JOHNSTOWN, Pa. | Almost 20 years ago, Pennsylvania officials were confronted with evidence that a well-regarded pediatrician had fondled the genitals of two small children during office visits. Instead of holding the physician accountable, regulators allowed the doctor to maintain his medical license. He went on to molest at least a dozen more young patients, victimizing children right up until the time of his arrest in January, prosecutors say.
Now, as Dr. Johnnie “Jack” Barto sits in jail awaiting trial on sexual assault charges involving more than 30 children, his 1990s-era patients and their parents claim the state Board of Medicine failed to stop him when it had the chance and bears responsibility for what investigators are calling a “pervasive and prolonged pattern of abuse.” Police, prosecutors and Barto’s own colleagues also deserve blame for looking the other way, they say.
“It could’ve stopped with me,” Lee Ann Berkebile, 28, of Johnstown, said in an interview with The Associated Press. “Instead they chose to cover for him and stick up for him, and now look what happened. All you did was let a sicko touch other girls.”
Barto, 71, was arrested in January and charged with groping a 12-year-old girl during an office visit several weeks earlier.
Barto has pleaded not guilty. If the charges hold up, the case will represent another black mark against a profession that’s long had trouble policing itself over sexual misconduct.
There have been more than 1,000 cases across the nation in which doctors were sanctioned for sexual misconduct but held onto their medical licenses, according to a 2016 investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. A study by the consumer group Public Citizen that same year found state regulators often failed to punish abusive doctors at all. More than two-thirds of doctors with sexual misconduct reports in the National Practitioner Data Bank, a federal government database, faced no discipline from their states’ medical boards, the study found.
