What Does Justice Look Like In a Notorious #MeToo Case?

In April 2025, a Long Island judge awarded over a billion-and-a-half dollars in damages to 107 women who testified in their civil suit that, as children and teenagers, they had been sexually molested by their former pediatrician, Stuart Copperman.

Copperman never responded to the 107 individual complaints so that the judgements against him were made by default. He did not appear in court, as he would have had to do in a criminal case. In fact, Copperman was never charged with a crime. Why so is a mystery that the New York Times investigated in 2019, but failed to crack.

The women had sued Copperman in 2021 under New York State’s Child Victims Act. Now known as the Adult Survivors Act, this law was enacted in 2019 in the wake of the #MeToo movement, and extended the age up to which survivors could sue, raising it from 23 to 55, along with a “look-back” window.

These extensions provided those who identified as survivors of Copperman’s abuse—who up to then had no legal recourse— a way to pursue justice.

But since the case first came to the public’s attention in late 2000, when New York stripped him of his medical license, Copperman has had years that would give him time to transfer or hide his assets, so it’s doubtful that the women will ever collect on the awards. What justice is possible in a system that routinely fails to protect the vulnerable? The Copperman case is yet another example of how the legal system routinely fails women seeking justice or closure in these cases. And as if that weren’t bad enough, the Trumpian zeitgeist continues to fuel the backlash against the #MeToo movement, even as survivors keep speaking out.

I have been writing about Copperman since 2000. That year, a 15-year-long investigation of his behavior in his medical practice culminated in a hearing where six victims, who didn’t know each other, gave remarkably similar testimony about their experiences as children. (Some had been as young as six years old).

Copperman, after having asked the girls’ mothers to leave the examining room, would masturbate them, under the guise of giving their genitals a “cleaning.” When the story hit the media, scores more women came forward to say that they, too, had been similarly abused by Copperman. He not only maintained his innocence, but immediately sued, unsuccessfully, to have his medical license reinstated. By then 65 years old, he retired, dividing his time between his homes, on Long Island and in Boca Raton, Florida, with his wife, Renee.

Sometimes, survivors told me in interviews, one of their three children would post on Facebook photos of family gatherings that included their father. Seeing images of a tanned, smiling Stuart Copperman on a pleasure boat in Florida with his wife, children and grandchildren, was enraging, many of Copperman’s former patients said.

Many of these female patients—now grown women—began to find one other on social media in 2018, as the #Metoo movement was going viral. Some of them had told their families about the abuse while they were Copperman’s young patients, but had not been believed. The number of the child patients who had been molested might reach up to a thousand, according to an estimate provided to Lilith by the survivors and by the lawyers who represented them pro bono in the recent civil case. Given that Copperman practiced pediatrics for 40 years out of his home office on Long Island, this estimate seems plausible.

Known for his diagnostic skills and devotion to his patients, Copperman was considered a pillar of his community in Merrick, on the South Shore of Long Island.

Perhaps sensing which mothers were vulnerable to his charms, he would take them aside when their daughters were approaching adolescence, according to media reports and court documents. He then told them that from then on he would ask them to leave the room when he examined their daughters. Without their mothers’ presence, their girls could more freely discuss with him, in his words, “teenaged stuff—boys, drugs, smoking,” all this according to Jeanna Limmer-Salgado, now 55.

In 1985, Limmer-Salgado was the first survivor to come forward. That was two years after Copperman first began to molest her, at age 13, she later testified “He looked at my vagina and said I had a fungus, that he needed to clean it,” she told the court in January 2025. Copperman had warned her not to tell her mother. She’ll be angry, he told Salgado, because you’re not cleaning yourself. Limmer, in her words “embarrassed and ashamed,” testified that she kept the molestation a secret for two years before finally telling her mother.

But Jenna’s mother, Elaine Limmer, a nurse, was a parent who believed her child. She immediately went to the police. When no charges resulted, she filed a malpractice complaint with the New York State Office of Medical Conduct. The state began an investigation; two years later, in 1987, Jenna Limmer-Salgado testified before a board consisting of two doctors and a minister. The minister believed her testimony, but not the two doctors. Copperman continued to practice, during the hearings and for 13 more years, until the state finally revoked his medical license.

