Doctor Found Not Guilty of Raping Woman He Drugged

After deliberating three days, a Van Nuys jury Wednesday acquitted a Panorama City physician who had been charged with raping an 18-year-old woman after injecting her with a sleep-inducing drug.

The jury did find Dr. Julian Milestone, 58, guilty of a misdemeanor offense, prescribing a dangerous drug without medical cause. He faces the possibility of a six-month jail term. Had he been convicted of the more serious charge, the general practitioner could have been sent to prison for eight years.

After the verdict, Milestone said the trial “was a nightmare for me, my wife and my family. This decision vindicates me.”

Throughout the three-week trial, Milestone did not dispute the fact that he was sexually involved with the Van Nuys woman who filed the rape complaint against him.

But the physician maintained that he and the woman did not share a doctor-patient relationship.

“They were romantically involved,” Milestone’s attorney, Robert Rentzer, told the jury. “They both had knowing mutual consent of what was happening.”

Milestone took the woman to her Van Nuys apartment on Sept. 1, 1983, where he admitted injecting her with the sedative, sodium amytal. The couple was discovered by the woman’s roommate, who took her to a hospital. There she was treated as a victim of rape.

Milestone was arrested the next day.

On the stand, Milestone testified that the woman, now 19, had been introduced to him by mutual friends. She told him she had been raped when she was 15, and she sought help from Milestone, according to court testimony.

‘I Needed Help’

“I truly felt that I needed help in my relationship with members of the opposite sex,” she testified during the trial.

Milestone and the woman dined together and discussed her problem. After meeting with her twice, Milestone testified, “I told her that I wasn’t a teen-ager any longer, and that I wasn’t satisfied with just holding hands. But she said she was tense and anxious.”

Milestone said he then suggested that “she needed something to relieve that tension,” and the couple went to her Van Nuys apartment.

The woman testified that, when they were discovered, she was groggy and unaware of what was happening.

“I felt I was there but I wasn’t,” she said. “I tried to get up, but I was too heavy.”

When the complaint was filed against him, the physician said, he was shocked. “I was flabbergasted that our relationship could have ended that way,” he said.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Imerman contended that Milestone forced himself on the woman after he rendered her unconscious with the drug.

“She had no idea what he was going to do to her,” the prosecutor said. “If she had known, she never would have gone back to the apartment with Dr. Milestone.”

Milestone is now retired, having sold his medical practice last year.

Superior Court Judge Richard G. Kolostian set April 23 for sentencing on the misdemeanor charge.