The woman, 52, lay on the exam table at a clinic in Richland, Washington. Her legs were parted and propped up.

The OB-GYN, Dr. Mark Mulholland, stood between her legs, inquiring about the woman’s sex life as he had in prior visits, she wrote in a complaint filed with Washington state health care regulators.

She said Mulholland had previously asked about her enjoyment of sex and if she had a boyfriend, a strange way to learn about a patient’s sexual activity, she thought. But this was her last checkup after her hysterectomy and the last time she expected to see Mulholland.

“Do you masturbate?” Mulholland asked the woman during their final appointment, according to her complaint.

The question shocked her. She wrote that Mulholland explained he wanted to “make sure the nerves were intact.”

Then, the woman wrote, he inserted his fingers into her vagina and pumped his hand back and forth in a way she said felt “sexual and not medical.”

“Does that hurt?” the woman said Mulholland asked her, before ending their visit by saying “the playroom is open” — a comment she interpreted as Mulholland clearing her for sexual activity.

The woman said she left the room in shock. She made her way to the parking lot of the Kadlec Clinic-Associated Physicians for Women, climbed inside her car and sat, incredulous, she said in an interview with KUOW and ProPublica. What happened felt terribly wrong, she said.

Mulholland did not respond to requests for comment for this article after being sent a detailed list of findings by email and by letter. His attorney declined to comment.

What the woman didn’t know was that by the time of her exam in February 2025, the Washington Medical Commission had already received complaints from four other women since 2022 accusing Mulholland of sexual misconduct. And yet he was allowed to keep seeing patients throughout.

The accounts related by the women, whom KUOW and ProPublica are not naming to protect their privacy, included descriptions of Mulholland touching them unnecessarily, using sexually charged language, or performing painful or seemingly sexual pelvic exams that involved moving his fingers in and out.

The commission also gathered testimony a year before the woman’s February 2025 appointment from three of Mulholland’s colleagues with their own troubling accounts. These included hearing firsthand about or observing him telling patients they had “tight” and “pretty” vaginas, touching and slapping his patients’ legs, and aggressively pulling a patient’s pants down without permission. 

Washington law allows the commission to take emergency action and suspend a doctor’s license while disciplinary proceedings are pending. The law says a suspension is defensible if it’s more probable than not that the physician poses an “immediate threat to the public health and safety.”

In Mulholland’s case, the commission did not choose suspension. Instead, it issued a formal statement of charges accusing Mulholland of abuse and unprofessional conduct in April 2025 — more than a year after the commission’s investigator submitted her reports on two of the complaints for review and 11 months after Mulholland was offered an informal settlement that he apparently did not sign.

Even after the commission declared its charges against Mulholland, he was allowed to keep practicing while the case proceeded. He saw patients as late as May, before he went on leave.

At least 84 patients have filed lawsuits against Mulholland or his employer since the state’s investigation became public. Court filings by Mulholland’s attorney, made in response to the lawsuits, have denied wrongdoing or improper conduct toward women. He also has denied the allegations made by the medical commission and is entitled to a hearing to contest them.

Emily Volland, a spokesperson for Kadlec and its affiliate, the Providence health system, said Mulholland is no longer employed by Kadlec. Volland declined to comment on the allegations against him but said via email: “We take our patient’s safety very seriously and are fully cooperating with the state in this matter.”

The lawsuits against Mulholland, Kadlec and Providence are ongoing. Lawyers for Providence and Kadlec in court filings denied allegations of negligence and wrongdoing.

While other news coverage has described the lawsuits and the commission’s actions in 2025, none has focused on how the state dealt with complaints against Mulholland during the three years before he agreed to restrictions on his license.

Washington state has faced criticism in the past for its handling of sexual misconduct complaints. A 2021 Seattle Times investigation found that in 282 cases of alleged sexual misconduct since 2009, state regulators took more than a year to impose discipline.

Several other states in recent years have dealt with their own high-profile cases of sexual misconduct involving OB-GYNs. On March 10, for instance, Columbia University in New York released a report detailing how a culture of silence at the institution had allowed OB-GYN Robert Hadden to abuse more than 1,000 patients over decades. 

