A suburban Pittsburgh woman hopes to find out how nude photos of her before and after cosmetic surgery wound up on Facebook for all the world to see. So does her well-known surgeon, Dennis Hurwitz, MD, FACS, of the Hurwitz Center for Plastic Surgery in Pittsburgh, a defendant in the lawsuit Meghan Smail, 30, of Wilcox, Pa., filed earlier this month.
The lawsuit holds Dr. Hurwitz responsible for the actions of a Jane Doe defendant known as Kate Jones, who gained access to the photos through the practice's Web site and, having identified the patient from the photos' file names, forwarded copies to the patient and her friends via the social networking site Facebook last March.
Ms. Smail is suing Dr. Hurwitz, the Hurwitz Center for Plastic Surgery and Kate Jones/Jane Doe on grounds of invasion of privacy and intrusion upon seclusion; invasion of privacy and unreasonable publicity; breach of confidentiality; breach of fiduciary duty; negligence; and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The lawsuit seeks a jury trial and a judgment of $150,000 plus punitive damages from each defendant individually as well as collectively.
While the patient's lawsuit claims that the photos, which depict full-frontal and -posterior nudity from her neck to her knees before and after an April 2005 surgery, were displayed on the center's Web site without her consent, Dr. Hurwitz begs to differ. "Our records confirm otherwise, and [the patient and her attorney] were notified of this," he says. Attempts to reach Ms. Smail for comment were unsuccessful.
Dr. Hurwitz says he does not know the identity of the other defendant; how the photos of this patient and 13 others ended up in Kate Jones's publicly accessible, online file-sharing account; or how she was able to ascertain the patient's name from the photos, which had been securely uploaded to the marketing company that manages the center's Web site.
"There's no question, it was not someone within my company," he says. While he admits that the uploaded photos' file names contained patients' names, this had not previously presented a disclosure risk. "We had no reason to believe they would still be present [or] retrievable by a third party. It has never happened before in 8 years of posting to our Web site."
The center has since adopted new measures for securely transferring photos to the marketing company, and no longer includes patient names in its photos' file properties, says Dr. Hurwitz.
"Obviously I am very regretful of any discomfort this has caused my patients," says Dr. Hurwitz, "and I hope we can resolve this amicably."
David Bernard
