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Ethicists weigh in on whether actions taken a decade ago are relevant today
by
Kristina Fiore, Director of Enterprise & Investigative Reporting, MedPage Today
September 25, 2024
Last Updated
September 26, 2024
An ob/gyn in New Jersey has been accused of “catfishing” at least three women, as revealed by a memoir published this summer.
Emily Marantz, MD, who is also known by her maiden name Emily Slutsky, reportedly posed as a man named “Ethan” and kept up intimate online chats with women on the internet dating site OkCupid more than a decade ago.
Sociologist Anna Akbari, PhD, wrote about her experience getting involved with “Ethan” — and finding two other women who went through the same ordeal — first a decade ago and in her new memoir, There Is No Ethan. Ethan first reached out to Akbari, touting a PhD from MIT and an apartment in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, in late 2010.
Akbari wrote that their conversations were engaging, but she grew suspicious as Ethan’s excuses for not being able to meet in person became more implausible, culminating in a cancer diagnosis. Akbari had to stop responding, but felt bad since it was, in theory, just before the start of Ethan’s chemotherapy treatments.
She claims Ethan was “persuading and emotionally manipulating women with attention, affection, and the promise of love and companionship,” according to the New York Times review of her memoir.
Akbari found two other women who were talking with “Ethan,” and the three of them together were ultimately able to track down Marantz and confront her, according to an interview with History Nerds United. Still, she said they never received a satisfactory explanation as to why Marantz would do this.
Marantz just said it was initially boredom, but then it became a type of addiction, according to the interview.
Ultimately, the three women confirmed a total of 10 women who had been talking with “Ethan” — no easy feat to keep up, let alone for someone in medical school, which was the case for Marantz when Ethan was corresponding with Akbari.
Akbari told MedPage Today that she and the other women reached out to Marantz’s medical school, and later to her residency program, but there were no consequences. Another of Marantz’s catfishing victims who was also a physician eventually wrote an anonymous letter to the NIH, where Marantz had a position at the time, but that, too, went nowhere.
“I’ve spoken with medical ethicists, and they’ve said … shouldn’t we be holding our medical professionals to a higher standard?” Akbari said. “Can we separate what someone does online from what they do in their medical practice?”
Marantz is currently an ob/gyn at Jersey City Medical Center in New Jersey, part of the RWJBarnabas Health System. She went to medical school at University College Cork School of Medicine in Ireland, followed by residency at the University of Toledo Medical Center in Ohio, and a fellowship in ob/gyn at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Wauwatosa, according to her profile on the RWJBarnabas website.
On her personal website, Marantz claims she earned an undergraduate degree in nuclear engineering from MIT, followed by a master’s degree in applied physics from Columbia University. That site also mentions postgraduate training in health informatics and policy at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City, and experience as a clinical informatics researcher at the NIH.
In a statement emailed to MedPage Today, Jersey City Medical Center said it has “full confidence in Dr. Marantz’s ability to continue providing the highest quality of care to her patients. The events from more than a decade ago have been reviewed and addressed to the satisfaction of the medical center.”
But bioethics experts contacted by MedPage Today saw it differently. Nir Eyal, DPhil, director of the Center for Population-Level Bioethics at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said that “if the allegations against the physician are proven correct … the alleged unethical behavior would question this physician’s reliability as a clinician.”
“How can the professional society, and how can ob/gyn patients in particular, trust someone who allegedly treated women so cruelly?” Eyal asked, adding: Would you send a cat to the vet who treated cats cruelly — even though it was technically legal, and it occurred years earlier?
Daniel Hausman, PhD, also a bioethics expert at Rutgers University, told MedPage Today in an email that “because of the trust that individuals place in physicians, which may be indeed the difference between life and death, we demand higher moral standards of physicians [than other occupations]. We lay bare our fears, secrets, and our bodies. Even if the shady activities of a doctor were not related to medicine, dishonest behavior would be a serious red flag.”
“In this case, Slutsky’s intimate online deception of women is especially concerning, given that she works in a gynecology center,” Hausman added. “I would not place my trust in a doctor who had behaved as Slutsky has.”
Eyal noted that a “potential solution” would be for Marantz “to focus on research and abstract data, and avoid patient interaction. But she would also need to give assurances that she handles confidential medical information responsibly. A letter from a psychiatrist would be helpful.”
Marantz’s medical license in New Jersey is active and has no discipline attached to it.
Kristina Fiore leads MedPage’s enterprise & investigative reporting team. She’s been a medical journalist for more than a decade and her work has been recognized by Barlett & Steele, AHCJ, SABEW, and others. Send story tips to [email protected]. Follow
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