Editor’s note: According to a Sept. 25 update by Portland CBS affiliate KOIN, the number of plaintiffs accusing retired physician, David Farley, of sexual abuse has grown to at least 170, bringing the civil lawsuit brought against him and his former employers to $970 million. Family Health, Legacy Meridian Park Hospital and Providence Health & Services are named as co-defendants, “for decades of sexual abuse inflicted under the guise of medical care,” the lawsuit states.
The following information has been adapted from an article published Sept. 20 at CNN.com.
Dr. David Farley was a familiar and respected figure in the small Oregon town of Wilsonville, about 17 miles south of Portland–until his medical license was revoked after several women came forward, alleging that he had molested them, often repeatedly, Meena Duerson and Meridith Edwards reported.
Despite the allegations, no criminal charges have been filed against Farley as a grand jury said it was not given enough evidence to indict him. Survivors have pleaded their case to Oregon’s Attorney General, Ellen Rosenblum, however, thus far, she has not intervened. The lawsuit has been amended multiple times to add women, girls, men and boys who say they, too, were abused by Farley.
CNN interviewed three women who told the news network that they were sexually abused by Farley, who was their family doctor and a prominent member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS), where “he held a respected role in the community.” The women are unable to comprehend how a grand jury deemed the evidence insufficient to indict Farley.
Referring to the LDS church’s stance on Farley, one of the women, Nicole Snow, told CNN, “They don’t want to come out and say that they have a predator in their mix.”
Despite the lack of a criminal indictment in the courts and excommunication from the LDS church, the women are determined to keep fighting.
The Small Town Family Doctor & LDS Member
Nicole Snow’s life in Wilsonville — roughly a half-hour drive from Portland — and those of her family members were intertwined with Farley’s through school, social gatherings, shared vacations, and the LDS church. Despite his esteemed reputation, Snow recalls uncomfortable encounters during her teenage years when Farley would corner her and her friends at church, massaging their shoulders and urging them to visit his office, leaving her feeling anxious and uneasy.
For years, Nicole Snow kept quiet about her qualms about Farley, a Harvard grad. So when she developed stomach pain at age 15, her mother took her to Farley’s office, unaware he was a sexual predator.
Farley served as a go-to physician for many generations at West Linn Family Health Center (West Linn is adjacent to Wilsonville), which according to Oregon Live, he founded in 1993, providing a wide range of services including wellness checks, sports physicals, prenatal care, and delivering babies. His reputation in the LDS Church brought many fellow LDS members to his practice. His influence made him a trusted figure throughout the broader community.
Editor’s note: According to Mormon Stories Podcast on Facebook, Farley was a bishopric member and stake high counselor.
Snow, now 32, recalled how, during her first visit to him, Farley positioned her mother in such a way that she couldn’t see what he was doing with his hands, allowing him to manipulate the situation without her mother realizing it.
Ed: There should always be a female medical professional present in the room during gynecological and breast exams.
By the time Snow turned 19, she had seen Farley more than 40 times. Snow claims he subjected her to repeated sexual abuse, including using scare tactics to conduct what she describes as uncomfortably long breast exams and repeated penetrative pelvic and rectal exams. “He told me and my mother that he had a young patient die of cervical cancer, and so he as a doctor wanted to check all his patients starting at a young age and frequently. That’s how he was able to start abusing me,” Snow told CNN.
Above: Screenshot from Mormon Stories Podcast on Facebook
Male Authority Figures In The LDS Church
Snow alleges that her upbringing in the LDS Church made her particularly susceptible to older men in positions of authority, as the church granted them the power to deeply probe into personal matters without question.
“At one point he asked my mom to leave the room so he could ask me about my sexual history, and that was something I was very familiar with, going into the room with a bishop alone, being asked sexual purity questions,” Snow says.
In 2009, when Snow turned 18, she saw Farley for the first time without her mother being present. Farley knew Snow was not yet sexually active. Nonetheless, he suggested a procedure to “make sex more pleasurable.” Snow would later learn that this minor surgery is called a hymenectomy.
