The woman, 52, lay on the exam table at a clinic in Richland, Washington. Her legs were parted and propped up.

The OB-GYN, Dr. Mark Mulholland, stood between her legs, inquiring about the woman’s sex life as he had in prior visits, she wrote in a complaint filed with Washington state health care regulators.

She said Mulholland had previously asked about her enjoyment of sex and if she had a boyfriend, a strange way to learn about a patient’s sexual activity, she thought. But this was her last checkup after her hysterectomy and the last time she expected to see Mulholland.

“Do you masturbate?” Mulholland asked the woman during their final appointment, according to her complaint.

The question shocked her. She wrote that Mulholland explained he wanted to “make sure the nerves were intact.”

Then, the woman wrote, he inserted his fingers into her vagina and pumped his hand back and forth in a way she said felt “sexual and not medical.”

“Does that hurt?” the woman said Mulholland asked her, before ending their visit by saying “the playroom is open” — a comment she interpreted as Mulholland clearing her for sexual activity.

The woman said she left the room in shock. She made her way to the parking lot of the Kadlec Clinic-Associated Physicians for Women, climbed inside her car and sat, incredulous, she said in an interview with KUOW and ProPublica. What happened felt terribly wrong, she said.

Mulholland did not respond to requests for comment for this article after being sent a detailed list of findings by email and by letter. His attorney declined to comment.

What the woman didn’t know was that by the time of her exam in February 2025, the Washington Medical Commission had already received complaints from four other women since 2022 accusing Mulholland of sexual misconduct. And yet he was allowed to keep seeing patients throughout.

The accounts related by the women, whom KUOW and ProPublica are not naming to protect their privacy, included descriptions of Mulholland touching them unnecessarily, using sexually charged language, or performing painful or seemingly sexual pelvic exams that involved moving his fingers in and out.

The commission also gathered testimony a year before the woman’s February 2025 appointment from three of Mulholland’s colleagues with their own troubling accounts. These included hearing firsthand about or observing him telling patients they had “tight” and “pretty” vaginas, touching and slapping his patients’ legs, and aggressively pulling a patient’s pants down without permission.

Washington law allows the commission to take emergency action and suspend a doctor’s license while disciplinary proceedings are pending. The law says a suspension is defensible if it’s more probable than not that the physician poses an “immediate threat to the public health and safety.”

In Mulholland’s case, the commission did not choose suspension. Instead, it issued a formal statement of charges accusing Mulholland of abuse and unprofessional conduct in April 2025 — more than a year after the commission’s investigator submitted her reports on two of the complaints for review and 11 months after Mulholland was offered an informal settlement that he apparently did not sign.

Even after the commission declared its charges against Mulholland, he was allowed to keep practicing while the case proceeded. He saw patients as late as May, before he went on leave.

At least 84 patients have filed lawsuits against Mulholland or his employer since the state’s investigation became public. Court filings by Mulholland’s attorney, made in response to the lawsuits, have denied wrongdoing or improper conduct toward women. He also has denied the allegations made by the medical commission and is entitled to a hearing to contest them.

Emily Volland, a spokesperson for Kadlec and its affiliate, the Providence health system, said Mulholland is no longer employed by Kadlec. Volland declined to comment on the allegations against him but said via email: “We take our patient’s safety very seriously and are fully cooperating with the state in this matter.”

The lawsuits against Mulholland, Kadlec and Providence are ongoing. Lawyers for Providence and Kadlec in court filings denied allegations of negligence and wrongdoing.

While other news coverage has described the lawsuits and the commission’s actions in 2025, none has focused on how the state dealt with complaints against Mulholland during the three years before he agreed to restrictions on his license.

The Washington Medical Commission has faced criticism in the past for its handling of sexual misconduct complaints. A 2021 Seattle Times investigation found that in 282 cases of alleged sexual misconduct since 2009, state regulators took more than a year to impose discipline.

Several other states in recent years have dealt with their own high-profile cases of sexual misconduct involving OB-GYNs. On March 10, for instance, Columbia University in New York released a report detailing how a culture of silence at the institution had allowed OB-GYN Robert Hadden to abuse more than 1,000 patients over decades.

States like Ohio and Delaware have moved aggressively to make it easier to keep doctors accused of sexual misconduct away from patients.

In Washington, the medical commission wasn’t the only organization that allowed Mulholland to keep practicing.

A Kadlec risk management employee, through an attorney, acknowledged to the commission that the clinic had received patient complaints against the doctor and said they were investigated. (The letter did not describe the complaints but said they included “communication with patients regarding obesity.”) Mulholland’s privileges were never restricted or terminated, the statement said.

When local news stories covered the commission’s charges against Mulholland in June, it unleashed a deluge of 18 new complaints in the following three months.

In September, the commission placed restrictions on his license that prevented him from seeing female patients. Mulholland agreed pending a hearing on his case.

“They just let him keep practicing.”

Yanling Yu, a former Washington medical commissioner and a patient advocate with Washington Advocates for Patient Safety, wouldn’t comment on the Mulholland case directly. But she said it’s ethically wrong to allow a doctor facing serious allegations of sexual misconduct to continue seeing any patients while an investigation is ongoing.

“In an ideal regulatory system, if there has been enough or strong evidence to support the allegation, the doctor’s practice should be temporarily suspended or at least summarily restricted to protect patients’ safety,” she wrote in an email.

Kyle Karinen, executive director of the Washington Medical Commission, said the agency wasn’t slow to act and that it must operate under the system lawmakers created.

“I acknowledge that sometimes it takes longer than people would like, but we take that process really seriously,” Karinen said. “When we file a case and go to a hearing, we want to make sure that everybody has the opportunity to be heard on a particular topic.”

The woman who saw Mulholland in February 2025 filed a lawsuit against the clinic and a board complaint against the doctor, both in August. She said she was indignant after learning about the earlier complaints.

She said the commission should have taken those women more seriously. “They just let him keep practicing,” she said.

2022: The First Complaint

The first sexual misconduct allegation against Mulholland landed in the commission’s email inbox in January 2022. The author was a first-time mother who, at 41 weeks pregnant, went to have labor induced at the Kadlec Regional Medical Center.

The woman said she had hoped a female doctor would deliver the baby. But Mulholland was the on-call doctor assigned the day she arrived. When she saw that the doctor was a man, she asked if the female nurse who was there could perform her predelivery cervical check instead, according to her complaint.

Mulholland insisted, she said. (He later told a commission investigator that because the woman was having labor induced, he had to personally know her cervical dilation and consistency, whether the fetus was in breech position or if her amniotic sac was intact. He also said because she was experiencing high blood pressure, her delivery couldn’t wait to be rescheduled with a female doctor.)

“I didn’t have a choice but to trust who was supposed to be trustworthy,” the woman said in an interview with KUOW and ProPublica.

In her complaint, she said Mulholland was inappropriate. When the nurse asked her if she still had her underwear on, Mulholland joked that he still had his on too, she wrote.

During the cervical check, with his fingers inside the expectant mother, he pressed in different directions, according to her complaint. The woman said Mulholland told her he doesn’t perform exams this way because it hurts. Then he showed her what he described as the correct way, she said in the complaint.

“The cervical........

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