S07 E06: The Experts

- True story, media.

“- Please note that this show discusses child abuse,”

which may be difficult for some listeners. For resources about abusive head trauma, go to shakinbabie.org. - Child abuse doctors have had a rough few years in the media. From take care of Maya?

- How many times are you allowed to be wrong and destroy lives before they say, "Okay, that's enough." These families walked in hoping for help for their child, and some of them walked out of handcuffs.

- To my kicks and bogs do no harm series, which featured one of the families from take care of Maya, and, of course, my sister, Megan Carter. - One minute, you know, I'm sitting there

next to my daughter's bedside, and then the next minute, I'm being escorted out of the hospital. Taking five in NBC News reviewed three other cases involving what's, and although other doctors reach different conclusions, Dr. Woods found abuse, and that led CPS

to remove the children from the homes.

“It's been eight months since the Carter's reunited,”

and the days are still tough. - Some of the rings are doorbell, I'm scared to answer it, because I don't know if it's gonna be somebody coming with more allegations, and trying to take my kids away.

- There was also the preventionist from serial productions. - I'm a mom who lost everything in less than 24 hours due to one doctor's misdiagnosis, and that's enough. (audience applauding) - And then the next person speaks, and the next one.

The stories they tell form a pattern, of parents walking into a Lehigh Valley hospital to get help for a child, only to leave without them, and most recently, an episode of law-norder SVU, entitled "Hubris."

- Kids remove from their homes, they didn't even find any evidence of abuse. - This is not a mistake. - Can you help us? - At two Olivia Benson.

So what's going on here? How did this idea of rogue child abuse

“pediatricians destroying families, gained so much steam?”

How did people like Dr. Sally Smith, who've devoted their careers to this grueling work, become villains in the media?

The thing that has always been missing

from this narrative about marauding caps is motive. Why would doctors invent abuse stories? Why would they be hellbent on tearing families apart? These are pediatricians we're talking about. It's definitely not for the money.

Child abuse pediatrics isn't especially lucrative compared to other areas of medicine, especially considering the training and education that goes into this rigorous subspecialty. And if we're following the money, which this is America,

we should be, it just so happens that there are doctors who are profiting off of child abuse cases. Everyone's just been looking at the wrong side of the courtroom. 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 and this is nobody should believe me. (gentle music) - We are almost to the end of season seven. Can you believe it? If you have questions, comments or rabbit holes

that you want the team to go down, let us know at [email protected]. We're going to have Erin and Mariah back on the mic for our mail bag episode coming up. And you know what?

The nobody should believe me team never sleeps. We're gonna be back in the feed weekly with new case files episodes, while we are working on season eight. And as always, you can get even more by subscribing

on Apple Podcasts or Patreon, where you can find our subscriber only show. Nobody should believe me after hours. You can listen in this month for some juicy coffee kids updates and some dramatic readings of my emails from John Stuart.

And as always, if monetary support is not an option,

rating and reviewing the show on Apple and Spotify really helps. Thank you as always for listening. In order to ground this conversation in reality, we wanted to start by asking Dr. Steven Boos, an experienced cap and former president of Helfer,

the Grips Professional Society, about what these doctors actually do. So can you give us a description? What is a child abuse pediatrician and what is it? Child abuse pediatrician do?

In the United States, a child abuse pediatrician is a board-certified pediatrician who has completed certain additional experience or training that qualified to them to sit for a board exam prepared through the American Board of Pediatrics,

The initial cadre of people could testify

to their prior experience or do some training prior to the accreditation of the training.

“But nowadays, you have to do an accredited three-year post-graduate”

post-residency training program in Child Abuse Pediatrics in order to sit for the board exam. What we do, I think there's a core activity and then there's a penumbra around that. The core activity is what I said earlier,

which is evaluating children in whom the question of child abuse has been raised and a person with concentrated experience and knowledge is being asked to help evaluate that. Other things we do, we work within our system to establish guidelines and protocols.

We, some of us engage in a lot of prevention activities. Some of us engage in foster care, medical care. And many of us have other professional activities that are necessarily directly related to child abuse pediatrics.

“- So obviously, this is a difficult job.”

You're seeing on a regular basis things that, frankly, think most people would prefer to either not think about or don't even sort of acknowledge necessarily exist. What brought you into this particular field? What attracted you to child abuse pediatrics?

