During the first moments of his 44-day long trial in Arizona in 2004, prominent OB/GYN Dr. Brian Finkel announced to anyone in the courtroom who could hear him, “I’ll be glad when this clown show is over.” It was “vintage Finkel,” reporter Paul Rubin would write for the Phoenix New Times, “always the wise guy, cocksure, always in control.” 

Over the years of his medical career, Finkel had acted as a go-to resource for local and national journalists. It was said that he had never met a television camera he didn’t like. But in that Arizona courtroom, his image as the media’s sweetheart and a friend to women was about to shatter. Countless former patients had stacked up allegations against him. He claimed that these accusations were fueled by false memories, and argued that his accusers were simply incapable of understanding proper medical procedures.

It was only five years earlier that media outlets had been publishing golden boy stories about Finkel, dubbing him “The Terminator” and promoting him as “a damn good doctor.” A profile published by the Phoenix New Times in 1999 painted Finkel as a controversial but charming eccentric who decorated his business with Elvis collectibles and statues of fertility goddesses - giving it a ‘pawn shop’ vibe. On the day the news outlet visited his building, Finkel was wearing a “blood-red dress shirt, tie and cufflinks, a beeper on one hip and a Colt .45 on the other.” He referred to himself as “the prince of the pelvis,” “the disciple of Elvis!” and “The uptight, out-of-sight, feeling-all-right Dr. Brian Leslie Finkel.” By the way he spoke to reporters, it’s clear he saw himself as untouchable – even when he was put in handcuffs. He never wavered – maintaining that he was innocent and that his accusers were victims only of poor memories and low intelligence.

Janet Creller was one of those alleged victims. 

“I said, ‘Something happened, something odd happened here.’ And she said, ‘You’re just waking up from a twilight sleep - it’s going to be ok. Let’s just get you out of here and get you home.’ And it was very ‘shuffle you out the door.’” 

Were Janet and his other accusers lying about Finkel? Were they “deliberately manipulative human beings,” a “mob… created by the media…The Victim’s Club” as Finkel’s defense attorney Richard Gierloff called them? Was Finkel simply a misunderstood doctor doing his job?  What could a man so confident of his innocence, so beloved by the media, have done to rouse an eventual 100 women into making accusations against him? Finkel was playing proverbial legal Russian Roulette–for these accusations, if proved true, could end his career and land him in prison for up to 75 years - the rest of his life. 

Podcast Intro:

You’re listening to Conceiving Crime, the podcast dedicated to Investigating crimes past and present involving sex, procreation, pregnancy, birth, and all things human reproduction. I’m your host, Sami Parker. See the full show notes & links to resources from this episode at ConceivingCrime.com.

Act I: A Doctor Women Could Trust

It was the early 2000s when Janet Creller was searching for a doctor with whom to schedule a discreet appointment. Finkel seemed to fit the bill. The glowing reports of his good reputation swayed her to schedule that appointment with him. As she lay on the exam table in Finkel’s office, she could feel herself slowly drifting out of consciousness. She trusted Finkel–who had come highly recommended–to care for her through this vulnerable experience. But as she slipped into a twilight sleep, she said she could hear herself demanding someone to ‘Stop,’ telling someone that what they were doing wasn’t right. But she was sedated, exposed, and totally helpless.

“I gave him too much power, you know. I looked at him with the degree that he had and the way that he presented and he was well-known and what I thought was apparently liked within the community and who was I?” 

Janet would remain silent about her experience in the immediate aftermath, only revealing the details years later.

It turns out that in their lionizing reports of Finkel, the media had played some red flags off as nothing more than typical or laughable behavior. 

Brian Finkel grew up in a reportedly dysfunctional home. His father was a doctor but both of his parents were alcoholics and abusive, he claimed. He left home at age 17 to attend college on an Air Force scholarship and became a doctor in hopes of finally winning his father’s approval. Ultimately, he became estranged from both his parents. Later in life, he told the Phoenix New Times, “My mother’s dead, but I’m looking forward to being an orphan. I can’t wait for that nasty son of a b**** to die, so I can go piss on his grave.”

