An Oregon doctor cared for generations of families. Now dozens of women say he also abused them | CNN

Wilsonville, Oregon
CNN
 — 

Editor’s Note: This story contains disturbing descriptions of sexual assault.

The three women sit huddled together, hands and arms intertwined, heads on each other’s shoulders. For too long, each felt utterly alone and it’s as if their physical closeness gives them a boost of strength.

Each tells CNN they were sexually abused by their family doctor. An investigation following similar accounts by other women led to his medical license being revoked. Dozens of women have come forward saying they were molested, often repeatedly.

Unfathomably to the survivors, a grand jury said it was not given enough evidence to indict so there were no criminal charges. Pleas to the state attorney general to intervene have not led to new charges.

But the women have vowed to keep fighting. “Seeing these women’s faces (of other survivors) and hearing a little bit about their stories, it’s more fire to keep going,” says Katie Medley.

In the Oregon community where Nicole Snow grew up, Dr. David Farley was always there. His house was around the corner in Wilsonville, a city on the banks of the Willamette River, about a 30-minute drive south of Portland. His kids went to her high school, he ran in the same social circles as her parents, and their families had even vacationed together. Every Sunday, she saw him at their Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the center of town where he was a long-standing and respected member of the congregation.

“I remember very specifically as a teenager, he would chase me down at church, me and other friends my age, and really pin us in a corner and massage our arms and shoulders and say, ‘Hey, you need to come see me,’” Snow says. “I would often try to leave early just to go hide in the car.”

For years, Snow didn’t articulate the anxiety she felt around Farley, a Harvard-educated doctor. So, when she started experiencing stomach pain at the age of 15, it was only natural for her mother to take her to his office.

Farley was a one-stop shop for generations of patients at the West Linn Family Health Center in the neighboring community. He did wellness checks and sports physicals for the children in the affluent suburbs, as well as prenatal care and delivering babies. His standing in the LDS Church attracted many fellow Mormons to his practice, but he was a fixture for the wider community too.

Snow, who is now 32,  said, “From the very first visit, he was able to manipulate and place my mom in a specific place in the room where she had no idea what he was doing with his hands.”

Over the next three years, during more than 40 visits, Snow says he subjected her to repeated sexual abuse, using scare tactics to conduct what she describes as uncomfortably long breast exams and repeated penetrative pelvic and rectal exams. “He told me and my mother that he had a young patient die of cervical cancer, and so he as a doctor wanted to check all his patients starting at a young age and frequently. That’s how he was able to start abusing me.”

Snow says her upbringing in the LDS Church made her particularly vulnerable to an older male, as the church put men in an unquestioned position of authority with grounds to delve deeply into even the most personal aspects of one’s life. “At one point he asked my mom to leave the room so he could ask me about my sexual history, and that was something I was very familiar with, going into the room with a bishop alone, being asked sexual purity questions,” Snow says.

In 2009, Snow turned 18 and went in for her first appointment without her mother. Despite knowing she was not yet sexually active, Farley suggested a procedure to “make sex more pleasurable” — what she would later learn was called a hymenectomy.

“He just said he would want to ‘stretch me out’ a little bit,” she says. When she declined, he tried to convince her by listing the names of her friends he’d performed the procedure on. Then, he became aggressive. “It actually made me quite fearful,” she says.

When she finally agreed, he broke her hymen with his bare hands, washing the blood off in the sink while she lay “terrified” in excruciating pain, she told CNN. Afterwards, it hurt to walk for days.

At the time, she didn’t process these experiences as abuse. “I had no idea. I thought this was normal,” she says. She dropped out of high school over health problems she attributes in part to the abuse from Farley.

It wasn’t until years later, after Snow moved away and saw another OB-GYN, that everything clicked. “She said, ‘We’re going to do a pap smear and this should be your first pap smear,’” Snow recalls. “When I replied, ‘Oh no, I’ve had over 10, maybe close to a dozen,’ the expression on her face let me know that that wasn’t normal and shouldn’t have happened.”

