She Asked for a Female Provider. Brooklyn College’s Clinic Allegedly Sent Her Back to Him.
A former Brooklyn College film student says she went to her campus health clinic for care and instead spent two years fending off the hands of the man treating her. In a civil suit filed in Kings County Supreme Court, Regina Patino, 26, alleges that Gary Giardina, a 78-year-old physician assistant at the CUNY-run clinic, groped her during multiple exams between 2022 and 2024.
When she reported it and asked for a female provider, the lawsuit alleges, the clinic’s then-director acknowledged that Patino “was not the only student” to raise concerns about Giardina — and then waved the complaint away, telling her he “is an older man and has no interest in young girls like you.”
Giardina, according to the New York Post, is still on the job. And CUNY has stood on this exact ground before: it paid more than $600,000 to settle the John Jay College “Swamp” harassment suit, then let one of the accused professors walk back into a classroom. Here is what the complaint says, and what the university’s own record says about how it handles the ones that came before.
- StillemployedGiardina remains a physician assistant at the Brooklyn College clinic as the suit is filed — NY Post
- 2022–2024windowthe period of alleged clinic-visit conduct described in the complaint — NY Post exclusive
- $610Kcuny precedenttaxpayer cost of the John Jay “Swamp” settlement; the accused professors paid $0 — 2021 settlement records
- $750MbenchmarkColumbia’s 2025 settlement over a clinician whose patient complaints were ignored for years — ProPublica
The claims here are civil allegations, unproven and untested in court. According to the complaint as reported by the New York Post, Patino visited the Brooklyn College Health Clinic — the student clinic at 2900 Bedford Ave. — several times between 2022 and 2024, and on those visits the lawsuit alleges Giardina guided her into his office with his hand on her lower back, then moved his hand up her thigh and pressed his cheek against hers during examinations. The suit says the conduct recurred across multiple appointments rather than being a single incident.
“[Giardina] guided her into his office with his hand on her lower back, moved his hand up her thigh and pressed his cheek against hers.”
From the complaint, as reported by the New York Post · civil allegations, unproven
Patino, a former CUNY and Brooklyn College film student, is the sole named plaintiff, but the complaint reportedly folds in accounts from other students who describe similar discomfort with the same provider. The defendant is a real, licensed practitioner: the federal NPI registry lists Gary M. Giardina as a physician assistant in New York, license 004761, active since 2008 — a detail that matters because it means the person the suit describes is not anonymous and remains professionally credentialed to see patients.
None of this has been answered in court. Giardina has not responded publicly, no criminal charge has been filed, and no licensing action has been reported. What follows is what the lawsuit alleges the institution did with the warning it says it received — because that, more than any single exam, is the accountability question.
Brooklyn College president: Michelle J. Anderson, in the role since 2016. The college issued a statement; she offered no personal comment.
CUNY chancellor: Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, who did not return a request for comment.
Who appoints the board: most CUNY trustee seats are filled by Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY), with additional seats appointed on the recommendation of the New York City mayor — Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D), who took office in January 2026. No elected official has commented on the suit.
The single most damning line in the complaint is not about the physician assistant at all. It is about the person who was supposed to protect students from exactly this. According to the lawsuit, when Patino reported her discomfort and asked to be seen by a female provider instead, the clinic’s then-director, Ilene Tannenbaum, a nurse practitioner, acknowledged that Patino “was not the only student to have raised similar concerns” — and then declined to act on any of them.
The complaint quotes the director’s alleged reassurance directly. Rather than reassign the patient, open a Title IX referral, or document the pattern, the lawsuit alleges Tannenbaum told Patino that Giardina “is an older man and has no interest in young girls like you” — an age-based dismissal offered, per the suit, in the same breath as an admission that other students had complained.
“He is an older man and has no interest in young girls like you.”
Clinic director Ilene Tannenbaum, as alleged in the complaint · her account is not yet on the record
CUNY’s own Policy on Sexual Misconduct does not leave that call to a clinic director’s gut. It obligates employees to route complaints of this kind to the Title IX apparatus for assessment — not to weigh a colleague’s age against a student’s account and decide the matter on the spot. Tannenbaum retired at the end of the 2024 school year after roughly three decades at the college. Her retirement closes her tenure; it does not, the suit contends, close the question of what the clinic knew and chose not to escalate. Tannenbaum has not publicly responded to the allegation.
