You ask him how he came across the article.
'I read,' he says, narrowing his eyes. 'Didn't you take any journalism courses?'
That's when, for the first time, you begin to understand the experience many of his former colleagues have described to you. Now you're the lowly scrub nurse-or even the seasoned superior- whose competence is being so pointedly challenged by Dr. David Arndt. And, just as they have explained it, he does it in a way that suggests he has no choice but to do it, and that he is confident, in the end, you will appreciate being made aware of just how far you've fallen short of his expectations.
There's an intensity to David Arndt that never seems to slacken, a way in which he seems both hyper-aware of his very public collapse and oblivious to it. Overnight, the high-octane, Harvard- trained Arndt became the doctor who left his patient on the operating table so he could go to the bank to cash a check. In an instant, that summer of 2002, the news went national. But the profound professional embarrassment would turn out to be only the beginning. Within two months,Arndt would be charged with statutory child rape, indecent assault, and drug possession. He would file a 'poverty motion,' the surgeon in one of medicine's most lucrative specialties asking the court to pay his costs. And then, in a separate case nearly a year later, he would face one more charge, this one for possessing metham-phetamine with intent to distribute.
'His downfall is almost operatic in its tragedy,' says Grant Colfax, a Harvard-trained doctor who was once one of Arndt's closest friends. As Arndt prepares to stand two separate criminal trials, Col-fax is like many of the people who knew him well and are now left scratching their heads. Their emotions oscillate between two poles: There's the lingering disbelief that such a brilliant and compassionate doctor-some say the most brilliant and most compassionate they had ever known-could seem to self-destruct in such a spectacularly public way. Then, perhaps more troubling, there's that voice inside them, which had been muffled deep for so long, the one that kept telling them it was only a matter of time before David Arndt's self-absorption and sense of invincibility finally got the best of him.
David Carl Arndt was born on October 10, 1960, in New Haven. Kenneth Arndt was attending Yale medical school and living in student housing with his wife,Anne. Many of the other med students weren't even married yet, never mind parents. The couple's baby became an immediate attraction for Ken's classmates. 'From the time he was extremely small, David was a very bright guy,' says Jack Barchas, one of Ken's good friends at Yale and now chairman of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. 'And he just radiated happiness. We'd go over there for brunch-lox and bagels-and here was this little kid, always interacting.'
When David was almost two, the Arndts packed up for Boston, so Ken could do his residency in dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital. They had another child, a daughter. Ken would begin climbing the ranks of Boston medicine, joining the faculty of Harvard Medical School and eventually becoming chief of dermatology at Beth Israel Hospital. Years later, Anne, a psychologist, would also join the Harvard Med faculty. Friends describe the couple as charming, warm, stylish, and smart.
Growing up in Newton, David stood out. Extremely bright, no doubt about that. Tall too. Kathy Sias was his neighbor and one of his best friends. She ate dinner with his family, accompanied them on ski trips to their place in New Hampshire. Longhaired David was intense and intellectual but fun to be around. What did they do together? 'A lot of drugs,' she says, chuckling. 'Just about everybody in our clique did during those days.'
She and other friends say David, who attended Weeks Junior High School in Newton and the private Cambridge School of Weston, was always pushing limits. (He kept a boa constrictor as a pet, says Sias.) They also say Anne and Ken seemed hipper and easier for teens to talk to than other parents in the neighborhood. But Sias says that as she spent more time with the family, she changed her mind. 'They were as unclued-in to teenagers as most parents, but they thought they were more clued in,' she says. 'His father was remote. His mother thought she knew everything because she was a psychologist. 'Oh, it's just a phase,' she would say about anything going on with David.'
(Through their attorney, Stephen R. Delinsky, Ken and Anne Arndt declined to comment for this story, and David declined to talk beyond his brief conversations outside of the courtroom. 'Dr. Arndt's parents respect, love, and admire him very much and are deeply concerned that your proposed article about David will seriously compromise his ability to achieve justice,' Delinsky wrote. The couple 'are confident that when all the facts are presented in court, David will be found not guilty in both cases.')
Though David would eventually become comfortable in his homosexuality, it's not surprising that his teenage years were more difficult.
