On the last Friday of February 2025, Sanjeev Kumar walked toward a Memphis hospital with a full list of surgeries waiting for him inside. Two people in plain clothes approached him from a civilian car. They asked if he was Dr. Kumar. He said yes. They said they had a warrant and showed him a piece of paper. The first words he read on it were something like prostitution, sexual assault, human trafficking.
“I was obviously shocked inside, but I remained calm and cooperated with them,” he says. By the time he was handcuffed and in the car, he counted six agents spread across the area, talking on radios.
That afternoon prosecutors unsealed the indictment. His hands were cuffed. He could not read the binder they were reading from. “They’re talking about illegal sex acts and rape, human trafficking, and all these type of salacious allegations, and I’m just literally shocked.” His own attorney walked across the courtroom to him. “He’s like, hey, you never told me that you had sex with these patients. And I said, because I didn’t.”
He spent the long weekend in solitary confinement. His first phone call was to his wife. She had already heard; a fellow physician had watched the arrest. Patients scheduled for surgery that morning had been fasting since midnight. He has never learned what they were told.
Seventeen months later, on July 8, 2026, Chief U.S. District Judge Sheryl H. Lipman sentenced him to 240 months in federal prison. He is 45 years old. He is free on bond until a restitution hearing on October 2, after which the court is expected to set the date he reports. He is appealing. He spoke to The Justice Impact Show, with host JP Maroney and co-host Stephen Keller, five weeks before that hearing.
The cases nobody wanted
Kumar trained in gynecologic oncology at the Mayo Clinic, which he calls “the Supreme Court of Surgery in the US,” and came to Memphis in 2013. He asked a mentor how a surgeon builds a career after fellowship. The answer: “Do cases that nobody wants to do.”
Two categories came to define the practice: women with extensive prior surgery and scar tissue, and women with extreme obesity, 400 and 500 pounds, a population he says nobody else wanted to operate on. One patient had to be scanned at the zoo because the hospital CT table could not bear her weight. Endometrial cancer is driven by obesity, and Memphis, he says, is “probably the epicenter of the obesity epidemic.” He took Jehovah’s Witness patients with massive tumors when other surgeons would not, because they refuse blood transfusion and a 20 or 30 pound tumor can bleed.
By the government’s own data set, presented at trial, the clinic had more than 9,000 patients and was probably the largest of its kind in Tennessee. It was open six days a week. “We had a policy in the clinic that we would never turn anybody away. It doesn’t matter if you had insurance, if you didn’t have insurance, if you paid your bill or you didn’t pay your bill.”
How a hysteroscopy became a sex crime
On April 16, 2024, Kumar was performing robotic surgery at a hospital when messages reached him that police were in his clinic. His car had been broken into a few days earlier, and his first guess was a burglary. It was the FBI.
The arrest came ten months later, and the theory behind the headline charges is the part of this case that reaches past medicine. Kumar lays it out plainly. A hysteroscopy is a procedure in which a surgeon looks inside the uterus with a telescope. Prosecutors’ working theory, as he understood it, was that if they could prove health care fraud and tie it to a hysteroscopy, the procedure became a fraudulent penetration, and a fraudulent penetration was rape. His clinic sat in Memphis and drew patients from Arkansas and Mississippi. “Since they cross the border, in their opinion it becomes human trafficking.”
“Imagine a patient comes in, she’s 60, 70 years old from Arkansas, and gets seen by my physician assistant, who’s a female. Procedure is performed with consent, everybody’s happy. Five years later, I, the physician, get charged with sexual assault, human trafficking, and get arrested.” He says some of those counts were built on dates when he was not in the clinic at all.
The announcement came from then-Acting U.S. Attorney Reagan Fondren, who, according to Kumar, called him a predator in a white coat. The Justice Department’s press release page for that February 28, 2025 announcement now carries a notice that the comments and quotations in it have been retracted. The Associated Press reported on March 31, 2025 that Fondren had been fired by the White House.
By then the story had gone around the world, including to India, where Kumar was born. He got out on bond and stayed inside, on advice that his physical safety was at risk. “People are threatening me, our family, social media, writing things like stone him to death.” His children were threatened. “How do you unring that bell?”
On October 17, 2025, a federal judge dismissed 17 counts, including all four Travel Act counts, holding that “sexual activity” under the statute requires conduct undertaken for sexual gratification, which the indictment had not alleged. None of the sexual-misconduct allegations reached a jury.
The board that said no
What did reach a jury in January 2026 was a device and billing case. Prosecutors alleged that between September 2019 and April 2024, Kumar performed more than 15,000 hysteroscopy-with-biopsy procedures on Medicare and Medicaid patients using improperly reprocessed devices, and billed as if the procedures were medically necessary and the devices new or properly reprocessed. The jury convicted on 40 of 46 counts: 18 of adulteration of medical devices, 16 of misbranding, and 6 of health care fraud. It hung on the rest.
Before any of that, Kumar says, the same allegations had already been heard by the body he was trained to regard as the final word on medical practice. After the April 2024 search, he says, the FBI referred its findings to the Tennessee medical board. The board investigated for months, visited the clinic, photographed every room, interviewed witnesses, and in September 2024 dismissed the matter in a report he describes as roughly 490 pages, with a cover letter saying the case was closed. “When the medical board sent me the letter, I thought the case is over at that point. But obviously not.”
