S07 E08: Anatomy of a Conspiracy Theory

- True story, media.

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

which may be difficult for some listeners,

for resources about abuse of head trauma, go to shakenbaby.org. Conspiracy theories are most effective when they contain just enough of the truth to seem real. QAnon was predicated on the idea

that global elites, particularly democratic politicians, were trafficking children and participating in satanic abuse, and that President Trump was going to come into office and bring them all to justice. And as we now know, thanks to the deluge of horrors

that continue to emerge from the Epstein files, it leaps from across the political spectrum or indeed up to many disturbing things. But as for the people who were supposed to bring them to justice, well, that's suddenly the last thing

they seem interested in doing. That's another thing about conspiracy theories. They tend to include some projection

“and they take hold when they do for a reason.”

The specifics may be very wrong, but the cultural anxieties that fuel them are very real. We've broken down a number of specific cases this season of parents who are presented as falsely accused of abuse because of a doctor's misdiagnosis,

but there is no evidence in any of these cases that the doctors who diagnosed abuse were wrong. And these cases are not outliers in the media coverage. They're the rule. There's no way I can investigate every single story

about an allegedly falsely accused parent, but every single time I have from take care of Maya, to my kicks and bars, do no harm series, to the preventionists, to Daphne Chens work, they've all been just like this.

The parent's stories fall apart the moment you take a closer look. So why does this media narrative persist? - Court records provided us from these parents who spent thousands of dollars to fight the state in court, also reveal some doctors coming to such far-reaching conclusions

without thorough investigations. - Notice they say parents provided the court records

they're referring to, and that's the first clue

that you might not be getting the whole story. Child abuse investigations are complex and hidden beneath layers of very necessary privacy and confidentiality protections. These stories are challenging to cover.

Unless you're not actually interested in telling the truth, then you can actually benefit from this interconnected web of silence. State officials can't comment on active cases, DCF and doctors can't comment period,

and the victims, well, they're too little to speak for themselves. And the very people speaking on their behalf and controlling access to most of the evidence are the ones suspected of harming them. But still, how can all these people have the same story

if there isn't something to it? All these parents who got the same wrong diagnosis from the same doctor who have nearly identical stories about shrill child abuse pediatricians pronouncing abuse after a 10 minute visit.

Only to have that diagnosis debunked once the child was taken to a proper specialist. And it's allegedly happening everywhere. As the producer of Take Care of Maya, Caitlyn Keating, remarks on in a podcast interview.

- Now that the trial has started, it's like, I'm getting messages basically every hour from people saying, this happened to me,

“I don't have money, I can't hire a lawyer, can you help me?”

That consistency has to mean something, right? It's not like all these falsely accused parents are coordinating this coverage together. It's not like they're in cahoots with these specialists who save the day.

That's crazy, right? People believe they're 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 Dammab, and this is "Nobody She Believe Me." I find myself in strange waters, three and a half years into making this show. I didn't expect to be reporting on child abuse as my full-time job. And to be honest, it's been kind of lonely watching headline after headline about misdiagnosis of a child abuse.

I've never seen a child abuse in my life. I've never seen a child abuse in my life. I've never seen a child abuse in my life. I've never seen a child abuse in my life. I've never seen a child abuse in my life.

I've never seen a child abuse in my life. I've never seen a child abuse in my life. I've never seen a child abuse in my life. I've never seen a child abuse in my life. A misdiagnosis of abuse, an out-of-control child abuse pediatricians, and feeling like

I'm the only one in the media who seems to care that none of it's actually true. I've gotten used to people yelling at me about Manchester by proxy, and how I'm

But as I started to look into the other cases in these stories and into all these lawsuits,

“so many of them were about fractures and abusive head trauma, forms of abuse that are far”

less exotic than my chosen by proxy. And that's how I found Tara. I like to joke with people when they asked me how I became a science and health reporter and I tell them I had a baby, because I was in grad school for photojournalism, and I got married and we wanted a child and I was in my thirties and you know, tick tick tick.

That's journalist Tara Haley, perhaps the only other person in the media as obsessed with child abuse denialism as I am. We're around the same age and we both ended up here after a career pivot brought on by pregnancy.

This was in 2010, which was when they finally retracted the Wakefield study on MMR and autism.

