DALLAS — He often whispered as he spoke.
“I’m also human,” he told her. “If you’re attracted to me, I can be attracted to you.”
But the person saying that isn’t who you’d expect. He was her counselor, and she was his client.
“This happened to the both of us, I understand that, I'm the professional here,” he told her. “You affected me in a way that no one else ever had.”
She’d come that day to confront him.
“I've felt hurt by you,” she said. “I've felt manipulated by you.”
She recorded the meeting – secretly.
During the more than two-hour recording, the counselor alternates between apologizing for what happened, while also blaming his patient, asking her not to report him because he feared he’d lose his license.
“I did not want him to be able to continue to do what he had done to me,” she told WFAA. “I didn't want him to be able to do it to other people.”
She asked us not to use her real name. Instead, we are using the pseudonym, Emily.
A WFAA investigation found that after Emily filed her complaint in 2019, the counselor let his license lapse without the state ever having taken action. Later, the same counselor got his license reinstated without her complaint having been investigated – even though she’d provided state regulators a copy of the audio recording.
As a result of WFAA’s investigation, state regulators have enacted changes to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
“I still have anger about it, because they're the agency that's supposed to keep people safe,” Emily said in an interview.
Emily sought help for anxiety from licensed professional counselor, Max Duran, in 2018. She says she saw him once a week for about 10 months.
“I would say the process of him being inappropriate was very incremental,” Emily told WFAA. “It's hard to explain how those little incremental things didn't raise red flags. But when they're happening little bits at a time and maybe not every session, they don't scream out at you is something that shouldn't be happening.”
She says – over time – she began having feelings for him, so she told him about it.
“Ultimately, I think he took that and used that as a way to be abusive,” Emily said.
Shannon Thomas, who specializes in counseling abuse victims, told WFAA that it isn’t uncommon for clients “to feel supported and to then transfer into that thinking that there's a romantic connection.”
“We go into therapy for trust, for a place to feel safe,” Thomas said. “A predatory therapist zeroes in on that and will absolutely exploit it.”
Emily’s complaint to state regulators said it started with a “hand hug” and eventually sexually inappropriate comments. She told state officials it escalated to fondling and kissing after about eight months.
“I didn't walk out of therapy feeling good,” Emily said. “I walked out of therapy feeling really confused. Hurt. So, I reached out to a friend and let her know what was going on. And she immediately said, ‘You've got to stop seeing him now.’”
That was the summer of 2019, according to her complaint. Emily says she recorded him the last time she saw him.
“I do know what I did wrong. Okay?” Duran explained to Emily, according to the recording.
On the recording, Duran told Emily he didn’t want to “punish her” by sending her to a different counselor.
“I was vulnerable and weak,” Duran said on the recording.
“The thing is I was supposed to be vulnerable,” Emily responded.
“Yes, yes, yes, yes,” Duran said. “See, what people also don't understand is therapists are also vulnerable.”
On the recording, Duran asked Emily not to report him to state officials.
“If I have a reputation of being suspended for breaching boundaries, it's over,” Duran said. “You don't need to strip away my license to teach me a lesson.”
But Emily was not to be dissuaded. She reported him to the Texas Health and Human Services Department, which at the time oversaw the licensing of counselors, therapists and social workers. What Emily didn’t know was at that time, the department was years behind investigating complaints against counselors and therapists.
“It was very common to have complaints that would sit three, four, five, six years before something would happen,” said attorney Kenda Dalrymple, who represents counselors and other licensed professionals. “It was the worst mess ever.”
Around the time Emily filed her complaint in 2019, the Texas Legislature created the Behavioral Health Executive Council, or BHEC. The agency assumed the duties of several agencies to regulate and license therapists, counselors, psychologists and social workers.
But it would take time for the new agency to hire enough staff, write policies and procedures, and then begin clearing out the backlog of about 1,400 complaints against therapists and counselors – some more than a decade old. Dozens of complaints alleged sexual misconduct.
Darrel Spinks, the new agency’s executive director, said BEHC found some of the backlogged complaints did get investigated, but failed to get pushed through the system. Hundreds of others simply didn’t get investigated at all. The new agency trimmed the backlog by more than half within a year.
“We threw manpower at it,” Spinks told WFAA.
But before the agency could take action on Emily’s complaint, Duran allowed his license to lapse. Emily received a letter in May 2021 notifying her that he was no longer licensed and “therefore is no longer within the jurisdiction of the council.” The case was closed – which meant the council no longer had the authority to act.
“They didn’t so much as even talk to me about my complaint,” Emily told WFAA. “I submitted the recording and absolutely nothing came from them until they dismissed the case.”
Spinks told WFAA that if Emily filed her complaint today with BHEC, it would be handled much differently.
“It would not sit for that length of time nowadays, it just wouldn't,” Spinks told WFAA.
WFAA asked what would happen if the counselor with a pending complaint tried to get relicensed. Spinks told WFAA the agency keeps a tracking system on complaints. If someone’s license lapses and they came back to get it reinstated, they would reopen the investigation and move forward with it.
“We're not going to let you evade the investigation or the consequences of that just by letting your license expire,” Spinks said.
But our interview also prompted Spinks to look for the case we’d described, and that’s when he discovered that Duran had gotten his license reinstated in December 2022. In his application for reinstatement, he denied that he’d had any “pending any administrative or disciplinary action” involving his license,” the records show.
Duran told state regulators that he allowed his license to expire during the pandemic.
“Due to public and client concerns, I stopped providing counseling because I was not able to provide services in person,” Duran wrote to BHEC.
When Spinks discovered Duran had been relicensed, a BHEC investigator contacted Emily to let her know her complaint had been reopened. The investigator also asked her to resend the audio recording that she previously had submitted with her complaint.
“My initial response was definitely a lot of anger,” Emily said. “Personally, I never felt like they took my complaint seriously.”
Spinks ordered a review, which found that complaints filed under the old system with Texas Health and Human Services had not been tagged with special tracking.
“There wasn't anything showing staff that hey, you need to be on the alert, this individual expired with a pending complaint,” Spinks said. “After I found this one, I kind of was holding my breath. I thought 'I hope we haven't done this in any other instance.' We swept the system and that was the only individual that had their license reinstated."
Spinks, however, told WFAA that BHEC identified about eight other complaints filed under the old system that had been dismissed due to the license having expired. Spinks said they’ve since flagged those cases should those people reapply for a license.
But that wasn’t all. The review found a gap in the existing system.
Spinks said the policy didn’t explicitly state that special tracking should remain if a complaint is dismissed because a license expires. State regulators changed policy to be clear that the tracking should remain in those cases.
WFAA first met with Spinks on Aug. 23. Two days later, Aug. 25, an agency panel convened and suspended Duran’s license. The order says there was “sufficient evidence” to “demonstrate that the previous complaint alleging sexual misconduct and sexual exploitation … has merit.”
In October, Duran didn’t show up for a scheduled hearing before an administrative law judge. Agency officials told the judge that Duran failed to respond to notifications of the investigation.
BHEC meets in February, and is expected to decide on Duran's case. Duran did not respond to WFAA’s requests for comment.
“He knows he’s been caught, and there’s no use fighting it,” Emily said.
Emily told WFAA that she feels relieved her complaint “is finally being dealt with the way it should have,” but also “frustrated that it wasn’t handled the way it should have been in the first place.”
Spinks offered apologies to Emily on behalf of the agency.
“I hope she finds some comfort and solace in the fact that she did effect the change in an agency with statewide jurisdiction for an area that desperately needed that change,” Spinks said. “It did come at a cost, and for that, I can only apologize to her for it.”
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