Doc in Beatles case facing cancer suit

NEW YORK, May 5 (UPI) -- A doctor sued in New York for treating a woman for cancer she allegedly didn't have was once sued for revealing Beatles member George Harrison was a patient.

The lawsuit pending in U.S. District Court accuses Dr. Gilbert Lederman of wrongful death for treating Giuseppa Bono, a 34-year-old mother of three who died in 2003, the New York Daily News reported Wednesday.

The newspaper said court records show the year before she died, Bono went to see Lederman and Dr. Philip Silverman at Staten Island University Hospital and told them she had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer by doctors in Italy. The two American doctors treated her with radiation and she returned to Italy where she later died.

The suit alleges her cancer diagnosis was never confirmed either in Italy or the United States and that Bono had an inflamed pancreas, not cancer.

Attorneys for the two U.S. doctors maintain in court papers that pancreatic cancer cannot always be proven by biopsy and that in their judgment she had the disease.

The newspaper said lawyers for both sides did not return calls for comment.

Lederman found himself in the public eye previously when he was sued by Harrison's widow and son for disclosing that the former rock star was his patient and allegedly forcing the musician to autograph a guitar while on his deathbed, the Daily News noted. That suit was later settled, the newspaper said.