SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — Disturbing new allegations have emerged against a jailed California brain surgeon briefly employed in Fort Smith.
He has been accused of raping minors for two decades and seeking to impregnate women so he could later have incestuous sex with their children.
Dr. James Kohut, a married father-of-two from Santa Cruz, was originally arrested in late May along with his two female nurses, accused of performing sex acts on seven children under the age of 13.
Kohut, 57, has been in jail since May 14, charged with 11 felony counts, including sodomy, lewd acts with children, forcible lewd acts with children, and other related offenses involving at least seven minors.
Kohut had been hired at Sparks Clinic Neuroscience Center in Fort Smith after he was fired from his job at Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz for ‘making unwanted sexual advances toward female nurses’. He was also disciplined in 2002 by the state medical board for watching pornography at work.
The 57-year-old has since been fired by Sparks Clinic, and his license has been suspended in Arkansas.
Despite arguing that Dr. James Kohut has a compulsion to commit sex crimes, is wealthy enough to walk down to the Santa Cruz Yacht Harbor and buy a boat and wrote a suicide note on the first night of his incarceration, assistant district attorney Steven Moore failed to carry adequate burden to withhold bail, according to Santa Cruz Superior Court Judge John Salazar during a hearing Monday.
However, due to uncertainty regarding Kohut’s precise amount of wealth, Salazar scheduled the bail setting for June 28 in order to obtain the Kohuts’ tax forms. Kohut and his wife have begun the process of separation and the assets are currently being divided.
The surgeon’s nurses Emily Stephens, 29, and Rashel Brandon, 42, who were his lovers, were also arrested last month over alleged sex crimes targeting children.
Kohut is currently married and has two college-age children; while Brandon is also married and has three children. They both remain in custody at the Santa Cruz County Jail, while Stephens is being extradited from Arizona to California.
Brandon was arrested May 9 and charged with 11 felonies involving child sexual abuse as well as multiple charges related to the production of child pornography.
Stephens, who was arrested at her home in Arizona on May 12, was charged with committing sexual penetration, oral copulation and sodomy against three children.
Some of the alleged assaults took place between January 2016 and May 9.
Kohut’s attorney wrote in his bail request that the videos submitted as evidence in the case depict Brandon and Stephens engaged in sexual acts with children, but Kohut is not in them.
“Much of the evidence against Dr. Kohut consists of allegations by Brandon, who has already demonstrated a willingness to lie to investigators regarding her own crimes even when confronted with images evidencing her criminal conduct,” the defense’s motion stated.
The bail request prompted Assistant District Attorney Moore to write an opposition to the request detailing a series of shocking allegations against the suspect dating back to at least 1997.
“For nearly 20 years, the defendant has had a fixed sexual desire to be part of multiple “taboo families” where the parents raise their children sexually,” the prosecutor wrote. “He has a specific desire to have sex with a mother and a daughter. He then wants to impregnate the daughter and raise the child sexually in the “taboo” family lifestyle.”
According to Moore, multiple law enforcement agencies in several different states, as well as the FBI and Australian Federal Police, have investigated Kohut over the past two decades, but he has never been convicted of any crime.
The prosecutor claimed in his court filing Kohut preferred children between ages 6 and 8, and preyed on children in California, Ohio, Florida, Louisiana, Nevada and Australia.