And so I had questions about vaccines, and I started asking those questions, because I was A in journalism school as a graduate student, and had the time to do it, and two, because I have a journalist mindset, which is sort of similar to an investigators mindset or

“a scientist mindset, when I started trying to quote unquote do my own research, instead”

of coming across things that look suspect and then concluding that vaccines were dangerous, which a lot of moms who quote do their own research do, the more I learned, the more I realized I didn't know. Tara was really speaking my language here, because yes, curiosity, intellectual rigor, I started interviewing everybody across the vaccine spectrum from the founder of the biggest

anti-vaccine organization in the country, all the way to the man who invented the

rotavirus vaccine, who was the most outspoken vaccine advocate there was, and everybody in between, I talked to school nurses, I talked to parents, I talked to parents of kids who had been lost, vaccine preventable diseases, I talked to parents who said that their children have been affected by vaccine injuries. My thesis ended up being on vaccines, and the anti-vaccine movement and the information

about vaccines, and I kind of give a lay of the land in terms of understanding a lot of

“the arguments that get used in anti-vaccine settings, basically.”

The anti-vacc movement has been gaining momentum for years, and with RFK junior, a die-hard anti-vaccer who also doesn't believe in germ theory, installed as the director of health and human services, it's safe to say that it's having a day. So fast forward a few years, and I'm writing regularly for NPR, and at this point I cover a lot of pediatrics, things in general, vaccines were my gateway drug to pediatrics and

maternal health, and I was attending the American Academy of Pediatrics meeting, and I saw a story on Shaken Baby on a abusive head trauma, and I already had a decent working professional relationship with the people at AAP who would connect me with experts. And when I started to look into it, that was when I discovered these arguments against it, but different from the vaccine thing, I recognized the arguments.

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 recognized them. They were the same tactics. And then I found the Venn diagram, and the Venn diagram was that one of the alternative explanations for Saken Baby is vaccine injury.

The connection between the anti-vax movement and abuse denialism is not insinental. Dr. David Ayub, a diagnostic radiologist and prominent anti-vaxer who once accused the vaccine alliance of committing a genocide with their vaccination efforts in poor nations, made it career pivot in the odds to working as a defense expert witness in child abuse cases. He and a small cadre of fringe doctors who do this work have been incredibly successful

in spreading the idea that the clinical diagnosis of abuse in abusive head trauma and fracture cases is fraudulent. Dr. David Ayub and his work are very popular in the fractured family's Facebook group, the online community we mentioned in the last episode. And he's big into another theory that's popular with this group, the idea that infantile

rickets is being mistaken for abuse. A number of parents in the fractured family's group post about working with Ayub, and according to these posts, he'll read a report for around $2,500. In a journalist from ProPublica named David Armstrong wrote a lengthy piece on David Ayub several years ago, members of fractured families brainstormed about how to help clear his name.

One member wrote in a 2018 post, "Maybe we can figure out a way to discredit David Armstrong, but using the real facts instead of the ones he made up, like the specialists do to us." Another member posted an even more a cervic taste on Armstrong's piece. David Armstrong isn't getting the last laugh, all the pro parental rights and pro-informed consent Facebook groups are sharing the article on David Ayub and learning about infantile rickets.

And this belief that the diagnosis of abusive head trauma is not scientifically sound,

has spread nonetheless.

“I was seeing these headlines coming out constantly saying that shaken baby has been”

discredited, shaken baby is questioned, and none of them were true. It was like saying that vaccines had been questioned, or the CDC schedule had been questioned. And I knew it wasn't true, because I had seen the evidence. I had been immersed in the research. And I thought, "Okay, you know what? You keep waiting for the quote-unquote right time to do this, Tera,

and that's never going to happen. You just have to do it."

And bless her, Tera did. Her extraordinarily thorough piece entitled, "No, shaken baby syndrome hasn't been discredited," was published by Science News in July of 2025. This piece lays out the extensive science around the diagnosis, which is the subject of broad consensus among doctors across various pediatric sub-specialties, including radiologists, ophthalmologist, orthopedists, and child abuse doctors,

and publications throughout the nation immediately issued retractions and apologies to the doctors they dragged to the mutt, kidding. But like me, Tera has noticed not just the prevalence of these abuse to nihilism stories, but the similarities in the stories themselves. Tera, if you were going to write a bad, you know, medical kidnapping story.