The reason a single clinic complaint deserves scrutiny is that CUNY has a documented history of what happens after the complaint. The clearest example is John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where former students sued in the late 2010s alleging what one filing called a “swamp” of sexual harassment among faculty — a culture, the plaintiffs said, in which professors’ conduct was an open secret and the institution’s response was to look away.
The number that should follow any CUNY harassment claim is what the John Jay matter cost — and who paid it. CUNY settled by paying $164,499 to each of two plaintiffs plus $281,000 in legal fees: roughly $610,000 in taxpayer money. The accused professors paid nothing out of pocket. And in the detail that lingers, one of them, Ric Curtis, was back in a CUNY classroom by 2024. The pattern the John Jay plaintiffs described was not that no one ever paid — it was that the institution paid, and the accused moved on.
$164,499 × 2 — settlement to each of two John Jay plaintiffs.
+ $281,000 — legal fees, for a total of roughly $610,000 in public money.
$0 — what the accused professors paid out of pocket.
2024 — the year one accused professor, Ric Curtis, returned to a CUNY classroom.
That is the institutional memory the Brooklyn College suit lands in. The Patino complaint does not have to prove the John Jay pattern to raise the same worry: an early warning that a director allegedly heard, an accused practitioner who allegedly kept his post, and a university that historically absorbs the settlement and keeps the accused on the payroll.
There is a more expensive lesson a few miles north in Manhattan about what it costs an institution to wave off complaints about a clinician. At Columbia University, patients told administrators for years about Robert Hadden, an OB-GYN in the university’s medical system. Those complaints were not acted on with the urgency they warranted, and the eventual reckoning was staggering.
In 2025, Columbia agreed to a $750 million settlement covering 576 patients — on top of roughly $277 million in earlier settlements, pushing the institution’s total exposure past $1 billion. The through-line to Brooklyn College is not the scale of the alleged conduct, which is different and far graver in the Columbia case; it is the mechanism. Both stories turn on the same institutional failure: a complaint reaches someone with the authority to act, and that person decides the complaint can wait. Columbia is what that decision can eventually cost.
The Columbia case became the reference point precisely because investigators found the warning signs were there long before the payout — a documented trail of concerns that an institution had the chance to act on and did not. That is the standard against which the Brooklyn College clinic’s alleged “you’re not the only one, but never mind” response will be measured if the suit proceeds.
The complaint was filed in Kings County (Brooklyn) Supreme Court in late June 2026 and seeks unspecified damages. As of publication the court has not yet posted an index number to the public docket, and the plaintiff’s attorney has not been named in the reporting — both routine for a filing this fresh. No answer has been entered on Giardina’s or CUNY’s behalf, so the university’s formal legal position is not yet on the record.
What is on the record is a short institutional statement. Brooklyn College said it “takes all reports and allegations of misconduct seriously and is committed to maintaining a safe, respectful, and supportive environment,” and that “because this is a pending legal matter, the college is unable to comment further.” Neither Giardina nor Tannenbaum responded, and CUNY’s central office did not comment. The practical status is unchanged from the day the suit dropped: no criminal referral, no licensing action, and — per the Post — the accused physician assistant still employed at the clinic where the conduct is alleged to have occurred.
“Brooklyn College takes all reports and allegations of misconduct seriously and is committed to maintaining a safe, respectful, and supportive environment. Because this is a pending legal matter, the college is unable to comment further.”
— Brooklyn College, July 4, 2026
Strip the case to its load-bearing claim and it is not really about one exam room. It is about what a public university does with a warning. The lawsuit alleges a student reported a provider, asked for a woman instead, and was told by the person in charge that other students had said the same thing — and that nothing came of any of it.
A student says she asked her campus clinic for a female provider. The clinic’s director allegedly conceded she was “not the only one” to complain about the same physician assistant — and, the suit alleges, sent her back to him anyway.
He is, by the New York Post’s account, still employed there. CUNY has settled this kind of allegation before for more than $600,000 and kept the accused on. Columbia shows the ceiling: a billion-plus, when complaints about a clinician go unheeded long enough.
The allegations are unproven and Giardina is presumed innocent. But the question the filing forces is one the university can’t litigate away: when a student says “not him,” who at CUNY is obligated to listen — and what happens when they don’t?
