You can't possibly find a more bizarre story today in the world than the case of Dr. Robert S. Markman, a retired Southern California anesthesiologist who began his medical practice in 1974.
This month, Markman filed a federal lawsuit claiming he was assaulted by authorities, falsely arrested, involuntarily placed in a 72-hour mental health hospital and victimized by a conspiracy of deceitful state agents.
The doctor's trouble began in the oddest of places: his adult daughter's vagina. Beginning in her early twenties in the 1990s, she suffered “constant clitoral arousal” that made “thought, conversation and engaging in every day activities very difficult,” according to Medical Board of California records.
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The woman's condition drove her to a variety of hospitals including UCLA Medical, the Mayo Clinic and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center with little success, and left her both incapacitated and depressed.
In 2007, Markman decided he'd personally assist by injecting propofol–one of the powerful narcotics that caused Michael Jackson's demise in 2009–as well as lidocaine and ketamine into his daughter's vagina to relieve pain, according to medical board records that alleged he performed this procedure “approximately 500 times over five years” at his home described as “filthy and cluttered.”
In 2011, police officers attempted to interview Markman's daughter, but the doctor violently blocked the move, an act that earned him a misdemeanor conviction, 30 days in jail and 12 anger management classes.
Two years later, the medical board suspended the doctor's license for seven years on a variety of counts related to the use of propofol.
So why in May 2014 did he show up almost nude for a psychological evaluation during a medical board probation hearing in Cerritos?
According to his lawsuit, officers checking him for weapons seriously injured his shoulder during a prior visit and he decided the best way to avoid another rough body inspection would be to bring a friend with a camcorder to videotape his passage through the guards. Medical board officials rejected his idea. They'd placed a photo of the doctor on a wall office with a warning of his past “violence and mental instability.”
Markman concocted an alternative plan. For a scheduled 10 a.m. meeting, he stripped to his underwear, entered the state offices and walk toward the security detail, in his mind making it easy to see he wasn't armed except for “the gun God gave me.”
Authorities weren't amused. They arrested Markman and he landed in the psychiatric hospital because, he says, officers and doctors fabricated his dangerousness as well as tales that he slept with his daughter after injecting her with propofol and had booby-trapped his home to thwart potential law enforcement visits.
“None of the statements provided in the Application for 72-Hour Detention for Evaluation and Treatment are factual and all of [the defendants named in his lawsuit] knew that these statements were all completely and utterly false,” Markman declared in his court filing seeking a jury trial and damages.
The suspended doctor, who worked for decades at St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, decided to serve as his own lawyer in his case against the medical board, California Highway Patrol officers and College Hospital of Cerritos.
Court records show the defendants have not yet filed responses.
The federal case number is 2:15-cv-03335.
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CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.