States like Ohio and Delaware have moved aggressively to make it easier to keep doctors accused of sexual misconduct away from patients.

In Washington, the medical commission wasn’t the only organization that allowed Mulholland to keep practicing.

A Kadlec risk management employee, through an attorney, acknowledged to the commission that the clinic had received patient complaints against the doctor and said they were investigated. (The letter did not describe the complaints but said they included “communication with patients regarding obesity.”) Mulholland’s privileges were never restricted or terminated, the statement said.

When local news stories covered the commission’s charges against Mulholland in June, it unleashed a deluge of 18 new complaints in the following three months.

In September, the commission placed restrictions on his license that prevented him from seeing female patients. Mulholland agreed pending a hearing on his case.

“They just let him keep practicing.”

A former patient of Dr. Mark Mulholland’s

Yanling Yu, a former Washington medical commissioner and a patient advocate with Washington Advocates for Patient Safety, wouldn’t comment on the Mulholland case directly. But she said it’s ethically wrong to allow a doctor facing serious allegations of sexual misconduct to continue seeing any patients while an investigation is ongoing.

“In an ideal regulatory system, if there has been enough or strong evidence to support the allegation, the doctor’s practice should be temporarily suspended or at least summarily restricted to protect patients’ safety,” she wrote in an email.

Kyle Karinen, executive director of the Washington Medical Commission, said the agency wasn’t slow to act and that it must operate under the system lawmakers created.

“I acknowledge that sometimes it takes longer than people would like, but we take that process really seriously,” Karinen said. “When we file a case and go to a hearing, we want to make sure that everybody has the opportunity to be heard on a particular topic.”

The woman who saw Mulholland in February 2025 filed a lawsuit against the clinic and a board complaint against the doctor, both in August. She said she was indignant after learning about the earlier complaints.

She said the commission should have taken those women more seriously. “They just let him keep practicing,” she said.

2022: The First Complaint 

The first sexual misconduct allegation against Mulholland landed in the commission’s email inbox in January 2022. The author was a first-time mother who, at 41 weeks pregnant, went to have labor induced at the Kadlec Regional Medical Center.

The woman said she had hoped a female doctor would deliver the baby. But Mulholland was the on-call doctor assigned the day she arrived. When she saw that the doctor was a man, she asked if the female nurse who was there could perform her predelivery cervical check instead, according to her complaint.

Mulholland insisted, she said. (He later told a commission investigator that because the woman was having labor induced, he had to personally know her cervical dilation and consistency, whether the fetus was in breech position or if her amniotic sac was intact. He also said because she was experiencing high blood pressure, her delivery couldn’t wait to be rescheduled with a female doctor.)

“I didn’t have a choice but to trust who was supposed to be trustworthy,” the woman said in an interview with KUOW and ProPublica.

In her complaint, she said Mulholland was inappropriate. When the nurse asked her if she still had her underwear on, Mulholland joked that he still had his on too, she wrote.

During the cervical check, with his fingers inside the expectant mother, he pressed in different directions, according to her complaint. The woman said Mulholland told her he doesn’t perform exams this way because it hurts. Then he showed her what he described as the correct way, she said in the complaint.

“The cervical check was the longest and most painful one I have ever had,” she said in the complaint.

“I didn’t have a choice but to trust who was supposed to be trustworthy.”

A former patient of Mulholland’s

Three OB-GYNs, when presented by KUOW and ProPublica with the woman’s description of the pelvic exam, said the maneuver sounded unnecessarily painful.

“That sounds strange,” said Alson Burke, an associate professor at the University of Washington who teaches medical students how to perform pelvic exams. “Saying ‘I don’t do something because it hurts’ and then doing it doesn’t make sense to me.”

Commission records show that Mulholland said the allegation that his cervical exam was longer than what’s typical was absurd.

“I do try to be as careful, quick, gentle, and efficient as I can be when doing a pelvic exam whether it is for gynecology or obstetrics,” he wrote in an email to a commission clinical health care investigator. “With regards to being the most painful one she ever had, for that I am surprised as well as sorry. I pride myself on trying to be as gentle as absolutely possible. I get frequent compliments on how much less uncomfortable my exams are than most other providers, male or female.”