In college, Finkel met his future wife Diana, and they were married in the early 1970s. While he was in the military, the couple traveled the world. At one point, Finkel alluded to spending time with prostitutes while traveling with his wife, telling a reporter, “You can get any girl for only $8 a night.”  Eventually, the couple had two children together - a son and a daughter. After returning to Arizona, he set up shop as a doctor.

But after opening his OB/GYN practice, things didn’t go well for Finkel. He allegedly had his privileges revoked with several local hospitals due to unknown reasons that the Phoenix New Times called “personality conflicts” with Phoenix General and Good Samaritan hospitals - which Finkel referred to as “  General” and “Good Scam.”

Then, in 1984, his wife Diana became pregnant with their third child while she was still nursing their second child. He decided she should have an abortion but was unable to find a local doctor to carry one out, even among his colleagues. So Finkel, who had learned to commit abortions in the military, threatened to carry one out on his wife and child himself. She was then sent to Mesa, Arizona for the abortion but Finkel was not happy with how his wife was treated by that abortionist. She was not given anesthesia, he claimed. "I'm saying to myself, 'If this is the . . . very best that my wife can access, then what's going to happen to the working Jane Doe on the street?' So I said, 'F*** it, I'm putting an ad in the Yellow Pages, and I'll help a couple people when they come in.’ There weren’t a couple people; they were pounding on my door by the thousands!”

Finkel had seen an opportunity. At the time, the average abortion cost about $300 and there weren’t any local doctors willing to commit them. According to a US Department of Labor report, the average obstetrician/gynecologist in the year 2000 was making $133,000 a year. Finkel decided to refocus his career from delivering babies to aborting babies, and eventually, abortions accounted for an astounding 80% of his business. Before his abortion empire came crashing down, Finkel was making $600,000 a year off of killing babies. His wife Diana, acted as his office manager for years and told the Phoenix New Times, "When he first started the practice, I said, 'Treat each woman with dignity. Please. I've been there. Talk to them first with their clothes on. Give them that much courtesy.’"

One of the few outspoken abortionists who would agree to television interviews at the time, Finkel became well-known and esteemed by abortion advocates in the 1990s and early 2000s for his abortion work as owner of Metro Phoenix Women’s Center. Dubbed the “king of the local abortion market” in Arizona, Finkel was committing as many as 2,000 abortions annually – 20% of the total abortions in the state at that time. And the media loved him. In 1999, the Phoenix New Times published an article on Finkel titled, “Trash-talking abortionist Dr. Brian Finkel has a message for pro-life zealots, Kiss My Ass.” In that article, Finkel said he nicknamed his abortion room his “Vaginal Vault,” explaining, “This is where I do the deed.” He also said he called the D&C first trimester suction abortion machine the “super sucker” and explained, “This is my abortion machine, where I do the Lord’s work. I heal the sick with it.”

Committing abortions and speaking to the media had brought Finkel money, fame, and prestige. In his eyes, he was a reproductive rights hero who believed his business and even his life were at risk from so-called pro-life extremists. He was brazen enough to brag about telling a pro-life activist who he had nicknamed “Beer Belly,” “I want you to know that if your wife ever needs an abortion, I’ll do one for free. Not because I’m a nice guy, but just because I want to get between her l-e-e-e-e-gs.” He claimed to have always complied with his wife’s request to ‘treat women with dignity.’ That’s not a claim that many of his patients would agree with.

The late pro-life activist Mark Crutcher spent years working with Finkel’s alleged victims. 

“People have to understand, this is not some outlier in the abortion industry. Over a 20 year period of time, Brian Finkel did one out of five of all the abortions done in the state of Arizona. So he was a big-time player. All the local pro-abortion groups were referring to him and so he was the champion for women’s rights.”

On at least two occasions, Finkel invited the media to watch him commit abortions. Both times, he was praised in the press for treating his patients with compassion. The media reported hugs, smiles, and adoring glances between Finkel and his patients. But not all of his patients were fortunate enough to have reporters watching Finkel’s every move during their abortions. 

