Iowa Doctor Convicted of Sexually Assaulting Girl – “I told you so”

Dr. Lynn Lindaman said he was only trying to help the eight-year-old “explore her sexuality in a safe place.” That safe place being his home.

This wasn’t the first time Lindaman has committed such an act. Forty-seven years prior, he sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl, Sherri Moler, who was attending a gymnastics camp at the University of Iowa. He was there working as a counselor and athletic trainer. Even though he was convicted of the crime, he went on to practice medicine in Iowa. When Moler learned that he had been seeing patients, she appealed to the Board of Medicine to revoke his license. They voted not to take action. I’m not surprised at all.

But after Lindaman’s conviction last year of two counts of second-degree sexual abuse, the board finally voted to suspend his license. After this information came out, Moler attended a medical board’s meeting via Zoom in which she proclaimed, “I told you so.”

Moler is suing Lindaman thanks to a new law basically eliminating the statute of limitations when the sexual assault victim is a child. The Iowa Board of Medicine should be sued as well.

This is all connected with my case and others like me who have been intimately violated in medical settings. Because government, universities, and other institutions refuse to hold medical professionals accountable for circumnavigating the informed consent process and violating patients’ intimate spaces – even despite the absence of lust – they create and even foster an environment in which sexual deviants thrive. They ultimately protect those like Lindaman. You can’t tell the difference between those with criminal intent and those without because of the power imbalance involved. Patients are told that we just don’t understand the “nuanced difference” between sexual abuse and medical care. And patients like me are invalidated and even held in contempt for daring to file complaints and speaking out against the medical establishment. If the lay person cannot tell the difference between sexual abuse and care, something is horribly wrong, and it’s not from the patient’s side. The medical community needs to make absolute sure that patients know they are not sexually abusing them by virtue of a true informed consent process and giving them the right to say “no,” rather than subjecting them to unwanted and unconsented intimate experiences. But that doesn’t happen. Intent is irrelevant because, as this article states, medical harm is a by-product of action rather than intent. And until patients’ perspectives are valued when it comes to their intimate boundaries – until patients are validated – until the onus is placed on the medical community where it should be to explain all intimate tasks and procedures and get true informed consent – until medical personnel are held accountable for failing to do so – stories like these will continue to make headlines.

And with each one, all harmed patients like me can say, “I told you so.”