The nurse present during the woman’s exam told the commission it seemed “no longer or any more painful than these types of exams are typically.”

Up until that day, the patient’s pregnancy had been a joyous experience, she said in an interview with KUOW and ProPublica. She was excited to meet her daughter and picked out the outfit she’d arrive home in.

The nurse was ultimately able to line up a midwife to assist with the woman’s delivery in place of Mulholland.

But her cervical exam with Mulholland made the birth experience “worse than we could have ever imagined,” the woman, now 27, said in an interview with KUOW and ProPublica. It brought about depression and anxiety, she said.

“My daughter’s an only child, and I’m not sure if she ever will get a sibling because of how traumatic that was,” she told the news organizations.

By the end of July 2022, the new mother’s case was closed without any disciplinary action.

At the time, it was an isolated complaint in the record of a doctor who, records show, had not faced accusations of sexual misconduct with the medical commission before.

Then, a little over a year later, came another complaint, this time filed by a woman who had worked with Mulholland for nearly a decade.

October 2023: A Co-worker and Patient Speaks Out

According to an investigator’s report, the woman said she had worked at Kadlec Regional Medical Center for nine years and her interactions as Mulholland’s colleague had always been professional.

The complaint she filed in October 2023 concerned events she said took place when she was Mulholland’s patient. She’d had her fallopian tubes and the tissue lining her uterus removed and developed pain that was only present when she was menstruating.

On the day of her appointment, her complaint said, she’d explained all this to Mulholland when he began a line of questioning.

“Does it hurt you to have intercourse?”

“No,” she replied.

Then, the woman wrote in her complaint to the medical commission, Mulholland stood close to her and in a lower tone asked. “Not even when he’s deep inside you?”

“No,” she said she asserted.

Mulholland told the woman he needed to do a pelvic exam, according to the complaint.

While examining her, the woman wrote, Mulholland used one hand to push down on the top of her abdomen and with the other hand began repeatedly and “powerfully” thrusting his fingers into her vagina.

Burke, the associate professor of medicine at the University of Washington, said repeated “thrusting” is neither a technique she uses nor something she has ever observed.

“The reason I wouldn’t recommend it is because it could be triggering and really uncomfortable for someone,” Burke said. “Is that actually helping you gather the information? And is the patient feeling safe in the way that you are examining them?”

She said that no part of the pelvic exam should be performed in such a way that its intent could be perceived as sexual.

According to the former colleague’s complaint, each time Mulholland shoved his fingers inside, he leaned in close and asked, “Is this the same as the pain you felt?”

The woman wrote that Mulholland was “effectively holding her in place” on the exam table and she was unable to move to escape the pain. A medical assistant was nearby, she said.

After the pelvic exam, she said, the assistant left. Mulholland told the woman that she had a “great looking vagina,” she wrote, and that he usually had to use three fingers, but with her, he could only use two. Before leaving, the woman said in her complaint, the doctor asked her if she worked out and said he could tell she did.

Through an attorney, Mulholland later told the commission that he conducts all of his exams “as respectfully as possible” and that he is “very cognizant of his patient’s reactions.”

The doctor was responding to a commission investigator’s December 2023 request for his version of what happened during the woman’s visit.

That same month, a complaint from a third woman arrived.

December 2023: Another Exam Complaint

It was three weeks before the new year when the woman went to the medical commission for help.

The patient, whose primary language is Spanish, had an interpreter join her in-person appointment virtually. A physician’s assistant had referred the woman to Mulholland to discuss a possible hysterectomy to relieve pain.

The woman later told a commission investigator that during her appointment, Mulholland entered the exam room and introduced himself. Then he lifted the paper sheet that covered her naked lower half, looked at her genital area, then looked back at her, which made her uncomfortable. Without asking her to reposition herself, he grabbed her by the butt to move her down the exam table, she said.

Mulholland’s pelvic exam was aggressive, she said in her written complaint to the commission. The investigator who interviewed her wrote that the woman said he’d moved his fingers in and out and that she felt a lot of pressure.