Editor’s note: According to the Cleveland Clinic, a hymenectomy is a minor surgical procedure that opens or removes the hymen, a piece of tissue near the vaginal opening. The procedure is performed to correct a malformation that’s present at birth.
Farley told Snow he just wanted to “stretch” [her] out a little bit,” she says. Snow declined at first. However, Farley aggressively convinced her to have the hymenectomy done by listing the names of her friends he’d performed the procedure on. “It actually made me quite fearful,” Snow told CNN.
After reluctantly agreeing, Farley performed the procedure by breaking her hymen with his bare hands. While she lay “terrified” and in excruciating pain, Farley washed the blood off in the sink. Snow claims that it was painful for her to walk for days after.
Long-Term Ramifications of Abuse
After the procedure, Snow says she didn’t process the experiences as abuse. “I had no idea. I thought this was normal,” she says.
Snow dropped out of high school because of health problems that years later, she realized were attributed in part to the abuse from Farley.
But that revelation wouldn’t come for several years, after Snow had moved away and saw another OB-GYN who told her, “We’re going to do a pap smear and this should be your first one.”
Snow told the OB-GYN, “I’ve had over 10, maybe close to a dozen.” At that moment, the doctor’s facial expression revealed that “That wasn’t normal and shouldn’t have happened.”
Snow told her family about her encounter with the new OB-GYN, but they warned her against going public about Farley because of his stature in the community, including being a prominent member in the LDS church.
“They were nervous for me to come forward and do this fight alone,” Snow told CNN, who reached out several times to Farley and his attorney. Neither have issued any comment to the news organization.
More Survivors Come Forward
In 2020, the Oregon Medical Board (OMB) suspended Farley’s license after receiving reports about his behavior.
“For so long, I felt like I was being silenced or I was the only one,” says Snow, who now lives in Utah.
Although more victims had come forward, the news gave her no comfort. “The depth of misery I felt in that moment, because I know how much I’ve struggled from the abuse … to think of any other little girl or woman also struggling and being abused at the hands of him just shattered my world,” Snow told CNN.
Snow connected with two other women who had met Farley through the LDS Church and grown increasingly uncomfortable with his behavior.
“He had a really good ability to make you feel like you’re special, that special treatment that I now recognize as grooming,” Katie Medley told CNN.
Medley moved to the West Linn area in 2016 and met Farley at church when he spoke as an expert on a women’s health panel. At the time, Medley had three children and wanted another. She saw Farley over the course of four years, during which time she claims to have received almost three times the recommended number of penetrative exams.
In 2019, after one of the exams, Farley called her at night at home, claiming her exam showed abnormalities. He then proceeded to tell her the same story he had told Snow, that one of his young patients died because of cervical cancer. Therefore, he wanted to be safe, not sorry; another exam was needed.
“I’m in tears and terrified; I’m scared I’m going to die of cancer,” Medley recalled.
The follow-up exam was simply an excuse for Farley to sexually abuse her, Medley alleges. “He just put his hand inside me … and I just remember that he was moving his finger a lot and he just said everything feels really good. And then he took his hand out and kept fondling my external genitalia.”
After the appointment, Medley cried while sitting in her car. “I didn’t understand what was happening to me. He had sexually stimulated me that entire appointment, biologically,” she says, adding, “I thought I must be a psychopath; I must have a problem if my body is responding to a medical examination that way. I’ve since learned that that happens to a lot of victims of abuse, and I think it’s something that keeps us quiet. It’s a power move because, who wants to say that to someone? It’s the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever said, ever.”
For the next eight months, Medley tried to suppress the memory of her experience. Then, unexpectedly, her neighbor and friend from church, Lisa Pratt, dropped by one day and casually brought it up, asking Medley, “Hey, have you ever had a weird experience with Dr. Farley?”
Medley told CNN that at that point, “Immediately, I knew.”
