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Joan Rivers’s Doctor Denies Allegation That She Fled Procedure Room, Lawyer Says

The lawyer for Joan Rivers’s voice doctor, Gwen Korovin, is denying allegations that she panicked and then abandoned Ms. Rivers when she went into cardiac arrest during a routine procedure last summer in New York.

Dr. Korovin’s lawyer said that contrary to claims in a malpractice lawsuit filed by Ms. Rivers’s daughter, Melissa, Dr. Korovin had faithfully stood by her patient and was in fact the last doctor remaining in the procedure room, not the first to leave.

“What happened was she never left the room,” the lawyer, William Lewis, said in an interview this week. “Not only did she never leave the room, she was the last doctor to leave the room after Miss Rivers was taken away by E.M.S. in an ambulance.”

The disagreement signals the beginning of what is likely to be a jockeying over the facts in the case of Ms. Rivers, who died on Sept. 4, seven days after going into cardiac and respiratory arrest at Yorkville Endoscopy, an Upper East Side clinic, during procedures to examine her throat and digestive system.

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Dr. Gwen KorovinCredit...Bruce Glikas/FilmMagic

Representatives for Dr. Korovin, an ear, nose and throat doctor whose patients include a number of well-known singers and actors, had not spoken publicly about the case before now.

The allegation that Dr. Korovin fled the procedure room at the crucial moment when doctors were trying to revive Ms. Rivers comes from a handwritten statement by the anesthesiologist during the procedure, Dr. Renuka Bankulla, according to Jeffrey B. Bloom, a lawyer for Melissa Rivers. In that statement, according to Mr. Bloom, Dr. Bankulla said that as she looked around for Dr. Korovin to perform a cricothyrotomy — an emergency incision into her neck to open up an airway — “she could not be found in the procedure room.”

Dr. Korovin fled, the lawsuit said, because she was not credentialed to practice at the clinic, and she “wanted to avoid getting caught.”

But Mr. Lewis said that just because Dr. Bankulla looked for Dr. Korovin and could not see her did not mean she had left the room. “Maybe she was distracted,” he said. “I don’t know where she looked or how hard she looked, but it’s not that big a room and the doctor never left there.”

Mr. Bloom, the lawyer for Melissa Rivers, said on Tuesday that if Dr. Korovin had in fact been in the room, it was strange that she did not step forward to help in the frantic attempts to revive Joan Rivers after a “code blue” was called.

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Joan Rivers in 2011 with her daughter, Melissa, who in a malpractice lawsuit alleges that Dr. Korovin panicked and then abandoned her mother when she went into cardiac arrest.Credit...Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

“More important, if Korovin was there, why didn’t she do something?” Mr. Bloom said. “She’s an airway specialist. Why isn’t she stepping forward and saying ‘I’ll do it’ or ‘You do it’ or ‘Somebody do it.’ Instead she obviously did nothing.”

The lawsuit, filed on Monday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, also alleges that Dr. Korovin ignored Dr. Bankulla’s warning that Ms. Rivers’s throat would seize up if Dr. Korovin inserted an instrument down her windpipe to look at her vocal cords. There has been no official determination of who, if anyone, was at fault in Ms. Rivers’s death, but the lawsuit attributes it to the closing of her vocal cords and the failure of medical staff to notice that her vital signs were declining.

The call to resuscitate Ms. Rivers was made at 9:28 a.m. on Aug. 28, according to the suit. Dr. Bankulla finally succeeded in intubating Ms. Rivers — putting a tube in her windpipe to deliver oxygen — at 9:48, the court papers say. At that point, according to the complaint, she would have suffered brain damage from a lack of oxygen.

Mr. Lewis declined to comment on Ms. Rivers’s treatment, saying it would violate privacy laws for him to address it. But he said the assertion that Dr. Korovin had left the room reminded him of a widely circulated account that Dr. Korovin had taken a “selfie” photograph of herself and Ms. Rivers in the operating room.

A federal health investigation of the clinic later determined that it was the clinic’s medical director at the time, Dr. Lawrence Cohen, who had taken cellphone photographs of Dr. Korovin and Ms. Rivers, sedated on the operating table.

Dr. Bankulla’s lawyer declined to comment on Tuesday on whether his client believed Dr. Korovin had fled or not. There were several other witnesses in the room who, if the case goes to trial, may be called to settle the dispute over whether Dr. Korovin fled, including, according to clinic records, two other anesthesiologists and two nurses. Besides Dr. Korovin, Dr. Cohen, Dr. Bankulla and the clinic are also defendants in the malpractice suit.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 23 of the New York edition with the headline: Rivers’s Doctor Is Denying Accusation That She Fled Procedure Room. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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