May 25, 2026 • 56 mins
Welcome to Season Seven of Nobody Should Believe Me. Andrea revisits the case of Maya Kowalski—the story at the center of the Netflix film Take Care of Maya–and the family’s high-profile lawsuit against Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital. What became widely framed as a story about “medical kidnapping” began when hospital staff reported suspected medical child abuse after Maya arrived with a history of extreme ketamine treatments.
How did a case of horrific abuse become a story about evil doctors kidnapping children?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Please note that this show discusses child abuse, which may
be difficult for some listeners. For resources about abusive head trauma,
go to shakenbaby dot org.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Take care of Maya Trial new details as well, and
now take care of Maya Trial well. Maya Kowalski and
her family have waited out five years to hear a
verdict and their two hundred and twenty million dollar lawsuit
against Johns Hopkins All Children's.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Hospital, And did the conduct of Johns Hoist All Children's
Hospital in fact?
Speaker 4 (00:28):
Are my class?
Speaker 1 (00:31):
What happened to Maya? That was the question posed by
Diane Neary in her viral feature for New York Magazine
that ran in the fall of twenty twenty two. There
was that headline, along with a closeup of Maya Kowalski's eyes.
I remember reading this article long before I'd end up
reading thousands of pages of court documents, medical records, testimony,
(00:52):
and police records about the case and thinking, I don't
think this reporter understands what actually happened here. And then
of course there was the Netflix film.
Speaker 5 (01:05):
No matter what we did, the court sided with the
hospital staff.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Judget don't care about the evidence.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
You don't get to the truth by accepting was in
front of you without questioning it. And I realized that
this was a lot bigger than just the kowalskis.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
How many times are you allowed to be wrong and
destroy lives before they say, okay, that's enough.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
These families walked in hoping for help for their child,
and some of them walked down in handcuffs.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
And this was followed by a high profile court battle.
Nobody Should Believe Me had been on the air for
about a year at this point, and this was the
biggest story about Munchausen by proxy since Gypsy Rose blanched.
So I felt like I needed to address it. I
pulled in some experts for a roundtable discussion about the film.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
My impressions were was a huge opportunity lost. What they
could have done is looked at the actual issues in
this abuse. They could have looked at, you know, in
this case.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
There was and that was all I originally planned to do,
but everyone else just kept getting it so wrong. But
it is not the person who's doing the medical record
reviews job to interview every doctor.
Speaker 6 (02:17):
It's to look through those records. And that is how
how do you get that?
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Why do you believe that that's the case if she
is making if she is the sole person making the
recommendation to.
Speaker 6 (02:30):
The judge, the judge is relying on. She was not
the sole person. She was not the sole person. I'm
sorry there was.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
There was Affi David's and testimony other doctors Johns Hopkins
in What actually happened to Maya Kwalski is that she
was the victim of extremely well documented Munchausen by proxy abuse.
In the year preceding her faithful hospitalization at Johns Hopkins
All Children's, Maya Kowalski was subjected to fifty five infusions
(02:59):
of ketmie, a powerful drug that can cause hallucinations, memory loss,
and bladder issues, among other side effects. Her treatment course
also included a highly experimental five day ketamine coma in Mexico,
doctor Fernando Cantu, who performed the treatment, told Maya's parents
that the procedure had a fifty percent chance of death.
(03:23):
Maya was pulled from school wheelchair bound and dangerously underweight.
Her mother, Beata Kowalski, an infusion nurse by trade, administered ketamine,
delauded and other drugs orally intramuscularly and into Maya's port
at home, often against doctor's orders. Biata talked online and
elsewhere about Maya's impending death and pushed to get her
(03:45):
daughter labeled as terminal and attempted to seek out hospice care,
despite the fact that complex regional pain syndrome isn't a
terminal diagnosis, and that diagnosis was handed out to Maya
by a dubious doctor after three world class hospitals diagnosed
her with conversion disorder. On October seventh, twenty sixteen, when
(04:05):
Maya was hospitalized with reports of excruciating pain, Biatta told
staff at Johns Hopkins All Children's that if they refused
to administer the unheard of amount of ketamine she was
requesting that they quote might as well consult hospice so
she can finally get enough medication and just let her die.
So how did such a clear and obviously life threatening
(04:26):
case of abuse get twisted into a story about evil
doctors kidnapping a child? What was going on here? Once
I started pulling at this thread, I couldn't stop the case,
and the civil trial consumed my life for months. We
just recapped this case in a mini series. By the way,
(04:48):
if you don't have time to listen to the previous
eighteen episodes I made about this. I ended up covering
the trial as it unfolded over eight weeks, ending in
a jury awarding the Kuwalski's two hundred and se sixty
one million dollars, and two years later, the story continues
to unfold. Late last year, a Florida appeals court vacated
(05:08):
the verdict and the Kowalski's request to reconsider the appealed
decision was denied. And as all this has been playing
out in court, the impact of Kowalski v. Johns Hopkins
has been felt far and wide because, as reporter Daphne
Chen said in the trailer you just heard, this has
always been bigger than just the Kowalskis. Kowalski lit the match,
(05:29):
and no matter what ultimately happens in their court battle,
the fire won't easily be contained. People believe their eyes.
That's something that is so central to this topic, because
we do believe the people that we love when they're
telling us something. If we didn't, you could never make
it through your day. I'm Andrea Dunlop, Welcome to Season
(05:51):
seven of Nobody Should Believe Me. The Kowalski's legal battle
had already been going on for years by the time
(06:12):
this story got traction in the media. Jack Kowalski filed
his original lawsuit in October of twenty eighteen, two years
almost to the day after Maya was originally hospitalized with
the defendant, Johns Hopkins All Children's So.
Speaker 4 (06:26):
The original lawsuit against Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital, brought
by the Kowalski family alleged a lot of things, some
of which were dismissed before trial. The original lawsuit brought
claims for everything from malicious prosecution for the hospital and
their healthcare providers, calling the Department of Children and Family
(06:49):
Services reporting suspicions of medical child abuse and neglect.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
We spoke to Ethan Shapiro, an attorney for Johns Hopkins
All Children's about how this court case and its aftermath
have played out.
Speaker 4 (07:02):
The counts that survived included everything from medical malpractice for
the alleged misdiagnosis of medical child abuse, the alleged failure
to give what we considered to be extreme doses of
ketamine and other dangerous drugs. There were allegations of battery,
and there were allegations of intentional infliction of emotional distress,
(07:26):
some of which the family alleged caused the mother to
commit suicide. As you saw from the appellate court ruling,
the Appella Court sided with my client, JOHNS. Hopkins All
Children's Hospital, ultimately finding that the hospital complied in good
faith with the mandatory protection statutes and were not liable
(07:47):
as a matter of law or as a matter of
fact for the unfortunate death of missus Kowalsky.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
There were two possible far reaching issues with the Kowalski
verdict had it wisted appeal. One is the potential legal
precedent set by allowing a family to claim damages against
an institution for a suicide, and the other, of course,
was holding the hospital libel for reporting abuse.
Speaker 4 (08:12):
The attempts to hold healthcare providers liable for mandatory reporting
under Chapter thirty nine are rare, but not unheard of.
In fact, if you looked at the published decisions, a
lot of them are for the flip side, where you know,
for example, a parent whose child was ultimately abused or
(08:32):
harmed is suing a state agency or a mandatory reporter
for failing to report suspected abuse. I think for example,
you know, in a case of a contested divorce where
a child reports symptoms of sexual abuse to a teacher
and the teacher doesn't bring that forward, you could see
a situation where the other custodial parent finds out about
(08:54):
that and then would have a lawsuit or potential prosecution
against a mandatory reporter. Now, all of that being said,
we've seen a spate of these lawsuits more in frequency
since the Kowalski case, since the movie, and since the
fact that it survived the initial motions to dismiss based
on statutory immunity. How often do we see these types
(09:19):
of cases go to trial? Incredibly rare, and I think
they're going to become more rare now that the Second
District Court of Appeal has reaffirmed statutory rights and immunities
for mandatory reporters.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
The Kowalski lawsuit and its imitators position this legal battle
very clearly as a parent's rights issue, claiming that quote
doctor Smith and Johns Hopkins all Children's knowingly and recklessly
violated Jack and Beata's constitutional right to make medical decisions
for their child by refusing to discharge Maya following repeated
(09:54):
requests from Jack and Beata and by conspiring to abuse
a process and legislative provisions designed to purtat children from
imminent harm. And while some of the counts of the lawsuits,
such as conspiracy, malicious prosecution, and the First and Fourteenth
Amendment claims were dismissed before trial, the spirit of these
claims remained. The plaintiff's story was that the doctors had
(10:15):
conspired to separate Maya from her mother. They'd known their
abuse claims were fake, and they made them anyway, and
their wanton disregard for this family had driven Biata Kowalski
to take her own life. And these claims have served
as inspiration for a number of other lawsuits around the
country against child abuse pediatricians, and hospitals, from San Diego
to Minnesota to Pennsylvania. According to these lawsuits, doctors aren't
(10:39):
just making mistakes. They're all powerful entities who are conspiring
to remove children from their innocent parents for their own
financial gain and career advancement. The terminology varies depending on
the venue, but there is in fact a name for
all of this medical kidnapping. Like any other conspiracy theory,
it's hard to trace the exact origins of the term
(11:00):
medical kidnapping, but it appears to have gained a foothold
in parents' rights focused internet spaces sometime in the twenty tens,
and gained significant traction during the highly publicized Justina Pelletier case,
a precursor lawsuit involving Munchhausen by proxy. Medical kidnapping is
deeply entwined with the idea that Munchausen by proxy isn't
(11:22):
a real form of abuse, that every allegation is necessarily false,
a witch hunt against carrying moms, and that CPS workers
and physicians are hiding behind their legal immunity protections. This
concept has even deeper Internet origins than medical kidnapping itself,
going back to the Mothers Against Munchhausen Allegations website, which
(11:43):
popped up in the late nineties. Medical kidnapping, like so
many things, is a fringe idea that has migrated from
the dark corners of the Internet into mainstream publications such
as The New York Times and Pro publica People magazine
where Take Care of Maya producer Caitlin Keating worked when
she did discovered this story. Published an article in November
of twenty twenty five, titled where is Maya Kowalski Now?
(12:07):
All about her life after getting medically kidnapped ten years ago.
This was weeks after the verdict was reversed. So how
did we get here and how did hospitals become such
a target?
Speaker 4 (12:19):
So hospitals are in a very unique situation for children
that are at risk for suspicions of neglect or abuse
because often healthcare workers are the frontline defense and being
able to diagnose it and being able to report it.
