Press Release

ANOTHER NEW LAWSUIT ALLEGES SEX SLAVERY AND PSYCHIATRIC MISCONDUCT AT FAMOUS STATE-OPERATED PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL

November 8, 2019

For more information contact: S. Randolph Kretchmar, 847-370-5410

Copies of the Federal Complaint filed in this matter will be available on request during a press conference at 12:00 noon, Friday, November 8, 2019 at the Union League Club of Chicago, Room 822, 65 West Jackson Boulevard.

Kretchmar & Cecala, P.C., has been retained by another plaintiff, in an ever-widening story of sexual abuse and official misconduct in the State’s psychiatric system. This is the sixth federal lawsuit filed alleging misconduct in state mental health facilities.

Under Illinois criminal statutes, any sexual contact between institutional staff and an involuntary patient, may subject the staff member to felony charges of sexual abuse.  There is strict policy requiring staff to report any suspicions of sexual abuse within four hours. In all the cases filed to date nobody reported anything, or if anyone did, the report was quashed higher up the chain of command.

The new lawsuit specifically details sexual abuse of a female patient by staff and a cover-up by top state psychiatric officials. The new suit was filed today by Jennifer Coleman against Mark Roberson, a therapy aide at Elgin Mental Health Center, and Syed Hussain, a psychiatrist there, alleging that Roberson engaged in sexual abuse of Coleman during her hospitalization at Elgin until her release in 2019, and then attempted to continue the “relationship” he had coerced her into after her release.

Two earlier federal lawsuits have been pending for more than a year against a social worker at Elgin Mental Health Center, who is alleged to have seduced several patients beginning in 2014, and to have continued for years to use them as her personal sex slaves.  That social worker plead guilty in a state criminal case for her actions related to these matters and is now serving a sentence in a state prison.

Mark Owens alleged in 2018 that the same social worker tried to get his psychiatric diagnosis altered to discredit him, and to increase his medication to hurt his memory or otherwise disable his ability to complain about her sexual abuse.

Another pending suit filed in July 2019 by Michael Dopson against Erica Ware, a mental health tech at Chicago Read Mental Health Center, alleged that Ware engaged in sexual abuse of Dopson beginning in 2016 and continued until his release in 2019.

The Law Offices of Kretchmar and Cecala, P.C. has cooperated with the Internal Investigations Division of the Illinois State Police, in relation to the allegations.

“We’ve discovered system wide psychiatric abuses and as predicted, more plaintiffs have come forward. The public will ultimately see psychiatric slavery in Illinois as the ugliest crime against humanity since Auschwitz,” said S. Randolph Kretchmar, one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs.

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