Rape Crisis Group Backs Physician

A leading rape crisis organization has rallied to the cause of a Lancaster emergency room doctor who was accused of mishandling the post-rape exam of a 4-year-old girl.

The group, Mothers Against Sexual Assault, disputed a report filed by a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy who accused the doctor of handling the girl too roughly and leaving her in an exam room for 90 minutes while seeing other patients.

At a news conference Wednesday at the Burbank Airport Hilton, the group said it supported Dr. Christine Daniel’s contention that she did not mishandle the girl during the Aug. 5 exam, but rather was examining her for what appeared to be evidence that she had been raped more than once.

After the incident, Daniel, who is a member of a group of doctors that contracts its services with the hospital, was suspended from that group.

Flanked by members of the organization and an adult rape victim whom she had previously examined and comforted, Daniel said she pleaded with the tiny victim’s mother and grandmother, and a rape crisis worker, to enlist the help of a pediatric gynecologist, to verify her suspicions of an earlier rape. But, she said, they sided with a sheriff’s deputy who rushed the procedure in an effort to arrest the girl’s 12-year-old cousin.

Daniel said Wednesday that she believed that an adult had inflicted the earlier wounds.

“Just looking at the gravity of the injury tells you that is not something that can be done by a 12-year-old,” she said.

“If there was indeed another perpetrator who inflicted the previous injuries, Dr. Daniel did not want to be responsible for sending this victim back into an abuse situation,” said Claire R. Reeves, president of Mothers Against Sexual Abuse.

Daniel, Reeves said, is a caring physician who has dedicated her medical career to serving the poor.

Daniel is a “medical missionary,” Reeves said. She is the founder of Sonrise Community Outreach Programs, which organizes medical care for uninsured people throughout Los Angeles and provides meals, groceries and substance-abuse counseling to the needy.

Minnie Pickens, who was examined by the doctor after a 1992 rape, said Daniel’s care “was marvelous.”

“She calmed me down,” said Pickens, who has maintained a lasting relationship with the doctor.

In a report filed just hours after the girl’s exam at Lancaster Community Hospital, Deputy Theresa Dawson filed a report accusing Daniel of treating the girl roughly, leaving her in an exam room for 90 minutes while seeing other patients and ultimately refusing to complete the exam.

Daniel has said that she treated other patients only because hospital procedure required the presence of a nurse from the county Sexual Assault Response Team, who arrived two hours late.

She also said that she was patient and gentle with the girl and only refused to complete the exam because she felt Dawson was misrepresenting her findings.

Further tests were performed at County/USC Medical Center nearly 48 hours after Daniel’s exam. Doctors there found evidence of only one rape, believed to be carried out by the boy.

But Daniel said that by that time the older, more severe, discolorations and scratches she saw near the rectal area may have been gone. She noted that during her exam the previous injuries were already fading, though they appeared to her to be only about 24 hours old.