If you think of a situation where a child would
come into a hospital with an unexplained fracture that couldn't
(12:42):
be a result of anything other than trauma, and potentially
trauma in an area that couldn't be explained in the
absence of intentional abuse, the healthcare worker would be the
one that would be in the best position to make
that call of reasonable suspicion to the Department of Children
and Families. Now, in that unique situation where the child's
(13:02):
an impatient in the hospital, already the easiest thing for
the courts to do to try to find an immediate
safe placement for the child before the court can figure
out whether one of the custodial parents or perhaps a
grandparent or a relative could be filled in that role
is to shelter the child immediately at the hospital. So
(13:22):
hospitals are put in sort of a precurious position that
other mandatory reporters don't have to deal with. Think firefighters,
teachers in some states. Journalists are never going to be
in the situation that the person making the report may
also be the person required by order of the court
(13:43):
to provide safe shelter to the child in the short
and the medium term.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
And does a hospital, once a child is sheltered there,
does a hospital have any choice about whether or not
to keep that child there Under the law, No.
Speaker 4 (13:58):
The hospital is required to follow the court order, just
as anyone would be required to follow the court order. Now,
the hospital can make recommendations as to what they believe
is in the best interests of the child from a
medical standpoint, for whatever medical treatment is necessary. And if
you remember back to the Kwalski case, once all children
(14:21):
reasonably believe that Maya would have benefited from intensive impatient
or outpatient psychotherapy to treat whatever her pain syndrome was,
they made a recommendation to transfer to Nemours Hospital in Orlando,
who are experts in that so they can make recommendations,
but absent an order from the court releasing the jurisdiction,
(14:43):
the hospital has to keep the child in custody.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
There are many worthwhile critiques about how child protection is
handled in the US, and we're going to dig into
those this season. But sorry if this is a spoiler.
There is no evidence that doctors are conspiring to kidnap
children or even making a significant number of incorrect abuse diagnoses.
So why has this idea gotten so much traction? What
(15:13):
is this actually about?
Speaker 4 (15:15):
I think what the plaintiff ultimately wanted to try was
a civil rights case. And Andrew, when you spoke earlier
about this, you know, influx of what's been called generously
a parents' rights movement, which is always in tens with
what may be best for the child. This case was,
(15:36):
in the plaintiff's mind, one of those cases in the forefront.
They brought constitutional actions that were dismissed. I mean, you
heard the backstory from the Kwalskis escaping a communist system
with the implication to only find themselves, you know, at
the center of a deep state conspiracy, amongst multiple acts
(16:00):
to harm Maya and target the mother for reasons that
were never fully explained, at least not with evidence, and
as a second district said, there was no evidence of
any intent directed at YadA Kuwalski whatsoever. But that was
certainly what they wanted to put in front of the jury,
and that was certainly one of the things that they
(16:20):
thought that they could exploit for the purpose. From my
perspective of drumming up dureror emotions, the.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
Plaintiff's lawyers and the Netflix film told an emotionally evocative
story about a suffering family, but by leaving out so
much crucial information, that story obscured a very big question.
What would have happened if there hadn't been a report?
What if Beata had been allowed to carry on? Should
parents just be allowed to give their children fifty to
(16:50):
one hundred times the recommended dose of ketamine and subject
them to experimental procedures that carry a fifty percent risk
of death? According to Jack Kwall's these post vertic comments
in the press, Yes.
Speaker 4 (17:03):
Parents have rights and.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
They make the decision for their children. Ethan disagrees.
Speaker 4 (17:12):
So hospitals are not burgering. You can't walk into a
hospital and have it your way and demand medical careent
that is wildly outside accepted medical standards. You can't do
it for yourself, and it's going to draw extra scrutiny
if you're going to demand it on behalf of a
vulnerable child or a vulnerable adult that truly cannot consent
(17:35):
on their own behalf. And that's fine. Our system is
set up where we have parents be the natural guardians
of the children, who are empowered to make reasonable medical decisions,
just the same way that you can be appointed to
be the medical guardian for somebody becomes gold and infirm.
But it doesn't give the guardian the unfettered right to
(17:56):
demand treatment that medical providers know to be dangerous. You know,
there are protocols and pathways for the safe treatment of
chronic regional paident syndrome, for the safe treatment of conversion
syndrome of factitious disorder, and none of them call for
doses of ketamine that I think the evidence showed were
(18:18):
twenty three milligrams per kilogram per hour, which is more
than what you need to anesetize a two thousand pounds horse.
So the parents have rights to direct reasonable medical care,
but they don't have an unfettered right to direct and
demand dangerous medical care.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
The question of what rights children should have as human
beings isn't a new one, and the tension between children's
rights to be safe and cared for and their parents'
rights to make decisions on their behalf is something that
hospitals have always been caught in the middle of.
Speaker 4 (18:50):
Hospitals have been dealing with this for years. There are
religious sects that do not believe in blood transfusions, so
hospitals have attorney on standby that they call it to
in the morning to say, we have a child here
who's been in a horrific accident. The child's bleeding out.
The only way to survive is to transfuse blood, and
(19:11):
the parents are saying that they're object on religious and
moral grounds. We file motions with the court, We wake
up the judge in the middle of the night, We
get an order from the judge for immedia blood transfusions,
and we transfuse the child to save the child's life
above what the parents' wishes are. That's the tension in
society where you know your religious rights and your rights
(19:34):
to direct medical care. We've decided as a society end
when it's going to jeopardize the life of a child.
So it's not a new concept. It's not a new
concept in the law, and it's not isolated to cases
like this.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
Halfway through the trial, just as the defense was going up,
Judge Hunter Carroll ruled to dramatically limit testimony pertaining to
Munchausen biproxy abuse. This was baffling given that the abuse
was the reason Maya had been separated from her parents
in the first place, not to mention the fact that
the plaintiff had already been allowed to assert in their
opening statement and had one witness testify that Biata Kowalski
(20:11):
did not have Munchausen biproxy, which they framed as a
psychological condition rather than a form of abuse.
Speaker 4 (20:18):
So I'm certainly not here to criticize tough decisions made
by the trial court on evidence. But to your question
about whether this particular issue brought in the mother's psychological diagnosis,
there could be ways you could start the trial and
(20:39):
go through the entire trial where that becomes less of
an issue. However, if the plaintiffs are permitted to stand
up an opening argument and talk about how the collective
they set about to destroy this family with an erroneous
diagnosis of munch by proxy, or to talk about how
(21:04):
even though Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital made the reasonable
medical choice to try to escalate Maya's condition, whatever it
may be, to the specialist set nomors, that the family
objected to that because of this erroneous diagnosis of medical
child abuse from munchausen Brod proxy. That, from my perspective,
(21:26):
necessitates the defense to be able to justify to the
jury that's now heard this testimony for several weeks to
justify that that diagnosis or that working diagnosis, whether it
appears in the medical record or on medical billing, was
made reasonably. And I think the question that you're getting
to next is if that's true, then why didn't we
(21:51):
watching this trial get to see all of Sally Smith's
detailed report that the hospital relied on in part in
arriving at some more diagnoses.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
And I think you know, importantly with the framing of
this right, the question is whether there was number one
cause for concern to make that immediate call, and then
was there evidence of abuse that necessitated this separation period
and her being sheltered in the hospital, And in fact,
there was extensive evidence, And so that's the question. However,
(22:24):
the plaintiff did have several witnesses testify that Beata, including
doctor Chopra, who is not an expert on this, that
Beata Qualsky did not have Munchausen by proxy, and so
they were permitted to testify, as you said, like in
the negative, that this was an outrageous allegation and that
(22:44):
you know, Biata was a caring mother who was making
appropriate medical decisions. So there was evidence allowed to be
presented about Munchausen by proxy by the plaintiff. Can you
talk about the decision that the trial court made halfway
through the trial, Uh, when it was the defense's turn
to present.
Speaker 4 (23:03):
So from my perspective sitting at council table, it appeared
the court wanted to refocus the trial on the remaining
allegations medical malpractice, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and I
think there were some battery allegations in there as well.
And the court's central question was what does the mother's
(23:25):
state of mind or whether she suffers from this psychological
diagnosis have to do with whether the hospital provided medically
acceptable care to Mia Kwalski. In the abstract, that's a
completely fair question, right because if you take it one
step back further, my client's position from day one was
(23:48):
whether this is CRPS or whether it's factitious disorder or
conversion disorder or a psychological pain response. The treatment for
this is still not wild doses of ketmie third enough
to nessetize the horse. Now back to your question, you know,
in real time from my perspective, and it's just mine
(24:09):
at defense council table, we felt it necessary to paint
the full picture for the jury, so we didn't look
like monsters that were coming up with this diagnosis to
target the family. But in the abstract, that was the
way the court was looking at the question in real time,
and you know, certainly that affected the presentation of evidence
(24:30):
after that.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Yeah, because while there was quite a lot of evidence
that was admitted at trial and during the pre trial period.
I mean, this has been one of the benefits as
a journalist about reporting on this case is that we
just have so much information to work with, there are
only pieces of that that were actually presented at trial.
(24:55):
I don't think beyondest blog was ever presented at trial,
which was a pretty strong piece of evidence. And so
this this trial court decision made it so that certain
things that even were available to the public were not
available to the jury. And then it also meant that
the one piece of documentation that really tied all of
(25:15):
this together from the person who had the highest level
of expertise about child abuse and who had reviewed thousands
of pages of medical records, and that would be doctor
Sally Smith's report, and that was never admitted into evidence.
Speaker 6 (25:31):
That remains private and sealed.
Speaker 4 (25:34):
To this day. It does, yes, her report is confidential.
I mean the lawyers have seen it because we had
the potential introducing in evidence, so I know what it says. Obviously,
doctor Smith knows what it says. The family knows what
it says. The family did not want the jury to
see it for understandable reasons. But ultimately the court made
(25:55):
the decision that the court made based on what I
told you. That was what I understood to be the
court's logic. You know, the courts certainly had their reasons
for following it. They were understandable to me in a vacuum,
you know, it was. But again, it was frustrating to
some degree that that report felt necessary from the defenses perspective,
(26:17):
to rebut insinuations of these false allegations or that they
came out of nowhere, they were introduced by the planet.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
You know, as someone who tells stories for a living
about abuse, and specifically about this abuse, you have to
really tie it together. It's not well understood. It's not
easy for your average sure to understand exactly what the
harm was to this child and what the danger that
she was in. But you know, just in terms of
(26:45):
like the asymmetry in the storytelling that you have the
plaintiff able to tell this very dramatic story, which they did.
Speaker 6 (26:59):
With all all kinds of tactics.
Speaker 7 (27:02):
Right.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
They had a lot of pictures, they played the nine
to one one call, They had videos of the family,
they had videos of Maya in pain. You know, they
used a lot of elements to tell this story.
Speaker 6 (27:14):
It's sort of did that decision kind of hamstring.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
The defense's ability to tell a story that actually put
the focus back on.
Speaker 4 (27:27):
My Yeah, perhaps so again from the hospital's perspective, and
maybe let me take it a step back from that,
and this is me talking right from my perspective, But
it's based on a lot of conversations with healthcare providers,
a parent coming in with a different belief of what
their child has is not uncommon, and most healthcare providers
(27:52):
are not offended by that. Like healthcare providers are human,
Medicine is an art and a science. You have a
constellation of symptoms and sometimes reasonable people can disagree. That's
why they call it a standard of care, not necessarily one.
