''Doc'': The Rape of the Town of Lovell

By Jack Olsen

Atheneum, 479 pages, $19.95

The premise of mass sexual exploitation in Jack Olsen`s latest true-crime saga seems preposterous: Over 25 years, John Story, the trusted family doctor in the little Wyoming town of Lovell, sexually assaulted his female patients during gynecological ''examinations,'' without many of them even catching on, let alone complaining.

But as Olsen pieces together the tawdry tale, ''Doc'' becomes a traversal of evil, religious hypocrisy, sexism, and pathological denial on an almost cosmic scale.

In 1985, after a long and emotionally wrenching prosecution that virtually tore apart the town, Story was convicted of assaulting several patients and sentenced to 15 years in Wyoming State Prison. Olsen has relied on trial testimony, police reports, public documents, scores of interviews and what he calls ''the cross-checked memories of the people most intimately involved.''

''Doc`s'' victims ranged in age from 13 to 70. He assaulted them repeatedly, sometimes two generations of the same family. The real number may be in the hundreds, Olsen writes; harassment of Story`s accusers by his supporters may have made other victimized women too afraid to come forward.

To show how such outrageous crimes could have occurred, Olsen piles detailed layers of guilt, disbelief and shame in chapter after vivid chapter. Finally, the mundane ugliness of ''Doc'' becomes all-too believable in the atmosphere of isolation, sexual repression and religious bigotry that pervaded the small Wyoming community.

Story, a Scripture-quoting Baptist who led a splinter group away from that church because it was too liberal, was a nonsmoking teetotaler, a straitlaced character who reminded people of Mr. Peepers, and he earned the trust and affection of the town as a hardworking physician.

He knew his victims all too well. Most of them were Mormon women, deeply religious and sexually inexperienced.

Examining his patients with no nurse present, Story conducted pelvic examinations that sometimes lasted an hour. He`d take 15 minutes to do a Pap smear. He would drape the women`s legs so they couldn`t see what he was doing. He told them he was using medical instruments.

Preposterous? Not according to Olsen`s reporting. Some women were simply too stunned by Story`s behavior to react. Then they blamed themselves, or persuaded themselves they were imagining things. Others realized what had actually occurred only much later, sometimes on their wedding night.

The victims kept their shame private-that was what protected Doc. Who would believe them? Their husbands would have killed Story if they`d found out.

Olsen`s cast in this tawdry tale contains many characters, but he wisely centers on one woman, Arden McArthur, to study love and life among the Mormons. Devout, decent and a Story favorite, she slowly was forced into the realization that the doctor she`d trusted since girlhood was a fiend.

Amazingly, it took 25 years for a few confidential whispers to crescendo into scandal that rocked two generations.

And then, in another peculiar twist in this remarkable book, the brave coterie of outraged victims found themselves battling the town establishment that was fanatically loyal to Doc, who maintains his innocence to this day.