- I'm on the, not first generation,

but the older end of the group. And so there was no such thing as child abuse pediatrics when I went into pediatrics. I had no formal mentor during my residency training, encountered a limited number of cases,

but my first post residency position was in a very small, remote air force base in Northern Japan. It is tradition many places where the junior guy gets it. And so I came and as the junior guy, recognized my lack of training and started looking into the literature,

attending some training courses. And when I became the senior guy, I kept it. And then when I went to my next base, I did it. And it became an interest of mine, both a need that I recognized needed filling,

a niche in which I could provide a unique experience and interest. And a practice in which maybe I tolerated it better than other people did. So I got into it out of need, state out of interest,

and persisted as others went screaming for the door. Child abuse pediatrics is the smallest subspecialty in the field, with only 425 physicians having been board certified since the subspecialty was established in 2006. According to the AP, there are fewer than 400 caps practicing

nationwide and they're not distributed equally. Many states and rural areas do not have access to a cap and rely instead on pediatricians and nurse practitioners with far less experience to evaluate child abuse cases. Women dominate the field of caps,

representing 83% of the workforce, and all of the big media stories criticizing specific caps have been about women. The scale of need for child abuse pediatricians is fast. According to the National Children's Alliance,

in 2022, more than half a million victims

of child abuse in neglect were identified. An access to training in fellowship programs is limited. And in case this needs saying, it's just a tough gig. I wonder if you can just share, especially as you've been doing this for a long time,

“what are some of the biggest challenges of the job?”

- So at the beginning of a case, you engage very much with what becomes one side of the coin when the case goes as far as court. And so I think maintaining objectivity in the face of things that are disturbing,

things that may engender a desire to blame and feel anger

with one side of the coin,

such that when it becomes a discussion, a two-sided discussion, you can occupy a rational scientific middle. I think that is a challenge, persisting in the field

when things don't go the way you think they should. Or even when things go the way you think they should, but that's just not enough for the poor child caught in the middle. Sometimes when it's not the way

you would like to see the adults have to cope and adjust and deal. I think that, you know, that kind of emotional centering and tolerance, it is a challenge. And then there's the more nerdy challenge

of the gold standard question. So when you do research, if you're looking at a diagnostic research,

you have to decide ultimately,

well, was this a sign of the condition or was it not a sign of the condition? So to answer that question,

“you have to figure out who's got the condition”

and who doesn't, which is exactly my job day in and day out is to decide who has the condition who doesn't and then ultimately, if I'm to have a check on myself, I have to look down the line and say, what did I say and did I end up being right,

which means who has the condition and who doesn't? So I think that that the challenge of the gold standard is something that affects us in research in day-to-day clinical practice and then in the maintenance of the quality

of clinical practice.

And I would like to say because it often doesn't get said

that that same challenge pertains to people who want to say, oh, no, that's not child abuse. That's this postulated new thing. And they too have to deal with the issue of the gold standard. They can't really assert it's that other thing.

They have to prove that this other thing exists and they have to prove the relationship between that other thing and to sign that I would see as a fairly orthodox child abuse pediatrician as a sign of child abuse.

- More on those other things that certain doctors postulate about in a bit, but what's simmering under the entire media narrative about caps is the idea that this is not a legitimate subspecialty because abuse is not something

that doctors can diagnose because they can't see appearance in tent. But diagnosing abuse cases isn't like reading T-Leaves. There is robust peer-reviewed science that undergirds the process of diagnosing abuse,

which has been constantly evolving since the publication of the battered child syndrome in the Journal of American Medical Association in 1962. A study that was widely credited as introducing child abuse as a clinical diagnosis.

- Child abuse is not the only condition where there has been a debate whether the diagnosis is a diagnosis of exclusion. Meaning it is what is left when all other things are excluded.

Versus is it a diagnosis that can be positively diagnosed

“because it's got, oh, this is the child abuse syndrome, right?”

And as this is the case in these other diagnoses, it's a little bit of both, right? So if I see a patterned injury, where I recognize the pattern, I pretty much know what happened.

I can pretty positively state it. And then we just have to look for the story and match it or refute it. On the other hand, if I've got a constellation of findings, that says to me, oh, well, in the population

that has been studied and published, this means child abuse in 75% of cases. And then I have to say, well, what was the issue with those other 25%? Well, maybe they had this underlying condition, right?

Or maybe they had this innocent event, which is or is not reported or is or is not

“a potentially conjectured event in this child's life, right?”

So I do have to do some exclusion. And in fact, we recommend certain exclusionary testing for many cases, either because of a pattern

we may very early in the process have a high index of suspicion, that the ultimate conclusion is going to be abuse after rational alternatives, which we call differential diagnoses are excluded.

A central argument in this anti-cap rhetoric is that there are low knackers with far too much power, but this is demonstrably false.

Caps are nearly always at a minimum,

the second doctor brought into a value-ad abuse, once there is already an elevated concern about a child from a treating physician, such as an ER doctor or a specialist. And even within the subset of cases they see,

caps only end up confirming abuse in fewer than half of the cases they evaluate. Here again, is Assistant District Attorney Matthew Torbinson talking about how cases get ruled out before they ever make it to his desk.

“- I think any of the doctors that I've worked with”

and any doctor who works in the area of child abuse or anyone that works in the area of child abuse will say, it's a good day when we can conclude that a child was not abused. So I think they're doing their level best to look for

any other causal mechanism or explanation for the child's condition. - That's been my experience with all the medical professionals. They're extraordinary, careful, making the diagnosis or looking to rule out

any other potential causes. I would also note there's a study of child abuse doctors and child abuse pediatricians and whether they are more cautious or more likely to make a child abuse diagnosis than physicians who are not trained in making the diagnosis.