You know, correct diagnosis and every circumstance And where am
(28:13):
I going with this? Dandred? So think about it this way.
If somebody comes into to a hospital or a doctor
and says, I think my child's got irritable bowel syndrome,
and what really helps them is if I give them,
you know, and ensure and to tile in all when
they complain. The doctor could tell you, based on my
(28:34):
test and based on my clinical diagnosis and the symptoms,
I don't think your child has that. But if that's
the only treatment you're recommending for what you think the
diagnosis is, we're not calling DCF on you because you're
not putting the child in danger. So merely because the
hospital is a difference that you know, we don't think
(28:55):
and when I say we, I'm speaking on behalf of
basically every certified medical profession, with the exception of Kirkpatrick
and Hannah. We don't think Maya has CRPS, says Lourie's
Hospital in Chicago, says Tampa General Hospital, says All Children's Hospital,
and says everyone else in between. They're not calling DCF.
The call was based on the fact that you're hearing
(29:18):
evidence of immediate threat to Maya's life, either from the
drugs that are being given or what the mother is
saying that she's going to do if you don't put
my child in a propo follower academy induced coma. So,
you know, going back to your initial question of you know,
how does this affect the presentation of evidence, I think
(29:39):
it affects it to the degree that this is not
just about a parent disagreeing with what the diagnosis is
and you know, portraying this as ou ivy league people
up in your tower think you know what's best for
my child. The imminent danger that a child could be
in if the parents fervently believe and are disregarding medical
(30:02):
advice from several world class and local providers is where
the context needs to come for the jury to understand
ultimately why the hospital was making reasonable decisions both in
their medical care and their recommendations for future care.
Speaker 8 (30:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
So take us to the verdict. What ultimately was the
verdict in the award in this.
Speaker 4 (30:29):
Case, gross verdict I believe was for two hundred and
sixty one million that was set aside slightly by the
trial court on some post trial motions. That verdict has
been completely vacated or erased by the Second District Court
of Appeal finding there were multiple errors in the way
that the Chapter thirty nine, the statutory immunity was ultimately applied.
(30:53):
So right now there is no verdict against my client
and no judgment that we're liable for.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
I've thought a lot about why the Kowalski story took
off the way it did, and how such a well
documented abuse case got laundered to the extent of a
sympathetic Netflix documentary and a quarter billion dollar verdict in court.
It certainly doesn't hurt that Maya is a beautiful white
girl with a dead mother, a sort of true crime
Disney princess. But I think Beata's absence from this story
(31:45):
is what really allowed it to take off. Beata Kowalski
was a complicated person in real life, someone capable of
subjecting her daughter to unfathomable abuse. She said she would
put her daughter on hospice and let her die. I
have no reason to believe that she wasn't serious about
that threat. But in the retelling, Beata is flattened into
(32:06):
an archetypal, self sacrificing, heroic mother, the one people want
to believe in. And because she wasn't around to complicate
this picture, the filmmakers and lawyers got to make her
into whatever they wanted. And of course Maya and her
younger brother are incredibly sympathetic figures. They've lived through a
multitude of traumas in their young lives. But the idea
(32:28):
that the doctors were the cause of these traumas, rather
than the intervention that likely saved Maya Kuwalski's life, is
counter to reality. But I have a strong sense that
most people watching the film and cheering on the initial
jury decision don't have any idea what this verdict actually meant.
Speaker 4 (32:46):
From my perspective, had this verdict remained, this would have
continued to be a massive chilling effect on the ability
of mandatory reporters to report their suspicions of medical child abuse,
physical child abuse, mental child abuse, or neglect without the
(33:08):
fear of being prosecuted. In a civil court, being prosecuted
in the court of public opinion, and potentially having your
life and your finances and your professional license ruined. And
unless you're on the front lines of this, I represent
hospitals for a living, so I have a lot of
(33:29):
people call me with questions what do you think in
this scenario? And I remember one that really haunted me.
It was about two weeks after the verdict, and I
had a client, a doctor call me who is an
er physician, and said, I have a child in here.
She's an eleven year old girl. She's got a severe
(33:50):
vaginal infection, and the person who's posing as the parent
doesn't seem to speak the same language as her right
flashing lights for child trafficking and sexual abuse. And her
question was, if I call this, do I have to
attach my name to it, which in Florida you do
(34:10):
if you're a healthcare provider. Can that be discoverable? And
can I be sued? And the answer to all of
those questions are yes, yes, and yes. And you know
what I have to explain in this is while you
can be sued, one would hope that given the fact
(34:31):
that you have what I think is more than a
reasonable suspicion that should you be sued, we'd be able
to get the case dismissed right away, which always leads
to the next question, Then what happened in Kowalski? Right,
And I'm not trying to make it so simple to
say that, you know, there's no scenario that any mandated
(34:53):
reporter could step above or beyond the bounds of immunity,
even though I believe in the second district seemed to
agree that the evidence was that all Children's complied in
good faith with their mandatory reporting obligations. But imagine if
you're in that situation, on the front line of protecting
children and you were pausing. And that's what I'm talking
(35:16):
about in terms of the chilling effect. If it happens
in a case that's that obvious, then what happens on
the cases that are more in the margins and when
the statute is written, where these people can be prosecuted
for failure to report a suspicion, not a substantiated belief,
but a suspicion, then I think, from my perspective, for
(35:38):
those two years, the chilling effect was very real.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
Much of the media surrounding these cases emphasize the idea
that doctors and child abuse pediatricians are rushing to judgment.
Diane Neary, the journalist I mentioned up top, recently did
a season of Cereal called The Preventionist, where she hammered
her argument against child abuse pediatricians with these words in
the series finale quote, I'm saying, even one pause, one wait,
(36:11):
a second might be the difference between a family staying
together or being broken apart.
Speaker 6 (36:17):
But as Ethan.
Speaker 1 (36:18):
Says, there's a very real cost to that pause, and
children are the ones who pay it. We don't have
to guess what happens when doctors start ignoring warning signs
of abuse. The deaths of Olivia Gant and Colin McDaniel
tell us how that story ends. How Maya's story could
have ended. The fate of Justina Pelletier, whose parents' lawsuit
(36:39):
was the precursor to the Kowalskis, shows yet another possible path.
The Pelletiers lost their lawsuit against the hospital, but they
did get their daughter back. Now in her twenties, she
is deeply impacted by her ongoing health issues. It seems
very unlikely that she will ever live an independent life.
So the big question now is did the appeal, which
(36:59):
barely made a blip in the media, put us back
on the right track.
Speaker 4 (37:03):
The second District's decision in favor of my client was,
from my perspective, very well written, very lengthy, very thorough
analysis of the way the law is. Right now, I
believe that is going to be a vindication of the
rights and duties of mandatory reporters so long as they're
(37:25):
staying within the law, complying in good faith with their
rights and obligations under the law. So my optimistic view
of this is that the decision in favor of my
clients is going to vindicate the rights and responsibilities of
all mandatory reporters. Now the attack for which those of
(37:46):
us and I put myself in that camp, believe that
the law should remain broad, that we would like to know,
we would like the state to be aware of reasonable
suspicions of abuse, the vast majority of which are screened
out without any action or any interference of parents' rights.
But I think if there's going to be an attack
from the camp that believes these laws are too restrictive,
(38:09):
that parents should have closer to unfettered rights to make
decisions of their child, even if from the mind of
a reasonable person that those decisions are harming a child.
I think you're going to see the attacks at the
legislative ent because from the court's perspective, they're interpreting the
law as it's written. You know, if you read the
(38:32):
Second District's opinion in favor of my clients, they're doing
an excellent deep dive into Here's what the statute says,
here's what the entire statutory scheme is, and based on
our interpretation of the statute, here's what the decision should
ultimately be in favor of Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital.
(38:52):
And if people want to undo that, it's not going
to be by bringing case after case. It's going to
be lobbying for legs to roll this back. It could
be rolled back with something as simple as changing the
criteria of mandatory reporters have to report a reasonable suspicion.
You could change that definition to say they're only required
(39:15):
to report substantiated complaints that are verifiable through a panel
of three medical experts. That would make the standard for
a report so infinitely high it would only catch those
that are so egregious. These are societal questions and for
the past sixty years, society has decided to cast this
(39:37):
net very broadly. You're at the front line of thisss
andre and if you're sensing a sea change, you should
be alarmed.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
As Ethan indicates, I've been keeping an eye on the
shifts in these conversations around doctor's abuse and parental rights.
In fact, it's baked into my origin story. My sister
Megan Carter was covered in my Kicks and Box series
Do No Harm, along with a whole host of other
families who claim to have been falsely accused of abuse
by doctors and Hicks and bog isn't alone. Similar stories
(40:07):
have made the pages of USA Today, the New York Times,
Serial Podcast, New York Magazine, and this one really hurt
Pro Publica. And as I've tracked these stories, I've noticed
a trend. While cases of false accusations of Munchausen by
proxy often make big headlines, as they did in the
Justina Pelletier case in the Mia Kowalski case, there are
(40:28):
a bunch of other cases being ushered in with them
that are seemingly much more straightforward physical abuse cases. Munchausen
by proxy cases are particularly easy to misrepresent in the
media because of how misunderstood this form of abuses. If
you leave enough context out, you can frame a perpetrator
as a heroic, embattled mom, especially because perpetrators themselves have
(40:51):
often put in years of work to build that image.
By the time these false accusation stories end up in
the press, the media coverage of their cases becomes an
another part of their whole grift, another opportunity to play
both the victim and the martyr, to pull one over
on not just the journalist but their entire audience. And
Munchausen biproxy stories are by their very nature difficult to
(41:13):
unravel and get to the bottom of. It's also really
important for anyone reporting on child abuse to understand how
these systems actually work, because that pause that journalists like
Neeri are asking for it's already happening. There already are
systems in place to rule out abuse and protect families
from being unduly separated from their children. But that part
(41:34):
doesn't make such a juicy headline.
Speaker 4 (41:37):
So this is my personal opinion on this. It's the
same when you watch Law and Order and they skip
jury selection because it's boring and long, and you know,
all of a sudden you've got a jury and you're starting.
But that's kind of one of the most important elements
of this and until you do it, you don't really
realize how much goes into that process. This is the
(42:00):
same with the DUP process rights. After a call is made,
and there's this perception that you know, a doctor or
any mandatory reporter can pick up the phone and call
the suspicion of abuse or neglect and within moments the
child is taken away from the parents. That's not how
it works. There there are as there were in Maya
(42:22):
Kwalski's case. There's an investigation. There has to be a
well documented file that is brought before a judge who's
going to look at that at multiple stages. The emergency stage.
Is this an emergency where the child's at imminent risk
where I have to put a shelter order in place
because there's obvious signs of abuse, neglects, sexual abuse, or
(42:44):
someone threatening to take the child into hospice to put
them under. Is this a situation where you know I
can do something temporary by saying, like, you know, here's
an injunction against giving this medication. But everybody cool off
and come back in a week, and you know the
child's going home with the parents, And so your listeners
(43:04):
have to remember that there's a lot of due process.
