AIDS Patient Uses City Law to Sue; Claims Chiropractor Discriminated

In what is believed to be the first lawsuit of its kind in San Diego, a man with AIDS has sued a Hillcrest chiropractor, claiming he was refused treatment because of his disease.

The suit by Robert E. Walsh Jr., 36, is thought to be the first filed under a year-old San Diego ordinance aimed at prohibiting discrimination against AIDS patients.

Walsh claims he went to the Richmond Street office of chiropractor Joseph A. Cicmanec on Aug. 4 and requested a back realignment.

Questioned About X-Rays

Walsh said he filled out two forms at the receptionist’s request, and indicated on one of them that he had recently undergone chest X-rays. When the receptionist asked why he had been X-rayed, Walsh told her he had AIDS and was under a doctor’s care, according to the suit.

The lawsuit alleges that the receptionist left to confer with Cicmanec, then returned and told Walsh that the chiropractor would not treat him, and told him to go to UCSD Medical Center instead.

Walsh claims he was “shamed, humiliated, degraded and emotionally upset” and alleges that Cicmanec and his employees “acted in a despicable manner with a willful, conscious and callous disregard” of his “rights and emotional condition.”

Cicmanec declined comment Wednesday, and his attorney, Laura Halgren, said only that the chiropractor “does dispute the allegations of the complaint.” No court date has been set for a hearing.

Walsh, a state employee, also declined comment Wednesday. He was diagnosed as having Kaposi’s sarcoma, an AIDS-related cancer, in February, 1988, according to his attorney, Timothy R. Pestotnik.

Pestotnik chairs the board of the San Diego AIDS Project and helped start a free legal-advice clinic for AIDS sufferers who feel they are victims of discrimination.

‘No Other Choice’

Pestotnik said Walsh went to the legal clinic within a week of his experience at the chiropractor’s office.

“He wanted to do anything he could to make the situation not happen to somebody else,” Pestotnik said. “I tried for five months to settle this case, but the defendant would not discuss it with us. My client and I felt we had no other choice.”

Pestotnik, whose father died of AIDS three years ago, said his law firm, Luce, Forward, Hamilton & Scripps, will represent Walsh free.

Many complaints of discrimination have been taken to the legal clinic, but all of the other cases have been resolved without a lawsuit, Pestotnik said.

“We try to step in and explain to them that the disease is not transmitted casually,” he said. “Usually, we get an apology and a promise it won’t happen again. The law is there, though, in case that doesn’t work.”

The San Diego City Council passed the February, 1988, ordinance to enable people with AIDS and AIDS-related complex to sue landlords, employers and businesses that discriminate against them. One month earlier, the County Board of Supervisors approved a similar ordinance for unincorporated areas of the county. Similar measures have been enacted in other California cities, including Los Angeles, West Hollywood, Santa Monica, Pasadena, San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley.

A handful of lawsuits have already been filed in other cities with AIDS anti-discrimination laws, including a Los Angeles case in which an AIDS patient sued a dentist in January, 1988, for allegedly refusing to treat him. That case is pending.

Also in Los Angeles, Forest Lawn mortuary was sued in 1985 for $10 million for allegedly refusing to handle the body of a suicide victim who was thought to have had AIDS.

In April, 1987, a Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge ruled that a West Hollywood nail salon did not have to give a pedicure to an AIDS patient who claimed the salon discriminated against him because of his disease. The judge in that case concluded that “there is an extremely small, but nonetheless real, risk of exposure to AIDS from the procedures of a pedicure.”