And the study actually found that they're more cautious than making the diagnosis than physicians who have not received the specialized training. - Yeah, to me that makes sense because they are gonna be the most knowledgeable

about any kind of differential diagnosis, right? - Exactly, they're gonna know the mimics for child abuse, all the conditions, all the rare bleeding disorders or genetic disorders that should be evaluated in examined

before making that diagnosis. - Part of the misinformation that's being spread about caps is the idea that they're overzealous and wrongly diagnosing abuse. But the numbers say that the opposite is true.

If you're concerned about parents being wrongly dragged through the system and I would argue we all should be, you want more training on a diagnosis, not less.

If there are half a million cases of abuse

and neglect being confirmed by CPS each year, the data tells us that that number would be lower if we had more caps throughout the country, not higher. But a case of abuse being ruled out isn't very headline-grabbing.

Now, about those other doctors I mentioned up top.

“- I think the narrative that's frequently put out”

by parents who are claiming that they are falsely accused is like, the child abuse pediatrician missed this other thing and now I'm gonna get this defense expert in here to tell us what the real problem is and I think that can be evaluated

by looking at the expertise of those two doctors. - 100%. True story, I was presenting in a conference recently where I got to meet a bunch of lovely listeners and one of them was so excited to let me know

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A common thread in medical kidnapping stories is the idea that abuse was not the real reason for a child's injuries, and that this has been proven by an alternate explanation from another doctor.

Diane Niri and Mike Kicksenbogg employed this tactic frequently and Dr. Anthony Kirkpatrick in anesthesiologist with no board certification or admitting privileges who runs an all-cash ketamine clinic in Florida where he liberally hands out questionable diagnoses of CRPS

had a starring role in Take Care of Maya. Paid experts played a more minor, but notable role in John Stuart's case as well. As he insisted that I should speak with Dr. Edward Wiley, who his team had brought on as an expert witness.

I was unable to reach Dr. Wiley, but his deposition,

which John sent me, was an interesting read.

Notably, at the time of his deposition in November of 2018, Dr. Wiley had not reviewed any of the photos or videos of Nolan that were one of the lynch pins of the state's case against John. Dr. Wiley said that John's lawyer had not made him aware

that these existed, Wiley also testified that he'd been brought in to look at this case in the spring of 2015. The prosecutor corrected him that this wouldn't have been possible because the event in question didn't take place

until December of 2015. Wasn't it 2014, Wiley asked? Once they got the date sorted, it came to light

“that not only had Dr. Wiley not seen much of the crucial evidence.”

He had not looked at the case in approximately two years. The clearly baffled prosecutor asks,

so are you not in a position to give your opinion at this point

to which Wiley replies, well, you ask me whatever you want, I'll give you any opinions that I have. They sold John. Wiley, who's a forensic pathologist by training, had reviewed Dr. Vega and the deputy medical examiner

Dr. Harris reports and gave his opinion that the cervical spine injury observed at Nolan's autopsy would have caused quadruplegia and difficulty breathing, which more or less tracks with Dr. Vega's opinion

but illuminates nothing further about the timeline. And once again, this is not an exculpatory finding. And there are other good reasons not to take Dr. Wiley's expertise on this case at face value. In his deposition, Dr. Wiley goes on to offer his opinion

that it's impossible to distinguish abusive head injuries from accidental ones and posits that the injuries to Nolan's brain could have been caused by the fall from the bed, or quote any other kind of accident. And opinion that puts Dr. Wiley far outside

the medical consensus on abusive head trauma. Dr. Wiley is pretty clearly in the camp that doesn't believe in this diagnosis at all. When the prosecutor points out that Nolan's combined injuries fit very clearly into the diagnosis of abusive head trauma,

“he replies, quote, "Well, that's what the child abuse pediatricians”

all say, but I don't see any reason why any sort of accidental injury wouldn't do exactly the same thing." This willingness to offer a fringe opinion under oath is presumably what makes his work worth the $300 in our price tag, despite the fact that he didn't see fit

to be prepared for his deposition. John's attorney, David Little, who hired Wiley, gave a pretty choice quote to the Sarasota-Herald Tribune about what they were up against in the realm of medical expertise, saying, quote, "We had two witnesses and they had 42.

It's harder to get defense medical experts because more doctors have been prosecuted for perjury as a result of opinions the state doesn't like," end quote. Experts like Wiley do sometimes have their testimony excluded using the dopare motion, a statute used to ensure

jerseys only here from credible experts on the stand. However, doctors being tried for perjury is exceptionally rare. And the few examples that exist are related to doctors lying on the stand about their credentials and expertise, not for offering a genuinely held medical opinion,

however wacky it may be. I've read many depositions from defense expert witnesses, and Wiley's is pretty representative of what I've seen, but Matthew Torbinson has read hundreds of these, and has become especially interested in the role

of experts like Wiley. I wonder if we could just start with this case,

“the case, the junior case, could you tell us about that?”

