104 Women Win $1.6 Billion Against Long Island Pediatrician Stuart Copperman

For decades, Stuart Copperman ran a pediatric practice out of the basement of his home in Merrick, New York. Between 1968 and 2000, he sexually abused scores of female patients during what should have been routine medical examinations. Six women came forward to the state Board of Professional Medical Conduct, which revoked his license in 2000. Copperman was never criminally charged.

New York's Child Victims Act, signed into law in 2019, opened a temporary window allowing survivors of childhood sexual abuse to file civil claims regardless of when the abuse occurred. Attorneys including Kristen Gibbons Feden, a shareholder at Anapol Weiss, and Long Island attorney Michael Della filed suit on behalf of 104 women who said Copperman had abused them as girls.

Copperman, by then in his late eighties and living in South Florida, never responded to the litigation. That silence allowed the court to proceed to default. In Nassau County Supreme Court, Justice Leonard D. Steinman appointed Special Referee William Bodkin, who presided over a number of the individual damages hearings, assessed the testimony of each plaintiff, and in several cases wrote that he found the accounts credible and the abuse's psychological scars profound and permanent. Individual awards ranged from $500,000 to $32 million depending on the severity and duration of each plaintiff's abuse.

The final tranche of judgments came down on March 28, 2025, bringing the total across all 104 cases to $1.6 billion. Lawyers for the women described it as one of the largest cumulative civil damage awards against a single individual in U.S. history. Feden said the verdicts reflected what the women had long deserved: 'For decades, these women were silenced and dismissed. Now, they cannot be ignored.'

No reduction or remittitur has been reported. Collection against an 89-year-old defendant with undisclosed assets is a separate matter the plaintiffs' attorneys did not address publicly.