When Snow told her family, they warned against going public. “They said it’s going to be me against the community, because he is such a prominent member. They were nervous for me to come forward and do this fight alone.”

CNN has reached out repeatedly to Farley, who has not responded to any request for comment. His lawyer declined to comment to CNN.

Then, in the summer of 2020, her brother called with news: Farley was retiring, and Snow was not alone. The Oregon Medical Board (OMB) had suspended his license after receiving reports about his behavior and were investigating.

“For so long, I felt like I was being silenced or I was the only one,” says Snow, who is now a stay-at-home mom of a preschooler in Utah. But the news of more victims gave her no comfort. “The depth of misery I felt in that moment, because I know how much I’ve struggled from the abuse … to think of any other little girl or woman also struggling and being abused at the hands of him just shattered my world.”

Snow’s brother connected her with Lisa Pratt and Katie Medley, moms who had met Farley through the LDS Church and grown increasingly uncomfortable with his behavior.

“He had a really good ability to make you feel like you’re special, that special treatment that I now recognize as grooming,” Medley says. She moved to the area in 2016 and met Farley at church when he was an expert on a women’s health panel. At first she could not get on Farley’s patient list, but when she met him again at the church he told her just to call the clinic and say he had personally approved the transfer.  At the time she had three children and knew she wanted another.

In the four years she was his patient, Medley says Farley conducted 11 penetrative exams, nearly triple the medical guidelines at the time — pelvic exams were typically done annually, while pap smears were recommended every three years for women aged 21 to 65.

One night in 2019, she says, he called her at home to tell her he’d found abnormal results in one of her tests. Recounting the same anecdote he’d told Snow, he told Medley he’d once lost a young patient to cervical cancer and needed to do another exam to keep her safe.

“I’m in tears and terrified; I’m scared I’m going to die of cancer,” she recalls.

Farley took advantage of her follow-up exam, she says, to abuse her. “He just put his hand inside me … and I just remember that he was moving his finger a lot and he just said everything feels really good,” she says. “And then he took his hand out and kept fondling my external genitalia.”

After the appointment, she got in her car and cried. “I didn’t understand what was happening to me. He had sexually stimulated me that entire appointment, biologically,” she says. “I thought I must be a psychopath; I must have a problem if my body is responding to a medical examination that way. I’ve since learned that that happens to a lot of victims of abuse, and I think it’s something that keeps us quiet. It’s a power move because, who wants to say that to someone? It’s the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever said, ever.”

For the next eight months, Medley said she tried to block out the memory. Then, Pratt — her neighbor and friend from church — approached her. “She popped over one day, and she said, kind of out of the blue, ‘Hey, have you ever had a weird experience with Dr. Farley?’ Immediately, I knew.”

Pratt had been Farley’s patient since 2015, when she moved to Wilsonville and was looking for a doctor to manage her pregnancy. He came highly recommended by a friend from church, and at first, his approach — like giving her his personal cell phone number — made her feel special. “He’s treating me like family,” she remembers thinking. “I felt really awesome.”

But her visits grew increasingly uncomfortable. When she brought her baby in for a check-up, Farley put his head on her naked breast while she nursed, ostensibly to check if her milk had come in — an experience she’d never had before with a doctor with her older children. “Then he stuck his hand down my shirt … and groped my breast,” she said. “I felt so caught off guard, like, what is going on here?”

In office visits, she says he pressured her to have overly frequent pap smears, becoming angry when she declined — and recited the same story about having lost a young patient to cervical cancer. He even once had her come to his home for a pregnancy check-up, she says, where he conducted an extremely painful procedure in his bedroom.

As time went on, she began to voice her concerns to friends — and was stunned to learn they weren’t surprised. “They’re like, ‘Well you know he’s known for being a creep, right?’”