And from my experience, and I will admit I don't
have a lot of experience in front of the dependency court,
but from my what I would admit to be somewhat
limited experience, the judges are very reluctant to start interfering
with parents' rights unless they have to. And the other
(43:27):
thing I would tell you is, yes, I can completely
understand a situation of a mandatory reporter thinking, Okay, the
child is confided in me that you know, dad spanks them, right,
something that I think reasonable minds in society can think.
There's degrees of that, and maybe I don't spank my kids,
(43:49):
but we're not going to start separating every child from
their parent who gets a swat on the butt, even
if I don't think that's appropriate behavior. But if you
don't call in something that's setting off your alarm bells,
how do you know that's not the fourth or fifth
time that child's confided in somebody? Why wouldn't you let
the agencies that are trained to track these think, huh,
(44:13):
that's the fifth time? Now? That I've got a call
from five different teachers saying that that kid was subject
to some type of corporal punishment at home that made
the child uncomfortable. Maybe we should investigate this because these
kids now come forward five times, and so that's the
type of thing that when you get rid of the
reasonable suspicion standard, we were also getting rid of the
(44:37):
ability of trained professionals to track whether there's a pattern
that may, in isolation not seem threatening to the welfare
of a child or a vulnerable adult, but over time
lets them track potential problems.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
Do you think that medical professionals would still report if
they weren't required by law, but they knew that they
would be protected by the law.
Speaker 4 (45:08):
In my experience having gone through this, perhaps the most
heroic thing that I've heard from my clients that participated
in Maya Kowalski's case, who were raked over the coals
in the court of public opinion, raked over the coals
in a biased movie that gave no effort to give context,
(45:29):
intentionally concealed deposition testimony that would have put the hospital
in a much more favorable light, were dragged into a
forum and subject to intense public scrutiny. When you ask
them was this worth it? Their response is if it
(45:52):
helped a child get onto a road where they detox
from drugs that could have potentially killed them, put out
on the road where they're running, where they're back in school,
where they're able to maximize their potential, I would do
it again. So you know, when you say all healthcare providers,
(46:16):
you know, of course there are some that are going
to wash their hands at this situation. But when you
really look at the people that have dedicated their lives
to pediatrics, they're not in it for the money. There
are much more lucrative areas of medicine that people could
go into. I am optimistic that if you tweaked the law,
(46:39):
you would still get a lot of people on the
pediatric side that would err on doing what they needed
to do to protect the child, so long as they
knew that they had statutory protections should their reasonable suspicion
be opposed by somebody.
Speaker 1 (46:57):
Sometimes Munchausen biproxy cases come to a head in a
dramatic moment the way that Maya's case did, but it's
always preceded by a pattern of abuse over time. But
so many cases in these compendiums of falsely accused parents
are not much Housen by proxy cases, but cases of
abusive head trauma, a form of child abuse that, unlike
Munchausen by proxy, involves a specific incident and about which
(47:22):
there is a huge degree of medical and scientific consensus
on how to diagnose. So how are these stories ending
up in the same bucket as Munchausen by Proxy. Though
the Kowalski case is the main focus of Take Care
of Maya, the film widens its lens to four other
families who claim they've also been falsely accused of abuse
by the child abuse pediatrician doctor Sally Smith, and as
(47:45):
the credits role, a montage of families from around the
country place these parents also say they've been falsely accused
by doctors. Here's reporter Daphne Chen in Take Care of Maya.
Speaker 3 (47:55):
It was January twenty nineteen when I hit publish on
that piece about the Ki family, and I kind of
thought I'd move on to the next thing. But that
was when the call started coming in and the email
started coming in, and I realized that this was a
lot bigger than just the Kowalskis. I'm sitting at my
(48:15):
desk and I start hearing from more and more families,
people who had gone to the doctor for help for
their kids and then became the target of the system.
These families walked in hoping for help for their child,
and some of them walked out a handcuffs.
Speaker 1 (48:33):
And this helps frame Jack Kowalski's legal crusade as addressing
a systemic injustice. He's not just dragging his traumatized children
through a highly publicized, years long legal battle for a payday.
He's there on behalf of all false accused parents who've
been victimized by the system. Here's Viviana Graham, one of
the other parents featured in the film.
Speaker 3 (48:53):
This young girl, Maya represents hope for all of us
and bringing Sally Smith down the system down.
Speaker 1 (49:01):
This is the framing throughout the varied media stories and
lawsuits around the country, out of control child abuse, pediatricians
falsely accusing parents is a systemic issue that needs reform.
I started off reporting on the Miya Kowalski case from
the outside, following the trial and reading huge piles of
legal documents. But then midway through my reporting, I got
(49:22):
a voicemail.
Speaker 4 (49:23):
Hi, Andrea, this is Patrick. I am doctor Sally Smith's son.
Speaker 1 (49:29):
The media at this time was excoriating doctor Sally Smith,
the child abuse pediatrician in the Mia Kawalski case, calling
her vile names, and criticizing every minute of tape from
her depositions. Seemingly every family who'd ever been involved in
a case that she'd provided an evaluation for sprang forth
to claim that it was not their children who'd been
the victims, but they themselves, innocent parents who'd suffered at
(49:53):
the hands of doctor Smith. I was the lone voice
in the media who seemed to understand that, far from
being the villain of the Maya Kowalski story, Sally Smith,
along with the care team at Johns Hopkins All Children's,
had been one of its heroes. People were not happy
with me for this take. In fact, my reporting on
(50:13):
doctor Smith landed me my very first death threats. After
the trial was over and the quarter billion dollar verdict rendered,
I flew down to Florida to interview doctor Smith. By
the time I sat down with her, I knew the
Kowalski case up down in sideways, and of course this
was Munchausen by proxy my area of expertise, But I
became curious about the other four families in take Care
(50:36):
of Maya who were alleging that they were victims of
doctor Smith. There was one story that really stuck with me,
in particular that of the sole male voice in this cohort,
a Florida man named John Stewart, who claims he was
falsely accused of the murder of fifteen month old Nolan Kelly.
Here he is in Take Care of Maya.
Speaker 9 (50:56):
I spent over three hundred days in jail before they
finally dropped the charges. They ruined my life because of it.
Speaker 1 (51:06):
In addition to his fleeting soundbites in the film, John
inserted himself into the courtroom drama by showing up on
the day doctor Sally Smith testified. He confronted her outside
of the courthouse and filmed the aftermath, which was shared
on TikTok.
Speaker 9 (51:19):
She's evil, she's a liar, she's in malpracticed.
Speaker 4 (51:22):
Sally.
Speaker 9 (51:23):
She freaking charged me with a crime that I did
not commit. That medical evidence clearly shows that I was innocent,
and she has never been held accountable. She's freaking medically
kidnapped Maya Kowalski. She needs to be held accountable. The
fact that you, as a deputy, are not arresting her
disgusts me and disturbs me on every level. She has
fucking killed people. She has literally killed people. She has
(51:45):
freaking abused children, She has harmed children.
Speaker 4 (51:48):
I am reporting this to you.
Speaker 9 (51:49):
I want her arrested for that. Please arrest her for that.
She is illegally kidnapped numerous children, she has illegally imprisoned
numerous parents without any medical evidence, and she has not
been held accountable. And I'm begging anybody in law enforcement
(52:10):
to do their job and hold that evil, psychopath, narcissistic
scumbag accountable.
Speaker 1 (52:16):
There were almost no details in the film about what
happened to Nolan, Kelly or any of the other children.
But on my way to interview doctor Sally Smith two
years ago, I read the media coverage of John's case.
The most thoroughly reported account of John's case was in
the Sarasota Herald Tribune. It featured four pictures of John,
two of which showed him in his military uniform. There's
(52:38):
only one picture of Nolan. He's standing outside with one
of his siblings, pantiless, as one year olds often are.
He has adorable tufts of curls and his big dark
eyes look up into the camera. I had so many
questions about what really happened to Nolan. I was overwhelmed
by sadness reading about it. He'd been fifteen months old
when he died, a month younger than my own, and
(53:00):
sun was then the part of me that was curious
to know more was drowned out by the part of
me that couldn't bear too. So I let it go
until two years later I got a message.
Speaker 10 (53:13):
Well, I was actually watching Dateline and a.
Speaker 7 (53:21):
Show about doctor Vega being involved came on and I
was like, yeah, I started, So I started, I started
thinking about some things.
Speaker 9 (53:33):
So then I asked them, you know about.
Speaker 10 (53:36):
My occasion in particular at chat EPT, and it brought
up your podcast. So I looked at it, listened to it,
and saw that I felt that you were basically defending
Sally Smith erroneously. So yeah, so that's that's why I
reached out to y'all, because I didn't feel that that.
Speaker 11 (53:58):
It was right that she.
Speaker 10 (54:01):
Basically got to lie.
Speaker 1 (54:02):
Again coming up this season on, nobody should believe me.
I think inevitable conclusion that this is not accidental trauma in.
Speaker 6 (54:14):
The Childmy ruled this a homicide. Right.
Speaker 3 (54:18):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (54:20):
One of the main problems with the system is that
it has focused so much on poor people that it
ends up really missing serious cases of abuse.
Speaker 11 (54:30):
Then the question is just because something makes sense, is
it true?
Speaker 12 (54:35):
These things that they introduce as speculative is just to
throw off the court. The court is not a medical arena,
it's a legal arena.
Speaker 5 (54:44):
Review thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of documents
about this child and ended up producing a forty five
page report delineating all of the different ways that there
was evidence of medical child abuse in the case.
Speaker 12 (55:01):
The arguments were the exact same tactics I had spent
two years exploring with vaccines. I didn't have to go
through the whole Let me look into this because I
recognize them.
Speaker 8 (55:13):
I think he knows exactly what happened. I think blacking
out is just a cop out excuse. He knows what
he did is horrific.
Speaker 5 (55:24):
I mean, just watching him, I think he's a dangerous
person and I think, frankly, if you put this on
the airways, you may escalate. Parents have extraordinarily strong rights
in this country, and children are the ones that have
very very limited rights.
Speaker 3 (55:40):
Come on.
Speaker 7 (55:41):
I mean, if you can't hit your mind around that,
like there's the snow point evens walking anymore.
Speaker 11 (55:47):
Seriously, the assumption that being with the parent is always
going to be the best solution, it will always feel
wrong to me. I will always grieve that I didn't
get those years in a situation away from my parents.
Speaker 1 (56:07):
Nobody should believe me. Is written, reported, and executive produced
by Me Andrea dumlop. Our co executive producer is Maria Gossit.
Our editor is Greta Stromquist. Story editing by Nicole Hill,
Research and fact checking by Aaron Ajai. Additional research by
Jesse V Randall, Mixing and engineering by Robin Edgar. Our
production manager is Nola Carmouche. Music from Blue Dot Sessions,
(56:31):
Sound Snap and Slipstream. Special thanks this week to Ethan Shapiro.