'Looking back, I think he was aware of it, but I don't think he wanted to be,' Sias says. 'If he had admitted that he was gay, he would have probably lost a big part of his circle of friends.' He dated girls, including Sias. 'For about a week and a half,' she says. 'We went back to being best friends.'
After logging time at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst from 1978 to 1979, Arndt left the state for San Francisco. He immediately soaked up the ethos of the city-part tie-dyed Haight- Ashbury hippie, part Tales of the City free spirit. The son of Harvard faculty members enrolled in a 'university without walls' college called Antioch West. The downtown school awarded students course credit for their life experience. It no longer exists. He quickly earned a bachelor's degree and became a mental health counselor, working with the homeless who, in the parlance of San Francisco, were housed in 'homeless hotels.' Arndt's living quarters weren't much better.
On April 7, 1982, Arndt married a woman from India named Shobha Hundraj Nagrani. They would file for divorce four years later, and it became official in December 1987. Many of his friends say they knew little about the circumstances surrounding the marriage. What they did know about Arndt during this period was that he was into writing, literature, the arts scene. He was passionate, smart, insightful, alive.
And arrogant.
'One of a kind,' says Harvey Peskin, who was a professor in San Francisco State University's clinical psychology graduate program when Arndt enrolled in 1983. What set him apart was the way he put everyone around him, especially the professor, on notice. 'Professors tend to believe that students have to work to earn their respect,' Peskin says. 'David felt that the professor was the one who had to earn the right to have his respect.'
As the yearlong class wore on, Peskin, who had initially been irritated by Arndt's chutzpah, found himself wanting to pass his brilliant student's test. David Arndt has that effect on people. 'I don't think his behavior changed much,' Peskin says, 'but I think I changed.'
But Arndt would begin changing in other ways. One day in 1983, he walked into a San Francisco clinic where Stephen M. Goldfinger, a psychiatrist who oversaw mental health services for the homeless, was presiding over a case conference. Afterward, they talked, and soon they were dating and then living together. Goldfinger was thirty-two, Arndt twenty-three.
Arndt earned his master's degree and turned in his tie-dye for extensive travel throughout Asia, gourmet cooking, and an intensified focus on his career. He began contemplating medical school and took some supplemental pre-med classes.
It was around this time that Jack Barchas got a call from Ken Arndt. Barchas was then the director of a prestigious research laboratory at Stanford. His old Yale med school pal told him that David was living in California and for the first time was thinking about pursuing medicine. 'Ken, it's probably easier for me to talk to him about it than you,' Barchas said. 'Have him come see me.'
As it turned out, Barchas's lab had just been given a very early and crude MRI machine, which the researchers were about to experiment with using rats. Arndt volunteered to help. In no time, he had all but taken over the project. 'He was like a navy SEAL,' Barchas recalls. 'Just willing to do it and not waiting to be told.' Arndt suggested to Barchas that they write an academic paper about their findings. When it was published, the name of David Arndt was listed first, followed by a bunch of respected researchers with actual titles after their names.
Years later, when Barchas was serving with Ken Arndt on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Medical Association,and he would ask about David, Ken would say, 'It's all coming together for him.'
In 1988, David Arndt came home. He made his way to the hallowed ground of Harvard Medical School, where his father, one of the nation's top dermatologists, was a heavyweight. If relations between him and his parents had been strained during some of his time in San Francisco, they appeared to be back on track. But David didn't advertise his connections. Occasionally, a classmate would notice the author's name on their dermatology textbook. 'Kenneth A. Arndt-any relation to you?'
'Yeah, that's my father,' David would reply casually.
And no one who saw David in class-with his burning intelligence and remarkable self-possession-would question whether he had the goods to get into Harvard on his own. Soon after Arndt joined the medical school's class of 1992, Steve Goldfinger joined the Harvard faculty. They shared a gracious Victorian in Jamaica Plain that was well appointed with the artwork they had collected together on their travels-Balinese puppets, Burmese wall hangings, Borneo masks. They frequently had Arndt's med school friends over for dinner or cocktail parties. What those friends saw was a couple that seemed to enjoy life and each other's company. They had a couple of dogs and a garden that Goldfinger faithfully tended to.
