Shady Doctor Loses 2.3 Million Dollars in A Lawsuit For Sleeping with a Married Woman...SMDH

Shady Doctor Loses 2.3 Million Dollars in A Lawsuit For Sleeping with a Married Woman...SMDH

North Carolina’s second highest court has thrown out a $2.3 million civil judgment handed down against a Mooresville physician accused in a lawsuit of having an affair with a married nurse. The reason: Dr. Matthew Johnson never knew he was on trial. In a ruling handed down this week, a three-judge panel of the N.C. Court of Appeals said Johnson’s due-process rights were violated because the notice for his 2019 civil trial and other legal notifications went to a Mooresville address where he no longer lived. In fact, Johnson only learned of the trial when a reporter sought his reaction to being docked several million dollars by the jury. “The facts before us do not indicate that (Johnson) was negligent or inattentive to his case,” Judge Fred Gore wrote in his ruling this week. “This is a case where (he) never received proper notice of trial.” Johnson’s appellate attorney, Rebecca Watts of Charlotte, said the ruling upholds her client’s constitutional rights. “In due process, it’s not all right that a judgment is handed down against someone who did not know there was a trial taking place,” she said. “Basically, it’s a do-over. A potential do-over.” The unanimous opinion — which included the support of Appeals Court Judge John Arrowood of Charlotte — grants Johnson a new trial. It allows him for now to keep millions of dollars in his pocket. But it also means that the details of his disruptive workplace affair stand to receive another airing in court. That a doctor’s private behavior remains a matter of public reckoning comes down to a peculiarity of law. North Carolina remains among only a handful of states that still allow lawsuits for criminal conversation — a legalistic fig leaf defining the act of sleeping with someone else’s husband or wife. In Johnson’s case, the wife was Jana Sprinkle, a longtime surgical assistant at his Mooresville practice, with whom Johnson initiated a sexual relationship in 2014, the appeals court opinion says.

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