Pediatrician admits to assaulting dozens of young patients
Nearly two decades after Pennsylvania state regulators let him off the hook, a former pediatrician admitted in court Thursday that he sexually assaulted 31 children, most of them patients.
Dr. Johnnie Barto of Johnstown pleaded guilty to sexually abusing two family members and admitted to sexually assaulting more than two dozen patients.
The abuse spanned decades and typically involved girls and boys between ages 8 and 12, prosecutors said. One of the victims was 2 weeks old. Barto molested children in the exam room at Laurel Pediatric Associates in Cambria County and at local hospitals, according to the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office.
Barto, 71, was arrested in January and charged with groping a 12-year-old girl during an office visit several weeks earlier. Suspecting she might not be alone, the attorney general’s office put out a call for other accusers to come forward — and they did, by the dozen, with claims going back to the late 1980s.