What you have written is libel, and I suggest you remove your comment, since the LA Times has stated exactly how they conducted the investigation.
Ryan, Hamilton and a third colleague, Paul Pringle, kept knocking on doors, and over a period of months, they persuaded more than 20 current and former USC employees and a handful of former patients to talk on an anonymous basis. The story they told was jaw-dropping.
Unlike similar stories about sexual abuse, our investigation did not have the benefit of police records, court filings or other public documents because none existed. It was based almost exclusively on interviews.
The LA Times journalists did not look at patient records for the first story; they based the reporting solely on interviews with patients and with staff. They found these patients by basically just cold-calling people that might have been victims until they found some. Given the hundreds of women the doctor molested, this was actually not that hard to do (though in most cases this would have been like finding a needle in a haystack).
After the story broke, hundreds of women contacted the LA Times and provided permission for the LA Times to access their records as part of the investigation because they didn't trust USC to investigate properly without external pressure.
Source: https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-times-pulitzer-geo...
