A Rape Victim’s Anger Against Fugitive Doctor

For the longest time, Jan Davis couldn’t talk about what happened. Now she can’t stop. Her sentences spiral off into agitated silences, her face is anxious and drawn, but the words just keep on coming. Occasionally, this spectacle moves someone to suggest she find a counselor, someone to help put the past behind her. She always declines.

“I don’t need that,” she insists, with an admonishing look, as she leans back into the rose-colored sofa in her Fairfax County, Va., apartment. “I don’t have any hidden anger. All of my anger is right up front.”

Doctor Accused

Two-and-a-half years ago, Davis says, she was raped by her gynecologist during what should have been a routine examination in her hometown near Pittsburgh. She told her sister about it first, and then her mother, but for reasons they now find painful to discuss, neither encouraged her to go to the police. So Davis kept quiet for another six months, until the night her sister’s neighbor reported the same complaint.

Eventually nine women came forward. The critical paragraphs of their police affidavits are almost identical. Most of them had hid their alleged attacks for years. “We didn’t think we would have a chance against a doctor, my husband and I,” one of the women later testified. “Who would believe us?”

Reza Rasti, a 44-year-old Iranian national, was charged with nine counts of rape and nine counts of indecent assault. His lawyer entered a plea of not guilty, but before the case could get to trial, the doctor disappeared.

Rasti has been a fugitive for more than a year now; the local assistant district attorney who handled the case has turned his primary attention to other things. Davis, however, remains a kind of prisoner. She broods over details of the investigation and stays late after her secretarial day at a local NASA contractor to type entreaties to public officials. “. . . I believe you are the only person at this point that may be capable of helping me,” she beseeched First Lady Nancy Reagan not long ago. “I am counting on you,” she told Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese.

Davis has trouble going to any doctor now, much less a gynecologist. “She puts it off and puts it off and then she just quivers and shakes and sweats when she gets in there,” says her mother, Kay Silbaugh.

Davis hopes that talking about the case will give other women courage. But most of all, she wants the doctor to pay.

“You follow the system, you push all the right buttons,” she says. “And then he walks away. There are nine people whose lives he’s turned upside down for the past two years, and he got away with it.

“I think he left because he felt, deep down, I wasn’t going to drop it. At the hearings, I didn’t cry, like some of the other girls. And I don’t care if it takes the rest of my life,” she says flatly. “I’m gonna find him.”

For most women, the idea of rape during, and in the guise of, a gynecological examination is almost unimaginable. The implicit violation of trust, the furtive, surreal looniness of it, is hard to fathom. Why would a woman stay on the examining table long enough to let it happen? Wouldn’t there be some warning? And once it had happened, why wouldn’t she go straight to the police?

Jan Davis can explain most of that now, but she is still troubled that it took another woman’s example to bring her forward. “I wanted to be the kind of person who would stop him,” she says sadly, “but I didn’t. I just couldn’t.”

In April, 1985, Davis, then 26, thought she was due for a gynecological checkup. She was new to Fairfax County, so she arranged to see the family gynecologist during a weekend trip home to Fayette City, Pa., a speck of a town in the Allegheny Mountains about an hour’s drive from Pittsburgh.

“I’d been going to him since I was 17, and I continued to go back; that’s how confident I felt,” she remembers. “He said sure, come in, we’ll squeeze you in.”

Mild-Mannered Doctor

Reza Rasti was about 5-foot-6, with thinning brown hair and a mild, almost apologetic manner. He spoke with a slight accent. He had finished medical school at the University of Tehran in 1969, and come to the United States shortly afterward. His wife, Fatemah, was from a well-to-do Tehran family; he had grown up in a rural village outside the capital.

His practice included everyone from the dutiful matrons of the steel mill towns along the Monongahela to the wife of a suburban police chief. His waiting room was decorated with the school pictures of the babies he had delivered, and he kept pictures of his two children prominently displayed on his desk. “I liked him real well,” Davis’ mother, also a patient, remembers. “He was gentle and he was always talking about family.”

When Davis’ niece was born, it was Rasti who performed the emergency Caesarean the family believed saved the baby’s life. “We loved the man for what he did,” recalls Billy Sterner, the baby’s father. “After that, he was like a god to me.”