- Absolutely, so it's the prosecution of David Allen. David Allen is Jr's father, and Jr was admitted to Children's Hospital in Wisconsin, and I believe he had a total of 12 fractured bones, most of those fractures were fractured ribs. They were about a week old when he was admitted to the hospital,

but the main reason he was admitted to the hospital was he had a traumatic brain injury, a brain injury that was inflicted by another human being. He had subdual bleeding on the brain. He had retinal hemorrhaging in his eyes.

He had significant brain swelling, and that brain swelling and that brain injury would eventually take his life. I think he died about four months after being admitted

We charged David Allen originally with child abuse

and with child neglect, two counts of child abuse, one for the abuse of head trauma, one for the rib fractures. We up those charges to homicide after Jr passed away in 2013, and then over the next two years, the defense assembled a team of six different defense experts

for the case and all of those experts testified at trial. So who are these experts and what opinions are they bringing into these cases? So Joseph Scheller was one of the defense experts I've encountered him a number of times over the course

of my career, and he was arguing that Jr had an enlarged head

and that he had a fluid accumulation on his brain

that made him susceptible to having bridging vein rupture from very minor trauma or no trauma at all. And he argued that that was the result.

“That's what caused Jr's collapse and demise.”

We asked Dr. Steven Boose about this big head theory. In a couple of cases, and that appears to be a very popular claim in the media that there is an epidemic, an epidemic of doctors missing, mistaking children with microcephaly for children with abusive head trauma.

Sorry, macrocephaly, not microcephaly. So children who have large, that these injuries are actually

caused by or they're mimicking, because the child has a large head

that doctors are diagnosing them incorrectly with abusive head trauma. I'm assuming this is something that you've encountered. Can you explain what macrocephaly is and sort of how it relates to abuse of head trauma?

- Okay, subtly, head, macro, big, macrocephaly, big head. That's all it means, it's just that we Latinize it for tradition. So this argument, it's not that there's nothing behind it.

“There is something behind it, but you have to know exactly”

what that something is, and the circumstances, one that is complicated, like everything else. So how does a child end up with a large head? One way is, and this is probably the most common way is that their parents have big heads, okay?

There is a circumstance where children, for familial reasons, their skull grows rapidly and thus they have an expanded space between their brain and the surface of their skull. There's host of names for this thing,

some which are gone out of favor, but the benign expansion of the extra axial fluid space or the benign expansion of the subaract noise space, so best or beef. - And so that means like there's more space

“than there normally would be between the skull and the brain?”

- Yes, okay, okay. So the rationale is that when that space is bigger than during motions of the head, the brain is freer to lag behind or to rebound beyond

and thus pull on the veins that cross that space and tear them. And thus result in sub-dural hemorrhage, okay? So that's the most common, and that's the rationale, then the question is just because something makes sense, is it true?

That's when you need to go to data. So if you look at children who appear generally well, but have a big head and someone decided to image that head, a small percentage of them, I think it's less than 10%, but I'd have to go back and look at a series of papers,

how some fluid, which may be blood or other fluid in the sub-dural space. Now, these children are well because of that, however, they may get evaluated for child abuse. They're highly unlikely to have other findings,

such as retinal hemorrhage. - So in this instance, like a child would be coming in with what kind of symptoms,

oh, this looks a little suspicious for a post.

“- So the kid's head is big and it has crossed off”

of normal growth curves and it seems to be a growing faster. So both the size and the pace at which it's growing are accelerated. - So those are noticed independently of other. Those are noted as the primary concern.

Got it, right? These are otherwise well children. So the physician is concerned that the child has hytrosephalus, that there's some blockage in the fluid flow through the brain that is inflating the brain

and thus inflating the skull. And they want to exclude that because if you have hytrosephalus, you can decompensate and it can be bad for you. So they go to imaging, but what they find is that the fluid space is inside the brain are normal.

That fluid flow through the brain appears to be normal,

but the fluid space between the brain and the skull is large.

And then someone says, "Hmm, maybe I should measure dad and mom." And they measure them and they go, oh, big head, what's your hat size?

“You know, nine and a quarter, what are you kidding me?”

So that's that. So some of those kids at imaging have these sub-dural fluid collections, okay? And some of those kids, then they go, oh, sub-dural collection, we need to do the child abuse work up.

And I would accept that reference and I would do the child abuse work up. I would be as nice to people as possible, as supportive as people as possible, as I did it. And then when I've done that, you find no retinal hemorrhages,

you find no fractures, you find no nothing else. So the vast majority of times, and you go, yeah, this is just this beef-less thing. And I don't think this could be child abuse. Or I don't think this is highly likely to be child abuse.

- So some babies have naturally large heads that grow quickly because of a benign condition where extra fluid collects around the brain, which usually runs in families with large head sizes. And this fluid collection can look like a possible flag

for abuse. But if there are no other signs of abuse of head trauma, such as retinal hemorrhages or fractures, it gets ruled out. And this is where the extra training caps receive is so valuable.

