When a Massachusetts district attorney charged Dr. Derrick Todd with raping a patient in January 2025, two Spotlight reporters set out to understand how Todd was able to act with such little accountability. They found that skepticism around the charming, famed rheumatologist had mounted steadily over the last decade. Patients at Boston’s premier medical institutions wondered about his odd requests, his unwanted touching, his aggressive and unnecessary pelvic exams.
But each time a patient raised questions, the medical establishment seemed to give Todd the benefit of the doubt, the Spotlight Team found. Each time, he was allowed to continue to practice, unfettered, with no oversight.
The challenge with this project: So much of a doctor’s work is shielded from public view, protected by privacy laws and powerful institutions. But the team was able to pierce this secrecy through dogged reporting, scouring thousands of pages of legal and medical records, and convincing scores of patients to talk.
The team filed a state public records request to the Mass. Board of Registration in Medicine for statistics on complaints, investigations, and resolutions from 2014 to 2024. They also filed another state public records request for the entire archive of disciplinary, criminal, and malpractice records for every doctor who has held a license in the state since 1996.
The team built a database that combines state licensing and disciplinary action data. They scraped the data and built a public-facing lookup tool to provide readers a unique, comprehensive look into doctors’ records.
Beyond the challenges in obtaining the data directly and the technical problems that we encountered during scraping, the actual scraped data were incredibly dirty, particularly when it came to institution names.
The Globe team built and released a lookup tool that allows readers to more fully examine doctor discipline, malpractice, and criminal records. Until now, only some of these files were available to the public, attainable only through difficult and opaque searches on government websites. This new online tool features records of nearly 80,000 doctors over roughly three decades, all in one consumer-friendly place.
More than 270 former patients have now filed suits accusing him of grooming them, pressuring them to consent to unnecessary breast and pelvic exams, and ultimately sexually abusing them. But there was scant initial attention after law enforcement officials first launched their criminal investigation in 2023, and the hospitals and medical practice where Todd worked stonewalled the public for months.
Reporters at the Globe decided the community deserved more answers. Through persistent community sourcing, they worked to identify more than 30 patients who accused Todd of sexual assault — the vast majority of whom were anonymous in legal documents — and coax them to step forward.
A follow-up Spotlight investigation examined the state’s medical board, which is supposed to hold to account the state’s 40,000 doctors. Instead, reporters found that the board routinely protects physicians over patients.