“Like, what are the elements that you see? Because I wonder if they're the same ones that I see?”

I mean, first, you have a very sympathetic parent. And when I say sympathetic, it's probably going to be a white parent. It's probably going to be a middle class or upper middle class parent. They're going to live in a suburb or a nice part of the city. They have other kids. They have a good job, maybe they're a teacher or a librarian, or maybe they volunteer at Lawn Profits. They're

they're a good Christian family, right? That would never do anything to harm their children.

So you've got to have the right sympathetic portrait. And that's not to say that there aren't, I mean, I feel like I do have to qualify. Is there? Has there ever been a case, at least was shaken? Maybe for example, where someone was was inappropriately accused of it? I'm sure there has been, because there's been murder and rape and burglary that a, you know, every single crime has people that have been found guilty or been accused and appropriately who were not.

But they're the minority of cases is what I mean. Although they also tend to be the people who are members of minoritized and oppressed groups. Research indicates that abusive head trauma is under-reported and less likely to be diagnosed in babies of white intact families than in families of color or single parent families. There are the occasional families of color that appear in these media stories, but white families dominate. All of the perpetrators to be cheered and

take care of Maya are white and the founders of fractured families, Holly Simonten, Rebecca Wenosek, Reina Tyson, and Breah Huber are all white women. Another thing is that I will go and ask them which doctors I should talk to. And I will talk and the doctors who will talk to me are the doctors who will only give me the information that that family has allowed those doctors to give me.

“I think a lot of people don't realize a doctor can talk to the media if they have permission from”

the family and the family can control exactly what they can and can't share. They can have, it's not like hip is not binary, it's not all or nothing. They can say I give you permission to share this information, but not that information. And so it's easy for a journalist to get one-sided information from a doctor who sounds authoritative and not get any information from a doctor who might have other information that you're lacking because of hip-a. And that's legal.

And that is how it should be in the sense that we want to protect people's medical information. I mean, hip is an appropriate law, but I don't think all journalists who are doing these stories recognize how it can be manipulated by the parents. And the parents may or may not even be savvy enough to intentionally do it. All the parents have to do is go to the doctor that's sympathetic to their cause and say, "Hey, can you talk to this reporter about XYZ?" And then just say that.

So you're going to have that. You're always going to have the alternative explanations or the

for medical kidnapping in particular, you're going to have these weird conditions that are rare that we don't know a lot about that are hard to get definitive blood tests for things like pots, which is a real condition, but can also be misused. This is something we've unpacked on the show before. The way that the legitimate experiences and frustrations of people with rare or poorly understood conditions can be so easily exploited by abusers to provide a cover. And it would appear

that nearly every family in the fractured family's group has received a diagnosis of a rare disorder. And much like in Munchausen by proxy cases, the media stories tend to focus on the experience of the parents and what they've been through. You're going to have neighbors and friends

those friends and neighbors will be people who have set up fundraisers to help the family pay for

“the medical bills, right? You're going to have the kids friends, parents talking about how sad it is that”

this child has this horrible disease. And you know, so those are some of the elements that I noticed when we go in there. And what we don't see are actual medical records. Or if we do, it's very, very, very limited views of them. We don't hear independent experts who are not associated with the case who will tell you how rare that condition is and what the likelihood is of a being there. And I don't know if that's because the reporters don't see them out or because they can't find

outside experts to give that perspective. I'm not sure which it is. But if you can't get someone who's involved with the case to talk, you ought to at least have an expert on there who can talk about this condition more broadly who is not involved in the case. This characterizes nearly every one of these medical kidnapping stories, sympathetic portrayals

“of white middle-class parents told in such a way where they are controlling the reporters access”

to the information. The only records they share are the ones that fit their narrative. The only doctors you hear from are the ones they allowed to speak to the media. And outside doctors are research that support their story are often curiously anonymized. Stories will say doctors disagreed or refer to a prominent pediatric neurologist or a child abuse expert without directly quoting or naming them. And this, I've come to believe, is deliberate.