They know about things like this. Dr. Joseph Sheldler is a name I immediately recognized because it comes up in many cases, including the Viviana Graham case, which was featured in Take Care of Maya,

my kicks-in-box work, and a number of other media stories. More on that later. But for now, who is this guy? He testified over 600 times as a defense expert,

“and I believe that that is a significant under estimate”

of how many times. The number changes, and it gets bigger, depending on who's crushing in him and who's confronting him. But by last time, cross-examining in him was just last fall.

And the numbers that he provided to me were 600 times over 600, at least 300 of those were for the defense on abusive head trauma cases. The other area that he testifies is for the defense, for the lead paint industry involving cases where someone's

bringing a lawsuit on behalf of a child who's ingested lead paint and who is having brain development problems as a result of lead paint exposure and ingestion, he defends the lead paint industry in those cases. He's done it over 300 times.

What he'll also testify to is that he accept about, he accepts about 90% of the abusive head trauma referrals he reviews for the defense. So if you just look at that number, he's saying that nine out of every 10 times

a doctor across the United States is getting the diagnosis wrong when they're saying this is abuse. And in most often, most of those cases, you're having multiple doctors come to the same conclusion that it was abuse.

If you have a child that's passed away, you have a child abuse pediatrician, you have the doctors at the hospital, and then you have a forensic pathologist who are all saying this is abuse and he's saying,

no, they're all wrong. - Another expert who showed up in Viviana Graham's and Matthew's junior case caught my eye. Dr. Chulimak, a radiologist who specializes in breast imaging and mammography,

but shows up frequently as a defense expert in child abuse cases. - Chulimak is a radiologist from Hershey, Pennsylvania. She was another one of the defense experts. She testified the same theory

to what Joseph Scheller said essentially. Dr. Wainie Squire came from England. She actually at the time that she came over to the United States to testify. She was prohibited in England

from testifying an abusive head trauma case.

So she was found to have given incredible testimony

in six cases involving child homicide in England.

We tried to have her prohibited from testifying

“in our case because of it, and the judge ruled”

rather than prohibiting her than I could cross examine her on that information. - Dr. Mack was involved in a 2015 lawsuit over imaging she interpreted showing injuries, including healing rib fractures,

that the plaintiff's argue should have raised suspicions of abuse. According to the record, Mack believed the findings were more likely related to complications of prematurity and did not report suspected abuse.

Several months later, the child was found unresponsive and taken to the hospital, where scans showed severe brain injuries consistent with abuse of head trauma. The child survived, but suffered permanent brain damage,

seizures, and developmental disabilities. And the child's father was later convicted of felony child abuse. And then there's Dr. Charles Heiman, a forensic pediatric specialist.

- We had another individual who Dr. Charles Heiman, who is a self-proclaimed bone fragility expert, I think he hails from California. Here is a clip of Dr. Charles Heiman testifying in a 2018 murder trial,

“where he argued on behalf of the defense”

for a man named Erin Rowe, who had been charged with murdering and torturing his 47-deal daughter six years earlier. - Is that this recent all for injuries in use of head injuries, all being a fracture?

- And there's no abuse of head injuries. Does it fit the head findings? Yes, it can fit all the head findings and the eye findings. You know, one option is there was a high force, traumatic injury that fractured some or all

of these 13 to 17 rip fractures. Absolutely no evidence to support that. Or the alternative is that this, that these fractures occur, not with a single application of force,

but through the process of micro fractures in bone fragility. Erin Rowe was ultimately convicted and is currently serving a life sentence. David Allen, the father in Matthew's case,

was ultimately convicted as well. And by the time Dr. Heiman and the others testified on his behalf, he'd actually confess to the crime. - There was a confession and it was,

there's a couple really powerful things

about the confession. The rib fractures that Junior had, they were older, they were about a week to 10 days older based on the healing that we could see

on the radiologic imaging. And Junior's father's confession, David Allen's confession was, that about seven days prior to when he inflicted the abuse of head trauma through shaking,

he was actually in the basement with Junior and he squeezed him so hard that it sounded like glass bottles shattering. That was his vivid description that he gave to law enforcement in his confession.

So, it timing-wise it matched and the what he heard that audible description that he provided, that's not something that police can falsely plant and someone that's an experience

that someone's having when they give that sort of sensory detail when they're giving an answer to something like that. He also confessed to shaking Junior prior to Junior's admission to the hospital, which was consistent with the injuries

that we saw that Junior had. I thought the most compelling thing about his confession though was actually when the cops left the room after they took his statement, they left the camera recording.

And of course, the false confession expert didn't watch this and didn't talk about it. But for the next seven minutes, he apologizes over 72 times to his son, while he's crying.

He says, "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, my son. I'm so sorry." I wish I could tell you

that these experts are never effective in court,

but they are. In November 2025, the New Jersey Supreme Court issued a highly unusual ruling that expert testimony diagnosing shaken baby syndrome, slash abusive head trauma.

