At 19 years old and about to be married, Stephanie Mateer went to an OB-GYN within walking distance of her student housing near Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.
She wanted to start using birth control, and she was looking for guidance about having sex for the first time on her 2008 wedding night.
Mateer was shocked, she said, when Dr. David Broadbent reached under her gown to grab and squeeze her breasts, started a vaginal exam without warning, then followed it with an extremely painful examination of her rectum.
She felt disgusted and violated, but doubt also creeped in. She told herself she must have misinterpreted his actions, or that she should have known that he would do a rectal exam. Raised as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she said she was taught to defer to men in leadership.
“I viewed him as being a man in authority,” Mateer said. “He’s a doctor.”
It was years, Mateer said, before she learned that her experience was in a sharp contrast to the conduct called for in professional standards, including that doctors use only their fingertips during a breast exam and communicate clearly what they are doing in advance, to gain the consent of their patient. Eventually, she gave her experience another name: sexual assault.
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