But did his status make Finkel a target for false accusations or did it make him an untouchable abuser? 

Janet recalled the moments she can remember of her abortion with Finkel:

“And he was sitting next to me a few moments, it was a Twilight sleep that I was put under, but after he had administered the IV he stood up and he pulled off his gloves and he proceeded to walk down to the end of the table and presented between my legs at the end of the table.”

“There was a tube of lubricant that was down there that was used to … at that time he put some on the palm of his hand and with a very flippant upward motion applied it whereas in most exams let’s say if you were at a gynecological yearly exam, they would just put a little bit on you and be very delicate about how it was being done and he just with a completely upward motion put it on barehanded and as I’m going under this twilight sleep here, I knew that that was a very odd thing to do but then he kept moving, placing his hand back there and moving his hand back and forth and massaging the area and simulating sex with his bare hand.”

To Janet, Finkel was no hero. He was a sexual predator. 

Act II: The Dominoes Fall

RAINN, the Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network, reports that 1 out of every 6 American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime. Every 98 seconds an American is sexually assaulted, and doctors are not immune from being perpetrators of sexual assault. The National Institutes of Health reports that based on data from the U.S. National Practitioner Data Bank, from January 2003 through September 2013, 862 doctors faced disciplinary actions because of sexual misconduct. Those are only the cases that are known. The National Sexual Violence Resource Center reports that 63% of sexual assaults go unreported to police. One of the reasons sexual assault survivors do not report the assault is fear that they will not be believed. 

Janet, who wondered who would believe her over the prominent, reputable doctor Finkel, said this was true for her. Finkel maintained to the police, and later to the judge, that his accusers were just confused. But patients had been filing complaints against Finkel since as early as 1991. Could they all have been confused or lying in an effort to shut down an abortion business?

Prior to Janet, a woman we’ll call "Terry" had told police that Finkel had sexually abused her in 1991 during a gynecological examination.

In March of 2000, around the same time that Janet had been abused, a woman named Kathe Kalmansohn said she had been to see Finkel that month and that he had assaulted her. She also claimed that he was on top of her, groping her breasts as she woke up from the anesthesia. He then told her he was going to touch her in other places. She testified that she looked at the female medical staff person in the room, who turned away as Finkel abused her further. Immediately after leaving the facility, she told her boyfriend and then reported the assault to police. She then met with sex crimes detective Arthur Haduch, who spent a few months investigating Finkel. 

Kathe’s immediate call to police would trigger the avalanche of accusations against Finkel. About 100 women shared their alleged accounts of sexual assault at the hands of Finkel. 

A 37-year-old woman came forward to say Finkel had sexually abused her during a post-abortion pelvic examination in November 1995. "The movement of his hand was different from what my other doctors would do," she explained.

When asked why, after six years, she had finally decided to speak out, she said, “I just started feeling disappointed with myself for not coming forward.” She realized that had she spoken up sooner, she might have prevented other women from being assaulted. 

A 23-year-old woman also accused Finkel of assault, saying he massaged her breasts and made comments about them. She said he told her, “I’ve seen a lot of (breasts) in my life and yours are great.”

When asked why she didn’t report the assault sooner, she, like Janet, said she didn’t think anyone would believe her. She also said she didn’t want to have to relive the day of her abortion because it had been so emotionally traumatic for her.

“I just wanted to get the whole thing over with,” she said. “I hated that day.”

Another woman who saw Finkel for an abortion said he had her unnecessarily expose her breasts, "He came in and yelled, `Gown up above your chest!’ she said. “I wasn't sitting close enough to the end of the table, so he grabbed my legs and pulled me down on the table. He was very crude, militant-like, very abrupt. At that point, I just wanted to get it over with and get out of there."

Then there was a woman named Julie. Julie told police that Finkel had sexually abused her - orally - while she was on the exam table. 