Please note that this show discusses child abuse, which may
be difficult for some listeners. For resources about abusive head trauma,
go to shakenbaby dot org.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Take care of Maya Trial new details as well, and
now take care of Maya Trial well. Maya Kowalski and
her family have waited out five years to hear a
verdict and their two hundred and twenty million dollar lawsuit
against Johns Hopkins All Children's.
Speaker 3 (00:23):
Hospital, And did the conduct of Johns Hoist All Children's
Hospital in fact?
Speaker 4 (00:28):
Are my class?
Speaker 1 (00:31):
What happened to Maya? That was the question posed by
Diane Neary in her viral feature for New York Magazine
that ran in the fall of twenty twenty two. There
was that headline, along with a closeup of Maya Kowalski's eyes.
I remember reading this article long before I'd end up
reading thousands of pages of court documents, medical records, testimony,
(00:52):
and police records about the case and thinking, I don't
think this reporter understands what actually happened here. And then
of course there was the Netflix film.
Speaker 5 (01:05):
No matter what we did, the court sided with the
hospital staff.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Judget don't care about the evidence.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
You don't get to the truth by accepting was in
front of you without questioning it. And I realized that
this was a lot bigger than just the kowalskis.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
How many times are you allowed to be wrong and
destroy lives before they say, okay, that's enough.
Speaker 3 (01:28):
These families walked in hoping for help for their child,
and some of them walked down in handcuffs.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
And this was followed by a high profile court battle.
Nobody Should Believe Me had been on the air for
about a year at this point, and this was the
biggest story about Munchausen by proxy since Gypsy Rose blanched.
So I felt like I needed to address it. I
pulled in some experts for a roundtable discussion about the film.
Speaker 4 (01:56):
My impressions were was a huge opportunity lost. What they
could have done is looked at the actual issues in
this abuse. They could have looked at, you know, in
this case.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
There was and that was all I originally planned to do,
but everyone else just kept getting it so wrong. But
it is not the person who's doing the medical record
reviews job to interview every doctor.
Speaker 6 (02:17):
It's to look through those records. And that is how
how do you get that?
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Why do you believe that that's the case if she
is making if she is the sole person making the
recommendation to.
Speaker 6 (02:30):
The judge, the judge is relying on. She was not
the sole person. She was not the sole person. I'm
sorry there was.
Speaker 1 (02:36):
There was Affi David's and testimony other doctors Johns Hopkins
in What actually happened to Maya Kwalski is that she
was the victim of extremely well documented Munchausen by proxy abuse.
In the year preceding her faithful hospitalization at Johns Hopkins
All Children's, Maya Kowalski was subjected to fifty five infusions
(02:59):
of ketmie, a powerful drug that can cause hallucinations, memory loss,
and bladder issues, among other side effects. Her treatment course
also included a highly experimental five day ketamine coma in Mexico,
doctor Fernando Cantu, who performed the treatment, told Maya's parents
that the procedure had a fifty percent chance of death.
(03:23):
Maya was pulled from school wheelchair bound and dangerously underweight.
Her mother, Beata Kowalski, an infusion nurse by trade, administered ketamine,
delauded and other drugs orally intramuscularly and into Maya's port
at home, often against doctor's orders. Biata talked online and
elsewhere about Maya's impending death and pushed to get her
(03:45):
daughter labeled as terminal and attempted to seek out hospice care,
despite the fact that complex regional pain syndrome isn't a
terminal diagnosis, and that diagnosis was handed out to Maya
by a dubious doctor after three world class hospitals diagnosed
her with conversion disorder. On October seventh, twenty sixteen, when
(04:05):
Maya was hospitalized with reports of excruciating pain, Biatta told
staff at Johns Hopkins All Children's that if they refused
to administer the unheard of amount of ketamine she was
requesting that they quote might as well consult hospice so
she can finally get enough medication and just let her die.
So how did such a clear and obviously life threatening
(04:26):
case of abuse get twisted into a story about evil
doctors kidnapping a child? What was going on here? Once
I started pulling at this thread, I couldn't stop the case,
and the civil trial consumed my life for months. We
just recapped this case in a mini series. By the way,
(04:48):
if you don't have time to listen to the previous
eighteen episodes I made about this. I ended up covering
the trial as it unfolded over eight weeks, ending in
a jury awarding the Kuwalski's two hundred and se sixty
one million dollars, and two years later, the story continues
to unfold. Late last year, a Florida appeals court vacated
(05:08):
the verdict and the Kowalski's request to reconsider the appealed
decision was denied. And as all this has been playing
out in court, the impact of Kowalski v. Johns Hopkins
has been felt far and wide because, as reporter Daphne
Chen said in the trailer you just heard, this has
always been bigger than just the Kowalskis. Kowalski lit the match,
(05:29):
and no matter what ultimately happens in their court battle,
the fire won't easily be contained. People believe their eyes.
That's something that is so central to this topic, because
we do believe the people that we love when they're
telling us something. If we didn't, you could never make
it through your day. I'm Andrea Dunlop, Welcome to Season
(05:51):
seven of Nobody Should Believe Me. The Kowalski's legal battle
had already been going on for years by the time
(06:12):
this story got traction in the media. Jack Kowalski filed
his original lawsuit in October of twenty eighteen, two years
almost to the day after Maya was originally hospitalized with
the defendant, Johns Hopkins All Children's So.
Speaker 4 (06:26):
The original lawsuit against Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital, brought
by the Kowalski family alleged a lot of things, some
of which were dismissed before trial. The original lawsuit brought
claims for everything from malicious prosecution for the hospital and
their healthcare providers, calling the Department of Children and Family
(06:49):
Services reporting suspicions of medical child abuse and neglect.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
We spoke to Ethan Shapiro, an attorney for Johns Hopkins
All Children's about how this court case and its aftermath
have played out.
Speaker 4 (07:02):
The counts that survived included everything from medical malpractice for
the alleged misdiagnosis of medical child abuse, the alleged failure
to give what we considered to be extreme doses of
ketamine and other dangerous drugs. There were allegations of battery,
and there were allegations of intentional infliction of emotional distress,
(07:26):
some of which the family alleged caused the mother to
commit suicide. As you saw from the appellate court ruling,
the Appella Court sided with my client, JOHNS. Hopkins All
Children's Hospital, ultimately finding that the hospital complied in good
faith with the mandatory protection statutes and were not liable
(07:47):
as a matter of law or as a matter of
fact for the unfortunate death of missus Kowalsky.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
There were two possible far reaching issues with the Kowalski
verdict had it wisted appeal. One is the potential legal
precedent set by allowing a family to claim damages against
an institution for a suicide, and the other, of course,
was holding the hospital libel for reporting abuse.
Speaker 4 (08:12):
The attempts to hold healthcare providers liable for mandatory reporting
under Chapter thirty nine are rare, but not unheard of.
In fact, if you looked at the published decisions, a
lot of them are for the flip side, where you know,
for example, a parent whose child was ultimately abused or
(08:32):
harmed is suing a state agency or a mandatory reporter
for failing to report suspected abuse. I think for example,
you know, in a case of a contested divorce where
a child reports symptoms of sexual abuse to a teacher
and the teacher doesn't bring that forward, you could see
a situation where the other custodial parent finds out about
(08:54):
that and then would have a lawsuit or potential prosecution
against a mandatory reporter. Now, all of that being said,
we've seen a spate of these lawsuits more in frequency
since the Kowalski case, since the movie, and since the
fact that it survived the initial motions to dismiss based
on statutory immunity. How often do we see these types
(09:19):
of cases go to trial? Incredibly rare, and I think
they're going to become more rare now that the Second
District Court of Appeal has reaffirmed statutory rights and immunities
for mandatory reporters.
Speaker 1 (09:32):
The Kowalski lawsuit and its imitators position this legal battle
very clearly as a parent's rights issue, claiming that quote
doctor Smith and Johns Hopkins all Children's knowingly and recklessly
violated Jack and Beata's constitutional right to make medical decisions
for their child by refusing to discharge Maya following repeated
(09:54):
requests from Jack and Beata and by conspiring to abuse
a process and legislative provisions designed to purtat children from
imminent harm. And while some of the counts of the lawsuits,
such as conspiracy, malicious prosecution, and the First and Fourteenth
Amendment claims were dismissed before trial, the spirit of these
claims remained. The plaintiff's story was that the doctors had
(10:15):
conspired to separate Maya from her mother. They'd known their
abuse claims were fake, and they made them anyway, and
their wanton disregard for this family had driven Biata Kowalski
to take her own life. And these claims have served
as inspiration for a number of other lawsuits around the
country against child abuse pediatricians, and hospitals, from San Diego
to Minnesota to Pennsylvania. According to these lawsuits, doctors aren't
(10:39):
just making mistakes. They're all powerful entities who are conspiring
to remove children from their innocent parents for their own
financial gain and career advancement. The terminology varies depending on
the venue, but there is in fact a name for
all of this medical kidnapping. Like any other conspiracy theory,
it's hard to trace the exact origins of the term
(11:00):
medical kidnapping, but it appears to have gained a foothold
in parents' rights focused internet spaces sometime in the twenty tens,
and gained significant traction during the highly publicized Justina Pelletier case,
a precursor lawsuit involving Munchhausen by proxy. Medical kidnapping is
deeply entwined with the idea that Munchausen by proxy isn't
(11:22):
a real form of abuse, that every allegation is necessarily false,
a witch hunt against carrying moms, and that CPS workers
and physicians are hiding behind their legal immunity protections. This
concept has even deeper Internet origins than medical kidnapping itself,
going back to the Mothers Against Munchhausen Allegations website, which
(11:43):
popped up in the late nineties. Medical kidnapping, like so
many things, is a fringe idea that has migrated from
the dark corners of the Internet into mainstream publications such
as The New York Times and Pro publica People magazine
where Take Care of Maya producer Caitlin Keating worked when
she did discovered this story. Published an article in November
of twenty twenty five, titled where is Maya Kowalski Now?
(12:07):
All about her life after getting medically kidnapped ten years ago.
This was weeks after the verdict was reversed. So how
did we get here and how did hospitals become such
a target?
Speaker 4 (12:19):
So hospitals are in a very unique situation for children
that are at risk for suspicions of neglect or abuse
because often healthcare workers are the frontline defense and being
able to diagnose it and being able to report it.
If you think of a situation where a child would
come into a hospital with an unexplained fracture that couldn't
(12:42):
be a result of anything other than trauma, and potentially
trauma in an area that couldn't be explained in the
absence of intentional abuse, the healthcare worker would be the
one that would be in the best position to make
that call of reasonable suspicion to the Department of Children
and Families. Now, in that unique situation where the child's
(13:02):
an impatient in the hospital, already the easiest thing for
the courts to do to try to find an immediate
safe placement for the child before the court can figure
out whether one of the custodial parents or perhaps a
grandparent or a relative could be filled in that role
is to shelter the child immediately at the hospital. So
(13:22):
hospitals are put in sort of a precurious position that
other mandatory reporters don't have to deal with. Think firefighters,
teachers in some states. Journalists are never going to be
in the situation that the person making the report may
also be the person required by order of the court
(13:43):
to provide safe shelter to the child in the short
and the medium term.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
And does a hospital, once a child is sheltered there,
does a hospital have any choice about whether or not
to keep that child there Under the law, No.