Copperman was my sons’ pediatrician for three years in the mid-1980s, exactly when New York State was pursuing its first investigation of him. But I had no way of knowing this, because at that time, the Office of Medical Conduct did not make such investigations public. (I left his practice after he put his hand on my rear end while he was writing a prescription for my three-year old.) I know firsthand that Copperman was also an active member of—and generous donor to—his synagogue, Temple Beth Am in Merrick. His stature in the community was such that, when the pediatrician’s medical license was revoked in December of 2000, the rabbi, Ronald Brown, wrote a letter to the local newspaper in his support. This angered some congregants, I learned while reporting the story about Copperman for the New York Times. But the rabbi retained his pulpit until he retired, in 2017.

What would teshuva (repentance, or making amends) mean for someone like Copperman? Literally, the word means “return,” as in return to God. But before we Jews can return, we must ask forgiveness, not only of God but also of those we have wronged. In fact, he would have to ask forgiveness not just from all his victims, but from his wife and his children, too. Ever since the Copperman story first broke, in 2000, they have stood by their patriarch. Clinical social worker Shari Botwin, who served as an expert witness in the recent Copperman hearings, told me that she sees this behavior pattern “all the time” in her practice, in families where there is an abusive family member; the clinical term is “trauma abuse.”

“The family can’t accept that someone they love and look up to could commit such atrocious acts,” she said.

“He could have been a loving father and husband. But when he, in his role as pediatrician, shut the door to his examining room, he felt most entitled to act on his predatory urges. I think that’s why his family protected him,” she explained. And what of the survivors? Do the monetary damages awarded, even if they can never be collected, help them feel whole again? Of six victims I most recently spoke with, five told me that what they had needed most was to face him in court. “I want him to say, ‘I confess that I did what these women said. And I apologize’,” said one who, like most of the witnesses, testified using the name Jane Doe. Though denied the opportunity to receive a direct apology and admission of wrongdoing from their abuser, some acknowledged the importance of having their own voices finally heard. Forty years after Limmer-Salgado testified to the New York State Office of Medical Conduct, she feels vindicated. “Kristin Feden, our wonderful lawyer, believed me. The judge, Leonard Steinman, believed me,” Limmer-Salgado told me. When I asked her if she thought justice had been served, she said: “In some ways.” Then she added: “Speaking out helps me. It helps me take back the power Copperman took away from me.” Other witnesses in the recent case have told me, and social worker Shari Botwin as well, how crucial it had been for them to tell their stories, out loud and on the record.

In 2018 they reached out to every journalist they could think of, myself included, to get the story reignited. One of the women—like many of Copperman’s former patients, an alumna of the high school in Merrick, where he lived and practiced— posted about him on the high school alumni Facebook page. They sent fliers to his neighbors in New York and Florida, warning them a pedophile was living among them. Some of the women also say they called the respective managing agents of the condo developments where he lived, only to be told that since Copperman wasn’t a registered sex offender, there was nothing the management could do.

Then, in 2023, one month after the most recent hearings began, Copperman’s Florida golf club, Boca West, posted on its Facebook page a picture of him and his wife at the annual Valentine’s Day dinner. This time, after some of his survivors called to complain, Boca West took down the photo. A year later, as the court-awarded damages against Copperman passed the one billion dollar mark, property records show that he and his wife sold their condo at Boca West and downgraded to the more modest congregate housing known as Century Village. I reached out to Boca West to ask if the golf club had rescinded Copperman’s membership, but got no response.

Nor is there any mention of him in Boca West’s minutes, posted publicly on the club’s website. The rabbi who had supported Copperman after his medical license was revoked declined to comment for this article. I had wanted to ask him if, in light of the monetary damages rendered recently against his former congregant, he thought justice had been served. “Tzedek, tzedek, tirdof l’maan tichyeh,” it says in Deuteronomy 16.20. You are to pursue justice, in order that you may live. I take this to mean that justice is a matter of life and death. That if a victim is denied justice, she must pursue it nonetheless.

As Lynn Seigerman, one of the survivors, told me: “We needed justice however we could get it. We wanted to imprison him in whatever way we could. If not through the justice system, he’d have to hide away in his condo and not play golf and not go to the Valentine’s Day dinner with his wife, and have his neighbors shun him.” The only means with which these women could pursue justice was by using their voices. So they kept shouting, mostly through social media, and they have finally been heard. It’s not enough, but it’s something.

Alice Sparberg Alexiou is a journalist and author. She is currently at work on her fourth book, about her ancestor in Jerusalem who ran off with the Ottoman governor.