A Missouri woman who sought treatment at a Kansas hospital after a violent sexual assault has filed a lawsuit against the hospital and one of its staffers, whom she says leaked her personal information to her attacker.
Her abuser then sexually assaulted her again, she says.
In the civil complaint, filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court of Kansas, the woman’s attorneys said Atchison Hospital, located around an hour north of Kansas City, violated “its legal and ethical duty to act in the patient’s best interest” following the first attack in May 2017.
Although she gave her care providers the name of the man who allegedly attacked her, the woman instructed them not to divulge any of her information to third parties without consent, attorney Trevor Wohlford said in the complaint.
An X-ray technician, Janet Rawson Enzbrenner, was nevertheless able to access the woman’s file and contact the alleged assaulter to let him know he was being accused of a crime, according to the suit.
Enzbrenner also alerted the man to “intimate facts relating to Plaintiff’s private life that was not at that time known in the community, contained in a public record, or otherwise available to the public,” Wohlford wrote, claiming Atchison stored the woman’s records in an unsecured manner.
An apology letter to the woman from Atchison CEO John Jacobson contained in the filing appears to confirm that her information was leaked.
The woman says that she was then “relentlessly harassed” by her alleged attacker via graphic text messages, social media messages and phone calls. Enzbrenner also repeatedly harassed her by phone and text, she says.
Around six months after the initial assault, the woman says she was raped a second time by the same man in November 2017.
On Friday, a representative for the Atchison County Attorney told NBC News that prosecutors were aware of the alleged assaults but did not plan on filing charges, without explaining further.
Atchison fired Enzbrenner four months after the woman first came in for treatment following her complaints and an internal investigation, but another Kansas hospital, St. Luke’s Cushing, hired her shortly thereafter. In a statement to NBC, Jacobson said the hospital took quick action to terminate Enzbrenner and was “deeply disturbed” by the allegations.
The woman is requesting a trial by jury and seeks maximum punitive damages.
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