Speaker 4 (13:58):
The hospital is required to follow the court order, just
as anyone would be required to follow the court order. Now,
the hospital can make recommendations as to what they believe
is in the best interests of the child from a
medical standpoint, for whatever medical treatment is necessary. And if
you remember back to the Kwalski case, once all children
(14:21):
reasonably believe that Maya would have benefited from intensive impatient
or outpatient psychotherapy to treat whatever her pain syndrome was,
they made a recommendation to transfer to Nemours Hospital in Orlando,
who are experts in that so they can make recommendations,
but absent an order from the court releasing the jurisdiction,
(14:43):
the hospital has to keep the child in custody.
Speaker 1 (14:53):
There are many worthwhile critiques about how child protection is
handled in the US, and we're going to dig into
those this season. But sorry if this is a spoiler.
There is no evidence that doctors are conspiring to kidnap
children or even making a significant number of incorrect abuse diagnoses.
So why has this idea gotten so much traction? What
(15:13):
is this actually about?
Speaker 4 (15:15):
I think what the plaintiff ultimately wanted to try was
a civil rights case. And Andrew, when you spoke earlier
about this, you know, influx of what's been called generously
a parents' rights movement, which is always in tens with
what may be best for the child. This case was,
(15:36):
in the plaintiff's mind, one of those cases in the forefront.
They brought constitutional actions that were dismissed. I mean, you
heard the backstory from the Kwalskis escaping a communist system
with the implication to only find themselves, you know, at
the center of a deep state conspiracy, amongst multiple acts
(16:00):
to harm Maya and target the mother for reasons that
were never fully explained, at least not with evidence, and
as a second district said, there was no evidence of
any intent directed at YadA Kuwalski whatsoever. But that was
certainly what they wanted to put in front of the jury,
and that was certainly one of the things that they
(16:20):
thought that they could exploit for the purpose. From my
perspective of drumming up dureror emotions, the.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
Plaintiff's lawyers and the Netflix film told an emotionally evocative
story about a suffering family, but by leaving out so
much crucial information, that story obscured a very big question.
What would have happened if there hadn't been a report?
What if Beata had been allowed to carry on? Should
parents just be allowed to give their children fifty to
(16:50):
one hundred times the recommended dose of ketamine and subject
them to experimental procedures that carry a fifty percent risk
of death? According to Jack Kwall's these post vertic comments
in the press, Yes.
Speaker 4 (17:03):
Parents have rights and.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
They make the decision for their children. Ethan disagrees.
Speaker 4 (17:12):
So hospitals are not burgering. You can't walk into a
hospital and have it your way and demand medical careent
that is wildly outside accepted medical standards. You can't do
it for yourself, and it's going to draw extra scrutiny
if you're going to demand it on behalf of a
vulnerable child or a vulnerable adult that truly cannot consent
(17:35):
on their own behalf. And that's fine. Our system is
set up where we have parents be the natural guardians
of the children, who are empowered to make reasonable medical decisions,
just the same way that you can be appointed to
be the medical guardian for somebody becomes gold and infirm.
But it doesn't give the guardian the unfettered right to
(17:56):
demand treatment that medical providers know to be dangerous. You know,
there are protocols and pathways for the safe treatment of
chronic regional paident syndrome, for the safe treatment of conversion
syndrome of factitious disorder, and none of them call for
doses of ketamine that I think the evidence showed were
(18:18):
twenty three milligrams per kilogram per hour, which is more
than what you need to anesetize a two thousand pounds horse.
So the parents have rights to direct reasonable medical care,
but they don't have an unfettered right to direct and
demand dangerous medical care.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
The question of what rights children should have as human
beings isn't a new one, and the tension between children's
rights to be safe and cared for and their parents'
rights to make decisions on their behalf is something that
hospitals have always been caught in the middle of.
Speaker 4 (18:50):
Hospitals have been dealing with this for years. There are
religious sects that do not believe in blood transfusions, so
hospitals have attorney on standby that they call it to
in the morning to say, we have a child here
who's been in a horrific accident. The child's bleeding out.
The only way to survive is to transfuse blood, and
(19:11):
the parents are saying that they're object on religious and
moral grounds. We file motions with the court, We wake
up the judge in the middle of the night, We
get an order from the judge for immedia blood transfusions,
and we transfuse the child to save the child's life
above what the parents' wishes are. That's the tension in
society where you know your religious rights and your rights
(19:34):
to direct medical care. We've decided as a society end
when it's going to jeopardize the life of a child.
So it's not a new concept. It's not a new
concept in the law, and it's not isolated to cases
like this.
Speaker 1 (19:48):
Halfway through the trial, just as the defense was going up,
Judge Hunter Carroll ruled to dramatically limit testimony pertaining to
Munchausen biproxy abuse. This was baffling given that the abuse
was the reason Maya had been separated from her parents
in the first place, not to mention the fact that
the plaintiff had already been allowed to assert in their
opening statement and had one witness testify that Biata Kowalski
(20:11):
did not have Munchausen biproxy, which they framed as a
psychological condition rather than a form of abuse.
Speaker 4 (20:18):
So I'm certainly not here to criticize tough decisions made
by the trial court on evidence. But to your question
about whether this particular issue brought in the mother's psychological diagnosis,
there could be ways you could start the trial and
(20:39):
go through the entire trial where that becomes less of
an issue. However, if the plaintiffs are permitted to stand
up an opening argument and talk about how the collective
they set about to destroy this family with an erroneous
diagnosis of munch by proxy, or to talk about how
(21:04):
even though Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital made the reasonable
medical choice to try to escalate Maya's condition, whatever it
may be, to the specialist set nomors, that the family
objected to that because of this erroneous diagnosis of medical
child abuse from munchausen Brod proxy. That, from my perspective,
(21:26):
necessitates the defense to be able to justify to the
jury that's now heard this testimony for several weeks to
justify that that diagnosis or that working diagnosis, whether it
appears in the medical record or on medical billing, was
made reasonably. And I think the question that you're getting
to next is if that's true, then why didn't we
(21:51):
watching this trial get to see all of Sally Smith's
detailed report that the hospital relied on in part in
arriving at some more diagnoses.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
And I think you know, importantly with the framing of
this right, the question is whether there was number one
cause for concern to make that immediate call, and then
was there evidence of abuse that necessitated this separation period
and her being sheltered in the hospital, And in fact,
there was extensive evidence, And so that's the question. However,
(22:24):
the plaintiff did have several witnesses testify that Beata, including
doctor Chopra, who is not an expert on this, that
Beata Qualsky did not have Munchausen by proxy, and so
they were permitted to testify, as you said, like in
the negative, that this was an outrageous allegation and that
(22:44):
you know, Biata was a caring mother who was making
appropriate medical decisions. So there was evidence allowed to be
presented about Munchausen by proxy by the plaintiff. Can you
talk about the decision that the trial court made halfway
through the trial, Uh, when it was the defense's turn
to present.
Speaker 4 (23:03):
So from my perspective sitting at council table, it appeared
the court wanted to refocus the trial on the remaining
allegations medical malpractice, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and I
think there were some battery allegations in there as well.
And the court's central question was what does the mother's
(23:25):
state of mind or whether she suffers from this psychological
diagnosis have to do with whether the hospital provided medically
acceptable care to Mia Kwalski. In the abstract, that's a
completely fair question, right because if you take it one
step back further, my client's position from day one was
(23:48):
whether this is CRPS or whether it's factitious disorder or
conversion disorder or a psychological pain response. The treatment for
this is still not wild doses of ketmie third enough
to nessetize the horse. Now back to your question, you know,
in real time from my perspective, and it's just mine
(24:09):
at defense council table, we felt it necessary to paint
the full picture for the jury, so we didn't look
like monsters that were coming up with this diagnosis to
target the family. But in the abstract, that was the
way the court was looking at the question in real time,
and you know, certainly that affected the presentation of evidence
(24:30):
after that.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Yeah, because while there was quite a lot of evidence
that was admitted at trial and during the pre trial period.
I mean, this has been one of the benefits as
a journalist about reporting on this case is that we
just have so much information to work with, there are
only pieces of that that were actually presented at trial.
(24:55):
I don't think beyondest blog was ever presented at trial,
which was a pretty strong piece of evidence. And so
this this trial court decision made it so that certain
things that even were available to the public were not
available to the jury. And then it also meant that
the one piece of documentation that really tied all of
(25:15):
this together from the person who had the highest level
of expertise about child abuse and who had reviewed thousands
of pages of medical records, and that would be doctor
Sally Smith's report, and that was never admitted into evidence.
Speaker 6 (25:31):
That remains private and sealed.
Speaker 4 (25:34):
To this day. It does, yes, her report is confidential.
I mean the lawyers have seen it because we had
the potential introducing in evidence, so I know what it says. Obviously,
doctor Smith knows what it says. The family knows what
it says. The family did not want the jury to
see it for understandable reasons. But ultimately the court made
(25:55):
the decision that the court made based on what I
told you. That was what I understood to be the
court's logic. You know, the courts certainly had their reasons
for following it. They were understandable to me in a vacuum,
you know, it was. But again, it was frustrating to
some degree that that report felt necessary from the defenses perspective,
(26:17):
to rebut insinuations of these false allegations or that they
came out of nowhere, they were introduced by the planet.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
You know, as someone who tells stories for a living
about abuse, and specifically about this abuse, you have to
really tie it together. It's not well understood. It's not
easy for your average sure to understand exactly what the
harm was to this child and what the danger that
she was in. But you know, just in terms of
(26:45):
like the asymmetry in the storytelling that you have the
plaintiff able to tell this very dramatic story, which they did.
Speaker 6 (26:59):
With all all kinds of tactics.
Speaker 7 (27:02):
Right.
Speaker 1 (27:02):
They had a lot of pictures, they played the nine
to one one call, They had videos of the family,
they had videos of Maya in pain. You know, they
used a lot of elements to tell this story.
Speaker 6 (27:14):
It's sort of did that decision kind of hamstring.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
The defense's ability to tell a story that actually put
the focus back on.
Speaker 4 (27:27):
My Yeah, perhaps so again from the hospital's perspective, and
maybe let me take it a step back from that,
and this is me talking right from my perspective, But
it's based on a lot of conversations with healthcare providers,
a parent coming in with a different belief of what
their child has is not uncommon, and most healthcare providers
(27:52):
are not offended by that. Like healthcare providers are human,
Medicine is an art and a science. You have a
constellation of symptoms and sometimes reasonable people can disagree. That's
why they call it a standard of care, not necessarily one.