At trial, by his account, the body of that report was admitted after a fight, and the letter stating the board’s conclusion was excluded. The jury was left, as Maroney put it, to interpret 490 pages of medical findings without the one page that said what they meant.
He says his motion for a change of venue was denied, even as prospective jurors wept during selection and said they could not serve because of what they had read. And he made the decision most defense lawyers warn against. “I’m innocent, got nothing to hide. I’m gonna testify.” He was on the stand for two days. “The government never asked me even a single question, did not cross examine me.”
The devices
The adulteration and misbranding counts turn on how surgical instruments were reprocessed and stored. Kumar’s defense, as he describes it, rests on two documents anyone can read. The FDA’s own published guidance on reprocessing, he says, lists four exceptions, and two apply to him: the guidance does not reach health care facilities other than acute care hospitals, and it does not reach single-use devices that were opened but never used. He says the CDC’s corresponding guideline lists the same exceptions.
The second exception matters because of what the government said in its own filing. When the defense moved for a bill of particulars asking which device was used on which patient in which procedure, Kumar says, prosecutors responded that the government was not required to prove actual use of a device. “If you look at their press releases, the press releases will say I was convicted of reusing single use devices. However, if you look at their court filings, they say the government is not required to prove actual use of a device. So I’m still at a loss as to how do you reconcile the two.”
The instruments themselves, he says, were pulled from the clinic during the search, some from trash cans, and held in government custody for roughly eighteen months before the jury saw them. By then some were broken in two. None were complete. He says they tested negative for blood three times, and that the FBI’s laboratory declined to test them for DNA on the ground that they were not suitable. “There was no evidence that tied any specific device to any specific patient for use or reuse.”
He also points to testimony from an FDA lead reviewer who stated under oath that the agency had never cleared a hysteroscope for use without sterilization. The manufacturer’s FDA-cleared instructions for use, he says, state that the devices in question can be used with either high-level disinfection or sterilization. When his team raised the conflict with the FDA, he says, the agency wrote back that the instructions for use control. The testimony stayed on the record.
Justice Impact has not independently verified these claims. They are Dr. Kumar’s account, given on the record, and they will be tested in the appeal he is preparing. His brief was not finished when he spoke.
The documented record is what it is. A grand jury indicted him. The press release that announced it was retracted. The headline counts were dismissed. A jury convicted him on 40 counts. Announcing the sentence, U.S. Attorney D. Michael Dunavant said Kumar had used his medical license to target a vulnerable population of women, was motivated by greed, and that no punishment could achieve justice in the case.
Kumar’s read on why he was targeted is guarded. The official position at trial, he says, was that his clinic was an outlier in the government’s data mining. His answer is that it saw about nine times as many hysteroscopy patients as the next peer group while collecting less per patient. Patients who testified for the government, he notes, said the FBI contacted them first. Asked by Keller, whose book Pay to Play argues that federal cases like this rarely begin with the government acting alone, whether someone else wanted his clinic closed, he says he cannot speculate on specifics. “Who’s to benefit with our clinic not being open? It’s obviously our competitors and the hospital systems.”
“That doctor was me”
The last half hour of the conversation is aimed at other physicians, and it is the part that does not depend on how the appeal comes out.
The phrase Kumar wants doctors to hear is medical necessity. A patient comes in with abnormal bleeding. A specialist trained not to miss a cancer offers options. She chooses a hysteroscopy, with consent. Then, years later, the government hires a chart reviewer who says, I might not have done that procedure. “That care that happened five years in the past is now labeled medically unnecessary after the fact.”
He works the arithmetic on colonoscopies. Ten to fifteen million a year in the United States, by his recollection, to find something like 115,000 colon cancers. “Technically you can say that only a hundred fifteen thousand colonoscopies were medically necessary. Ten million of them were medically unnecessary because cancer was not found. But you’re forgetting that actually having a negative colonoscopy was actually the purpose.” A clear mammogram is the same. “Just because you can get a chart reviewer, pay them 750 bucks per hour, and say, hey, I would not have ordered that.”
The cost, he argues, lands on patients, because doctors who fear indictment practice defensively. Endometrial cancer, he says, is among the fastest growing cancers in the country, and hysteroscopy finds it.
Maroney put to him what a board member of the Justice Restoration Foundation had said: the experienced doctor with compliance staff and medical directors believes this cannot happen to him.
“Yeah, actually that doctor was me, up till two years ago. I am trained at the Mayo Clinic. I read extensively, I bend over backwards to do the right thing for the patient. I’m board certified. I’m literally doing everything that is required of a very hardworking physician and a specialist. And read my case. If they want to target you, they can.”
He tells doctors to read the trial transcript, where he says prosecutors called the uterus a sterile cavity, and then to look up the term uterine microbiome. He tells them to read what the FDA and the CDC say about hysteroscopes being semi-critical devices, and then to weigh the prosecution’s position as he heard it: “The moment a surgical instrument touches air, it is dirty.”
To the women who received notices that they may have been victims of a crime, some of whom still do not know what to believe, his answer is to go back to the moment care was given. “When we provided care, vast majority of our patients were happy. They consented to the treatment that was given to them, and they were actually grateful, and that’s why they returned to the clinic.” Several patients testified for him. At one point, he says, the court ruled that one more patient calling him a wonderful doctor would be cumulative.
His closing description of the system is a medical one. “I call it like autoimmune disease. The immunity that is designed to protect your body sometimes overreacts and starts eating the body itself.”
The restitution hearing is October 2. After that, a report date. Then the appeal.