“I yelled at some point,” she wrote in her complaint.

A nurse was present but seemed fixated on the computer screen, the woman said.

Before the appointment ended, Mulholland said he was “eager to see” the woman’s vagina again, laughed and then said he was looking forward to reuniting with her womb, the investigator quoted the woman as saying. When the Spanish-language interpreter on the computer screen went quiet and asked Mulholland to repeat what he said, the woman wrote in her complaint, the doctor told the interpreter there was no need to relay that last message.

The woman was left in pain for 12 days after her appointment with Mulholland, she told the investigator, adding that she didn’t want others to go through what she had.

In response to this complaint, Mulholland’s attorney wrote to the commission, “at no time has he ever simply moved his fingers in and out several times with this patient or any other.”

(A separate report the woman filed with the Richland Police Department, which the department classified as a potential sex offense with “forcible fondling,” was closed in 14 days. The responding officer wrote that he hadn’t found facts to indicate a crime was committed “on the basis that the alleged incident occurred during a medical examination.”)

The state medical commission pressed ahead with its investigations into the two 2023 complaints, both of which asserted Mulholland had moved his fingers in and out during a pelvic exam.

The investigator assigned to both cases turned to Mulholland’s current and former colleagues. Two said that while some patients complained about the way Mulholland communicated with them about weight issues, they personally did not have concerns. Three other current or former colleagues, meanwhile, described problems.

“The cervical check was the longest and most painful one I have ever had.”

A former patient of Mulholland’s

Alexis Tuck, an OB-GYN who worked at Kadlec from 2017 to 2022, said in a statement to the commission that she noticed a pattern of Mulholland’s patients switching providers because they wanted anyone “except Dr. Mulholland,” and sometimes requested her.

She said that when she asked these patients about the reason behind their switch they replied:

“He grabbed my belly fat and shook it in front of my husband.”

“He called me fat and made fun of me.”

“He told me my vagina is tight during a pelvic exam.”

“He told me I have a pretty vagina during a pap smear.”

“He made a comment about my vagina being tight and I talked to my mom about him. Apparently she had a similar weird experience with him.”

Tuck told the commission that more than once, patients cried in her office while sharing their stories.

“These accounts were consistent in their tone and content, painting a troubling picture of a physician whose behavior repeatedly crossed the line of professional and ethical conduct,” she wrote to the commission.

Tuck told the commission that the woman who filed the October 2023 complaint was among those who described their experiences to her. Tuck said the woman was “visibly shaken and emotional” when she detailed what happened, which, based on Tuck’s retelling, was generally consistent with the woman’s complaint to the medical commission.

Another colleague told the commission that Mulholland once told her as a patient was leaving the office, “I bet you were skinny like her when you were pregnant,” and that another time he said he thought he’d seen her driving a BMW and that she looked “hot.” Another said she found Mulholland’s comments about overweight women disrespectful.

The claims against Mulholland were piling up.

In February and March 2024, Britta Fischer, commission investigator, submitted the 2023 cases for review.

What to do next was soon in the hands of commissioners.

March-September 2024: A Decision Awaits 

The medical commission takes its guidance on how to handle allegations against a doctor from Washington statutes, which prohibit physicians from engaging in a range of behavior defined as sexual misconduct.

The law bans statements about a patient’s “body, appearance, sexual history, or sexual orientation” except for legitimate purposes of care. The law also bars behavior, gestures or expressions that could “reasonably be interpreted as seductive or sexual.”

A doctor can’t remove a patient’s gown or draping unless it’s with a patient’s consent, during emergency care or in a custodial setting.

A doctor can’t touch a person’s breasts, genitals, anus or other “sexualized body part” unless it’s “consistent with accepted community standards of practice for examination, diagnosis and treatment and within the health care practitioner’s scope of practice.”

Determining whether or not behavior is appropriate can be particularly difficult when it comes to OB-GYNs, said Emily Anderson, professor at Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics and Healthcare Leadership and Loyola University Chicago’s Stritch School of Medicine.

“They have access to our naked bodies as women, to our vaginas, to our breasts,” Anderson said. “They are allowed to do things that we don’t give other people permission to do, and that’s part of their job.”