Detective Haduch saw the pattern of accusations against Finkel, accusations that had been ignored by police, and he filed a report stating that Finkel had “established a history of molesting his patients during abortion procedures.” He recommended that Finkel be prosecuted for sexual assault and abuse. But it was more than a year after Kathe’s report of alleged assault that the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office launched its own investigation in September of 2001. By mid-October of 2001, the Arizona Board of Osteopathic Examiners voted to suspend Finkel.

When questioned, Finkel claimed his accusers simply didn’t understand how an abortion exam worked and that he had to check their breasts during their abortions to see if they had begun lactating. Finkel also said he was never alone with his patients and therefore wouldn’t have even had the opportunity to sexually abuse them. He declared his innocence and said no charges against him would stick.

He told the Phoenix New Times, "I don't like my integrity being challenged. I've gone out of my way to be hyper-vigilant, to protect myself from specious allegations such as this one and others."

Plus, he argued, “I’m never alone with my patients - never.” In a previous, February 1999 letter to advice columnist Ann Landers about unchaperoned x-ray technicians who perform breast exams, Finkel had written, “They misconstrue professional conduct for professional misconduct. . . . Physicians that abuse their patients in this state go to prison. I'm not going to go to prison, because I'm not doing anything wrong. I am a busy gynecologist, and would never do a breast exam on any patient, regardless of age, without a female attendant present to protect her dignity and my integrity.”

It was the word of a reputable doctor against the allegations of ex-abortion patients. It didn't occur to Finkel that there was a third group of people who could pull back the curtain on what happened to his patients behind closed doors.

Act III: Bullied into Silence No More

FInkel had defeated accusations against him in the past - accusations of malpractice by former patients who were helped by pro-life attorney John J. Jakubczyk. Jakubczyk had filed numerous malpractice suits against Finkel, but not one of them had held up in court. Confident he would be vindicated, it remains unknown if Finkel was worried about the other women in his life – his employees.

It had been his word against those of his patients, who had been under anesthesia when the alleged assaults took place and were not people worth believing, according to Finkel. He alleged that pro-lifers who often protested outside of his abortion business had put them up to the accusations. But then, six of his ex-employees came forward. 

“He did a lot of inappropriate things. Umm. For instance when the patient would be under sedation, he’d sedate them with IV valium. We’d go out of the room for about five to ten minutes… oh less than ten minutes give the sedation time to work. After we did the procedure, we’d kinda wake the patient by shaking or asking her how she’s doing because it’s just twilight. It doesn’t really put you under. His tactics were to put his hand on their breast and shake them, which is unnecessary. He would touch them in places that they totally wouldn’t be aware of because of the twilight. And when they come to, you know, that’s like a memory loss medication. You don’t remember anything. He done that quite often. Every nurse that worked there knows it happened. Quite often.”

“You know it’s about time he is finally getting in trouble for all this stuff he does and the stuff that we didn’t even, you know, that we ignored when we worked there because, like, who’s going to believe us? He’d brag on a daily basis, the money he had, and he had a lot of legal backup, who was going to believe me?”

Ex-employee Jamie also spoke to the detective: 

“You saw what?” 

“Like, it’s called the c*** flick. That’s what we called it.”

“The c*** flick?”

“C***, flick… I’m trying to tell you, like, how his procedure was, like, every girl.”

“And - and - and - and - did he - did he tell you he was doing this?”

“No, that’s just how he did it on every girl.”

“If he would do stuff all day, he - he gets in your brain, you know, so I’d, like, throw attitude because I know he won’t fire me, you know. So I throw attitude and then he’s like ‘You better straighten up or I’ll slap you with my dick.’ And then he’ll smile.”

Another ex-employee spoke with police telling them he would wake patients up by grabbing their breasts and if a patient was attractive, had larger breasts, or had enhanced breasts, he’d find a way to be alone with her in the room - there were no eyewitnesses to validate the type of assault Finkel had reserved for these women. One ex-employee called Finkel “a monster.”

