When Roy complained of her depression to a friend, her friend suggested that she see her therapist, Dr. Pauline Anderson. When Anderson refused to see Roy, she referred her to her colleague, Dr. Renatus Hartogs. At her first session with Hartogs, Roy was invited to a "bathtub party" with him. Within her next few sessions with Hartogs, he had begun propositioning her for sex; when she had asked the reason, he said that it would cure her of her attraction to women.[1][3][4]
For a 14 month period, starting in August 1969, Hartogs and Roy routinely had sex, with Hartogs waiving the fee he had set for his services. In turn, Roy started work for Hartogs as a typist in his office.[4][5] In 1971, Roy stopped seeing Hartogs; upon her release from Hartogs' care, she was committed into the Metropolitan Hospital Center for major depression.[3]
Roy enlisted the services of Robert Stephan Cohen to sue Hartogs after she had ceased visiting him; Cohen had previously represented Roy in her divorce case.[1] After initially failing to appear in court, Hartogs maintained his innocence, claiming that a hydrocele in his groin had made sexual intercourse painful for him.[6] Cohen, however, had found that such a hydrocele could easily be operated on, even by Hartogs himself. Further testimony was given at the trial by a selection of Hartogs' former patients, all of whom claimed that Hartogs had made inappropriate sexual advances towards them, and to have not noticed his hydrocele.[1][3]
After Hartogs' plea to dismiss the case against him was declined,[7] the jury found Hartogs guilty of medical malpractice, and ordered Hartogs to pay a combined total of $350,000 in damages ($200,000 in compensatory damages, $150,000 in punitive damages). While attempts by Hartogs to have the charges overturned were unsuccessful, he was able to reduce the amount paid in compensatory damages to $50,000 and avoid paying any punitive damages.[3]
Hartogs lost his license to practice medicine in December 1976.[8]
Journalist Lucy Freeman partnered with Roy to write Betrayal, an account of her experience seeing Hartogs and the ensuing lawsuit. The book was released in 1976, and was adapted into a made-for-TV movie in 1978.