Patients shared secrets, trusted doctor who allegedly videotaped them

For more than two decades, women came to see Johns Hopkins gynecologist Nikita Levy and trusted him with not only the most private parts of their bodies but also with their innermost secrets. Listening to problems with husbands and boyfriends, the joys and frustrations of motherhood, Levy was a caring confidant, said patients and co-workers.

On Tuesday, they were reeling from the news that their doctor had committed suicide after being accused of surreptitiously videotaping and photographing many of his patients. Police said they have removed nearly 10 image-filled computer hard drives from Levy’s home in Towson, Md.

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Police describe an “extraordinary” amount of evidence in the gynecologist’s Towson, Md., home.

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“Never in a thousand years would I have imagined such a thing,” said Deborah Doerfer, a certified nurse midwife who worked with Levy off and on for nearly 20 years. “He was in­cred­ibly compassionate. He was always there to take care of his patients. They expected him to be on call 24/7, and he was.”

Police would not speculate how many images the hard drives may contain, nor when Levy allegedly began recording them. Baltimore police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said police found multiple cameras in at least one examination room, although he would not describe how they were hidden.

“There are multiple multimedia videos and photographs on servers and hard drives,” Guglielmi said. “We just don’t know how many. We envision there are a lot. . . . We think the victim pool could be quite large.”

Levy, 54, a graduate of Cornell University Medical College, had worked at Johns Hopkins’s East Baltimore Medical Center since 1988, Johns Hopkins Medicine officials said. It is a community clinic that serves the largely low-income and African American surrounding neighborhood. Doerfer, who worked with Levy there for the past decade, said doctors were required to see about 25 patients a day.

“He had one of the biggest fan clubs in Baltimore, and he was always very, very busy,” Doerfer said. “People wanted to see him. He had an extensive patient population.”

And they all trusted him deeply, she said. “He saw some of the same patients for many, many years. They trusted him with their most intimate secrets. We hear it all. We were all their trusted confidants.”

Doerfer said that Levy had been married to a “lovely, sweet” woman for more than 20 years and that they had two college-age children. No one answered the phone at the Levys’ home, but a relative responded in an e-mail that “the family requests privacy during this very difficult time.”

Baltimore police said they plan on enlisting the help of federal authorities to plow through Levy’s hard drives, which were seized as a result of multiple search warrants. They cautioned that the investigation could be time-consuming and cumbersome, possibly requiring matching time stamps on videos to appointment logs. Detectives have reviewed only a handful of the videos and have not yet matched victims to images.

Some former patients expressed heartfelt sympathy for the family and remembered Levy warmly on social media sites. “You were the best doctor I ever had,” Jyllene Wilson wrote on the local Baltimore CBS affiliate’s Web site. “I remember when I lost the child you held my hand and cried with us.”