Increasingly Uncomfortable Visits
Pratt became one of Farley’s patients in 2015 after moving to Wilsonville and seeking prenatal care. A friend from church highly recommended him, and at first, his attentive approach—such as providing his personal cell phone number—made Pratt feel valued and special.
“He’s treating me like family,” she recalled, adding. “I felt really awesome.”
However, as time went on, Pratt’s visits became increasingly uncomfortable. During a routine check-up for her baby, Farley placed his head on her bare breast, claiming he was checking if her milk had come in—a procedure she had never experienced with any other doctor during previous pregnancies. “Then he stuck his hand down my shirt … and groped my breast,” she said. “I felt so caught off guard, like, what is going on here?”
During office visits, Pratt says Farley pressured her into having more frequent pap smears than necessary and became upset when she refused. Farley exploited her fears in the same way he did to Medley and Snow, repeatedly recounting the story about the young patient who died of cervical cancer. On one occasion, he even asked her to come to his home for a pregnancy check-up, where he performed a painful procedure in his bedroom.
As she started expressing her concerns to friends, Pratt was shocked to discover that they were not surprised by her experiences with Farley.“They’re like, ‘Well you know he’s known for being a creep, right?’”
Shortly after Pratt and Medley bonded over their shared experiences of sexual abuse at the hands of Farley, they had received word he was retiring and that his medical licence was suspended while the OMB investigated reports that he had conducted medically unnecessary, unchaperoned and excessive pelvic and breast exams and pap smears on underage girls, as well as soliciting parents for permission to photograph the breasts and external genitalia of teenagers under the age of 18.
During the investigation, Farley told the OMB that he received permission by the parents to photograph their children’s bodies for an educational pamphlet on puberty he was planning on creating, and claimed that he only learned later that using his phone to take pictures “was a big no-no.”
Pratt, Snow and Medley ultimately shared stories about their experiences being violated by Farley. The trio then contacted the OMB. An investigator with OMB told the women, “I don’t know if this makes you feel better or not, but you are not alone.”
The Revoking Of David Farley’s Medical License
Conducted in September 2020, the OMB’s investigation found that Farley had exhibited “unprofessional or dishonorable conduct” with multiple patients, including sexual misconduct and negligence, “ordered or administered unnecessary, outmoded tests contrary to acceptable medical standards which may have caused potential harm” and “breached the standard of care” with procedures “not medically indicated, nor supported by current medical science.” Furthermore, in regards to his taking photographs of underage patients, OMB found his “conduct was contrary to well recognized ethical standards” and revoked his license.
Pursuing Criminal Charges Against Farley
Confident that they finally had a sympathetic ear in the OMB investigator, Snow, Medley and Pratt, were encouraged by the investigator to contact the West Linn Police Department, where Det. Tony Christensen was alerted by the OMB investigator of the allegations against Farley. This approach was deemed the best method to pursue criminal action against Farley.
“We walked into that police department in September feeling so brave,” Pratt told CNN.
Unfortunately, “that feeling of power soon evaporated,” CNN journalists Duerson and Edwards wrote.
“Tony Christensen treated us like a nuisance, like we were annoying,” Snow says. “He just straight up said, ‘It’s going to be really hard to prosecute a doctor.’”
Other patients of Farley’s who filed police reports against him shared similar experiences. One mother, who anonymously spoke to CNN, said Christensen’s behavior was dismissive when she went to report that Farley had repeatedly groped her daughter’s breast while taking her heart rate in 2017. The mother complained about Farley’s conduct to his office after the exam. After the OMB investigation, when she reported her daughter’s experiences to the detective, the mother remembers Christensen responding, ‘Well this doesn’t happen like it happens on TV,’” she says. “Very condescending, like you all don’t know how this works.”
CNN was unable to reach Christensen for comment. He is now retired. CNN also reached out to West Linn’s current police chief. He did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment.
Ed: The police chief, Peter Mahuna, is looking into Detective Christensen’s treatment of alleged victims of David Farley after 71 of them lambasted his investigation in a September letter to Oregon Attorney General Rosenblum, West Linn Tidings’ Holly Bartholomew reported.