Because the doctors they mean are the doctors we talked about with the A Matthew Torbinson and others who make the rounds in these online groups. Doctors who specialize in child abuse specifically who specialize in explaining it away. And the fractured family's members adore

these doctors, referred to in one post a second opinion heroes.

“One of the most common types of posts in the fractured family's Facebook group is parents looking”

for experts to diagnose what's really wrong with their child. Because in the dogma of this group, there's no such thing as a legitimate abuse diagnosis. Every parent who says they were falsely accused of abuse appears to be accepted and supported at face value, whether the members know anything about them or not. One of the most chilling types of posts in this group is a member posting a news story about a stranger who's been arrested for child abuse. Viviana Graham recently

posted a news story about a doctor in Ohio who was arrested for assault after his 10-week-old baby was discovered to have fractures in his arms, legs, and rips. Viviana writes, quote, "What's your take on this? Sounds like some metabolic bone issues." Other members of the group agree that this must be a wrongful accusation. Highly doubt, this is abuse, one writes. This dad needs help. There are few details in the article Viviana linked to with this post,

but court documents about the case, which is still pending, reveal that the father made admissions to the police that he had harmed his son. He told investigators that he estimated he'd hurt the

child two to three times per week, beginning when the child was around four weeks old. Before finally

seeking out medical attention in January of this year, when the baby was discovered to have at least 10 broken bones. Neither confessions nor criminal convictions are enough to convince some members. One member shares a story from October of last year about a father who confessed to breaking his child's bones, writing, "I don't know. Something feels off about the way he quote confessed. The pictures don't scream abusive to me." In the world of fractured families,

every abuse diagnosis is wrong. Every family separation unnecessary and unjust. If there's physical evidence, a child has been harmed, there must be an alternate medical explanation. If there's a confession, it must have been coerced. If there's a conviction, it's necessarily a wrongful one. fractured families is a world in which no one abuses their children. And any doctor who says otherwise is a monster. Members get especially activated if a news story involves the same cap who diagnosed

their child. A foundational belief of this group is that child abuse pediatrics is not a real

subspecialty, and that these doctors are never to be trusted. There are many posts in the group talking

not only about how caps aren't trustworthy as medical professionals, but accusing them of kidnapping and harming children. Some in the group refer to caps as child abducting pediatricians. And while many of the major news stories around these families shy away from the more conspiracy-laden terminology, it's fully in the open on fractured families, where there are frequent shared posts from medicalkittnap.com. Media stories about false allegations in places like cereal and BC,

pro-publica and others, purport to be challenging individual child abuse pediatrics and the way they

as dangerous doctors who go too far. But a close read of these stories reveals that they're

actually following medical kidnapping conspiracy theory logic, that there is no right way to do the job of a child abuse pediatrics. If they disagree with colleagues, they're rogue outliers. If there's consensus among the doctors, it's evidence of a conspiracy or improper influence. And if they disagree with a quack doctor who's been hired by the family, then they're either arrogant or engaging in a cover-up. I find it ironic that the very thing that journalists and

“readers of these stories think are being disregarded is actually the most important thing”

to the doctors consider. So what is it that they think is being disregarded? The parents narrative.

The parent's narrative is the most important part of the diagnosis. The whole point of what

these child abuse pediatrics is doing is looking very carefully at all the information. The entire medical narrative, it's called a medical history, is the formal term. That is the core of what the child abuse pediatrics use when they're looking at the injuries. They say, okay, parents says, x, y, z happened. This order, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. I'm going to look at this child and see, do injuries, ABCDEFG add up to what would happen if 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 happened. And they don't.

And this is where we get into the talking point of she only spoke to us for 10 minutes and then called it abuse. That gets repeated over and over again. The rush to judgment that isn't actually

happening. A visit with a cap may indeed be brief, but it's happening in concert with an exam

record reviews, consultation with treating physicians, a CPS investigation, and often a police investigation. And the parent's narrative isn't disregarded. It's a key piece of evidence. I think the reason that journalists get sucked into these stories, one, are justice system is imperfect. There are a lot of problems in our justice system, including a lot of discrimination and institutional racism and discrimination against people with less money. I mean, we all know

the data on which people actually can defend effectively, which rapists get off the hook and which ones don't and so forth. So we have a system that really can be unjust. And as watchdogs, journalists take their job as a watchdog very seriously. It's sort of a point of pride for us, right? You know,

“with the word "speak truth to power" and give voice to the voice list. I mean, that's what motivates”

a lot of journalists who go into this job. And so if they're trying to fight for what they perceive as justice and fight for what's, you know, to uncover what's unjust, their mindset going into the case is to lean toward innocence. They're looking for the victim and they're looking for the underdog. Journalists love to champion and underdog. And what I think happens is they get confused about who the underdog is. The underdog should be the child. And they see the underdog as the parent.