You know, correct diagnosis and every circumstance And where am
(28:13):
I going with this? Dandred? So think about it this way.
If somebody comes into to a hospital or a doctor
and says, I think my child's got irritable bowel syndrome,
and what really helps them is if I give them,
you know, and ensure and to tile in all when
they complain. The doctor could tell you, based on my
(28:34):
test and based on my clinical diagnosis and the symptoms,
I don't think your child has that. But if that's
the only treatment you're recommending for what you think the
diagnosis is, we're not calling DCF on you because you're
not putting the child in danger. So merely because the
hospital is a difference that you know, we don't think
(28:55):
and when I say we, I'm speaking on behalf of
basically every certified medical profession, with the exception of Kirkpatrick
and Hannah. We don't think Maya has CRPS, says Lourie's
Hospital in Chicago, says Tampa General Hospital, says All Children's Hospital,
and says everyone else in between. They're not calling DCF.
The call was based on the fact that you're hearing
(29:18):
evidence of immediate threat to Maya's life, either from the
drugs that are being given or what the mother is
saying that she's going to do if you don't put
my child in a propo follower academy induced coma. So,
you know, going back to your initial question of you know,
how does this affect the presentation of evidence, I think
(29:39):
it affects it to the degree that this is not
just about a parent disagreeing with what the diagnosis is
and you know, portraying this as ou ivy league people
up in your tower think you know what's best for
my child. The imminent danger that a child could be
in if the parents fervently believe and are disregarding medical
(30:02):
advice from several world class and local providers is where
the context needs to come for the jury to understand
ultimately why the hospital was making reasonable decisions both in
their medical care and their recommendations for future care.
Speaker 8 (30:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (30:22):
So take us to the verdict. What ultimately was the
verdict in the award in this.
Speaker 4 (30:29):
Case, gross verdict I believe was for two hundred and
sixty one million that was set aside slightly by the
trial court on some post trial motions. That verdict has
been completely vacated or erased by the Second District Court
of Appeal finding there were multiple errors in the way
that the Chapter thirty nine, the statutory immunity was ultimately applied.
(30:53):
So right now there is no verdict against my client
and no judgment that we're liable for.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
I've thought a lot about why the Kowalski story took
off the way it did, and how such a well
documented abuse case got laundered to the extent of a
sympathetic Netflix documentary and a quarter billion dollar verdict in court.
It certainly doesn't hurt that Maya is a beautiful white
girl with a dead mother, a sort of true crime
Disney princess. But I think Beata's absence from this story
(31:45):
is what really allowed it to take off. Beata Kowalski
was a complicated person in real life, someone capable of
subjecting her daughter to unfathomable abuse. She said she would
put her daughter on hospice and let her die. I
have no reason to believe that she wasn't serious about
that threat. But in the retelling, Beata is flattened into
(32:06):
an archetypal, self sacrificing, heroic mother, the one people want
to believe in. And because she wasn't around to complicate
this picture, the filmmakers and lawyers got to make her
into whatever they wanted. And of course Maya and her
younger brother are incredibly sympathetic figures. They've lived through a
multitude of traumas in their young lives. But the idea
(32:28):
that the doctors were the cause of these traumas, rather
than the intervention that likely saved Maya Kuwalski's life, is
counter to reality. But I have a strong sense that
most people watching the film and cheering on the initial
jury decision don't have any idea what this verdict actually meant.
Speaker 4 (32:46):
From my perspective, had this verdict remained, this would have
continued to be a massive chilling effect on the ability
of mandatory reporters to report their suspicions of medical child abuse,
physical child abuse, mental child abuse, or neglect without the
(33:08):
fear of being prosecuted. In a civil court, being prosecuted
in the court of public opinion, and potentially having your
life and your finances and your professional license ruined. And
unless you're on the front lines of this, I represent
hospitals for a living, so I have a lot of
(33:29):
people call me with questions what do you think in
this scenario? And I remember one that really haunted me.
It was about two weeks after the verdict, and I
had a client, a doctor call me who is an
er physician, and said, I have a child in here.
She's an eleven year old girl. She's got a severe
(33:50):
vaginal infection, and the person who's posing as the parent
doesn't seem to speak the same language as her right
flashing lights for child trafficking and sexual abuse. And her
question was, if I call this, do I have to
attach my name to it, which in Florida you do
(34:10):
if you're a healthcare provider. Can that be discoverable? And
can I be sued? And the answer to all of
those questions are yes, yes, and yes. And you know
what I have to explain in this is while you
can be sued, one would hope that given the fact
(34:31):
that you have what I think is more than a
reasonable suspicion that should you be sued, we'd be able
to get the case dismissed right away, which always leads
to the next question, Then what happened in Kowalski? Right,
And I'm not trying to make it so simple to
say that, you know, there's no scenario that any mandated
(34:53):
reporter could step above or beyond the bounds of immunity,
even though I believe in the second district seemed to
agree that the evidence was that all Children's complied in
good faith with their mandatory reporting obligations. But imagine if
you're in that situation, on the front line of protecting
children and you were pausing. And that's what I'm talking
(35:16):
about in terms of the chilling effect. If it happens
in a case that's that obvious, then what happens on
the cases that are more in the margins and when
the statute is written, where these people can be prosecuted
for failure to report a suspicion, not a substantiated belief,
but a suspicion, then I think, from my perspective, for
(35:38):
those two years, the chilling effect was very real.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
Much of the media surrounding these cases emphasize the idea
that doctors and child abuse pediatricians are rushing to judgment.
Diane Neary, the journalist I mentioned up top, recently did
a season of Cereal called The Preventionist, where she hammered
her argument against child abuse pediatricians with these words in
the series finale quote, I'm saying, even one pause, one wait,
(36:11):
a second might be the difference between a family staying
together or being broken apart.
Speaker 6 (36:17):
But as Ethan.
Speaker 1 (36:18):
Says, there's a very real cost to that pause, and
children are the ones who pay it. We don't have
to guess what happens when doctors start ignoring warning signs
of abuse. The deaths of Olivia Gant and Colin McDaniel
tell us how that story ends. How Maya's story could
have ended. The fate of Justina Pelletier, whose parents' lawsuit
(36:39):
was the precursor to the Kowalskis, shows yet another possible path.
The Pelletiers lost their lawsuit against the hospital, but they
did get their daughter back. Now in her twenties, she
is deeply impacted by her ongoing health issues. It seems
very unlikely that she will ever live an independent life.
So the big question now is did the appeal, which
(36:59):
barely made a blip in the media, put us back
on the right track.
Speaker 4 (37:03):
The second District's decision in favor of my client was,
from my perspective, very well written, very lengthy, very thorough
analysis of the way the law is. Right now, I
believe that is going to be a vindication of the
rights and duties of mandatory reporters so long as they're
(37:25):
staying within the law, complying in good faith with their
rights and obligations under the law. So my optimistic view
of this is that the decision in favor of my
clients is going to vindicate the rights and responsibilities of
all mandatory reporters. Now the attack for which those of
(37:46):
us and I put myself in that camp, believe that
the law should remain broad, that we would like to know,
we would like the state to be aware of reasonable
suspicions of abuse, the vast majority of which are screened
out without any action or any interference of parents' rights.
But I think if there's going to be an attack
from the camp that believes these laws are too restrictive,
(38:09):
that parents should have closer to unfettered rights to make
decisions of their child, even if from the mind of
a reasonable person that those decisions are harming a child.
I think you're going to see the attacks at the
legislative ent because from the court's perspective, they're interpreting the
law as it's written. You know, if you read the
(38:32):
Second District's opinion in favor of my clients, they're doing
an excellent deep dive into Here's what the statute says,
here's what the entire statutory scheme is, and based on
our interpretation of the statute, here's what the decision should
ultimately be in favor of Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital.
(38:52):
And if people want to undo that, it's not going
to be by bringing case after case. It's going to
be lobbying for legs to roll this back. It could
be rolled back with something as simple as changing the
criteria of mandatory reporters have to report a reasonable suspicion.
You could change that definition to say they're only required
(39:15):
to report substantiated complaints that are verifiable through a panel
of three medical experts. That would make the standard for
a report so infinitely high it would only catch those
that are so egregious. These are societal questions and for
the past sixty years, society has decided to cast this
(39:37):
net very broadly. You're at the front line of thisss
andre and if you're sensing a sea change, you should
be alarmed.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
As Ethan indicates, I've been keeping an eye on the
shifts in these conversations around doctor's abuse and parental rights.
In fact, it's baked into my origin story. My sister
Megan Carter was covered in my Kicks and Box series
Do No Harm, along with a whole host of other
families who claim to have been falsely accused of abuse
by doctors and Hicks and bog isn't alone. Similar stories
(40:07):
have made the pages of USA Today, the New York Times,
Serial Podcast, New York Magazine, and this one really hurt
Pro Publica. And as I've tracked these stories, I've noticed
a trend. While cases of false accusations of Munchausen by
proxy often make big headlines, as they did in the
Justina Pelletier case in the Mia Kowalski case, there are
(40:28):
a bunch of other cases being ushered in with them
that are seemingly much more straightforward physical abuse cases. Munchausen
by proxy cases are particularly easy to misrepresent in the
media because of how misunderstood this form of abuses. If
you leave enough context out, you can frame a perpetrator
as a heroic, embattled mom, especially because perpetrators themselves have
(40:51):
often put in years of work to build that image.
By the time these false accusation stories end up in
the press, the media coverage of their cases becomes an
another part of their whole grift, another opportunity to play
both the victim and the martyr, to pull one over
on not just the journalist but their entire audience. And
Munchausen biproxy stories are by their very nature difficult to
(41:13):
unravel and get to the bottom of. It's also really
important for anyone reporting on child abuse to understand how
these systems actually work, because that pause that journalists like
Neeri are asking for it's already happening. There already are
systems in place to rule out abuse and protect families
from being unduly separated from their children. But that part
(41:34):
doesn't make such a juicy headline.
Speaker 4 (41:37):
So this is my personal opinion on this. It's the
same when you watch Law and Order and they skip
jury selection because it's boring and long, and you know,
all of a sudden you've got a jury and you're starting.
But that's kind of one of the most important elements
of this and until you do it, you don't really
realize how much goes into that process. This is the
(42:00):
same with the DUP process rights. After a call is made,
and there's this perception that you know, a doctor or
any mandatory reporter can pick up the phone and call
the suspicion of abuse or neglect and within moments the
child is taken away from the parents. That's not how
it works. There there are as there were in Maya
(42:22):
Kwalski's case. There's an investigation. There has to be a
well documented file that is brought before a judge who's
going to look at that at multiple stages. The emergency stage.
Is this an emergency where the child's at imminent risk
where I have to put a shelter order in place
because there's obvious signs of abuse, neglects, sexual abuse, or
(42:44):
someone threatening to take the child into hospice to put
them under. Is this a situation where you know I
can do something temporary by saying, like, you know, here's
an injunction against giving this medication. But everybody cool off
and come back in a week, and you know the
child's going home with the parents, And so your listeners
(43:04):
have to remember that there's a lot of due process.