Weeks after Pratt and Medley connected came the news that Farley was retiring and the state medical board had suspended his license while they investigated reports that he had conducted medically unnecessary, unchaperoned and excessive pelvic and breast exams and pap smears on underage girls, as well as soliciting parents for permission to photograph the breasts and external genitalia of teenagers under the age of 18.

At the time, Farley told the OMB  he had asked parents to let him photograph their children’s adolescent bodies for an educational pamphlet he hoped to put together on puberty, and said he only learned later that using his phone to take pictures  “was a big no-no.”

Having shared their experiences with each other, Pratt, Snow and Medley then reached out to share with the OMB too. Pratt remembers investigator Jason Carruth listening to her, and then saying, “I don’t know if this makes you feel better or not, but you are not alone.”

In September 2020, the OMB found  that Farley had exhibited “unprofessional or dishonorable conduct” with multiple patients, including sexual misconduct and negligence, “ordered or administered unnecessary, outmoded tests contrary to acceptable medical standards which may have caused potential harm” and “breached the standard of care” with procedures “not medically indicated, nor supported by current medical science.” In taking photographs of underage patients, it found his “conduct was contrary to well recognized ethical standards.”

His license was revoked.

The three young mothers felt they had finally had someone listen to them. Carruth, the medical board investigator, flagged the allegations to the West Linn Police Department, and encouraged patients like Medley, Pratt and Snow to contact Det. Tony Christensen. If there was to be any criminal action against Farley, this would be the way.

“We walked into that police department in September feeling so brave,” Pratt says, but that feeling of power soon evaporated.

Pratt talks of a “traumatizing” and “demoralizing” experience, and the women say Christensen was unprepared and ill equipped and left them questioning themselves.

“Tony Christensen treated us like a nuisance, like we were annoying,” Snow says. “He just straight up said, ‘It’s going to be really hard to prosecute a doctor.’”

Their experience was echoed by other patients of Farley’s who filed police reports as the investigation continued. A mother, who spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity,  said Christensen was dismissive when she went to report that Farley had repeatedly groped her daughter’s breast while taking her heart rate in 2017. “I remember the detective saying, ‘Well this doesn’t happen like it happens on TV,’” she says. “Very condescending, like you all don’t know how this works.” The woman had complained to Farley’s office after that 2017 exam.

Christensen  has since retired and could not be reached for comment. The current police chief did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment.

As the case grew in scope, Clackamas County District Attorney John Wentworth’s office got involved, conducting interviews with patients, witnesses and experts. But again, women like Medley, Snow and Pratt describe feeling belittled or dismissed.

After sharing her story with Deputy District Attorney Sarah Dumont, Snow says, “She said, ‘Well you were only abused just about 10 times, right?’ I remember crying, saying back to her, is 10 times not enough?”

Wentworth denies this happened, telling CNN, “This comment was never made.”

In 2022, the DA’s office did bring the case before a grand jury, but some patients now say Wentworth and Dumont fumbled the case, only allowing testimony from a small fraction of patients who had filed police reports. Some were told their cases were too old, and outside the statute of limitations.

“When I had my turn to go in, I just knew this is not a group of people that is trying to put this man away,” Medley says, describing Dumont’s questioning. “It felt like she was defending Farley. She was interrupting me, undercutting my statements, diminishing it.”

The grand jury ultimately issued a “not true bill” — meaning they decided they did not have enough evidence for a criminal indictment.

“It almost was like, out of body, like it just could not be real that they would say no,” Medley recalls.

The mother who said her daughter was groped  said her child testified to the grand jury, and found their decision painful. “She felt like, you did the work to hold him accountable and you just end up with more trauma, because nobody’s doing anything … Sometimes you wonder, is that worth it?”

Snow, Medley and Pratt all said they were being supported by their husbands and were sharing with their children why it was important to keep fighting.

Pratt and Medley spoke out about what they called a “botched” investigation at a city council meeting and joined an open letter to Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum in September 2022, signed by 71 of Farley’s former patients, slamming the DA’s office and begging Rosenblum to step in. She has not, but her office told CNN their criminal justice division continues to review the situation.