Based solely on shaking with impact, was not admissible in two pending trials, and one of these cases involved testimony from Scheller and Mac. And in this case, it sounds like it did end the right way, it did end with a conviction.

So in this case, those experts did not prevail, but there are many other cases where they do. And so why do you think these experts are having such an impact in court? - I think it's a number of reasons.

I think the first reason is to be a prosecutor to handle a case like this,

“you have to be aware of the underlying medicine”

and the science, and you have to really prepare. And you have to know who these experts are. I think if you go in a courtroom without knowing their background, knowing what they do in a courtroom,

they are professionals. They will destroy you on the stand, and they will take every advantage of what you do in the courtroom. If you're not prepared. For example, on the David Allen case,

the devil was in the details of what Dr. Scheller left out. So when he argued that junior had an enlarged head, he said that junior had this enlarged head

And what Dr. Scheller left out in his report

were all of the well child visits that junior had between birth

“and when he was admitted to the hospital”

with a traumatic brain injury, and what the head circumference measurements were for junior. Every single time they were in the 40th percentile from junior, so he's 40th percentile, birth, 40th percentile, one month, two month, three months,

and then he's admitted to the hospital, and he's over the 95th percentile. So this isn't a child with a gradually growing enlarged head. This isn't a child with macrocephaly, which is what he tries to say.

This is a child that had something really significant and really traumatic happened directly before the child was admitted to the hospital. But he won't point that out to the jury. He leaves those details out and he has those details.

- And despite the fact that these experts are far outside the medical consensus on abuse, they give credence to the idea that abusive head trauma, alternately referred to by its old name, shaken baby syndrome, is based on quote, "Junk science,"

a position now taken by the Innocence Project. These experts who frequently went to good medical schools and carried decent institutional patina may give the appearance of testifying that a specific case is not abuse.

But a close read of experts like Wiley, Scheller, Hyman, and others reveals the reality that they won't say any cases are abuse, because they don't believe in the existence of the diagnosis period.

- He seems to be in my reading of the opinion that abusive head trauma is not a legitimate diagnosis. Is that fair to say? - That's what he'll say. And in fact, one time when I cross examine him,

I got him to admit that he hates the diagnosis. He admitted that on the stand before the jury and he won on a, I asked him after he finished answering the question on whether or not he hated the diagnosis, whether or not he enjoyed his soapbox,

because he won on for about five minutes about why he hated the diagnosis in front of the jury. - And what was the content of that rant, essentially? Why does he hate it? - He says that the diagnosis tells you nothing

about how the child was injured, was the child struck in the head, was the child shaken, was the child, it doesn't give any information about how the child sustained the injuries.

“And that's why these cases are so very hard,”

because these injuries can result from a number of different mechanisms, but we know them all to be abusive mechanisms and we know them to be abusive mechanisms, because we can see children who are admitted

to the hospital with very similar injuries through accidental means, and it's not from afar, it's not from a roll off a couch, it's from, well, most people will say, most actors will say, we see this type of bleeding

on the brain and car accidents. - (speaking in foreign language) - (speaking in foreign language) - (speaking in foreign language) - (speaking in foreign language)

- (speaking in foreign language) - (speaking in foreign language) - (speaking in foreign language) - (speaking in foreign language) - (speaking in foreign language)

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- (speaking in foreign language) (upbeat music) - We're going to dive more into just how broad and medical consensus on abusive head trauma in an upcoming episode.

But this idea, the doctors don't know what accidental injuries look like and are calling everything abuse. It's just counterfactual. As we discussed with Dr. Jill Glick

an experienced child abuse pediatrician and ER physician. - I've seen hundreds of thousands of kids with accidental injuries, and actual injuries of far more common than child abuse of head drama, I should say.

And you always, pretty much have the same scenario,

the child's brought in, parent has a history, you understand the injury, and many of these are very treatable and they're fine. And many of these injuries, when with your siblings or when you're playing,

again, you know, healing injuries, but when you have a kid who comes in with severe brain injury and swelling and eye findings and there's a comment toast in the, you know, that takes a lot of force.

- And the work of these experts who almost without exception don't work as treating physicians is deeply frustrating for the doctors who actually are on the ground with families. - I'm at the bed say 24/7

seeing these board kids and families and trying to help figure out what happened. They times it is accidents with the right questions. And then you say to yourself, "Let's be intellectually honest."

“So, Dr. Wally, are you treating bedside injuries all the time?”

We have been working on a pizza emergency room and what is your experience in this?

I always say, if you, and I told people,

if I'm repeating myself like a senior, but if you have really severe chest pain right now, I'm not your doctor. I want the best possible person at the bedside

who's seen a million and likewise,

if a kid has concerns for child health treatment, particularly the abuse of head trauma and same concerns, 'cause there's a lot of things we think about as a physician when a child has central or brain injury

that we have to think about. And those are not mimics. It's just a differential diagnosis and I hate that term mimic.

“I think there's really been introduced in the law”

because we don't talk about mimics of pneumonia or mimics of this or that or the other. We just talk about it could be this virus or this bacteria. So to summarize that these things that they introduce a speculative is just to throw off the court.

