Former Fox Doctor has his home raided by DEA amid sexual assault lawsuits

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Citation Sarah Wasko / Media Matters

Keith Ablow, a psychiatrist and former Fox News contributor who was sued in 2019 by former patients who said he exploited them sexually, had his Massachusetts home raided by the Drug Enforcement Agency on February 13.

Boston 25 News reported that it remains unclear what the DEA were searching for at Ablow’s Newburyport residence but that they were at his house “for most of the day.”

As The Boston Globe noted in its report on the DEA raid of Ablow’s home (where he also operated his practice, Baystate Psychiatry, until the state suspended his medical license in May 2019), the former Fox contributor was not taken into custody and has not been charged with a crime, though a DEA spokesperson said the search was part of an “ongoing investigation.”

“In suspending Ablow’s medical license last May, the Board of Registration in Medicine alleged he had been improperly prescribing medications to his office staff for years and sometimes asked the workers to share the drugs with him,” the Globe reported. “Ablow’s authority to prescribe controlled substances regulated by the DEA was rescinded when Massachusetts suspended his medical license.”

Ablow made a name for himself on Fox as a transphobic member of the network’s “Medical A-Team.” Fox used the psychiatrist’s appearances to advance anti-transgender and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric that he supplied in spades, claiming that transgender people are “a very big threat to our culture” and have “a psychotic delusion.” Ablow has also been a defender of so-called “ex-gay” pseudoscience, which provides a basis for the dangerous and discredited practice of conversion therapy. He parted ways with the network in 2017 — two years before he was publicly reported by ex-patients for sexual exploitation and abuse.

In 2014, medical experts harshly condemned Ablow's behavior when asked by the Associated Press about his pschyoanalysis of then-First Lady Michelle Obama. Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, a past president of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), told the AP that “it is shameful and unfortunate that he is given a platform by Fox News or any other media organization,” adding that “he is a narcissistic self-promoter of limited and dubious expertise.” He made a number of vile comments on Fox during his time there.

In February 2019, Ablow was accused in lawsuits of manipulating patients he treated for acute depression, at times allegedly telling one of the women he “owned” her or that she was his “slave.”