spoke with Susan Crumiller to learn more about how the case and what’s at stake.You filed the case on behalf of four named plaintiffs and 200+ Jane Does. Has it been hard for victims to come forward with their allegations?There are many, many people who have made allegations, but don’t feel able to take the next step of either making contact with us directly or agreeing to pursue the case.
The biggest problem has been the victims fear of Dr. Khandker. He presents himself as an extraordinarily powerful person. Many of the people I’ve spoken to, their parents know him. Everyone in the community knows him. And these are young women, who just think of him as someone with unlimited resources and unlimited power. And many of the people we’ve spoken to are extremely afraid of retaliation by him or his agents.
When Khandker first filed his defamation case, he had his friends calling up random young women to try to intimidate them and suss out info. He capitalized upon these norms—he understood they protected him. “This is an insular community where there is a strong stigma against speaking out against respected community elders, particularly when it comes to sexual abuse. A lot of families blame the victimsI think the people that I’ve interacted with directly comprise a very small percentage of the people he victimized. I certainly think that there are most likely women and girls who were victimized who don’t speak English, which would just pose yet another barrier to them contacting us.
We knew of a lot of people who had experienced his abuse, or who knew somebody, or who knew somebody who knew somebody, but taking the step of reaching out to an attorney feels very very big and scary and difficult.Mostly they are young. One of the Instagram messages that our clients got was from someone who said she was in third or fourth grade. Although a lot of people said he did this to my mom, he did this to my grandma, he did this to my aunt.