The court is not a medical arena. It's a legal arena and God bless everybody goes in. They are hopefully they're intellectually honest, but it's not. It's about winning.

It's not about anything more than that.

And that's the game there, but it medicine's a very different date. It's a different thing completely. We're trying to try to heal people. - And as the data shows,

if you're concerned about false allegations, you should support caps because they're more likely to rule out abuse. - Cool cases I was involved with, where it was said that the child was abused

and it turned out not to be. And one was a criminal case. We were a child was a Somalia. It's from Somalia. Parents were undocumented.

The child had a traumatic brain injury. I don't have to go in the details. A doctor diagnosed child abuse. The defense attorney said would you take a look at it because I just doesn't add up.

I don't know, there's things that are medically honest. You can look in and teach me the medicine. - Make a long story short, I found a quaguelopathy. Okay, and what is that, what's a quaguelopathy? - It's a pleading disorder.

It was a pleading disorder. In any child abuse doctor who would have looked at this case would have done that too. It's not like I was brilliant in the moment, although I felt brilliant and felt good,

but it was using science and doing what we always do

in medicine. - And Dr. Mc, what do you think would have happened to that family if you had not been there

“to do with this loss to your kid and kicked out of the country?”

And what's interesting, I don't know the legal terms. I don't try to be a legal person, but it was in criminal courts. It was called Nalipras or something like that. - No problems. - Well, actually I don't know

of how it's pronounced, but we have the same one. We have the same one in this case. It's the same thing where it's just a memo not to prosecute. - Yeah, and what happened is it still had a juvenile case.

So I had to go to, I was honored to go to kit court, 'cause I want to meet the family, you know? And just say to them, you know, because this mom was devastated and her child fell and had a big and her cranial hemorrhage.

So anyway, you're right, these children would have been this family would have been really a bad place. So it's like a child of his pediatrician, steps back and says, what are the disconnects here that don't make sense, and we go through it?

So again, it's, we can't provide to the audience through these general journals, you know, these cases. And I can't let any of mine, you know?

“It's, if you want to know the truth, go to the families,”

and ask them for permission to get the medical records to have an honest intellectual view of it. And that's not what's happening. And I don't think people know to ask that question who are not medical people.

- It's hard to separate all of this from the moment we're in, where there's been a massive backlash to expertise in many realms. Medicine, perhaps most of all. But if you consider yourself a person who believes in science,

you should want more training for doctors, not less. So, you know, obviously you've had a lot of interactions with child abuse pediatricians. Can you sort of give us your perspectives on their expertise and how it fits into these cases?

- So you actually have to go through a fellowship to become a child abuse pediatrician. You have to have specialized training over a period of time, and then you have to pass a board certification to have the professional experience and ability

to be a child abuse pediatrician. So it's a very lengthy process. It's a hard process, and it's a process that involves a lot of specialized training experience. To contrast that when Dr. Scheller is on the stand,

he would admit that his only training regarding abusive head trauma, making the abusive head trauma diagnosis was when he was in medical school in the 1980s. He's not received any follow-up training

or specialized training or experience and making the diagnosis. He has not gone through any of the fellowship programs that exist on it. He will also say that some of his specialized knowledge

comes from reading reports.

I've read a lot of studies. I don't think anyone wants me making a diagnosis, regarding what their child has or what conditions their child has.

“And I think I've read probably every bit as much”

or reports as he has will not as many because he's paid a lot to do it. But that's the difference. There's an extraordinary amount of education that goes into an experience that goes into making the diagnosis. I think the other part of it that most people in the public

may miss is that when a child is admitted to the hospital and there's concern, that the child was abused, that original concern is coming from a doctor who's in the emergency room. And that's a doctor who sees kids

that suffer car accidents, who see kids suffer major falls, who see kids come in for any number of things that result in that child being hospitalized. And that doctor with that vast experience is saying, no, this doesn't match any of that.

I have high concern that this child has been abused and I want to get another doctor's eyes on this. Child abuse medicine is necessarily high stakes. The cost of an error on either side of the equation can have tremendous consequences.

And part of the discomfort, I think, comes from the fact

that in medicine there will always be some level of uncertainty,

which can feel unsatisfying or downright unjust. And sometimes, even good doctors can disagree as they did in John's case. So what do you do as a prosecutor

“when you have that kind of disparity between experts?”

I think the first thing is, I think they work very hard. And I shouldn't say it work hard. But I think because everyone is aware of the attacks that are made in the courtroom by the defense experts and the defense on these cases,

the organizations, the hospital and the medical examer's office, oftentimes don't even talk to one another when they're making the diagnosis about what did you see versus what did I see? And so they're independently coming to their own conclusions.

They may be reviewing the reports that each other author, but they're not talking to each other. And I almost wish, I do wish, that there is more conversation between the two professionals because I, like you say, I suspect that they do agree

on far more than they disagree on. And I think there's also information that each one possesses that could be very helpful to the other person in further rendering their expert opinion. So that would be the first thing I would say about it.

