It was around 2013 when Dr. Javaid Perwaiz told Kimberly Riddick, 35, that a cyst was making it hard for her to get pregnant.
The Portsmouth native said the doctor told her for three years that the cysts kept returning and required surgical removal.
“I thought I could trust him, that he was helping me out,” Riddick said, until she got a second opinion from a doctor who told her the surgeries weren’t necessary.
She said the scar tissue caused her to bleed excessively while delivering her daughter, and doctors have told her it’s too risky to have another child.
“I love children and always wanted a lot of kids,” Riddick said.
Riddick said she thinks about it all the time, “we put our trust in him and he betrayed our trust.”
She’s one of 94 women who, on Thursday, joined 510 others in suing Chesapeake Regional Medical Center and its senior executives. The lawsuit alleges that they allowed Perwaiz, an obstetrician and gynecologist, to perform medically unnecessary surgeries of his patients, many of which resulted in permanent sterilization.
The lawsuit claims that since the 1980s, hospital executives were alerted to the conduct of Perwaiz and yet continued to allow him to operate.
“Individual doctors aren’t acting alone,” said Anthony DiPietro, one of two attorneys representing the women in the lawsuit filed in Chesapeake Circuit Court.
“It takes an entire institution to cover up abuse.” The hospital administration, he said, are “not just complicit but actively participating in crimes by not stopping him (Perwaiz) when they are required to.”
CRMC did not respond to emails and voicemails requesting a comment.
Perwaiz is serving a 53-year sentence after a jury in 2021 found him guilty of defrauding private and government health insurance programs of over $20.3 million by performing irreversible hysterectomies, among other unnecessary procedures, on female patients.
To better fit his schedule, the lawsuit alleges, Perwaiz routinely delivered babies early through induction or C-sections. Premature birth caused so many babies to need intensive neonatal care, and suffer permanent brain damage, that it was nicknamed the “Perwaiz special” in CRMC’s neonatology unit.
The lawsuit describes that nurses found patients often lacked knowledge of their planned surgeries, and observed Perwaiz alter patient consent forms while a patient was already under anesthesia. Women were falsely told they had cancer, the lawsuit says, to justify the medically unnecessary and invasive procedures.
Insurance payments from Perwaiz’ surgeries brought the hospital millions in revenue, according to the lawsuit. In response to warnings of Perwaiz’s conduct raised by several physicians and hospital administrators, the lawsuit claims, executives either defended his actions or failed to respond.
Perwaiz was granted privileges to practice at CRMC in 1984 after Maryview Hospital in Portsmouth ended his ability to practice there after he performed unnecessary gynecological surgeries. From then till his arrest in 2019, hospital executives reviewed and re-approved his privileges every two years.
The women in the lawsuit are asking for $10 million in damages each.
“What happened at Chesapeake was not medicine. It was a chop shop,” said Victoria Wickman, co-counsel to DiPietro for the plaintiffs.
Chesapeake Regional was federally indicted in early January 2025 on multiple charges of health care fraud and conspiracy relating to their consistent granting of surgical privileges to Perwaiz over the course of decades.
The hospital, according to the indictment, allowed Perwaiz to consistently misclassify inpatient surgeries as outpatient surgeries, avoiding the heightened scrutiny and documentation required by health care benefit programs.
Two motions to dismiss the indictment have been filed by attorneys representing Chesapeake Hospital Authority, the governing body of the hospital. The motions claim the case should be dismissed on the grounds of sovereign immunity, and that the authority itself is not listed in the indictment.
A decision to dismiss the motions in the Eastern District Court has been appealed to the Fourth U.S. Circuit Appeals Court.