Accusation No. 3 by patients is sexual battery arrest No. 1 for a Florida podiatrist
A New York woman told sheriff’s detectives that a South Florida podiatrist recommended by her parents inappropriately touch her during an office visit.
While investigating this allegation against Saul Lipsman, investigators found that women who had seen the doctor in 2014 and 2016 reported similar incidents to the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.
Online court records show no charges from either earlier allegation. The new allegation led to Lipsman’s Oct. 20 arrest on one count of sexual battery by a person 18 years or older against a person 18 years of age or older.
Lipsman, who practiced in suburban Lake Worth near Florida’s Turnpike, posted $10,000 bond on Oct. 21 and pleaded not guilty on Friday.
Needles and cream
The probable cause affidavit says a Nassau County woman’s parents recommended their longtime podiatrist to her when she had foot pain during a March visit to their Palm Beach County home. She told police her parents “raved” about Saul Lipsman, and her father took her to the doctor’s office on March 11.
She told police that when Lipsman eliminated her pain with an injection on that first visit, she was as sold on him, too. She said while she found him a bit “weird,” his pain alleviating skills had her thinking, “I don’t care what this guy looks like, he is a god.”
The next day, the woman told police according to the affidavit, Lipsman called to ask how she was feeling and to tell her he had a new cream that could help her situation. So on Saturday March 12, the woman returned to Lipsman’s office with her father. She said Lipsman asked her father to stay in the waiting room while he showed her how to use the cream.
She said Lipsman, at one point, lifted her shirt, unstrapped her bra and began to spread the cream on her shoulders and lower back, the latter place the point of the previous day’s injection. She said it felt good, so she thought nothing of it. But when he asked her to turn over, her breasts were exposed. She said Lipsman began putting the cream on her high inner thigh followed by intimate contact.
The woman “said she had this sick feeling and felt totally paralyzed,” the affidavit said. “She had her eyes closed and became very tense. She stated she felt she could not move.”
But, she said, when Lipsman tried to kiss her breasts, she told him to stop. As she dressed and left, she said Lipsman offered to do the same thing the next day. She recalled her father asking her in the car, “What’s the matter? You’re white as a ghost?”
The woman told deputies that before she answered, she opened a car door and vomited.
When PBSO Detectives Rasheedah Khayyam and Jessica Guarducci talked to Lipsman in July, he admitted he and the woman were alone in the examination room, but said he didn’t touch her anywhere above her knees. Lipsman said she sat in a chair while fully clothed the whole time, never lying on her stomach. He said he gave her the cream, but didn’t touch any part of her body to show how to use it.
In his denials, the affidavit said, Lipsman asked if he did this, why didn’t the woman yell out for her father? Lipsman originally said the father was in the room with them aside from stepping out for a phone call or restroom trip. He amended that later, the affidavit said, to the father being out of the room for 15 or 20 minutes.
By this July conversation with Lipsman, the detectives had found something else from 2014.
Examining for injuries or inappropriate touching?
A 65-year-old woman told PBSO Deputy Patrick Desir that Lipsman “touched her inappropriately” a couple of weeks before going to the sheriff’s office on Feb. 12, 2014.
The affidavit quotes from Desir’s report that the woman’s knee, lower back and fractured left toe problems had brought her back to Lipsman for visits over the course of a year. This time, she said, he asked her accompanying aide to wait outside the exam room because it was too cramped.
While she was standing holding the bed rail, the woman said, she felt Lipsman touch her stomach, breasts, a shoulder, and move his hand down to her buttocks “at which time she felt something rising and hitting between her buttocks.” Lipsman, she said, claimed he was examining her for injuries she didn’t know about, then he left the room.
When Detective Khayyam and Guarducci asked Lipsman about this in July 2022, the affidavit said, he didn’t recognize the patient’s name, said maybe he walked behind her, but denied he would do anything such as what was described.
“Dr. Lipsman stated he has never been accused of anything like this before and never been investigated for this,” Guarducci wrote in the arrest affidavit.
When the detectives found the woman in a West Palm Beach rehabilitation center in August, she said she couldn’t remember specific details of what happened 8 1/2 years ago because of her health — she’d suffered a “massive stroke” in 2021 — but still wished to prosecute, as she had wanted to in 2014.
“She indicated if she went as far as (filing a report), then this doctor must have done something really bad to her,” the affidavit said.
Five days later, Detective Garducci met with a woman who reported Lipsman to PBSO in 2016.
From infected toenail to police complaint
Here’s what Garducci heard from a woman who said she saw Lipsman on Aug. 22, 2016, as recounted in the affidavit.
The woman went to Lipsman to deal with an infected toenail. While he removed that, she mentioned her back pain. Lipsman told her to come back after 5 p.m. that day. She did, but with her son and 93-year-old mother to help calm her anxiety. When Lipsman asked them to stay in the waiting room, the woman said she needed someone in the exam room with her. Lipsman let her mother stay.
Lipsman twice put his genitals on her hand, the affidavit said, then later had her stand up, bend forward and thrust at her from behind. Though her mother was in the room, the woman said Lipsman did this “out of her view.”
She said she told her son what happened, but prevented him from confronting Lipsman.
“She felt embarrassed and disgusting after this incident,” the affidavit said. “She stated she notified law enforcement and the (Florida) Department of Health because she is afraid he might be doing this to children.”
Sheriff’s office seeks help
There has been no released evidence so far of any contact with children, either in court documents or among Lipsman’s license discipline cases from the 1990s, which involve substandard care or false advertising.
But PBSO believes there are more victims.
The agency asks anyone who might have been victimized by Lipsman to reach out to Guarducci at 561-688-4148 or Crime Stoppers at 800-458-TIPS.