I know that they use different language, for example, but they mean the same thing. So the child abuse pediatricians call it a abusive head trauma. Friendsic pathologists refer to it as blunt force trauma. They don't use the abusive head trauma diagnosis

at least in Wisconsin and my experience. But they mean the same thing when you ask them the questions about how it was inflicted or what would the potential of causal mechanisms are that just use different terminology.

“So I think it would be worthwhile of both of the discipline”

spoke to one another about the cases, especially in cases where there may be a concern about timing.

Multidisciplinary work is crucial in child abuse medicine.

Where you have agencies that need to work in concert from child welfare to the doctors to law enforcement to ensure that a child is safe. But in stories like Johns and in the many lawsuits that have popped up around the country,

this vital collaboration is presented as evidence of collusion. The defense is almost always going to argue and court on these cases that it's the child abuse pediatrician that's driving the diagnosis

and driving the conclusion of abuse in these cases. And so to that end, when that argument is made, I actually think it's very helpful that you have an independent medical examiner's office that's reviewing the case and coming to their own independent

conclusions and not having the discussion. So I can see it cut both ways. On the one hand, you want the professionals talking and sharing information and sharing what they see from each one's perspective.

On the other hand, the attack in the courtroom is going to be that it's the child abuse pediatrician driving the diagnosis and therefore, when you have a forensic pathologist coming to their own independent conclusion and not having that talk

with the child abuse pediatrician or the hospital, sometimes that can be a beneficial as well. So I can see both sides of it.

The most important thing for people to understand

is that the only thing that is evidence in the abuse case is actual evidence. And we need credible experts to help us figure out what that evidence is. It makes me think of a case that I just resolved,

that just resolved a few months ago and that's the prosecution of Daviante Allen. And so he abused his infant son back in 2020 and it was fatal abuse of head trauma. His son died as a result of the abuse.

I charged him with homicide of his son and the case for the next five years remained open and pending and during the first three years that it was open and pending, we'd have all these review dates where the defense would just keep saying,

we're hiring experts for consulting with experts. They actually exhumed the body and flew it out to California

performed a secondary autopsy on the body.

He actually agreed with the findings,

“almost all the findings of our forensic pathologist.”

There was one disagreement about the age of the rib fractures that the child had. But outside of that, he agreed with the findings. But actually he submitted a document that was an affidavid in support of the bail motion of the defendant.

Now, this is a defense expert. Why are they submitting an affidavid in support of a bail motion for the defendant? They're supposed to be independent. Experts, they're supposed to be serving a truth-seeking function

and yet he's submitting this affidavid on behalf of the defendant.

The case drags on for three plus years because they're trying to hire all these experts. And in the course of that time, the courts slowly reduced the bail of Mr. Allen

“from over $100,000 cash bail to $20,000 cash bail.”

He posted the bail and he gets out. He has a no contact order with the mother of his deceased son. He's violating that no contact order almost immediately. He gets her pregnant again. They have a little girl.

She gives birth to that little girl. And just months later, that little girl

is admitted to the hospital with a piece of head trauma.

From Mr. Allen. Mr. Allen was with that little girl directly prior to her admission to the hospital. And of course, he does not go to the hospital when she's admitted to the hospital.

So he's violating his no contact order. He's in a number of times it by a number of ways. The defense expert actually meets with both Mr. Allen and the mother of the child. That was a violation of the no contact order.

That was actually facilitated by the defense attorneys in this case who were aware of the no contact order. But that meeting took place to convince her that this wasn't a homicide and that the state's experts were wrong.

And if you think about it from her perspective, she relied on those representations to the point that she was willing to violate the no contact order, willing to take Mr. Allen back in her life, willing to have another child with Mr. Allen,

and then that child ends up being abused. And that's the real stakes of all this. Miss information about abuse isn't just media clickbait. It has a real price and kids are the ones who end up paying it. As I said, it's important to look at each story individually

to evaluate the evidence in each case. Take care of Maya builds a case against caps and Dr. Sally Smith in particular entirely on anecdotes from parents who say they were falsely accused of abuse.

We've already talked about one of them, John Stewart, but there are three others in the film who say they too are victims of Dr. Sally Smith. So let's take a closer look at that.

“- And what I saw and what happened is what happened?”

You've with this cell phone and it hit her in the face. That's bad enough. - Boy. - There's nothing else to do that though. If there's something else in the back of her head,

that's something that I, that is unbeknownst to me. - That's next time, on Nobody Should Believe Me. (soft music) - Nobody Should Believe Me is written, reported, and executive produced by me, Andrea Dunlop.

Our co-executive producer is Maya Gosset. Our editor is Greta Stromquist, story editing by Nicole Hill, research and fact checking by Erin Agai, additional research by Jessa V. Randall,

mixing and engineering by Robin Edgar. Our production manager is Nola Carmich. Music from Blue.Sessions, Sound, Snap, and Slipstream. (soft music)