With no license, Farley could not practice medicine in Oregon and moved to Idaho in 2020, where he was briefly able to secure a job as a teacher’s aide in a public school. Local authorities were notified of the West Linn investigation, and the school terminated his employment after one day in the classroom, citing “incorrect application information.”

By 2022, Farley had relocated to the small town of Nephi, Utah, where Glade Nielson, a longtime friend from their days together as missionaries in Japan, served as mayor. Nielson confirmed to CNN that Farley is still a member of their local church and is in attendance every week.

The news that Farley is once again active in a church community is unsettling to the women who say he used that setting to prey on them. When they first came forward with their stories, Pratt, Medley and Snow also contacted their church leadership, looking for the institution to hold him accountable in the way that members of other patriarchal organizations like the Catholic Church and Boy Scouts have demanded accountability from their own institutions following abuse scandals.

“I was hoping that they would excommunicate him, remove him from this community that he loves and that he thrives on and that he abuses,” Snow said.

“I had a few meetings of trying to convince him to take this action,” Medley says of their local church leader, or stake president. “Ultimately he said, this has gone up as high as it can go with leadership in the church … they’ve decided not to do anything until after the civil suit is done.”

A spokesperson for the LDS Church  said a formal review will follow the end of litigation but noted it “has placed significant restrictions that limit David Farley’s participation in Church services and activities, including being present on Church property.”

The church also provided proof of a 2022 letter delivered to Farley’s home, notifying him he was permanently banned from his former hometown church in Oregon and further prohibited from attending meetings or entering church property at any other location — except in the town where he currently lives. There, he is “allowed to attend Sunday services when accompanied by his spouse.”

Snow doubts the actions of the church. “They don’t want to come out and say that they have a predator in their mix,” she says, “that they’ve believed a predator and put them up on a pedestal or given them a calling.” She, like Medley and Pratt, has left the church.

Back in West Linn, the city engaged an independent expert to investigate the police investigation. She found case files had been lost, there was potential neglect of duty, and that Christensen was “uninformed” and “did not have the training” to conduct the interviews in a sexual assault and abuse investigation. The report noted he was “more educated and organized in later interviews” and concluded his interviewing style was professional despite not being “trauma-informed.”

In March, Wentworth fired back at criticisms of his office in an op-ed for West Linn’s local newspaper, vigorously defending his handling of the case — noting that “all known patients with a colorable claim of abuse testified before the grand jury.”

In an email to CNN, he blamed “a litany of issues outside our control” for their inability to convince the grand jury and defended his 30-year track record of advocating for crime victims as a prosecutor.

“The notion that I would not indict a doctor who had sexually abused patients for years because I don’t ‘want’ to is absurd,” he wrote. “Dr. Farley’s behavior was unprofessional, and deserved sanction by the Oregon Medical Board. But, proving that his conduct was criminal is another matter requiring a much higher burden of proof.”

For the women who want Farley off the streets, it’s not enough.

After watching a documentary about the gymnasts abused by then-team doctor Larry Nassar, Medley, Pratt and Snow launched a civil suit against Farley. “Their experience made me feel like if I had backing, I could fight this, we could fight it,” says Snow. They are now represented by Manly, Stewart and Finaldi, the law firm who won settlements for the survivors in the Nassar case, as well as the D’Amore Law Group.

“This is a crime of violence,” says attorney Tom D’Amore. “It causes permanent psychological harm. They’re not going to forget what happened to them.”

In court papers, Farley declined to respond to the allegations, citing his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

If she saw him today, Medley said she would have a simple message for Farley: “You messed with the wrong people.”

And, like Snow and Pratt, she now knows she is not alone.

Their lawsuit has been amended multiple times to add women, girls, men and boys who say they too were abused by Farley. The number of plaintiffs now stands at 128.