The child is completely forgotten. The child is is a side issue. The child is a tool is a prop for the child. And that sounds harsh, but that's how these stories are written. The types of journalists that are reporting on these stories being predominantly crime and defend and forensic journalists, they have written about all the cases of exonerations that

“happen. The actual innocence project is a good program that really has exonerated a lot of”

people who truly didn't come at the crimes. And then that narrative gets confused with these narratives. It gets conflated. 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 that she was wearing some very cute, very comfy linen pants from Quints. I really do love this brand. I've wear it all the time.

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presented in one of these media stories, that would be madness and also beside the point. I don't know if every single one of the parents in these stories is guilty, but the way these stories are constructed is a huge problem. There's this fantastic blog post that was written on science blogs years ago

that was like the five tactics of denialist, basically, and one of them is using fake experts.

“And so what's interesting is what they do is they don't just deny expertise, they deny the validity”

of true expertise, and then offer up their own experts and say these are the real experts. And those tactics, it's that they were originally written by Mark and Chris Hufnegel. And Mark and Chris used to do this on science blogs, and they came up with these five tactics. And then later on John Cook, a researcher kind of turned them into flick, FLYCC. But they are fake experts on realistic expectations, expecting the science to be a hundred

person accurate, cherry picking, logical fallacies, which is a whole big, there's a whole bunch of different logical fallacies, and I would throw cognitive biases in there as well.

And conspiracy theories, those are the five.

And you know, I've having written about denialist type stuff for so many years now, I've tried to come up with one that's not in that list, and there isn't, it's that simple. Fake experts, logical fallacies, impossible expectations, cherry picking, conspiracy theories. Every set of denialist philosophies that you can come up with, those are the hallmarks of it. This pneumonic device is extremely handy in looking at how these arguments of the allegedly

falsely accused parents are constructed, as well as the media stories that featured them, starting from the top. Fake experts, check. We've already discussed a number of what DA Matthew Torbinson refers to as frequent flyers, people like Dr. Julie Mack, Dr. Joseph Scheller, and Dr. David IU. Recommending doctors who are willing to provide alternate explanations of abusive injuries appears to be one of the main functions of the fractured family's Facebook group.

These experts appear to be willing to give made-dorder diagnoses of what they refer to as abuse mimics. I asked child abuse pediatrician and ER physician Dr. Jill Glick about this.

“It's an I hate that terminic. 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 talked 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 illegal or illegal. 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. Many of these doctors are seemingly willing to testify that any child has something like Ricketts, Macrocephaly, Eller's Dameless Syndrome, Temporary, Osteogenesis and Perfecta, or Low Vitamin D to explain away abusive injuries. With price tags ranging from about 1,500 to 5,000 for a report, often offered without seeing the child, and tens of thousands more for court depositions and testimony. Such a group of doctors also exist in much housing by proxy cases.

People like Dr. Richard Bulls, Dr. Eli Newburger, and Dr. Anthony Kirkpatrick, to name a few, who seemed to pop up in an inordinate number of very clear abuse cases to say that it was not abuse. These doctors are spoken of with reverence and fractured families. Their cast is the targets of a witch hunt by a medical establishment who wants to cover up the truth about abusive head trauma. And not for the rather more logical reason that the medical establishment

is unhappy with these doctors, because they're onethical quacks. Here's Dr. Jeldeck again. You know, what really bothers neither most is that colleagues that people went through medical school go into court and lie and misrepresent, or I should say they might have their own belief, but it is that evidence-based. And in court, as an expert, if you look at the AMA,

testify on either side of the face of the case. And that's not the case here. This is about

winning a losing, and I don't know if it's about money, glory, or what, but it's personal belief.

