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A Mountain Home nurse practitioner accused of assaulting patients during medical exams now faces 25 criminal charges and four civil lawsuits in Baxter County Circuit Court.
Prosecuting Attorney David L. Ethredge filed an amended information against Joseph Riley Steves on Aug. 21. It charges 24 counts of third-degree sexual assault, a Class C felony, and one count of harassment, a Class A misdemeanor. In April the same case carried eight charges.
Steves, 37, was served with a new felony arrest warrant at the Baxter County jail that day, court records show. The warrant return lists his next court date as Sept. 8 at 9 a.m. The bond figure in his file did not change.
The lawsuits arrived first, filed between late May and late July on the civil side of the same courthouse. Three of the four target Access Medical Clinic as well as Steves, saying people had complained to the clinic about him before the woman suing was ever treated. The clinic denies that, and so does Steves.
Steves has not been convicted of anything. Court filings reviewed by the Observer do not show that he has entered a plea.
What the charged cases describe
The amended affidavit of probable cause, sworn Aug. 17 by a Mountain Home police investigator, lays out four women in detail. All four say Steves treated them at Access Medical Clinic on Highway 62 East. They range in age from 18 to 36.
The first went in the evening of Feb. 28 for an allergic reaction. The affidavit says Steves had her lie face down for a shot, and that when she pulled her pants down far enough to expose the top of her buttock, he told her “she needed to pull them down more to examine her legs.” He then pulled them to her ankles himself.
He ran his hands up both legs to just above the knee and remarked that “her calves were all muscle,” the affidavit says. He left her pants down while he gave the shot, then gave a second one, pressed on the injection site and offered to massage it. She said no.
He told her to “lay there and relax” while her buttocks were still exposed, according to the affidavit. When she tried to pull her own pants up, he told her he was a nurse and was used to it. No female staff member was in the room at any point, she told police.
She was unsettled enough that she sent her father to the clinic the next day to see whether he would be treated the same way. He was told to stand and pull his pants down to expose the top of his buttocks, the affidavit says.
The second woman, 36, went in March 23 for a urinary tract infection. The affidavit says Steves felt her legs, asked whether she had ADHD and told her, “We’re Vibing.” He then had her lie face down, pulled her pants below her buttocks, gave her two shots and grabbed and squeezed both sides.
She texted her husband right after the appointment that she “just got violated,” according to the affidavit. He filed a complaint with the state nursing board the next day.
The third, 19, was treated Jan. 2 for a sinus infection. The affidavit says Steves pulled up her pants legs and massaged her calves, then had her lie back and pushed on her abdomen and sides before putting his hands inside her waistband and pushing there too. She refused the steroid shot he recommended because she knew it would go in her buttocks, and she left in tears.
The fourth woman was not a patient. She had brought her 12-year-old son in Jan. 15 for flu symptoms, and the affidavit says Steves left the room after collecting the swabs, came back with a stethoscope and put it down her shirt without asking. He touched each breast and then between them.
When she told him she had no symptoms, his answer was “Don’t worry mom, that was free,” the affidavit says. She told him she was a nurse herself, and he left. Her son told her afterward that what had happened was not right.
Four women sue
The first suit came May 27 from a Missouri woman, filed by Michael Graugnard and M. Justin Minton of the Minton Law Firm in Benton. Two more were filed the afternoon of July 16 by Mountain Home attorney Benjamin R. Burnett, who filed a fourth on July 27.
All four name Steves, Access Medical Clinic Arkansas LLC, five unnamed people and eight unnamed companies as defendants. Each raises the same eight claims, among them battery, outrage and negligent hiring.
The accounts differ in detail but follow a pattern. Each woman says Steves exposed or touched part of her body during a visit that did not call for it, without warning her first or asking permission.
The May suit says the woman went in for a strep test in June 2025 and was told she needed a pelvic exam. She turned it down over the cost, then was told it would be free and that Steves needed to “feel around her pelvic region,” according to the complaint. She was billed several hundred dollars for it afterward.
One of the July 16 suits tracks the fourth account in the criminal affidavit closely. It describes a mother who brought her son in for a suspected strep infection in January 2026, says Steves put his hands down her shirt with a stethoscope and groped her, and renders his parting remark as “don’t worry mom, this one’s on the house.” The two documents differ on the date by one day and on the illness the boy was treated for.
The other July 16 suit describes a migraine visit. The woman says Steves pulled her pants past her knees without permission, gave her a shot, then touched her buttocks and asked whether anyone had come with her. She says she noticed the lights were off and the exam room door was “90% shut.”
