When GOP congressman Scott DesJarlais (TN) was a doctor, he had sexual relationships with his patients. Despite being a “pro-life” advocate, he pressured women in his life to have abortions, including his ex-wife, who had two abortions while they were together.
Somehow, with the country currently much more aware of sexual abuse issues, DesJarlais has avoided public scrutiny. And he doesn’t dispute the claims either. The 53-year-old congressman said he paid the fine against him levied by the Tennessee Board of Medical Examiners in 2013 for his sexual misconduct with patients.
When the Daily Mail tried reaching out to the two patients the congressman had affairs with 20 years ago, neither wanted to comment.
“This happened nearly 20 years in the past,” said one of the patients, who was just 24 when they had their affair in 2000. “That’s where it needs to stay.”
But the court documents obtained by the Daily Mail show just how manipulative and unethical he was was. To the first patient, only slightly older, he prescribed the now-banned painkiller Darvocet. DesJarlais also brought her to Las Vegas and bought her an $875 watch.
The younger patient got something else from him—an abortion. “She said that I had her pregnant,’ DesJarlais said in evidence. ‘I never really believed it.” However, he still offered to take the young woman, who he called “a psycho” to Atlanta for an abortion.
His first wife, Susan Lohr, a Gulf War veteran, who he said he “supported” in her decision to have two abortions. The first one was while she was on an experimental hormone drug and “was not supposed to get pregnant,’ he testified. ‘There were potential risks.”
The second was “after she had gotten back from Desert Storm and things were not going well between us, and it was a mutual decision,” DesJarlais added.
‘I don’t think it was easy for either one of us,’ he said in court. “I think it was a very difficult and poor choice and I think that there are probably regrets both ways.”
However, now the remarried DesJarlais proclaims that he is ‘pro-life and proud of it’, and says ‘God has forgiven me.’