“And that's how it should be practice. This is not standard to care. This is my own personal belief.”

And that's now how it's done. It's imbalanced. And what bothers me next layer is that there isn't any a medical, like American Bar Association, set up in place to say, to report someone that's providing irresponsible testimony. And these victimized experts make very good money doing this work. In 2022, Dr. Sheller said during a deposition, that he makes more than $350,000 a year testifying for the defense, an abusive head trauma,

and lead pink cases. And that this work makes up 75% of his income. There's a lot of chatter in the

fractured family's group about how much retaining these experts costs. Thousands for a report

tens of thousands to testify plus travel costs. One of the most prominent experts in this group, Dr. Michael Hallick, often offers testimony in reports pro bono. However, he has perhaps the most significant financial ties to the group. Dr. Michael Hallick is a fascinating and controversial

“figure. Earlier in his career, Hallick conducted influential research on vitamin D,”

metabolism, and deficiency. You know how all your orange juice has vitamin D in it? That's partly thanks to his research. But he's also been in quite a lot of trouble with the years, forgiving rather utray medical advice, like telling patients to avoid using excessive sunscreen. Especially, after it was discovered that he'd accepted funding from the indoor tanning association and pharmaceutical companies that offer vitamin D testing and supplements. This controversy

led to him resigning from Boston University's dermatology department, though he remained on the faculty for under-conology. And then, in the 2010s, he took up a new line of contrarianism, offering unproven theories that babies and young children with L.S. Danlos syndrome can get multiple fractures through normal care and handling, leading to their parents being falsely accused of abuse. There are numerous problems with this theory. For one thing, hypermobile L.S. Danlos

“syndrome is a clinical diagnosis that cannot be definitively made in infants. Hallick appears to”

circumvent this hurdle by diagnosing, or sometimes just suggesting, that the parents have HEDS, and therefore the baby is likely to also have it. Also, there's no science to support a connection between EDS and fractures in infancy. Research has shown a moderately increased risk of fractures in ambulatory children with EDS, usually in the limbs, not in their school or ribs, like many abuse cases, and these fractures happen from an identifiable traumatic event. The difference is,

according to an expert I spoke to, because their hypermobile joints make them fall down more, meaning that this is not applicable at all to babies. These are not unexplained fractures. In a cohort study of children formally diagnosed with EDS and generalized joint hypermobility, there was not a single instance of a fracture in a child under one year old. And according to a lengthy article in "Propublica" by David Armstrong, which unpacks another case from the fractured

family's group in detail, Hallick has never concluded that a single one of the hundreds of cases

he's evaluated was abuse. Something he talks about in a recorded meeting with the board of fractured families that was posted on YouTube. And so, of these more than 100 families that have come to me who had been accused of child abuse, I started to look at extenuating circumstances and potential other clauses. And one of them, of course, on my radar screen, was Erlas Danlos syndrome. And when I began to realize that this bone fragility associated with adults, you would automatically

assume people would have accepted it for infants, nobody had ever published this. So we decided to look at all of the cases that we had and we have 72 cases of infants that presented with fractures in multiple stages of healing and were diagnosed as due to non-accidental trauma, which, of course, is you for Mystic Term for parents abusing their children. Spoiler, he didn't confirm a single case of abuse in this sample. David Armstrong's piece goes on to

say that, quote, "Hallick regularly diagnoses children with EDS without seeing them in person." I already know on the phone they have EDS, he said, adding that he questions the parents about potential symptoms, "I almost don't have to ask, I know the answer." And quote, "EDS is a connective tissue disorder with a number of subtypes, the most common and most commonly invoked in abuse cases by doctors like Haulick being hypermobile EDS, which there's no genetic test for."

