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Two allege sexual actions
Embarrassment caused delay in abuse accusations, patient says.
YOUNGSTOWN — A middle-aged Columbiana County woman testified she initially suspected something was wrong with the treatment she got from Dr. Gregory S. Dew for her tailbone injury, but she didn’t come forward with her accusation that he raped her until she learned of his arrest on other charges.
“It kept bothering me,” she said of her suspicion of abuse Tuesday during Dr. Dew’s jury trial before Judge R. Scott Krichbaum of Mahoning County Common Pleas Court.
“After I saw his arrest a year ago on television, that was when I really knew that I had been abused,” Dr. Dew’s former chiropractic patient said. “I just didn’t want this to happen to other people.”
“It took me a really long time because I was embarrassed and also felt bad for his family,” she said under questioning by Rhys Cartwright Jones, assistant county prosecutor. “I knew that, if I came forward, it would mean probably a longer sentence,” if the former Boardman chiropractor would be convicted of the three rape counts pertaining to her, she said.
Dr. Dew, 46, of Kelly Park Road, Columbiana, is on trial on multiple rape and gross sexual imposition charges contained in two indictments.
The first indictment alleges he engaged in sexual activity with two girls, ages 15 to 17, who were his students at Youngstown Gymnastics Center in Boardman between 1990 and 1992, before he became a chiropractor.
Dr. Dew was fired from the Physicians Diagnostic and Rehabilitation Center, where he was a chiropractor, immediately after his March 2007 arrest on those charges.
The second indictment alleges Dr. Dew sexually abused three adult women who were his chiropractic patients between 2005 and 2007.
That indictment alleges Dr. Dew raped the Columbiana County woman three times between May 1, 2005, and March 31, 2007, but it does not provide specific dates of occurrence for each alleged incident.
That woman said Dr. Dew inserted his gloved finger into her vagina three times over that period while he was performing an internal adjustment of her tailbone digitally through her rectum.
Under cross-examination by Dr. Dew’s lawyer, Elizabeth Kelley of Cleveland, the patient said she could not see much of what Dr. Dew was doing because she was lying face down during the procedures. She also testified that there was always a female attendant in the room while Dr. Dew treated her.
The first time she alleged vaginal penetration, the patient testified she was suspicious but dismissed it as accidental because it happened quickly. “I kind of dismissed it because of the chaperone,” she said, referring to the female attendant.
In a court document filed before the trial, the prosecution said the alleged victim “never gave the defendant permission to adjust her through her vagina, and there is no clinical procedure for doing so.”
Also testifying Tuesday was one of Dr. Dew’s former gymnastics students, who said she made her report to Boardman police in fall 2006 after investigating to determine whether Dr. Dew’s alleged sexual activities with her and a fellow gymnastics student in the early 1990s were illegal and how long the statute of limitations for those alleged offenses would run.
The statute of limitations for sex crimes involving juvenile victims extends 20 years after the accuser’s 18th birthday.
After she filed her police report concerning the alleged gross sexual imposition against her in 1992, she testified that, at the urging of police, she e-mailed Dr. Dew several times before she recorded an hourlong telephone conversation with him.
“I knew it wasn’t OK, but I was doing it anyway,” the former gymnastics student said on the tape, referring to the physical intimacy she alleges that she and Dr. Dew engaged in while she was a teenager.
In her testimony, she said she believed she and the other alleged victim from the gymnastics school had a crush on Dr. Dew.
On the tape, which was played for the jury, Dr. Dew said: “I should have been the standard-bearer, but I wasn’t.”
Under cross-examination from Kelley, the alleged gymnastics school victim said Dr. Dew never forced her into any sexual activity. She also acknowledged she continued to exchange letters and e-mails with Dr. Dew and speak to him by telephone in the years after the offenses allegedly occurred.