Hospital Not Held Liable in Molestation : Judiciary: State Supreme Court dismisses suit by woman who was sexually assaulted by an ultrasound technician during examination.

A hospital is not legally responsible when an ultrasound technician, conducting a pelvic examination of a pregnant woman, sexually molests her, the state Supreme Court ruled Tuesday.

Although the hospital put the technician in a position that made the molestation possible, he made an “aberrant decision to engage in conduct unrelated to his duties,” the court said in a 5-2 ruling dismissing the woman’s damage suit.

A state appeals court had earlier reinstated the suit, relying on the high court’s 1991 ruling holding a city responsible for a police officer’s rape of a woman he had taken into custody.

But the Supreme Court said the two cases were different because a hospital technician lacks the coercive power of a law enforcement officer. The justices reached a similar conclusion Dec. 6 in a case involving a jail guard’s sexual harassment of trainees and co-workers.

In both cases, the court refused to overrule its 1991 decision, but appeared to narrow it so that it applies only to cases involving crimes by police against civilians.

The case involved a woman, identified as Lisa M., who was 19 and five weeks pregnant when she was injured in a fall in July 1989 and went to Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital in Santa Clarita.

She was given an ultrasound examination by Bruce Tripoli, a technician who worked for a hospital contractor. Tripoli refused to let anyone watch and, during a follow-up test, probed her vagina with ultrasound equipment and his fingers, falsely telling her it was part of the exam, the court said. He later pleaded guilty to a felony.

The woman sued Tripoli, the contractor and the hospital. Her lawyer, R. Rex Parris, said she may not be able to recover damages because Tripoli cannot afford to pay, and it will be hard to prove that the hospital negligently failed to protect her, the only avenue left open by Tuesday’s ruling.

“It’s essentially part of the guy’s job to look at naked women,” Parris said. “The court is of the opinion that it’s not foreseeable that a male in that position would not sexually molest a woman. They’re not living in the real world.”

The hospital’s lawyer, David Ettinger, said that the woman was not naked and that the examination was routine and not particularly intimate.

The court, in an opinion by Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar, said there was no causal connection between the examination and molestation.

The exam “was not of a type that would be expected to . . . give rise to intense emotions on either side,” Werdegar said. By contrast, she said, damages might be allowed if a hospital-employed psychotherapist sexually exploited a patient.

Unlike a police officer, Tripoli “was not vested with any coercive authority,” Werdegar said. Instead, he “simply took advantage of solitude, access and superior knowledge [of the scope of the exam] to commit a sexual assault.”

Dissenting Justices Joyce Kennard and Stanley Mosk said a jury should be allowed to decide whether the technician’s abuse of his job-related authority was a foreseeable cause of the molestation.