There are standards for physical exams. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ Committee on Ethics wrote that exams should be explained appropriately, done only with patient consent and “performed with the minimum amount of physical contact required to obtain data for diagnosis and treatment.”

State medical boards can also look to patterns of behavior.

Two of the three complaints against Mulholland from 2022 through 2023 mentioned movement in and out during pelvic exams, while all three described painful pelvic exams and comments the women considered inappropriate. Three colleagues also had described hearing about or witnessing him making disrespectful or inappropriate remarks, including one who said they were directed at her.

OB-GYNs “have access to our naked bodies as women.”

Emily Anderson, professor at Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics and Healthcare Leadership and Loyola University Chicago’s Stritch School of Medicine

Anderson, in a journal article, wrote that it’s common to find repeated, lesser forms of misconduct in the backgrounds of doctors who act egregiously.

“For example, sexual violations are nearly always preceded by boundary violations such as inappropriate comments or touching,” the article said.

Anderson and her colleagues recommended state regulators consider restricting a doctor’s license for multiple smaller offenses.

Stephanie Loucka, executive director of Ohio’s medical board, said that if patterns of misconduct exist, the process will find them — even when an OB-GYN’s actions occur under the guise of legitimate care. Ohio began its overhaul of sexual misconduct investigations seven years ago.

“If a complaint gets made, we’re going to work the fact pattern from the assumption that there might be something there, and we’re going to gather the evidence and see where the evidence takes us,” she said. “And it typically takes us clearly one way or the other.”

If there’s a threat of immediate harm in cases of sexual misconduct, Loucka said, Ohio moves “with a sense of urgency” to file an emergency suspension. She estimated it has taken the Ohio board from six weeks to nine months to do so.

In Washington, the medical commission reviewed the investigator’s reports on  the 2023 cases and decided on what it considered an appropriate resolution.

It proposed an “informal way of settling” allegations against Mulholland.

A heavily redacted May 31, 2024, letter sent to Mulholland’s attorney by the commission does not reveal the terms of the settlement. But the letter said the settlement would not require an admission of “any unprofessional conduct or wrongdoing.” Although settlements appear in the commission’s newsletter with brief summaries, the letter told Mulholland that a settlement would avoid a hearing, typically a public process.

All Mulholland had to do was sign.

Months passed. Mulholland’s attorney asked for the information gathered about his client, and the commission sent it. A June 2024 deadline for him to accept the agreement passed, as did a subsequent one in August. Nothing in documents released by the commission indicates he signed — or that the commission took any disciplinary action.

Mulholland kept seeing patients.

2018-2023: What the Hospital Knew

Long before the commission’s investigator filed her report with her superiors, Mulholland’s employer had also heard repeated concerns, according to Kadlec Clinic records acquired by attorneys in a lawsuit against Providence and the clinic. The attorneys submitted the documents as an exhibit in court.

(In court filings, Providence and Kadlec denied that they were negligent or that they knew or should have known about the abuse the plaintiffs alleged.)

Kadlec’s records in the lawsuit show that the clinic conducted a 2018 human resources investigation into allegations that Mulholland had mocked a co-worker’s sexuality and religion, concluding that it was “more likely than not” the allegations were true. Afterward, the records say, Mulholland’s employer provided him “coaching.”

Kadlec’s records also say that the clinic conducted a 2019 workplace investigation into allegations that Mulholland made sex jokes and condescending remarks, displayed discrimination toward women, and challenged a co-worker who complained about him.

A labor nurse told a Providence investigator that year that Mulholland had pinched a patient’s labia while she was in labor and asked if she was hurting. A colleague told the nurse that Mulholland had done the same to another patient who was giving birth, according to the labor nurse’s account as written down by the investigator.

A different colleague reported to a Kadlec workplace investigator that a patient had disclosed that Mulholland told her to “masturbate more often,” Kadlec records say.

Separately, Tuck, the OB-GYN who worked alongside Mulholland, told a Kadlec investigator that a patient disclosed she felt Mulholland had assaulted her but that the woman didn’t report it because she felt no one would believe her.

