Maj. Blaine McGraw faces faces 273 counts involving 96 women. (Bell County (Texas) Sheriff’s Office)
FORT HOOD, Texas — An Army doctor accused of crimes against nearly 100 women told investigators that he used his personal cellphone to record videos of his patients without their consent as a form of note-taking to later document his medical care.
Maj. Blaine McGraw, a 48-year-old OB-GYN, was first interrogated by Army Criminal Investigation Division agents in October after a woman’s husband noticed him recording while conducting a transvaginal ultrasound.
During questioning, McGraw gave investigators his passcode and granted permission to search his cellphone where they found 45 videos or thumbnails of deleted recordings that are now evidence against him in one of the largest sexual misconduct cases in the Army.
McGraw faces 273 counts of criminal charges which were laid out Tuesday in a preliminary hearing known in the military as an Article 32 hearing. Lt. Col. Dixon Merkt, an Army Reserve lawyer, presided over the hearing in a Fort Hood conference room and will provide a report to the Office of Special Trial Counsel with a recommendation on whether the charges should move to a court-martial.
McGraw, who has been in Bell County Jail since December, sat through the nearly six-hour hearing, flipping through papers in a large binder and typing on a laptop. He chose not to make a statement.
The charges against him include 92 counts of sexual abuse and assault; 92 counts of assault consummated by battery; one count of attempted sexual assault; 66 counts of indecent recording; 18 counts of conduct unbecoming; one count of extramarital sexual misconduct; one count of attempted subornation by perjury; one count of willfully disobeying a superior commissioned officer; and one count of dereliction of duty, according to the special trial counsel, which is prosecuting the case.
Lt. Col. Tara Goble, a prosecutor, presented Merkt with a slideshow outlining the charges associated with each of the 96 victims alongside the medical review of the specific allegation, a summary of the patient’s experience and images from any video taken of their exam.
“Most of these victims were young or naked or alone,” Goble said. “All while he used his medical access to violate them.”
One of the victims is an 18-year-old who McGraw secretly recorded 15 times in less than four months as she showered in her own home off base, according to prosecutors. Those are the only recordings that occurred outside of a medical setting. The rest involve patients McGraw saw at Fort Hood’s Carl R. Darnall Army Medical Center between August 2023 and October 2025, and at Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii beginning in 2019.
Daniel Conway and Maj. ReAnne Wentz, McGraw’s attorneys, did not call any witnesses or present any evidence during the hearing. They did question the prosecution’s three witnesses: two CID special agents and Col. Erin Keyser, an OB-GYN at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, who served as a medical expert for CID.
Agents provided Keyser with 150 cases where she observed McGraw’s videos, reviewed medical records and read patient summaries. Of those, she found about one-third were “appropriate” medical care. The others exposed patterns of abuse such as fishing for reasons to conduct breast and pelvic exams that Keyser said were not medically needed or conducted far more frequently than required.
McGraw told pregnant patients that breast exams were required during certain prenatal visits even though military medical policy does not require them at any prenatal appointments, according to evidence from the prosecution.
“If the thought was ‘I’m recording these to document my notes,’ several videos come on right as the exam happened. That’s not the difficult part to remember. It’s when the patient is giving family history. That is the hard part to remember,” Keyser said. “I felt like he abused his power as an OB-GYN and manipulated their trust to get them to consent to sensitive exams.”
Prosecutors said the videos also show McGraw removing women’s clothing and jewelry for them instead of exiting the room to allow them privacy to undress, leaving his hands on their bodies after performing exams and making inappropriate comments such as “Show me the boobs” or “You don’t want me to see the boobs today or what?”
CID agents interviewed McGraw twice. During the second meeting he said he had voyeuristic tendencies that manifested as a teenager. He said a 2024 deployment to Syria where he nearly lost a patient brought back the urge, according to Matthew Walters, a supervisory CID agent who testified Tuesday.
Wentz went after the tactics used by CID during the interviews, which Walters observed and did not participate in. She asked if he thought agents were too harsh on McGraw when they initially interviewed him, using “raised voices” and nearly two dozen expletives.
It was “aggressive and not effective,” Walters said.
Maj. John Architzel, a prosecutor, redirected questioning about CID’s aggressive tactics by asking Walters what McGraw told them about why he didn’t just use the audio recording feature on his phone instead of video.
McGraw told them he didn’t know the phone did audio recording.
