Woman Claiming She was Drugged and Raped Sues Palm Coast Doctor Gerard Abate; Criminal Investigation Open

A potential criminal case against Abate is pending, the Flagler County Sheriff’s Office said. 

The plaintiff, identified by her initials, M.D. and a current resident of St. Augustine, is represented by Michael Dolce, the Palm Beach Gardens attorney who led the six-year campaign that resulted in the 2010 law repealing the statute of limitation in criminal or civil actions relating to child victims of sexual abuse. Dolce specializes in representing victims of sexual abuse and is currently representing an 11-year-old girl suing the Catholic Diocese of Palm Beach and a school in Jupiter over an abuse claim.  

Abate, 67, has lived at Cinnamon Beach at Ocean Hammock since 2016 after moving from Pennsylvania. He bought a condo unit locally with his wife for $515,000. In 2018 he incorporated a medical consultancy, Vita-Scienta Consulting, headquartered at his Cinnamon Beach property. He is the consultancy’s sole owner, according to Division of Corporations records. He did not respond to an email about the lawsuit. 

The civil lawsuit alleges six counts, including sexual battery (or rape), battery, aggravated battery, exposing another to a sexually transmissible disease, poisoning and rape by fraud. The suit damages in excess of $30,000. 

Dolce in an interview said a “delayed report” was filed with local law enforcement but the case was not pursued. “My appreciation is, law enforcement did not feel they had sufficient information to make the case.”

That report was filed in 2019. It’s not unusual for victims of sexual abuse to file significantly delayed reports, as the law abolishing statutes of limitations involving children recognizes, though an eight-year limitation still applies regarding adults. 




But the report was unusual: it did not refer to an investigation, and defined the issue as merely “informational.” The report was generated by Andrei Picerne, a civilian who was working the front desk at the county courthouse, where the sheriff has operated since the agency’s evacuation from its operations center in 2018. Picerne received a case report from the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office about the alleged offense. Jacksonville had taken a report from the alleged victim, then transmitted the case to Flagler because that’s where she said it had taken place. Picerne merely copied the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office’s narrative into a Flagler report, and filed it. It was reviewed by supervisor George Bender of the Investigative Services Division. 

The report confirms that the alleged incident took place at Abate’s home between 6 and 11:30 p.m. on July 25. The woman was 56 at the time. In the reproduced Jacksonville narrative, the woman “stated during the date, they shared an alcoholic beverage and she began feeling dizzy afterwards. The potential victim said she woke up to the subject putting his fingers inside her vagina, and then he brought her to his bedroom where she dozed off. She advised when she woke up again, the subject was on top of her penetrating her vaginally while she still had on her underwear. The potential victim said she rolled over, put her clothing, and left the subject’s residence in her vehicle. She advised she still has her clothing from the incident.”

The report adds: “The potential victim advised she kept in contact with the subject until September 2018 when she found out he was married and asked him to get an STD test. She stated since the incident, she has been diagnosed with depression and PTSD.” 

FlaglerLive requested the sheriff’s report on Wednesday, the day the suit was filed. The agency provided the report 48 hours later. It wasn’t clear why charges were not pursued at the time, or why the report appeared to end conclusively with the wording from the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office (though it wouldn’t have, since it did not take place in its jurisdiction), which also did not pursue the case: “This report is for informational purposes only.”

A Flagler County Sheriff’s spokesperson today clarified: the case is not, in fact, closed after all.

“From what I was able to gather with ISB is that they were trying to see if the victim was still trying to cooperate in that case, so it’s pending in that regard. They’re still working on it, it’s still an active case,”  the spokesperson said. She referred to the Investigative Services Bureau. “They’re still doing work on their end. I don’t know for a fact that criminal charges aren’t going to be brought.”




The civil case against Abate is moving independently of the potential criminal case. 

According to the civil complaint, MD and Abate met on a dating website. She was looking for a serious, long-term relationship, as she described it in her profile on the site. Abate identified himself as a “Single Male seeing Females,” and included a nickname to suggest his profession: “Boreddocdx.” The woman did not know he was married and “would not have communicated with Dr. Abate or engaged in any other contact whatsoever had she known that he was in a committed marriage,” the complaint states. 

Abate “acted as if he was single” and showed interest in pursuing the connection by touting his success as a doctor, among other things, “highlighting the views from his ocean-front residence and responding to her admiration of that view shown in a photograph, specifically her statement ‘nice view’ with ‘Now I need someone to enjoy it with.’” She reiterated that she wanted to move slowly. 

They first met for coffee. Abate then invited the woman to his Cinnamon Beach home. The date was on July 22, 2017. During the date, the complaint claims, “Dr. Abate spiked [MD’s] drink while she was in the restroom with some drug that impaired her to the point of blacking out and being only mildly conscious. In that condition, she was unable to exert control over her environment, and unable to control that she was doing or what was done to her. While she was in that condition, Dr. Abate did sexually assault [MD].” (The allegation echoes an ongoing case in criminal court: that of Larry Cavallaro, who was 72 when he was arrested in 2019 on an allegation he’d drugged and raped a woman in January 2018. The case is heading for trial in October.)  