Finkel had been successfully intimidating his employees into silence for years, even unnervingly carrying a gun at work. But the employees he thought he had bullied into silence were now the ones to deliver the final blow that would send his abortion empire crumbling to the ground. The key witnesses Finkel’s alleged victims needed were the same women who had stood by and watched as Finkel had allegedly assaulted them one by one. 

After years of dodging the allegations against him, Finkel was arrested in October 2001 and was held on $650,000 bail. Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley said more than 100 women called his office about Finkel after news broke of his arrest. They told Romley that Finkel had abused them as well. 

By the fall of 2003, Finkel’s trial was finally underway. But, as the judge would say, Finkel showed no remorse and would not admit to his crimes. He maintained that each and every one of the women accusing him of sexual assault was ignorant.  At one point, Finkel looked at the women testifying against him in the courtroom and whistled the melody of Wizard of Oz’s “If I Only Had a Brain.”  He even pointed to Cindi Nannetti, the deputy county attorney who was co-prosecuting him, and said that for Halloween he was “going as a transvestite sex-crimes prosecutor.” But with the he said/she said nature of the case, it was unclear if he would be found guilty of any of the sex crimes he stood accused of. The trial included testimony from 53 witnesses and Finkel spent five days on the stand himself. Woman after woman detailed their shocking allegations against him, but during the 14-day jury deliberation, Finkel still declared that he was innocent and claimed that the jury would acquit him. He underestimated the powerful effect of the 35 women who testified against him.

After all of the testimony was given, and the jury returned its verdict, Finkel was acquitted-cleared- on 34 counts of abuse. But - the jury also found him guilty on 22 counts of sexual abuse involving 13 of the victims. That was all it took to send him to prison. As the decision was read, the courtroom sat quiet but once the handcuffs were placed on Finkel and he was led out of the room, his now-confirmed victims erupted in applause. "We got you," said 24-year-old Ebone Jordan, one of Finkel’s victims.  

The jury found Finkel not guilty on two of Kathe’s sexual assault claims against him and undecided on two others. He was also acquitted of abusing Janet, who said, "Just because we didn't get a guilty on everybody doesn't mean it wasn't true. Maybe enough evidence wasn't presented or things just didn't work out the way they should, but he's going where he belongs." Finally, after decades of drugging and assaulting women, Finkel would face justice for what he had done.

Then, just moments after the jury handed down their verdict, another witness slipped into the courtroom. The prosecution had worked to get Annette Barber there from California in time to testify against Finkel, but she arrived too late to share what she knew.

“Oh there he is,” she said upon seeing Finkel in the courtroom. “I haven’t seen him in a long, long time. I wish someone would have done something when I complained about him back then.”

“Back then” was years earlier when Annette was the non-commissioned officer in charge of the OB/GYN clinic at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. Finkel, then in the Air Force, was working there and Annette would occasionally serve as a chaperone during his patients’ gynecological appointments. In a letter to the Arizona Republic, she explained that one patient expressed feeling violated by him after he allegedly simulated a sexual act on her during her exam. Annette brought the complaint to the hospital’s chief nurse and chief administrator and spoke to a colonel about Finkel. The colonel, however, called Finkel “an officer and a gentleman” and told Annette she shouldn’t make such a “serious allegation.” Finkel later came to her and told her no one would ever believe her and to watch herself. Annette was then prohibited from acting as chaperone to one of Finkel’s patients ever again. 

“They totally swept it under the rug,” she said. “I went about my business, and served another 15 years or so in the Air Force before I retired. But I never forgot this guy, and I've told this story many times over the years. This guy was abusive, physically and verbally, and I'm happy that he finally got brought to justice."

Despite the years of controversy about legalized abortion and his time spent as the media’s sweetheart, Finkel’s trial did not make national headlines. Even today, few people know the story of how one of America’s most popular abortionists went on trial for sexually abusing many of the  women who had filed complaints against him. Mark Crutcher spoke with attorney John Jakubcyzk: 

“It would be very interesting to see if - if the court goes easy on him, it’ll be very interesting to see how these women's groups and the media would respond to this because one of the most outrageous parts of this whole thing is the fact that the national media will not cover the story.”

