NYC Doctor Raped Anorexic Girl Trapped In Hospital, Lawsuit Says

NEW YORK CITY — An 11-year-old girl watched hospital staff tear down drawings she'd made of her doctor, depicted as a monster and the devil, who was supposed to be treating her anorexia but repeatedly raped her instead, a new lawsuit contends.

Susan Kryhoski, now 40, detailed in a Manhattan Supreme Court suit filed Thursday the abuse she says she faced for two months in 1992 as the in-patient of Dr. Joseph Silverman, an anorexia researcher who died in 2012.

"He was the boogey man, he was the monster under the bed, he was everything bad you could possibly imagine," Kryhoski said. "And he was real."

Abuse began with her first visit to the Babies Hospital, now New York Presbyterian's Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital, when Dr. Silverman asked Kryhoski's parents to leave the examination room, the suit contends.

"So much of me died that very first day," Kryhoski said. "He quite frankly took my life from me."

Krykoski's parents agreed to submit their 86-pound daughter to in-patient treatment and, in the following weeks, Silverman continued to "inspect her insides," according to the suit.

Hospital staff ignored signs of abuse, including blood on Kryhoski’s clothes and treatments for anorexia that did not involve group therapy, interactions with other kids, or even a special diet, according to the suit.

Kryhoski said she was punished for her drawings of Silverman, with the words "disgusting" and evil" written underneath.

"It made me feel even more desperate and isolated," she said.

Babies Hospital staff also kept Kryhoski from speaking openly to her family, hanging up the phone if she became too upset while talking to her parents, the suit contends.

This lack of communication finally forced Kryhoski's parents to remove their daughter from the hospital against "medical advice," the suit says.

Kryhoski’s suit is not the first filed against New York Presbyterian over the conduct of Dr. Silverman, records show.

In a 2020 lawsuit, a former patient — also a teenager treated for anorexia at the Babies Hospital — said she contracted gonorrhea, and lost an ovary due to complications, after Silverman raped her in the late 1970s.

Silverman’s estate denied liability in that case and New York Presbyterian, which declined to comment on Kryhoski's suit, filed a motion to dismiss the 2020 charges.

Kryhoski told Patch she decided to file her Child Victims Act suit last year, after she became the mother of twin babies, a boy and a girl.

"I saw myself in [my daughter], especially," Kryhoski said. "That 11-year-old girl I was, and wasn’t allowed to be, is in her."