And from my experience, and I will admit I don't
have a lot of experience in front of the dependency court,
but from my what I would admit to be somewhat
limited experience, the judges are very reluctant to start interfering
with parents' rights unless they have to. And the other
(43:27):
thing I would tell you is, yes, I can completely
understand a situation of a mandatory reporter thinking, Okay, the
child is confided in me that you know, dad spanks them, right,
something that I think reasonable minds in society can think.
There's degrees of that, and maybe I don't spank my kids,
(43:49):
but we're not going to start separating every child from
their parent who gets a swat on the butt, even
if I don't think that's appropriate behavior. But if you
don't call in something that's setting off your alarm bells,
how do you know that's not the fourth or fifth
time that child's confided in somebody? Why wouldn't you let
the agencies that are trained to track these think, huh,
(44:13):
that's the fifth time? Now? That I've got a call
from five different teachers saying that that kid was subject
to some type of corporal punishment at home that made
the child uncomfortable. Maybe we should investigate this because these
kids now come forward five times, and so that's the
type of thing that when you get rid of the
reasonable suspicion standard, we were also getting rid of the
(44:37):
ability of trained professionals to track whether there's a pattern
that may, in isolation not seem threatening to the welfare
of a child or a vulnerable adult, but over time
lets them track potential problems.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
Do you think that medical professionals would still report if
they weren't required by law, but they knew that they
would be protected by the law.
Speaker 4 (45:08):
In my experience having gone through this, perhaps the most
heroic thing that I've heard from my clients that participated
in Maya Kowalski's case, who were raked over the coals
in the court of public opinion, raked over the coals
in a biased movie that gave no effort to give context,
(45:29):
intentionally concealed deposition testimony that would have put the hospital
in a much more favorable light, were dragged into a
forum and subject to intense public scrutiny. When you ask
them was this worth it? Their response is if it
(45:52):
helped a child get onto a road where they detox
from drugs that could have potentially killed them, put out
on the road where they're running, where they're back in school,
where they're able to maximize their potential, I would do
it again. So you know, when you say all healthcare providers,
(46:16):
you know, of course there are some that are going
to wash their hands at this situation. But when you
really look at the people that have dedicated their lives
to pediatrics, they're not in it for the money. There
are much more lucrative areas of medicine that people could
go into. I am optimistic that if you tweaked the law,
(46:39):
you would still get a lot of people on the
pediatric side that would err on doing what they needed
to do to protect the child, so long as they
knew that they had statutory protections should their reasonable suspicion
be opposed by somebody.
Speaker 1 (46:57):
Sometimes Munchausen biproxy cases come to a head in a
dramatic moment the way that Maya's case did, but it's
always preceded by a pattern of abuse over time. But
so many cases in these compendiums of falsely accused parents
are not much Housen by proxy cases, but cases of
abusive head trauma, a form of child abuse that, unlike
Munchausen by proxy, involves a specific incident and about which
(47:22):
there is a huge degree of medical and scientific consensus
on how to diagnose. So how are these stories ending
up in the same bucket as Munchausen by Proxy. Though
the Kowalski case is the main focus of Take Care
of Maya, the film widens its lens to four other
families who claim they've also been falsely accused of abuse
by the child abuse pediatrician doctor Sally Smith, and as
(47:45):
the credits role, a montage of families from around the
country place these parents also say they've been falsely accused
by doctors. Here's reporter Daphne Chen in Take Care of Maya.
Speaker 3 (47:55):
It was January twenty nineteen when I hit publish on
that piece about the Ki family, and I kind of
thought I'd move on to the next thing. But that
was when the call started coming in and the email
started coming in, and I realized that this was a
lot bigger than just the Kowalskis. I'm sitting at my
(48:15):
desk and I start hearing from more and more families,
people who had gone to the doctor for help for
their kids and then became the target of the system.
These families walked in hoping for help for their child,
and some of them walked out a handcuffs.
Speaker 1 (48:33):
And this helps frame Jack Kowalski's legal crusade as addressing
a systemic injustice. He's not just dragging his traumatized children
through a highly publicized, years long legal battle for a payday.
He's there on behalf of all false accused parents who've
been victimized by the system. Here's Viviana Graham, one of
the other parents featured in the film.
Speaker 3 (48:53):
This young girl, Maya represents hope for all of us
and bringing Sally Smith down the system down.
Speaker 1 (49:01):
This is the framing throughout the varied media stories and
lawsuits around the country, out of control child abuse, pediatricians
falsely accusing parents is a systemic issue that needs reform.
I started off reporting on the Miya Kowalski case from
the outside, following the trial and reading huge piles of
legal documents. But then midway through my reporting, I got
(49:22):
a voicemail.
Speaker 4 (49:23):
Hi, Andrea, this is Patrick. I am doctor Sally Smith's son.
Speaker 1 (49:29):
The media at this time was excoriating doctor Sally Smith,
the child abuse pediatrician in the Mia Kawalski case, calling
her vile names, and criticizing every minute of tape from
her depositions. Seemingly every family who'd ever been involved in
a case that she'd provided an evaluation for sprang forth
to claim that it was not their children who'd been
the victims, but they themselves, innocent parents who'd suffered at
(49:53):
the hands of doctor Smith. I was the lone voice
in the media who seemed to understand that, far from
being the villain of the Maya Kowalski story, Sally Smith,
along with the care team at Johns Hopkins All Children's,
had been one of its heroes. People were not happy
with me for this take. In fact, my reporting on
(50:13):
doctor Smith landed me my very first death threats. After
the trial was over and the quarter billion dollar verdict rendered,
I flew down to Florida to interview doctor Smith. By
the time I sat down with her, I knew the
Kowalski case up down in sideways, and of course this
was Munchausen by proxy my area of expertise, But I
became curious about the other four families in take Care
(50:36):
of Maya who were alleging that they were victims of
doctor Smith. There was one story that really stuck with me,
in particular that of the sole male voice in this cohort,
a Florida man named John Stewart, who claims he was
falsely accused of the murder of fifteen month old Nolan Kelly.
Here he is in Take Care of Maya.
Speaker 9 (50:56):
I spent over three hundred days in jail before they
finally dropped the charges. They ruined my life because of it.
Speaker 1 (51:06):
In addition to his fleeting soundbites in the film, John
inserted himself into the courtroom drama by showing up on
the day doctor Sally Smith testified. He confronted her outside
of the courthouse and filmed the aftermath, which was shared
on TikTok.
Speaker 9 (51:19):
She's evil, she's a liar, she's in malpracticed.
Speaker 4 (51:22):
Sally.
Speaker 9 (51:23):
She freaking charged me with a crime that I did
not commit. That medical evidence clearly shows that I was innocent,
and she has never been held accountable. She's freaking medically
kidnapped Maya Kowalski. She needs to be held accountable. The
fact that you, as a deputy, are not arresting her
disgusts me and disturbs me on every level. She has
fucking killed people. She has literally killed people. She has
(51:45):
freaking abused children, She has harmed children.
Speaker 4 (51:48):
I am reporting this to you.
Speaker 9 (51:49):
I want her arrested for that. Please arrest her for that.
She is illegally kidnapped numerous children, she has illegally imprisoned
numerous parents without any medical evidence, and she has not
been held accountable. And I'm begging anybody in law enforcement
(52:10):
to do their job and hold that evil, psychopath, narcissistic
scumbag accountable.
Speaker 1 (52:16):
There were almost no details in the film about what
happened to Nolan, Kelly or any of the other children.
But on my way to interview doctor Sally Smith two
years ago, I read the media coverage of John's case.
The most thoroughly reported account of John's case was in
the Sarasota Herald Tribune. It featured four pictures of John,
two of which showed him in his military uniform. There's
(52:38):
only one picture of Nolan. He's standing outside with one
of his siblings, pantiless, as one year olds often are.
He has adorable tufts of curls and his big dark
eyes look up into the camera. I had so many
questions about what really happened to Nolan. I was overwhelmed
by sadness reading about it. He'd been fifteen months old
when he died, a month younger than my own, and
(53:00):
sun was then the part of me that was curious
to know more was drowned out by the part of
me that couldn't bear too. So I let it go
until two years later I got a message.
Speaker 10 (53:13):
Well, I was actually watching Dateline and a.
Speaker 7 (53:21):
Show about doctor Vega being involved came on and I
was like, yeah, I started, So I started, I started
thinking about some things.
Speaker 9 (53:33):
So then I asked them, you know about.
Speaker 10 (53:36):
My occasion in particular at chat EPT, and it brought
up your podcast. So I looked at it, listened to it,
and saw that I felt that you were basically defending
Sally Smith erroneously. So yeah, so that's that's why I
reached out to y'all, because I didn't feel that that.
Speaker 11 (53:58):
It was right that she.
Speaker 10 (54:01):
Basically got to lie.
Speaker 1 (54:02):
Again coming up this season on, nobody should believe me.
I think inevitable conclusion that this is not accidental trauma in.
Speaker 6 (54:14):
The Childmy ruled this a homicide. Right.
Speaker 3 (54:18):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (54:20):
One of the main problems with the system is that
it has focused so much on poor people that it
ends up really missing serious cases of abuse.
Speaker 11 (54:30):
Then the question is just because something makes sense, is
it true?
Speaker 12 (54:35):
These things that they introduce as speculative is just to
throw off the court. The court is not a medical arena,
it's a legal arena.
Speaker 5 (54:44):
Review thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of documents
about this child and ended up producing a forty five
page report delineating all of the different ways that there
was evidence of medical child abuse in the case.
Speaker 12 (55:01):
The arguments were the exact same tactics I had spent
two years exploring with vaccines. I didn't have to go
through the whole Let me look into this because I
recognize them.
Speaker 8 (55:13):
I think he knows exactly what happened. I think blacking
out is just a cop out excuse. He knows what
he did is horrific.
Speaker 5 (55:24):
I mean, just watching him, I think he's a dangerous
person and I think, frankly, if you put this on
the airways, you may escalate. Parents have extraordinarily strong rights
in this country, and children are the ones that have
very very limited rights.
Speaker 3 (55:40):
Come on.
Speaker 7 (55:41):
I mean, if you can't hit your mind around that,
like there's the snow point evens walking anymore.
Speaker 11 (55:47):
Seriously, the assumption that being with the parent is always
going to be the best solution, it will always feel
wrong to me. I will always grieve that I didn't
get those years in a situation away from my parents.
Speaker 1 (56:07):
Nobody should believe me. Is written, reported, and executive produced
by Me Andrea dumlop. Our co executive producer is Maria Gossit.
Our editor is Greta Stromquist. Story editing by Nicole Hill,
Research and fact checking by Aaron Ajai. Additional research by
Jesse V Randall, Mixing and engineering by Robin Edgar. Our
production manager is Nola Carmouche. Music from Blue Dot Sessions,
(56:31):
Sound Snap and Slipstream. Special thanks this week to Ethan Shapiro.
Host
Andrea Gunning
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