The morning of her appointment, according to Davis’ sworn testimony, the nurse-receptionist led her to an examining room and told her to disrobe. Davis slipped on an examining gown and climbed onto the examining table. It is standard procedure for many gynecologists to have a nurse or nurse’s aide assist them during examinations, but Rasti seldom did. Davis, who had never been treated by any other gynecologist, didn’t know enough to know that was unusual.

On Examining Table

“I yakked and talked to him like nothing, like I always did,” she remembers. Rasti told her to put her feet in the stirrups on either side of the examining table, then draped her with a white sheet. He asked her to slide her hips toward him, a routine request, except that he had her slide so far down she was almost off the table.

The internal examination that followed, Davis now realizes, took far too long. “I had a hard time going to a gynecologist for a long time after this,” she says, “but when I did go, and the examination was so fast--a few seconds--it just made me sick.”

Halfway through Rasti’s examination, she says, echoing her testimony, she decided that something was wrong.

“I couldn’t see anything over the sheet, but I started to get a real awkward feeling,” she says. “I was having intercourse--you could feel the pressure. I thought, ‘I’m having sex with this man!’ It was like, I couldn’t believe it! I didn’t know what to do!

“I moved, because I was almost off the table at that point, and I felt a zipper, and that was it.

‘What Are You Doing?’

“I was real scared, and then I thought, ‘Wait a minute. He’s smaller than me.’ So I started to concentrate on his face. It was so composed . . . I said, ‘What are you doing?’

“I started to scramble off the table. I said, ‘You son of a bitch.’ He had his hand under his coat, and he was running out of the room. He said, ‘Come and see me when you’re dressed,’ just like he always did.

“I knew what had happened,” she says. “But now what? I got dressed and I went into his office. I’m standing there in his office, he’s writing a prescription. I said, ‘You’re sick.’

“He said, ‘What do you mean? I’ll see you next time.’

“I said, ‘There won’t be a next time.’ But I didn’t do anything. I was sick to my stomach. I left, walked out. The nurse asked what’s the matter, but I just kept on going.

“I was shaking so bad I didn’t know if I could drive the car. I didn’t know if I should go directly to the police, or go to get the rape test . . . but I knew I had K-Y jelly on me, and having just come from the gynecologist’s office. . . .”

Davis told her sister Pam Sterner. “I asked her if Dr. Rasti had ever done anything weird to her.

“She said, ‘No.’

“And I told her, ‘Well, I think we just had sex.’

“She said, ‘Did you see anything?’

“I said, ‘No.’

‘Your Word Against His’

“She said, ‘Well, it’s your word against his.’ She said, ‘I don’t know, I’d just drop it. Just don’t go back.’ And she kept asking me, ‘Are you sure it was him, are you sure it wasn’t the instrument?’

At the time, Sterner remembers, “I was thinking, I know how worked up she gets. . . . And if we push it . . . if she goes home and tells Mom and Dad, Mom will lose it and Dad will probably go down there and try to kill him. And she was OK. Nobody else had to know.”

A month later, Davis overheard her mother urging her teen-age sister to make an appointment with Rasti and decided she had to speak up. Her mother was angry she hadn’t been told sooner but she also was frightened by the thought of her daughter accusing a doctor of rape. “When you go to a police station and say the gynecologist raped you, you can already see the eyebrows going up,” her mother says now. “Much more so than if you went and said, ‘I got raped in a parking lot’ or garage. It’s because he’s a professional person. . . .

“It was a flabbergasting situation,” she insists. “I couldn’t believe a guy would do this, jeopardize his career. . . .”

Six months after Jan Davis fled the doctor’s office in panic, her sister Pam Sterner was awakened by a midnight telephone call from her next-door neighbor, Christine Crawford. Crawford sounded distraught. She asked Sterner to watch her baby for a few hours. Her husband had just finished the late shift at U.S. Steel, she explained, and they were going to the hospital.

‘A Nervous Reaction’

“She said Dr. Rasti had raped her,” Pam Sterner remembers. Sterner felt sick to her stomach as she hung up the phone and ran to the bathroom. “It was a nervous reaction,” she says. “I felt real guilty.” She was the one who had recommended Rasti to Crawford two years earlier. She had never told her neighbor about her sister’s trouble with the doctor.

She went home and showered several times, as rape victims often do. She waited for her husband, who was due home at midnight. When he arrived, she told him what had happened. They called the Jefferson Borough Police Department, whose dispatcher assigned the case to Richard A. Bonacci, the officer on duty.

