Children’s Hospital Colorado failed to alert police or social services for two years that a teen reported she was being abused, leaving her in constant fear of retaliation by her abuser, the former patient alleges in a lawsuit against the medical facility.
The patient, identified by the initials O.C. in an amended complaint filed this month in Adams County District Court, repeatedly told providers at the hospital during visits between December 2020 and May 2021 that a male relative had physically and sexually abused her, but the hospital allegedly didn’t file a report with authorities — as required by Colorado’s mandatory reporting law — until December 2022.
The lawsuit also alleges the hospital attempted to cover up the error by changing O.C.’s medical records to make it appear a staff member had filed a report on time.
Children’s required all staff to report child abuse suspicions to the hospital’s internal review team, rather than directly to law enforcement or a social services agency, according to the lawsuit. In O.C.’s case, the hospital conducted an internal review on three occasions after she presented for care, but didn’t ensure someone reported the abuse to the required authorities, according to the lawsuit.
The Aurora hospital’s policy of handling abuse reports internally also came up in the investigations that followed the 2017 death of 7-year-old Olivia Gant, whose mother pretended she had a rare disease and asked that the girl be transferred to hospice, where she died after 19 days with minimal nutrition.
In Olivia’s case, The Denver Post reported in 2021, some of the girl’s providers at Children’s had raised concerns about suspected medical child abuse before the hospice transfer — but no one filed a report. The hospital denied that its staff thought the girl was being abused.
Colorado’s child protection ombudsman, Stephanie Villafuerte, told The Post in 2021 that hospitals using internal teams to make decisions on whether to report concerns of child abuse conflicted with the spirit of the state’s mandatory reporting law.
“The law is really clear, and it just says, when you have reasonable reason to suspect abuse or neglect, you shall immediately report or cause a report to be made,” she said.
Olivia’s grandparents sued Children’s Hospital Colorado, seeking $25 million. They settled the case for an undisclosed amount in 2021. The attorney who represented them, Hollynd Hoskins, also represents O.C.
The internal reporting system at Children’s doesn’t have any built-in checks to ensure the hospital reports abuse allegations to the authorities, as required by law, Hoskins said. Hospital staff should be able to look up reports that have been made to police or human services and be responsible for reporting abuse if they find no one else already has, she said.
“The internal policy is incredibly dangerous and led to Olivia Gant’s death — and Children’s Hospital Colorado refuses to change the policy after everything came to light in October of 2019,” Hoskins said, referring to when a grand jury indicted Olivia’s mother, Kelly Turner, on charges related to her death. Turner is now serving a 16-year prison sentence.
“I missed out on a lot of life”
O.C., who is now a high school senior living in a different state, told The Post in an interview that the reporting delay left her in fear for her life and her family members’ well-being.
The abuser had told her he would kill her, her brother and her parents if she ever told anyone what he had done, and since authorities hadn’t taken action, she thought he would carry out his threat. She said she missed months of school because she was afraid to leave the house, and once had a panic attack when she thought she saw him behind her in a store.
The Post agreed not to identify O.C. because she is a victim of sexual assault and filed the lawsuit pseudonymously.
“I missed out on a lot of life because of that, because of constant fear,” she said.
Children’s Hospital Colorado said in a statement that it couldn’t comment on a pending lawsuit.
“We take our reporting obligations very seriously and make every effort to ensure abuse is timely reported,” the hospital said in a statement.
O.C. said she started to question herself when adults around her didn’t step in to protect her after she told them that the relative had sexually assaulted her multiple times. One provider at Children’s even said that building up skills to cope with seeing the abuser again would need to be part of her recovery, rather than focusing on protecting her from him, she said. Her thoughts of suicide increased.
“I started to feel really worthless,” she said. “When I was not believed, afterwards, all of my thoughts about it were, ‘It wasn’t that bad,’ ‘I didn’t deserve to be helped.’”
According to the lawsuit, O.C. told a social worker at Children’s while she was hospitalized in December 2020 that a relative had repeatedly sexually and physically abused her.
Theresa Hedenskog, a licensed clinical social worker who is listed as a defendant in the lawsuit, wrote in O.C.’s records that she reported the abuse, but authorities have no evidence of a report. She didn’t respond to a request to comment on the lawsuit.
Failed for a second time
It was the second time that O.C. told a mandated reporter, and nothing happened.
Her parents had taken her to private psychologist Virginia Kibler about a month earlier. O.C. disclosed the abuse, but Kibler wrote in her notes that she felt O.C. wasn’t ready to talk to police. Colorado law requires people who work with children, including mental health professionals, to report abuse even if the child doesn’t want to.
Kibler later told police she didn’t believe O.C.’s allegations, and found that the reporting process proved traumatic to previous patients. In October, she pleaded guilty to failure to report and received an 18-month deferred sentence, meaning that if she follows the court’s requirements for a year and a half, the judge will dismiss the case. The State Board of Psychologist Examiners sent her a letter of admonition and required her to complete ethics training.
During the time when she was seeing Kibler, O.C. had multiple visits to Children’s because of self-harm in response to her trauma. The hospital again conducted a child abuse assessment after O.C.’s parents brought her to the emergency room in January 2021, but still didn’t report the findings, according to the lawsuit. At the time, O.C.’s mother asked that the police be involved and said she thought her daughter wouldn’t recover until she could tell the full story of what had happened to her, according to the lawsuit.
A different social worker at Children’s who assessed O.C. at the time noted, incorrectly, that the hospital had reported the abuse a month earlier, and no one reported the abuse during her 21-day time in a partial hospitalization program. Typically, people in partial hospitalization sleep at home, but spend most or all of the day undergoing treatment.
O.C. underwent another assessment at the hospital in May 2021 following a suicide attempt, but still, no one reported the abuse, according to the lawsuit. Children’s transferred her to a psychiatric facility after her attempt.
Ultimately, it was O.C.’s mother who reported the abuse by calling police in August 2021. The feelings of worthlessness started to improve after that, O.C. said. While the forensic interview during which she revealed the details of the abuse to police wasn’t pleasant, it allowed her to start the process of moving forward — to feel safe that her abuser wouldn’t harm her or someone else again, she said.
“It was probably one of the most major things that helped me in my recovery, because I was taken seriously,” she said.
The relative who abused O.C. confessed that he sexually assaulted her and at least one other child. He pleaded guilty to sexual exploitation of a child and was sentenced to 10 years in prison in August.
“I feel so much safer now than I have ever felt,” she said.
The hospital only reported the abuse in December 2022, after O.C.’s parents asked for documents from her medical records related to abuse reporting, and the hospital determined it didn’t have those documents because no one had filed a report, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit further alleges someone at the hospital wrote a report and backdated it by two years, to make it appear Hedenskog, the social worker, had filed notice of O.C.’s abuse promptly.
O.C. said she hopes the lawsuit will prompt change in how providers respond when patients disclose abuse, and that her story gives hope to other survivors. It takes time, she said, but when survivors know someone sees them and believes them, they can start to heal.
“To anybody that is suffering in silence, I see you, and it’s going to be OK,” she said.
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