Hot doctor was gay bashed at Brooklyn hospital, suit claims

New York Post reports:

A rookie doctor in New York City for his first year of residency was gay bashed by his surgical bosses at The Brooklyn Hospital Center, the doctor alleges in a lawsuit.

Dr. Chad Jensen, a surgical resident, said one supervisor referred to him as a member of the ATM or “ass to mouth crew,” and others made vulgar jokes at his expense.

Dr. Armand Asarian, the surgical residency program director, and Dr. Sandeep Sirsi, the associate director, “regularly made hateful, anti-gay comments about their gay patients and unscientific judgments that these patients’ own ‘lifestyle’ caused their illnesses,” Jensen alleges in his suit.

Jensen, 32, who is from California, said he did not expect that kind of discrimination in New York City, where he moved in June 2017 to take the one-year residency and where he also came out as gay.

“It just reinforced all of those fears, essentially putting me back into those 29 years that I was living in fear, feeling like I couldn’t be myself,” Jensen told The Post.

He left the residency program before his year was up.

The Fort Greene hospital determined after Jensen left that he “had been harassed because of his sexual orientation,” according to the lawsuit which says Sirsi was forced to resign and Asarian was removed as director of the surgical residency program.

Brooklyn Hospital Center, which is part of the Mount Sinai network, said it is “committed to a healthy and inclusive work environment,” adding, “We intend to vigorously defend Dr. Jensen’s lawsuit.”

Sirsi got another gig as the director of the surgical residency program at NYU Langone Hospital — Brooklyn in Sunset Park.

That hospital said it was unaware of the suit when Sirsi was hired and “when we have an opportunity to review the information, we will do so.”

Neither Sirsi nor Asarian returned requests for comment.

Jensen, now a resident at NYC Health + Hospitals/Lincoln in the Bronx, said he wanted to bring the situation to light because he felt like he had no voice.

“It made me think of all the other people in this country that are also gay and feel like they have nowhere to go and it leads them down dark paths,” Jensen told The Post. “So me coming forward, I wanted to let people know that they’re not alone.”

The 2018 suit filed in Brooklyn Supreme Court seeks unspecified damages and for the hospital to conduct anti-bias training.