.
Exposed embodies public accountability reporting and eye-opening storytelling. The reporters discovered that the highest echelons of Columbia administration knew of Hadden’s arrest when they made the decision to let him keep practicing [EP 1 @ 8:48]. They uncovered Columbia’s involvement in Hadden’s criminal defense. They knocked on the door of the Columbia faculty member who had been warned in writing about Hadden in 1994 (and had dodged written questions and interview requests for months) [EP 4 @ 25:03]. They obtained confidential documents that revealed that Columbia had so undermined the DA’s investigation that the office considered criminal charges against the university [EP 6 @ 1:25].
After the release of Exposed, Columbia medical students staged a campus demonstration, demanding accountability, and disclosure of Hadden’s crimes, while handing out flyers with a QR code for the ProPublica story co-written by Laura Beil and Bianca Fortis. State assembly members later held a press conference at the Columbia gate, and hand-walked a letter to university president Minouche Shafik signed by 36 state lawmakers. Two months after the podcast’s release, Columbia finally agreed to notify patients, formally apologized for the institution’s role in their trauma, and established a settlement fund.
Throughout production, the team was keenly aware that many survivors were running up against a deadline they likely hadn’t heard of – the New York Adult Survivors Act, which opened a window for survivors of sexual assault in the state to hold abusers and institutions accountable in civil court. But that window was set to close in late November 2023. Since Columbia had refused to notify former patients about Hadden’s crimes, the journalists suspected that hundreds of women were not aware they had a path to justice.
After the release of Exposed, Columbia agreed to notify survivors two weeks before the Adult Survivors Act deadline.
The impact of Exposed is still being felt many months later. The reporters continue to receive messages of gratitude from survivors who are relieved to see some degree of accountability for the institutions that enabled Hadden, including women fully realizing their assaults for the first time.
To date, over 700 victims have come forward.
