Dr. Keith Ablow, the bizarre psychiatrist who was once part of Fox News’ “Medical A-Team,” had his office raided by the Drug Enforcement Agency yesterday. It’s just the latest round of troubles for Ablow whose license was suspended last year after he was accused of sexually abusing his patients.
Last year, I wrote about the shocking allegations against Ablow in three malpractice lawsuits. I quoted this from The Boston Globe:
“He began to hit me when we engaged in sexual activities,” wrote one plaintiff, a New York woman, in a sworn affidavit filed with her lawsuit. “He would have me on my knees and begin to beat me with his hands on my breasts,” she wrote, “occasionally saying, ‘I own you,’ or ‘You are my slave.’”
The malpractice lawsuits, two of them filed on Thursday in Essex Superior Court and a third filed last year, paint a picture of a therapist who encouraged women to trust and rely on him, then coaxed them into humiliating sexual activities, often during treatment sessions for which they were charged. When the New York woman had trouble paying her therapy bills, she said, Ablow advised her to work as an escort or stripper because the work was lucrative.
Although Ablow “categorically, completely” denied those allegations against him, his problems appear to have escalated.
From yesterday’s Boston Globe:
The Drug Enforcement Administration on Thursday raided the Newburyport office of Dr. Keith R. Ablow, a controversial psychiatrist whose medical license was suspended last year after state regulators alleged he drew three female patients into sexual relationships and improperly prescribed medications, including addictive narcotics, to eight people who worked for him.
Investigators searched Ablow’s office on Water Street as part of an "ongoing investigation” said Special Agent Timothy Desmond, a DEA spokesman. He declined to provide details about the investigation or describe what was seized from the building where Ablow operated Baystate Psychiatry until last May when the state suspended his medical license.
Ablow, 58, wasn’t taken into custody and hasn’t been charged with a crime, Desmond said. He referred further questions to federal prosecutors, who declined to comment.
Guilty of a crime or not, anyone other than a die-hard Fox fan could have seen there was something seriously amiss with Ablow. Here’s how I summed him up last year:
We always mocked Ablow for his crazy psychoanalysis, but there was something creepy-mean about it. For example, Ablow claimed that President Barack Obama did not want Americans protected. Also that he wanted Americans to worry about Ebola because it would strike him as “profoundly unfair” if the U.S. “insulat[ed] itself from a scourge sweeping the very countries he seems to think we have preyed upon.”
Ablow's smear of Michelle Obama over her healthy eating campaign is unforgettable: “And how well could she be eating? She needs to drop a few. … Let’s be honest: Like I mean, there’s no French fries happening? That’s all kale and carrots? I don’t buy it."
He also called for an “American Jihad” which “could mean boots on the ground in many places in the world” because “wherever leaders and movements appear that seek to trample upon the human spirit, we have a God-given right to intervene.” In one discussion that has disturbing resonance now, he likened Obama's outreach to Republicans to “the husband who beat you coming back saying, ‘I’ve changed! I’ve changed, honey!’ Look, no, you haven’t because you haven’t been in therapy with Dr. Keith Ablow."
Not surprisingly, Ablow is also a big fan of “Grab ‘em by the p***y” Donald Trump. Ablow urged FoxNews.com readers to start “Trumping Your Life” because, “As a psychiatrist and New York Times bestselling self-help author, it would be remiss of me were I to not point out that President Trump exemplifies ways of being and communicating that, if mastered by others, could greatly empower them, psychologically and interpersonally. We are not just witnessing a president possessed of certain political ideals; we are witnessing a president with true self-possession."
And then there was Ablow’s admiration for Donald Trump’s handling of his “small hands” issue raised during one of the debates: “Freud would have been standing up, like applauding, standing ovation. To be able to address such an intensely personal issue and say, ‘Listen, there’s no problem in that department,’ to me that showed an incredible degree of psychological strength.” In that same discussion, he called Hillary Clinton “Imelda Marcos on steroids.”
(H/T Media Matters)
(Ablow image via screen grab )