U.S. Reaches Agreement With Victims of Doctor Who Abused Native American Patients

The U.S. government reached a deal with victims of a pedophile doctor who sexually assaulted Native American boys for decades at federal hospitals in Montana and South Dakota, people familiar with the matter said.

Under the terms of the deal, the government would pay between $1.5 million and $2 million to each of eight victims to settle claims that federal officials ignored or tolerated the abuse, some of the people said. In total, the government would pay the victims about $14.5 million, one of the people said.

Lawyers for the victims and Justice Department officials reached the deal following a meeting with mediators in Rapid City, S.D., in late September. The agreement isn’t yet finalized, some of the people said. Because of the amounts involved, the deal must be approved by a senior Justice Department official, according to the agency’s rules.

Lawyers for the victims and Justice Department officials declined to comment.

The abusive doctor, Stanley Patrick Weber, arrived in 1986 at the U.S. Indian Health Service, a federal agency that provides health services to Native Americans primarily in the West, government records show. His supervisors at the Browning, Mont., IHS hospital suspected him of misconduct as early as the mid-1990s. Instead of firing him, the IHS transferred him to a hospital in Pine Ridge, S.D., where he worked for another 20 years as IHS officials ignored warning signs and punished whistleblowers, an investigation by The Wall Street Journal and FRONTLINE found.

Weber, now 73 years old, was later convicted of abusing six victims covered by the pending settlement agreement and is serving a lifetime prison sentence at Pekin, Ill., federal penitentiary. A criminal case involving a seventh victim involved in the settlement was dropped in 2020.

The IHS’s mishandling of Weber’s case was the subject of a 2019 documentary by the Journal and FRONTLINE. After the news organizations’ report, a White House task force reviewed the IHS’s sexual-abuse safeguards, and the IHS itself commissioned an independent investigation of Weber’s tenure. The agency sought to keep the resulting report, completed in 2020, secret for more than a year, but the Journal and the New York Times successfully sued for its release under public-records laws.

Those reports figured heavily in the claims of Weber’s victims, who alleged in two separate lawsuits that the government failed to meet its contractual duties to Native American tribes under 19th-century war treaties. Those duties include removing so-called “bad men” from reservations.

In one lawsuit, five victims from Weber’s time in South Dakota claimed, citing the Journal’s reports and the IHS’s independent investigation, that more than a dozen specific IHS officials knew of allegations against Weber and failed to act. The suit also claims more unnamed officials were aware of the allegations.

The independent IHS report showed officials at all levels of the agency, including one in its headquarters-based human resources offices, were aware of allegations and in some cases participated in covering them up. One senior official proposed reassigning a whistleblower who had complained about Weber’s conduct with teenage boys to Kotzebue, Alaska, a remote town within the Arctic Circle. Contacted by the Journal, the official said he didn’t recall the email.

In Weber’s criminal trial and in interviews with the Journal, his victims, now all adults, described years of sexual assault as young boys at IHS facilities, as well as in the doctor’s government-provided housing and elsewhere. One described a sexual encounter with the doctor after he checked him out of a juvenile detention facility. Another said the doctor raped him in an exam room at the hospital when he was 8 years old.

One victim who is part of the settlement, Joe Four Horns, now a 39-year-old federal inmate who was convicted of bank robbery, told the Journal in a 2018 interview that Weber began molesting him as an 11-year-old boy shortly after his father died.

“We deeply regret the trauma suffered by the patients under the care of Stanley Patrick Weber,” said Roselyn Tso, who the U.S. Senate confirmed as director of the IHS last month. “We know the trust in our agency has been damaged, and we are doing all we can to rebuild that trust,” she said.

Ms. Tso said the IHS had taken steps to prevent future abuse, including increasing training for employees and requiring broader reporting of abuse allegations.

In the civil lawsuits the government now seeks to settle, lawyers argued the government harmed Weber’s victims by failing to remove the doctor himself. But a federal judge ruled Weber’s conduct fell outside the statute of limitations, and lawyers for the South Dakota victims revised the case to focus on inaction by IHS managers that came to light more recently.

The proposed settlement payments per victim are higher than government payouts in some other recent sex-abuse cases. Last year, the government paid $7 million to settle claims by eight veterans that a medical worker at a Veterans Affairs hospital had sexually abused them, an announcement from victims’ lawyers said. It paid about $3 million this year to settle claims by three inmates after a federal prison guard was convicted of committing sexual abuse, according to the law firm representing the plaintiffs.