A Botched Investigation Against David Farley, M.D.
With more women coming forward, the office of the District Attorney of Clackamas County — John Wentworth — got involved. The DA’s office interviewed Farley’s patients, witnesses and experts.
Once again, however, many of the women, including the three profiled in the CNN story, felt “belittled or dismissed.”
Snow recalls that after sharing her story with Deputy District Attorney Sarah Dumont, the DDA responded “Well you were only abused just about 10 times, right?’”
Snow told CNN that she remembers crying, asking Dumont, “Is 10 times not enough?”
CNN reached out to Wentworth, who denied making the comment.
The DA’s office summoned a grand jury in 2022. The grand jury decided that there was insufficient evidence to criminally indict Farley.
Some of Farley’s patients accuse Wentworth and Dumont of botching the case. For instance, the DA’s office only allowed testimony from a small fraction of patients who had filed police reports. Some were told their cases were too old, and outside the statute of limitations.
“When I had my turn to go in, I just knew this is not a group of people that is trying to put this man away,” Medley described Dumont’s line of questioning methodology to CNN. “It felt like she was defending Farley. She was interrupting me, undercutting my statements, diminishing it.”
“It almost was like, out of body, like it just could not be real that they would say no,” Medley recalls.
As for the mother who told Det. Christensen that her daughter was groped, her daughter’s experience testifying to the grand jury was painful. “She felt like, you did the work to hold him accountable and you just end up with more trauma, because nobody’s doing anything … Sometimes you wonder, is that worth it?” the mother told CNN.
At a city council meeting in 2022, Pratt and Medley claimed that the investigation was botched by the DA’s office. They, along with 69 other of Farley’s former patients signed an open letter to Attorney General Rosenblum in September 2022, requesting that the AG’s office investigate. To date, Rosenblum has not intervened, but her office told CNN “their criminal justice division continues to review the situation.”
In West Linn, an independent expert was hired to review the police investigation into Farley, West Linn Tidings reported. The expert discovered that case files had gone missing, there may have been neglect of duty, and that Det. Christensen lacked proper training for handling sexual assault and abuse cases. While the report acknowledged that Christensen became more knowledgeable and organized in later interviews, it also noted that his interview technique, though professional, was not “trauma-informed,” which is critical for handling such sensitive cases.
David Farley Still Active in the LDS Church
In 2020, Farley moved to Idaho, where he landed a job as a teacher’s aide in a public school. However, after local authorities were notified of the ongoing investigation, the school terminated his employment after just one day in the classroom, citing “incorrect application information.”
Farley eventually relocated to the small town of Nephi, Utah, where Glade Nielson, a longtime friend from their days together as missionaries in Japan, served as mayor. Nielson confirmed to CNN that Farley is still a member of their local church and is in attendance every week.
The news that Farley remains active in a church community is deeply troubling to the women who say he abused them. Pratt, Medley, and Snow initially sought accountability from church leaders, hoping for decisive action, such as excommunication. However, church leadership deferred action until the civil case is resolved. Although restrictions have been placed on Farley’s participation, Snow questions the church’s handling, believing they are reluctant to acknowledge his predatory behavior. All three women have since left the church over their concerns.
Civil Lawsuit Against David Farley Filed
After watching a documentary on the abuse of gymnasts by Larry Nassar, Medley, Pratt, and Snow filed a civil lawsuit against Dr. Farley. Snow says the documentary gave her the confidence to fight, knowing she wasn’t alone. They are represented by Manly, Stewart, and Finaldi—the same firm that secured settlements for Nassar’s survivors—alongside the D’Amore Law Group. Farley invoked his Fifth Amendment rights in court. The lawsuit has expanded to include 128 plaintiffs, both women and men, who allege abuse by Farley.
Involving the Family
Snow, Medley, and Pratt shared that they are receiving strong support from their husbands. They are also explaining to their children the importance of continuing to fight for justice.
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