Caught in the act, Dr. Earl Bradley needed to think fast. What the hell are you doing, you bastard?" his patient's mother had screamed when she found Bradley with his hand in her daughter's diaper. Now the police were coming. Bradley would say the mother - poor, young, unwed - must have been trying to extort money from him. It worked. A detective wrote that, compared to the doctor, the mother was "not credible." A medical board investigator found that Bradley "specialized in welfare ... patients," so a shakedown was "a distinct possibility." The case was closed. And the doctor who would become one of the nation's most prolific sexual predators moved on. For 15 more years, Earl Bradley raped, molested and sodomized a generation of his pediatric patients along the Delaware seashore. He recorded 13 hours of the assaults on video. Before he finally went to jail in 2009, he victimized 1,200 children, maybe more. Reported cases of doctors sexually assaulting children are unusual; vulnerable victims are not. Most are adult women, especially those who are poor or dependent on narcotic painkillers or lacking the credibility or social standing to pursue legal action. Still ... Bradley's case underscores how American medicine so often puts doctors' interests ahead of patient protection. The AJC documented eight instances in which Bradley was the subject of accusations between 1994 and 2008. Each time, in ways that echo through hundreds of other cases the newspaper examined, Bradley avoided punishment.