The complaint against Abate describes the woman as escaping his residence “upon regaining sufficient abilities to do so.” But contact between the two continued. The suit alleges Abate “admitted to specific sexual acts.” The woman then discovered he was married, and that “others had allegedly complained about “him misrepresenting himself on dating websites. When she asked him to get tested for STDs, he did. The results returned positive for an unspecified but incurable disease (the description in the complaint fits that of herpes), subjecting the woman to “living in fear of having contracted the disease.”

Abate then allegedly repeatedly “reiterated his responsibility in writing for what he did” to the woman, and provided  a series of $3,000 checks between February and October 2018 that added up to $15,000, more than a year after the initial encounter. Neither the civil nor the criminal complaint make clear if any in-person contact took place after the July 2017 “date.”  

Though the counts against Abate parallel the sort of language found in criminal court, “any time somebody is victimized by a criminal they have a right to pursue a civil remedy for the criminal act,” separate from criminal charges, Dolce said in an interview. “Our goal in civil court is working with basically the same body of evidence.”




While a report was filed and charges not pursued at the time, Dolce said, “In civil court we have a lesser burden of proof.” Dolce made the analogy with the 1994-5 O.J. Simpson cases: the former NFL star was accused of murdering Nicole Brown Simpson, his wife. O.S. Simpson was acquitted of the murder, but soon afterward was sued in civil court, where in 1997 a jury found him liable for the wrongful death and battery of Nicole and ordered to pay $33 million. 

In the civil action, the plaintiff has the role of the prosecutor regarding the burden of proof. “I have to prove to the jury that my client’s claims of being sexually assaulted by Dr. Abate are true,” Dolce said. But that burden is lower than in criminal court. 

Though the counts against Abate parallel the sort of language found in criminal court, “any time somebody is victimized by a criminal they have a right to pursue a civil remedy for the criminal act,” separate from criminal charges, Dolce said in an interview. “Our goal in civil court is working with basically the same body of evidence.”

In a statement at Dolce’s law firm’s website, Dolce said: “We intend to offer proofs in this litigation that Dr. Abate violated my client first through deception and then through an egregious act of sexual violence, resulting in her becoming severely traumatized and impaired.  We are also prepared to offer proofs of the serious financial, emotional and mental health toll on a woman who was deliberately lied to for Dr. Abate’s selfish purposes.” 

If criminal charges against Abate do follow, it wouldn’t be the first time in recent years that civil or administrative action was followed by criminal action. 

An almost identical pattern followed the administrative, criminal and civil cases that developed out of allegations that former Palm Coast physician Florence Fruehan sexually fondled women in the course of medical examinations at his clinic in 2018. The case first emerged out of an investigation by the Florida Department of Health, which led to a settlement requiring Fruehan to surrender his medical license and never practice again. 




The revelations, first published here, also shed light on sheriff’s reports filed at the time of the alleged assaults, reports that had apparently led nowhere–until the administrative case illustrated the gravity of the former doctor’s behavior. He was eventually charged with a felony battery count (battery on a person 65 or older) and pleaded to 24 months’ probation. Last year, one of the individuals in the criminal case filed a civil suit against Fruehan on assault and infliction of distress counts. 

Abate describes himself at length on professional networking sites. 

“Over the past 18 months I have been a medical adviser for various companies,” he writes about the consultancy on his LinkedIn profile, detailing specific work in varied medical fields. Previously, he lists himself as the executive director for medical affairs and another job title at Quest Diagnostics in Madison, N.J., for four years, then lists seven different jobs at seven different companies, six of them lasting just one year, one of them two years, including chief clinical officer, medical director (at Pfizer in 2006-07, the maker of one of the covid vaccines) and a scientific liaison, among other titles. His longer stint before that was a private practice as a cardiologist at Sentara Williamsburg Medical Center in Virginia, and before that, a Florida connection: he was a cardiology fellow at the University of South Florida from 1987 to 1990. 

He holds an undergraduate degree from Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey and a medical degree from East Central University (Universidad Central del Este) in the Dominica Republic. 

“I knew early on that I wanted a career in medicine and in particular to be a cardiologist,” he writes in his brief LinkedIn biography. “When I was in 1st grade my grandmother had a heart attack and I wanted to do something to make her better. Years later I [fulfilled] that dream and had two rewarding careers, first as a cardiologist, caring for patients and then in becoming a leader in pharma and diagnostics industries with vast experience in medical affairs and clinical development in pharma, diagnostics and device.” He describes himself as a “visionary business strategist with proven successes” and “an expert developer of high-performance cultures with a demonstrable capacity in navigating positive change management.”