ANN ARBOR, Mich. – A man is sharing what he experienced at the hands of a now-deceased University of Michigan doctor 50 years ago.
Robert Julian Stone said he was a 20-year-old student at the university in 1970 when he contacted a friend while looking for a doctor.
His friend recommended Robert E. Anderson, who worked at the school from 1968 until his retirement in 2003. He died in 2008.
Stone was starting to come out as a gay man. He did not want to go to his family physician due to his sexuality.
“I called a friend of mine, a gay friend in Ann Arbor. I said, 'Look, I don’t know. Who do I go to? Who do I see? he said go to Dr. Anderson. Dr. Anderson treats all the gay men in Ann Arbor," Stone said.
Stone said during the visit, Dr. Anderson allegedly started undressing, and placed Stone's hand on his private parts.
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“After this happened, I was horrified. I was absolutely enraged and disgusted. It makes me want to cry. Homosexuality was still considered a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association in the 1970s. I felt completely disempowered to report this,” he said.
Stone said he called the friend who referred him to Anderson, and the friend was "silent." He said he has not spoken with the friend since, and the alleged incident followed him all of his life.
"It completely upended my trust in physicians," he said.
Last August, Stone sent university officials an essay about his alleged sexual abuse. It was called “My Michigan Me-too Movement, 1971.”
It launched an investigation within the University of Michigan Police Department, and now, University leaders are asking more people to come forward. The University created a hotline, and since Wednesday, there have been 22 more calls detailing alleged abuse.
"I confess to having some lingering guilt that if I had been more aggressive at the time of my assault, I could have prevented all of these other men from being assaulted," Stone said.
The University of Michigan is asking any former patients Anderson who believe they were subjected to sexual misconduct during a medical exam to contact the U-M Compliance Hotline at 866-990-0111.