Following the 2019 workplace investigation, Kadlec’s records say, Mulholland’s employer concluded in 2020 that he “engaged in multiple instances of inappropriate behavior” that violated the medical center’s expectations. He was placed on a “behavior agreement” and required to take harassment prevention training.

In 2022, Kadlec records show, more emails were sent to clinic leadership alleging that Mulholland was demeaning to patients and co-workers. They described a “toxic work environment” and said management failed to address employees’ concerns about the doctor.

Tuck departed the clinic sometime that same year. She later told the medical commission she left because management failed to take action against him.

Tuck raised concerns about Mulholland within an email to Chief Medical Officer Rich Meadows in July 2022, writing that patients “felt they had been insulted/assaulted” by Mulholland.

Kadlec’s records in the lawsuit show that Tuck had also told a Kadlec workplace investigator in 2019 that the clinic manager, Lisa Mallory, protected Mulholland. In the statement she later gave the state medical commission, Tuck said when she brought concerns about Mulholland to Mallory, she responded, “He’s always been like that.”

Mallory, in response to a request for comment from KUOW and ProPublica, said this statement was taken out of context. She declined to say more. Meadows, through a Providence spokesperson, declined to comment.

In June 2023, clinic records in the lawsuit say, Kadlec took a phone call from a patient who said Mulholland shoved his two fingers inside of her so hard during a pelvic exam that she felt his knuckles slam up against her vagina and anus.

“Rough, jabbing and pushing up, like he was trying to arouse me or something,” according to Kadlec’s narrative describing the woman’s complaint.

She told Kadlec that she had alerted Mulholland before the exam that her vagina was prone to tearing and that she experienced vaginal pain with as little as a sneeze or a cough.

Kadlec’s summary of the woman’s account said that after a rectal exam, Mulholland told the patient: “Well, you took that surprisingly well. It’s a good thing my fingers are small.”

The woman said her body where Mulholland touched her was inflamed for two and a half days.

When the commission eventually contacted Mallory as part of the state’s own investigation, the clinic manager acknowledged there had been complaints within Kadlec. She did not seem to give them much credence.

“Dr. Mulholland has received his fair share of complaints over the years as have all the other providers here” at the Kadlec clinic, she wrote in a statement to the state board. “From what I have observed, he cares deeply for his patients and has spent his career trying to educate women on their health. They have not always appreciated how he has done that.”

September 2024: State’s Investigation Resumes

By September 2024, more than two years had elapsed since the state received its first complaint about a pelvic exam performed by Mulholland. Six months had passed since an investigator forwarded her report on two other pelvic exam complaints. That month, the commission learned of a new one.

“During examination, he said my vagina was very dry and that my husband wasn’t doing his job,” the woman wrote in her complaint.

The woman also described her interaction with Mulholland to a commission investigator. At the appointment, the woman had told a medical assistant that she was concerned about a fishy smell, she said. Upon entering the exam room, she told the investigator, Mulholland said loudly, “Hey, I heard you had a vagina that smells like fish.”

When he conducted his physical examination, the woman told the investigator, Mulholland penetrated her with his fingers and was “going in and out” and touching her clitoris.

The patient said she asked Mulholland to stop more than once. She was uncomfortable and what Mulholland was doing reminded her of her past sexual abuse, she wrote in her complaint. She said he eventually stopped.

Next, according to an investigator’s memo outlining the patient’s interview, Mulholland asked her if she masturbated and if she used sex toys or her fingers to do so. When the patient said she did not, Mulholland encouraged her to purchase some toys and to use them alone, she said. Then, according to the memo describing the woman’s account, Mulholland rubbed her shoulder and said, “You’re too young not to have good sex.”

A mandatory reporter filed a complaint supplementing the woman’s filing at around the same time.

By that time, the woman’s account brought to four the number of women asserting sexual misconduct by Mulholland since 2022. Counting a woman who reported rude behavior in a submission that was not marked as alleging sexual misconduct and that the commission closed, Mulholland had been named in six complaints.

