- Details
- By Elyse Wild
The U.S. Government has reached an $18 million settlement with victims of a doctor who sexually assaulted Native American boys for decades at hospitals run by the Indian Health Service in Montana and South Dakota.
The settlement is the latest against the government for its part in Dr. Stanley Patrick Weber's abuse of teenage boys in the IHS system.
It's estimated that as many as a dozen IHS officials had knowledge of the accusations against Weber during his 20-year employment. Instead of terminating his employment, the IHS transferred him to a hospital in Pine Ridge, S.D., where he worked for another 20 years.
Weber began working at an IHS facility in Browning, Mont., on the Blackfeet Reservation in 1986. He was suspected of misconduct as early as the mid-1990s. The Wall Street Journal and Frontline released a documentary investigating the case against Weber in 2019. An independent report subsequently conducted its own investigation into the physician in 2020, which was only made public after the New York Times successfully sued for its release.
According to that investigation, Weber's colleagues reported his concerning behavior — including that he was luring underage boys into his home and allowing them to drink alcohol — in 1995. His supervisor attempted to raise the alarm within the IHS and reported his concerns to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The BIA's investigation was never completed.
Weber was transferred to Pine Ridge Reservation in 1995. His former supervisors in Billings reached out to Weber's new bosses and alerted them of their concerns. During his tenure at the Pine Ridge facility, Weber gained a reputation among medical staff for making nighttime visits to male patients even when he was not the doctor on call. In 2006, one of Weber's colleagues alerted the Clinical Director to suspicions that the doctor was molesting underage male patients.
No action was taken to remove Weber from patient care. The scathing report concluded that repeated failures to protect young patients from Weber's abuse "were consistently the product of weakness, apathy, evasion of responsibility, willful dereliction, or self-interest, rather than a commitment to patient safety."
Weber was convicted in 2019 of committing sex crimes against boys as young as 9 between 1994 and 2011 in Pine Ridge. In 2018, he was convicted of abusing young boys in Montana.
The new settlement brings the total to $32.5 million paid out to 20 victims who have brought claims.
The victims are represented by attorneys at Crew Janci. In a social media post, partner attorney Peter Janci wrote that the federal government's retention of Weber and the resulting abuse amounted to violations of the United States government's 1855 Treaty with the Blackfeet Nation and the 1868 Treaty with the Sioux.
Weber, now 73, is currently serving a life sentence at the Pekin, Ill., federal penitentiary.
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