“The national media has been conspicuously silent about the dealings with Brian Finkel. Back when he was gaining notoriety as a nationwide abortionist carrying his 45 on the side and wearing the helmet right and the flat jackets the national media went after him and interviewed him for all sorts of things. He was in the New York Times, he was on 2020, he was on Nightline, he made all sorts of appearances on national TV and yet throughout this entire trial there’s not been one national story on him except through the local pro-life organizations that put out the national pro-life news.”

“Well John you remember even when CBS did that story on Life Dynamics and our abortion malpractice campaign in which they included you as well, they made sure to get him in on the story. Jakubczyk: But certainly that New York Times story tried to make him out to be a hero and how the whole abortion malpractice effort was some conspiracy by us…”

Conclusion: Maintaining Innocence

Now a convicted sexual offender, Finkel has only proclaimed the louder that he was a good doctor whose bedside manner may have been less than perfect but that he wasn’t a sexual predator. “[I] never have held myself out to be a touchy-feeling, compassionate doctor. I wasn’t raised that way,” he said. “I wasn’t trained that way. ​​Perhaps I was too blunt when I counseled them about their lifestyle choices and perhaps I was too perfunctory that I didn’t seem compassionate." He said he was sorry if he “hurt their feelings” or “caused them emotional stress.” But he still claimed, “I never sexually abused them.”  

The abortionist's wife, Diana supported him through it all until her death in 2023, writing a statement to a newspaper following his conviction, saying, “My family and I are the true victims in this case.” 

A month after Finkel was convicted, Judge Jeffrey Cates sentenced him to nearly 35 years in prison – landing him in jail until he would be about 82 years old. Cates had increased Finkel’s sentence to an "aggravated" term on each count, telling him that he had "caused emotional harm to his victims, including depression, humiliation and fear,” and “had caused physical harm to some of them." Judge Cates also noted that Finkel’s lack of remorse and failure to take responsibility for his crimes "did not bode well for rehabilitation." Finkel would later appeal the convictions and in 2006 the Arizona Court of Appeals reaffirmed his sentence in all but four of the 22 counts he was convicted of. His sentence in two of those four counts was reduced by two years and the other two counts were sent for resentencing due to a procedural error. It could mean Finkel would be eligible for parole in 20 years rather than 25, but he would still remain in prison likely for the rest of his life. Unsatisfied, Finkel filed a second appeal that was denied. 

If Finkel had been the only abortionist to be accused of or convicted of sex crimes against patients, perhaps the media’s silence surrounding the case could be excused away. Maybe it would have been acceptable that the news coverage of his trial remained local. But Finkel was most certainly not an outlier. He is one of at least 30 abortionists across the nation who have been charged over the years with sexually assaulting patients. The assaults include inappropriate comments about patients’ bodies, sexually explicit emails, and rape – even the rape of a minor. 

Finkel was actually open about this, saying once, “There’s a rubric for people that own these [abortion] clinics. They’re known as ‘the slum lords’ of abortion because they really try to have as marginal a facility as possible to maximize their profit. Unfortunately, you have these back alley-like abortion mills, and I will call them a mill…. these slum lords that take advantage of women who desperately need health care. I’m going to catch a lot of flack for telling the truth, but there are a lot of places like this.”

It may never be known how many women Finkel or the other predators hiding within the abortion industry assaulted, many of them were unconscious as Finkel violated their bodies and their trust. Many of them may hear about Finkel’s conviction and wonder, “Did he assault me too?” In all likelihood, Finkel won’t be assaulting any other women or committing any more abortions in his lifetime. But his ability to dodge the law for more than two decades is the result of the nature of his business. It’s difficult for women to share that they have been sexually abused. It’s also difficult for women to share that they’ve had an abortion. When the abuse is carried out by a well-known doctor while a woman is under anesthesia and having an abortion – those factors combined are enough to keep women silent. It’s easy to sexually abuse your patients if they don’t want to even admit to anyone that they were even in your office to begin with.