Only 11 licensed physicians and physician assistants were the subject of six or more complaints in that time frame, the commission’s spokesperson said. As of last year, 41,256 people held this type of license in Washington.

A week after the mandatory reporter contacted the commission, Kelly Elder, a Washington Medical Commission staff attorney, sent the two pending 2023 cases back to Freda Pace, the commission’s director of investigations.

Elder asked Pace to have investigators try and reach people whose statements hadn’t been collected before.

Medical commission records show that investigator Britta Fischer also began looking into the new allegation.

Fischer’s inquiries produced statements from co-workers attesting to Mulholland’s good character and stating that they were unaware of any concerns raised by patients.

Mulholland himself, in a statement his attorney gave to the commission, said he didn’t have a “firm recollection” of the appointment the patient described in her complaint. He said he would never tell a patient anything to the effect that her husband was not doing his job. He said he addresses masturbation with patients who complain of sexual dryness or pain during sex, and he denied stroking the patient’s shoulder in a “suggestive way.”

Due to “unjustified allegations,” the statement said, Mulholland had changed the way he worked with patients. The statement said these changes included always trying to have a chaperone present instead of just during physical exams. He also started creating more physical distance from the patient during counseling and exploring “tangential issues, such as sexual health and wellbeing” only when a patient brought them up.

“Dr. Mulholland is truly sorry if his previous long-standing practice patterns have caused any patient any type of duress or anguish because of misinterpretation of what Dr. Mulholland was attempting to accomplish — excellent patient care,” the statement sent to the commission said.

Still, the commission also had the prior, adverse statements from colleagues and patients. In April 2025, the agency formally accused Mulholland of abuse and unprofessional conduct. (The allegations would later be amended to include sexual misconduct.)

Neither the medical commission nor the Washington State Department of Health, which oversees it, posted a news release on their websites. Members of the general public could have learned of the charges — if they knew to search for Mulholland’s name on the Health Department’s “provider credential search” page. Stephanie Mason, spokesperson for the commission, said the statement of charges would also go out to anyone who subscribed to quarterly email updates from the commission.

It wasn’t until a June Tri-City Herald story that the commission’s claims seemed to become widely known.

The outpouring of new patient complaints that followed echoed what the commission had already heard.

“Nobody was listening to me, and I did everything that I should have done.”

Torryn Kerley, a former patient who sued Mulholland. Kerley asked to be identified by name for this article.

Their accounts included allegations that Mulholland had peeked at their pubic hair under the sheet, physically pulled them down the exam table, used sexual language and performed extremely painful vaginal exams.

Two of the women who have filed lawsuits against Mulholland or his employers told KUOW and ProPublica they attended appointments with him after the commission had received multiple complaints and before he agreed to restrictions on his license.

One said she was angry she hadn’t heard about allegations against Mulholland sooner. After a hysterectomy, she was directed to see him every four months for a year for pap smears.

She saw Mulholland for the last time on May 1, 2025 — two days after the commission filed its allegations against him. She learned about the commission’s case after the media coverage began.

“I don’t know if I expected the lady at the counter when you’re checking in to warn you and say, ‘Hey, you’re gonna see Mulholland, and he’s had complaints,’” she said in an interview with KUOW and ProPublica. “I don’t see a company or whatever ever doing that, but it would have been nice to know. I would have picked a different doctor.”

Another woman who sued, Torryn Kerley, said she was angry at Kadlec to learn of all the women coming forward in lawsuits after she had already complained to the clinic about Mulholland.

“Nobody was listening to me, and I did everything that I should have done,” said Kerley, who asked to be identified by name for this article. “I reported it. I told people about it. I told doctors in the office about it.”

Karinen, the medical commission director, said it’s very unusual for the commission to file a statement of charges and then get dozens of complaints in the same vein against that same doctor, as happened with Mulholland.

“That’s unheard of,” he said.

Mason, the commission spokesperson, cast the arrival of the new complaints as a positive outcome of the action that commissioners took against Mulholland.

“That’s what opened the door to these women coming forward, because at that point, really not very many people had said anything at all, by comparison,” Mason said.

No date has been set yet for a hearing in which Mulholland can challenge the commission’s allegations against him.