The July 27 suit comes from a longtime patient who describes visits in December 2025 and February 2026. It says Steves grabbed her breasts more than once and that she walked out of the waiting room calling him “a pervert.” She says the conduct stopped whenever her husband came with her.
What the suits say about the clinic
Three of the complaints allege that multiple people had complained to the clinic’s human resources office about Steves before the woman suing was treated. That allegation is what carries the negligence claims against Access Medical.
The women describe reporting him afterward as well. One says she took her complaint to human resources and it was dismissed. Another says she told a nurse practitioner at the clinic the same day, and a third says she raised it with the receptionist, nurses and other staff, and that no one would listen.
Two of the suits say their lawyer sent Access Medical a signed medical records release on April 13 and that the clinic has not complied. Both say that is why they cannot pin down exact appointment dates or name the supervisors they believe are responsible.
Where the suits go past the charges
The criminal affidavit describes conduct on four dates, all between Jan. 2 and March 23 of this year. Two of the lawsuits describe visits well outside that window, one in June 2025 and one in December 2025.
The suits also accuse Steves of a more serious crime than the state has charged. Each says his conduct amounts to second-degree sexual assault by forcible compulsion, a Class B felony, on top of the Class C felony he faces in criminal court. That claim carries no weight in the criminal case, but it is the standard the plaintiffs are asking a jury to apply.
Each suit asks for less money than federal law requires for a case to move to federal court. That keeps all four in Baxter County, including the one filed by an out-of-state plaintiff.
The complaints carry their own copy-and-paste problems. Two of them refer to a minor child witnessing the conduct in cases where no child is described anywhere else in the document.
What Steves says
Steves answered the May lawsuit on July 17 through Todd Wooten of Hall Booth Smith in Little Rock. It is the only one of the four he has responded to in court, and Hall Booth Smith is not the firm handling his criminal defense.
He admits he worked at Access Medical as a nurse practitioner, and he denies the sexual assault allegations and all eight claims against him.
How he handles the rest is unusual. To most of the woman’s account of the visit itself, Steves does not respond with a denial. He answers over and over that he is “without knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief” about what she describes, which court rules treat as a denial.
That covers nearly her whole narrative. It includes her claims that he told her she needed a pelvic exam, that he said it would cost nothing extra, that he pulled her dress up without warning and that she was billed for the exam afterward.
One allegation in that stretch draws a flat denial. Steves denies that he did any of it for his own sexual gratification.
He also reserves a long list of defenses, including the statute of limitations, comparative fault and a claim that her injuries came from pre-existing conditions. He reserves a right to try to move the case to arbitration. Nearly two pages argue that any award of punitive damages would be unconstitutional.
His filing carries the same marks of reused templates found elsewhere in this case. It misspells his first name in the title, refers to him in the plural, repeats two paragraph numbers and raises a defense that would matter only if the woman had filed for bankruptcy.
What the clinic says
Access Medical answered the same lawsuit 11 days earlier, on July 6, through Michelle Ator and Melody Pruitt Guffey of Friday, Eldredge & Clark in Little Rock. Where Steves pleaded no knowledge of the visit, the clinic denies her account of it outright and asks the court to throw the case out.
The answer admits two things. Steves worked for Access Medical on the date at issue, and he treated the woman that day.
The clinic says the allegations against him are untrue as far as it knows. It also pleads a fallback position. If the conduct is found to have happened, the clinic argues, it was an intentional tort “outside the scope of Mr. Steves’ employment,” which would cut off the clinic’s liability for it.
The answer goes past a denial in one place. It says the woman knows her own allegations to be untrue, and asks the court to make her cover the cost of defending what it calls a “false and unreasonable pleading.”
The clinic also argues that the only claim that belongs against it is negligence under the Arkansas Medical Malpractice Act, and that the other seven are redundant. It reserves the right to argue consent, assumption of risk and contributory negligence later. And it disputes the use of unnamed defendants, saying the people the woman is trying to identify are known or knowable to her.
Access Medical first tried to get out of the case on a service question. It moved to dismiss on June 26, saying the papers were left at a clinic front desk rather than with a registered agent, a manager or another person authorized to accept them, as state rules require.
That fight ended in a deal instead of a dismissal. The clinic’s lawyer agreed on July 10 to accept service, and Circuit Judge Andrew Bailey signed an agreed order on July 15 finding service complete and the dismissal motion moot. Access Medical remains a defendant.
Steves has not answered the three later lawsuits, and the Observer has not reviewed a response from the clinic in those cases.
Twenty more, described in one sentence
The criminal case changed shape while those suits sat on the docket.
