Each state has its own set of statutes and regulations on licensing doctors, accommodating patients who wish to file complaints, and releasing information about physicians who have been subject to discipline and legal action. On this page, we’re sharing the key findings regarding Washington, which we will continue to update as the series progresses.
Key fact: The state’s criminal code has special categories of second-degree rape and indecent liberties for violators who are health care providers. If sexual intercourse occurs between a doctor and patient during a treatment session, consultation, interview or exam, the doctor is guilty of rape in the second degree, though the doctor may argue that the patient consented knowing the sexual act was not for treatment. A doctor is guilty of indecent liberties when there is other sexual contact with a patient and it occurs during treatment, consultation, interview or exams.
“Several member of the Commission expressed their admiration of the [doctor’s] conduct throughout this disciplinary process, and the obvious personal progress he made over the years he has been subject to the Prior Order.”
— The Medical Quality Assurance Commission, commenting on a doctor whose license was restricted after he was accused of various acts involving patients, including masturbating while doing a rectal exam of a patient and commenting on men’s genitals and asking them to take part in three-way sex. The board lifted all restrictions in 2002, noting he was serving a primarily geriatric population in various adult care homes and found that work “quite fulfilling.” The doctor was ordered to surrender his license in 2014 after he was caught smoking meth.
A woman called the OB/gyn to request emergency contraception. Momah gave her birth control pills, had her change into an exam gown, and then did a manual exam. He began massaging her clitoris. Then he pulled down his pants and underwear, got on top of her and raped her.
When she asked what he was doing, he said, “You know you want it.” She told him to stop but he didn’t.
Then he told her to come into the office and left the room. She wiped off his semen and got dressed and went to his office. There, the doctor threatened to reveal her history of narcotic dependence if she reported him to police, and that her child would be taken away from her.
Momah made almost identical threats to another patient after he raped her in 1998.
In that case, he called her into his office and said, “You know you wanted it and I can make you feel good,” then exposed his penis and pushed her head down and forced it into her mouth. Then he told her to go into the operating room and take off her clothes, where he raped her. In addition to saying she would lose her child if she reported him, Momah told her he had written in her patient chart that she was a “drug seeker.”
The state board detailed a long list of offenses – rape, sexual touching, predatory behavior, neglect, incompetence, overprescribing of drugs, unnecessary procedures and phony billing – when it suspended Momah in 2003.
He was convicted in 2005 and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
In a lawsuit filed the same year, eight women said that the state had failed to act on their complaints. The suit alleged the gynecologist had victimized anywhere from 60 to 500 women.
"He is a rapist, a pervert, a fraud, a liar, a butcher, a drug pusher who scarred a lot of women," the Seattle Post-Intelligencer quoted a former patient as saying during Momah’s sentencing. "It breaks my heart that he hurt his family, [but] not one of those family members were in his office.”
Momah’s license was revoked in 2006.
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