SEATTLE — An Everett man had his nursing assistant license suspended Friday after being charged with raping a woman under his care.
The incident took place in May 2018 at a Seattle hospital where George Tulus, 61, was one of several nurses who looked after a woman recovering from a severe stomach condition. During one of his six visits, the 51-year-old woman woke up and noticed the privacy curtains had been pulled around them, and the only other patient had been moved out of the room.
He was in the process of raping her, according to allegations in the charging documents.
She told him to stop, but he continued.
“Don’t worry about it,” he reportedly said. “This is how I do it.”
Then he reportedly threatened her, telling her that he knew where she lived and that he would make her life miserable.
Shortly after, she was transferred to another hospital. She didn’t tell anyone about what happened until October, when she talked to a nurse.
Tulus was charged in April in King County Superior Court with second-degree rape. He remained in King County Jail Friday, with bail set to $100,000.
“The victim was particularly vulnerable due to her isolation, as well as her immobility,” King County deputy prosecutor Emily Petersen wrote. “The defendant abused his position as a health care provider not only to commit this rape but to silence the victim.”
It wasn’t the first time that Tulus has been accused of sexually assaulting patients, but it is the first time he has been charged. Petersen wrote that he has a record of complaints going back to the early 2000s.
In 2011, an 18-year-old woman at Swedish Edmonds said she trusted Tulus at first. He was polite and gentle while giving her baths, she said.
But during one cleaning, he acted differently. He told her that her private parts needed to be washed, and allegedly began sexually assaulting her. He leaned over and kissed her on the lips and said “I like you,” according to her account.
She said she didn’t talk to police at first because “she didn’t want to think about it anymore and wanted to just forget the incident,” according to charging papers. She’s changed her mind since, prosecutors wrote — after eight years, she still feels insecure and frightened when she thinks about the encounter.
In 2005, another woman told hospital staff at Providence Regional Medical Center Everett that she was molested after falling asleep during a massage from Tulus. In 2004, a woman reported that Tulus raped her in the shower at the same hospital. And in 2003, a woman said Tulus threw her onto a bed at a Bothell nursing home, fondled her and attempted to pull her pants down, only quitting after she told him to stop “many times,” according to charging papers.
Petersen noted that Tulus was arrested three times between 1992 and 1995 in California, for soliciting lewd acts and prostitution.
Tulus, who is from Indonesia, resides in the U.S. on a work visa.
Zachariah Bryan: 425-339-3431; zbryan@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @zachariahtb.
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