This is not the average med student experience. 'Most of us came as unformed characters, having spent all of our time studying to get to Harvard,' says Timothy Ferris, a classmate of Arndt's who is now a primary care doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital. 'We came as receptors of knowledge, not producers. David immediately stood out as someone who appeared to have a fully formed character. He could do the work. He was confident. Most medical students were still so afraid that they spent all their time studying. David was organizing parties. He had a life. He had a car. He had a nice house. While the rest of us were putting our personal lives on hold for four to eight years, David had balance. He was where we all hoped to be. The fact that he was gay only added to that. The most mysterious part of us- our sexuality-and here is a guy who has it all figured out.'
Not that there weren't moments that gave his friends pause.
Grant Colfax appreciated Arndt's tremendous warmth and easy ability to talk intelligently about literature, politics, life. Like most of Arndt's friends, he found something magnetic about him. 'But he had some clear character flaws,' Colfax says. 'To my dearest friend, he was outwardly rude and uninterested. He couldn't even exude the bare social graces. She asked me, 'How can you be friends with such a jerk?' I saw what she was saying, but he had always been really kind to me and fun to be around.'
A few years into med school, Arndt accompanied Colfax to a gym near campus. 'David was totally dismissive of the whole thing,' Colfax recalls. 'Then, overnight, he had to be the best.' And so David Arndt, who up until this point had stood out only by what he said, also began to stand out by how he looked.
His nondescript physique was soon gone. He became even more toned as his weight training intensified during his general surgery internship at Beth Israel Hospital. On a warm spring day in 1993, Alexandra Page, a med school friend and fellow intern, had brunch with Arndt and Goldfinger. Afterward, Arndt showed her the new gym he had just switched to. 'We went inside,' she remembers, 'and it was just flush with attractive young men.'
It's only looking back now that Page can recognize that visit as a sign of trouble ahead. Goldfinger, she says, 'was a wonderful guy, incredibly bright and interesting, but he wasn't an Adonis.'
The relationship with Goldfinger would last through Arndt's first year of residency. But friends detected a change in Arndt's priorities, starting with his surprising choice of residency. He had always talked about neurosurgery. But when he didn't get into the Harvard neurosurgery residency program, he decided against pursuing the field elsewhere and switched gears. He secured a spot in orthopedic surgery at Harvard. In medical circles, neurosurgery has the reputation-fair or not-of attracting the intellectuals and orthopedics, the jocks. Arndt's interest in fixing other people's bones and muscles dovetailed with his growing concern with developing his own.
The breakup with Goldfinger came in the summer of 1994. They had been together for almost eleven years. Their lives were interwoven. Arndt had found someone new and wanted out. He moved into an apartment in the South End. Goldfinger had an exhaustively detailed legal agreement drawn up providing for the division of their art collection, arrangements for the care of their dogs, and a financial settlement. For more than a decade, Goldfinger would argue, he had paid for nearly all of Arndt's living, travel, and entertainment expenses (but not his tuition). The expectation had been that Arndt would absorb more of their shared costs after he entered private practice. So the most controversial provision in the agreement was this: Beginning in 1998,Arndt would be required to pay Goldfinger 9 percent of his income over the next fifteen years, not to exceed $500,000. Arndt signed the agreement.
Given the punishing schedules that doctors in training are forced to endure, it's not uncommon for personal relationships to become casualties. But what Arndt's friends did find curious-alarming even-was the way he handled the breakup.
'Here David is, a very good friend of mine. I was not as close to Steve. But clearly David was the one responsible for the breakup. And David had absolutely no insight into it,' says Grant Colfax. 'It was all about his problems. It was shocking to me.' He and other friends began to pull back from their relationship with Arndt.
Then there was the whiplash of seeing the guys Arndt dated right after Goldfinger. 'He ran around with all these Barbie doll boys,' says Colfax, who is also gay and is now the director of HIV prevention studies with the San Francisco Department of Public Health. 'Is that any different from a straight man who gets divorced in middle age and runs around with trophy wives? No, but it was
