An Army gynecologist took secret intimate videos of a patient under his care at Fort Hood in Texas, according to a lawsuit filed Monday.
The lawsuit says that the woman is believed to be one of scores who were preyed upon by Dr. Blaine McGraw and that Army leadership had allowed him to continue practicing despite receiving sexual misconduct complaints dating back years.
“By doing so, the Army gave cover to a predator in uniform,” says the lawsuit, which was filed in Bell County District Court.
McGraw has been suspended and is under investigation by the Army Criminal Investigation Division, or CID, according to a statement on Fort Hood’s media center website. It said “potentially affected patients” would be contacted by the investigators.
At least 25 women have been contacted by Army criminal investigators after they found photos and videos on McGraw’s electronic devices showing female body parts, a military official told NBC News. The lawsuit says the allegations against McGraw also include inappropriate touching, crude remarks and performing unnecessary procedures.
The woman filed the lawsuit under the name Jane Doe to protect her identity. She is married to an active duty service member with more than 20 years in uniform, according to her lawyer, Andrew Cobos. He said he’s representing more than 45 women who have approached him with claims against McGraw.
“Upon information and belief, investigators recovered thousands of photographs and videos from his phone, taken over the course of multiple years, depicting scores of female patients, many of whom remain unidentified,” the lawsuit says.
The plaintiff in the case learned about the covertly recorded videos last month when she received a call from Army investigators asking her to come in for an interview, the lawsuit says. They informed her that McGraw had secretly filmed multiple female patients during their appointments, the lawsuit says.
During the subsequent meeting, the CID investigators presented to her several frame grabs taken from videos recovered from McGraw’s phone — images that “unmistakably depicted” her body during an examination that took place three days earlier, the lawsuit says.
The investigators told her that McGraw had recorded “nearly the entirety of her final appointment, including both the breast and pelvic examinations, without her knowledge or consent,” the lawsuit says.
Once the interview was over, the investigators gave the woman a pamphlet containing the phone numbers of various Army departments. She left the meeting “disoriented and disarrayed.”
“She sat in her parked car and cried,” the lawsuit says. “Her sense of safety had been shattered.”
In a statement to NBC News, the woman said learning that she had been filmed without her consent left her feeling “violated, exposed and afraid.”
“It’s a wound that doesn’t heal,” she added. “How can anyone feel safe again when the very institution meant to protect them becomes the source of their trauma?”
Daniel Conway, an attorney for McGraw, said in a statement that the doctor has been "fully cooperative with the investigation."
"We’ve expressed to the government our concern that plaintiffs attorneys are holding press conferences citing inaccurate information apparently learned from government sources," Conway added. "At this point it’s best to let the investigation complete before we comment."
The Army referred to the statement released by Fort Hood, which was posted to its website Oct. 28.
It said the CID launched an investigation “within hours of a patient’s allegations against this former medical provider.” Fort Hood officials are contacting all of the doctor’s patients and providing them with the number for a dedicated call center to answer any questions, the statement added.
In a subsequent statement provided to NBC News after this story was published, Fort Hood said the doctor was suspended on Oct. 17, the same day it learned of a patient’s allegations, and “leadership met with the patient personally.”
“In addition to the criminal investigation from Army CID, multiple additional investigations are underway to examine all facets of the issue, including systems, clinical processes, policies, and other areas,” the statement added. “These investigations are intended to ensure that the rigorous standards in place were followed.”
Cobos said he’s also planning to file a federal claim against the Army.
“Major Blaine McGraw used his uniform and his position as an Army doctor to prey on the very women who trusted him for care,” Cobos said in a statement. “The Army received repeated warnings and still chose to protect its reputation instead of the safety of its service members, their wives, and their daughters.”
This isn’t the first time the Army, or officials at Fort Hood, have been accused of ignoring or downplaying reports of sexual harassment or misconduct.
One of the most high-profile recent cases involved an Army specialist based at Fort Hood named Vanessa Guillén. After she was killed by a fellow soldier in 2020, an Army report found that the 20-year-old soldier had been sexually harassed by a supervisor but unit leadership took no action.
Previous complaints
Before he began practicing at the Texas base, McGraw treated patients at Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii beginning in 2019, according to the lawsuit. One of his female patients there filed a complaint alleging that he had secretly recorded her pelvic examination on his cellphone, the lawsuit says.
“Rather than investigate or remove him from patient care, McGraw’s chain of command dismissed the complaint, laughed it off, and allowed him to continue practicing medicine,” the lawsuit says.
It accuses McGraw of preying on his patients in various ways. In one case, McGraw induced the labor of a pregnant patient “against her wishes,” the lawsuit says. In another, he told a patient during an examination that her “vagina looks pretty,” touched her sexual organs for no medical reason and made sexually suggestive remarks, according to the lawsuit. He referred to that patient’s clitoris, for instance, as her “happy spot,” the lawsuit says.
The allegations represent the “tip of the iceberg in a widening scandal that has left scores of military wives and daughters violated, voiceless and searching for answers,” the lawsuit says.
Before she met with CID investigators, the military spouse said in her lawsuit, she had been seen by McGraw about seven to eight times. She went to the Carl R. Darnall Army Medical Center, where he practiced, for treatment of pelvic pain, hormone irregularities and concerns about uterine health, the lawsuit says.
After one procedure performed under sedation, McGraw made a comment about seeing all of her tattoos, which existed on parts of her body that he had no reason to look at, according to the lawsuit. In another instance, McGraw made an inappropriate comment to her during what should have been a routine breast exam, the lawsuit says,
“Your surgeon did a great job — your breasts look great!” he said, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit says it was during a separate appointment, on Oct. 14, that McGraw managed to film the woman’s body parts without her consent.
While in the exam room, McGraw pretended to receive a call from a nurse and then placed his phone in his breast pocket — “camera facing outward and recording,” the lawsuit says.
McGraw performed a pelvic exam and then went on to perform a breast exam even after the woman said she had no such concerns. All the while, McGraw’s camera was recording her body, the lawsuit says.
In her statement to NBC News, the woman said she’s hoping her lawsuit will bring about meaningful change inside the Army.
“Walking into the exam room, I trusted the military hospital to care for me, just as it had so many times before,” she said. “I never imagined that trust would be broken in such a profound way.”
“I’m asking for accountability—not only from the provider, but from the Army itself,” she added. “We deserve to be seen, to have our voices heard, and to be protected. Moving forward, I want to see real safeguards in place to ensure that this never happens again.”