The affidavit filed in April had ended with a warning. More of Steves’ patients were reporting similar incidents and scheduling times to file reports, the investigator wrote.
Four months later, that line became 20 additional felony counts.
The amended affidavit carries the same warning again, unchanged, and adds one sentence. It says the total number of women to have reported incidents of the same nature “are 24 with one being a harassment.”
The amended information filed four days later puts it a different way. It says roughly 20 more victims have been relaying similar incidents to law enforcement and scheduling times to file reports.
Those two sentences are the entire public description of the 20 new felony counts. Everything else in the amended affidavit is the same four women, told again in nearly identical language. It offers no dates, no locations and no account of what is alleged in the other cases.
The four Mountain Home police case numbers are still there, one at the head of each woman’s account. The header is what changed. Where the April affidavit named the case it came from, the amended version lists the department’s case number only as “Multiple.”
The numbers do not reconcile
The state’s two August documents give different totals.
The amended affidavit says 24 women reported, and that one of those 24 reports is a harassment. Read that way, the felony count should be 23.
The charging documents say otherwise. The amended information and the arrest warrant both list 24 felony counts plus one harassment count, for a total of 25 charges against 24 reported complainants.
Three of the four original misdemeanor counts also disappeared without explanation. April charged four harassment counts. August charges one.
Nothing in the file reviewed by the Observer shows a motion to dismiss those counts, an order dropping them or any other accounting for where they went.
Every count, one date
The felony arrest warrant, No. 03CI-26-356, was printed Aug. 21 and filed Aug. 24. It lists the 24 sexual assault counts one after another down two pages, and each one carries the same violation date of Feb. 28, 2026. The lone harassment count carries that date too.
The affidavit that supports the warrant describes conduct on four separate dates. Those are Jan. 2, Jan. 15, Feb. 28 and March 23, all in 2026.
Feb. 28 is the date attached to only one of the four women. The uniform date on the warrant appears to be a byproduct of how the document was generated rather than an allegation that 25 offenses occurred in one day.
The bond did not move
Bailey found probable cause on April 7 and set bond at $60,000. Steves posted a surety bond the next morning through Campbell Bonding Co. of Harrison, according to a bail bond filed with the circuit clerk. A certificate filed with the Baxter County Sheriff’s Office shows a $6,000 premium was paid.
Bailey signed the amended finding of probable cause on Aug. 17. The total bond on that document is $60,000, the same figure set in April on a quarter as many charges.
The amended information and the arrest warrant each leave the bond line blank in a different way. Both read “READ ONLY” where a dollar figure would go.
The warrant return shows Steves was taken into custody on Aug. 21 at the county jail. The line for bond posted is blank, and the promise to appear section at the bottom is filled in and signed.
Steves is not in custody, according to Baxter County Sheriff’s Office records. Taken with the warrant return, the paperwork indicates he was booked on the new warrant and released on the bond he posted in April.
The state has not filed a motion to increase bond in the records reviewed for this story.
What the defense has filed
Steves is represented in the criminal case by the James Law Firm of Little Rock. The firm entered the case April 16 with a seven page discovery request signed by William O. “Bill” James Jr. and Alex Morphis.
On June 9 the firm filed seven more motions, all logged at the same minute. They include requests for expert witness information, for the criminal history of potential jurors, and for any plea deals offered to state witnesses.
Most of that batch is standard defense paperwork. One of the motions denies that police found any contraband, language that does not fit the allegations in this case and suggests a reused template.
Two of the June filings do carry specific claims. A motion to suppress statements says Mountain Home officers interrogated Steves after his April 7 arrest and took statements from him. A second motion says officers searched Steves and his property that day without a warrant and seized items.
Neither motion says what was seized. Neither has been ruled on in the records reviewed.
The state’s service lists also changed in August. Ethredge’s supplemental filings on Aug. 24 were served on Morphis and on a Dalton Orsborn at the same firm. James is not named on them.
What the state says it has
Ethredge filed a Rule 17 disclosure on April 30 and a supplemental version on Aug. 24. Both say the prosecutor’s office runs an open file.
The April version lists the material it is turning over. It includes narratives and supplemental reports for each police case, victim statements, one complainant’s medical report, video, and a verification report from the Arkansas State Board of Nursing.
The August version drops the individual case numbers and refers instead to additional incident reports, victim statements and medical reports.
What happens next
Steves is due in Baxter County Circuit Court on Sept. 8 at 9 a.m. before Bailey. The four lawsuits move on their own track down the hall, and all of them demand a jury.
The Observer does not identify people who report sexual assault. This story will be updated as the case moves.