When Crawford’s call came in, Richard A. Bonacci, the Jefferson Borough police officer on duty, remembers, “I was real skeptical, I guess because she had been at a doctor’s.” He told Crawford to meet him at the hospital so a rape test could be administered, figuring that would discourage a false claim. “She showed up, and I started thinking, this is probably legitimate.”

In the meantime, Sterner had telephoned Jan Davis at their mother’s house. Davis rushed to Jefferson Hospital to corroborate Crawford’s story. The next day, she called Jefferson police to report her own allegations.

In the days that followed, Bonacci learned that Rasti had telephoned local police a year or two back to complain that the husband of one of his patients had threatened his life. Yes, he’d threatened Rasti, the man confirmed angrily when the police contacted him this time. “Because he (had intercourse with) my wife!”

More Victims Come Forward

Now there were three victims. News stories soon brought forward three more, including one who had gone to police several years earlier alleging that Rasti had sexually assaulted her during an examination at a local clinic. On the advice of his civil attorney at the time, Rasti had insisted on taking a polygraph test, and passed. The woman never pressed charges.

Affidavits showing probable cause were filed, and an arrest warrant was issued. Rasti was taken before a magistrate at 1:45 and arraigned on charges of rape and indecent assault. He steadfastly maintained his innocence. The magistrate allowed the charges of indecent assault, but she ruled there was insufficient evidence of the “forcible compulsion” necessary to justify a rape charge under Pennsylvania law. Assistant District Attorney John Zottola decided to withdraw all of the charges and regroup. Rasti hired John Doherty, one of the top defense lawyers in the city.

In the next two months, the assistant DA brought his case--evidence and witnesses--before a few other magistrates, each time arguing, unsuccessfully, that the simple fact of penetration was enough to satisfy the necessary element of forcible compulsion. Jan Davis drove from Fairfax to Pittsburgh for each of these proceedings, as well as a few that were canceled at the last minute, after she had already made the trip. The case began to take up so much of her time that she quit her job and took temporary work.

In the meantime, three other women came forward, bringing the total to nine. With the exception of Davis and Crawford, the women were strangers to one another. The youngest was 18, the oldest in her mid-50s.

Second Arrest

Rasti was arrested a second time, and this time both the indecent assault and the rape charges were allowed to stand. Bond was set at $15,000. The doctor made bail and continued to declare his innocence. “We had entered a plea of not guilty and we would have persisted with that plea,” defense attorney Doherty says.

Rasti returned to his practice, but within the month the state board of health temporarily suspended his license. Two months later, Doherty requested a final hearing for the purpose of attacking the legal soundness of the rape charges. Rasti did not attend that hearing, but eight of the nine women showed up to testify.

One week after their testimony, the district attorney received a call from an anonymous tipster who claimed that Rasti had left the area. A month earlier, it was learned, the doctor quietly had transferred power of attorney to his brother-in-law, a student at the University of West Virginia. Rasti’s civil attorney, Henry Rea, handled the matter--accepting, he says, his client’s explanation that the arrangement was a precaution in case he ended up in jail. Rea now believes that Rasti had been planning his flight for several months. “He is someone who could not have faced the prospect of prison,” Rea says. “He was a quiet, meek little man.”

The day after Rasti disappeared, the judge who had listened to the women upheld the legitimacy of the rape charges.

Medical License Revoked

The Pennsylvania State Medical Board revoked Rasti’s medical license in July, 1986. This past summer Fatemah Rasti was traced to an address in Nottingham, England. Last month she telephoned Henry Rea. She said she was calling from Tehran and that her husband was living with her there. Rea does not know whether Rasti has resumed the practice of medicine, but says he remembers joking with Rasti’s brother-in-law that the Iranian military probably was eager for his services.

“I have no idea where he is,” Doherty says. “For all I know he could be in Philadelphia.”

Jan Davis says that the day she learned the doctor was gone was “the worst I ever felt.” She still telephones the assistant district attorney from time to time, but he doesn’t return her calls as quickly as he used to, and there isn’t a lot he’s allowed to tell about the investigation anyway.

With the help of her boyfriend Gary McGuffie, she continues her letter-writing campaign. They talk about finding an Iranian lawyer to track Rasti overseas.

“Somewhere he’s living with his wife and kids and they’re having a nice meal together,” she says wanly. “He’s not thinking every day about it like I think about it. He’s not afraid to go to the doctor’s. He has his happiness. He took it away from me.”