Given the range of subtypes and often complex diagnostic criteria, EDS is difficult to diagnose, making it especially frightening that suspected abusers have latched onto it. Because we know from much hasn't by proxy cases where abusers infiltrate a rare disease, this can significantly

children, a turn of events which only seems to have deepened the devotion of the fractured

“family's members, making him a sort of martyr figure. He now relies on donations of families”

he's helped to keep his clinic open. Most families in this group appear to be hiring multiple experts whenever they can, which really adds up. I tried to pros that when I was talking to a denialist and I made that comment that they're making money. I was told, "Oh, but the people who are child abuse pediatricians, it's also their job. They're also making money because it's their job to testify." And I'm like, "I'm talking about false, but Haulick false balance,

Batman." I was like, no, no, no, no. It is not the same thing to say that someone who willingly offers themselves up as a defense expert and accepts $100,000 to go and testify it for the case. But my point is it's not the same thing to say that that is the same as a child abuse pediatrician who is literally like they're subpoenaed. They're not getting paid more money to be at the court than they would be in the hospital. That's an example of the kind of false balance that you will see the

“actual denialist use in trying to claim that they're just the same as the doctors on the”

court and court other side. And it's not true. And I can't believe that there are journalists who will fall for that because to me it's really obvious. I'm not going to treat a child abuse pediatrician who is subpoenaed to testify for a case of a child that she actually treated or he actually treated who is talking about that case and is getting paid the exact same amount of money they would if they were sitting in their office talking to a family, that's not the same as someone who's

getting $160,000 to say, "Nope, that's not a real diagnosis." So on to logical fallacies and there are many to choose from. We've already talked about the many ways in which child abuse doctors are set up to be wrong every time. But a big logical fallacy that the media coverage relies on is the idea that if a parent isn't criminally convicted of child abuse, that that means no abuse happened. As we've discussed at length, the lack of criminal conviction for child abuse or any other

“crime is not a sculpatory. Lots of people commit crimes and get away with them. For instance,”

in the U.S. only an estimated two to six percent rape cases end up with a criminal conviction. In Florida, where the cases were discussing this season took place, the clearance rate for murder

hovered somewhere between 50 and 60 percent. In clearance rates, only account for criminal charges,

not criminal convictions. And according to earlier research, only a small minority of child fatalities from abusive head trauma result in a criminal conviction. And my colleagues in the media aren't naive about all of this. They're not presenting this nuance on purpose. Interestingly, when I originally reached out to District Attorney Matthew Torbinson for an interview, he said he'd be up for it, but was feeling a bit weary because he'd recently done a lengthy

interview with serial podcast and they hadn't used any of it. In case you missed it, we covered serial's latest podcast The Preventionist a few months back. It's virtually identical in structure to all of these anti-cap pieces. And I have a sense, the story they were telling would have looked pretty different if they included Matthew's interview, which he also recorded and shared with us. I've reviewed over a hundred of these head trauma cases drug. We have issued charges on

68 of those 100 cases in approximately half of those cases. There were homicide cases the other half or not homicides. In half of those cases, maybe that. About half, yeah. It's a little over 20. I don't even get exact number. So, 68, I don't 100. So, in the other cases, were those cases that were referred to you and then you didn't have the evidence or you weren't sure if it was a case of AHA? The case is not going to make it to me if there's concern that's

not a abusive head trauma. So, medical professionals on average, with children's hospital

Wisconsin and my experience, about a third of the cases that they reviewed, they can say this is

actually not abuse. In about a third of the cases that they reviewed, they say this may be abusive, may not be abused, I'm not sure. They are extraordinarily careful making a diagnosis of abuse. So, in that one third of the cases where they do say definitively, this is abuse and the cases being referred to me, I still may not be able to identify who the perpetrator was that committed that abuse because oftentimes these cases involve numerous injuries to the infant

operating long period of time. And, for example, there are cases where children are shaken numerous times. And so, when you have a timeline of events that takes place over a week or weeks, you have that child and the care multiple different individuals. And establishing was the perpetrator in that context to be really difficult. In the preventionist, as in all of these stories, the cap, Dr. Deborah Jensen, is painted as being overzealous and diagnosing abuse.

And the series gives the impression that she's a powerful lone wolf, which she fundamentally

is not. Can you describe a little bit about how a multi-disciplinary team works?

you in a medical context? Absolutely. So, there will be child protective services that are

“involved. There will be law enforcement that will be involved. They have a requirement under”

Wisconsin law to information share. So, they're investigative reports should be shared with each side. There are also be a CAC or child advocacy center. So, if there's child witnesses, we'll have forensic interviews with those children to further the investigation as well. So, and all those individuals will come together in information share. We have a weekly MDT every Wednesday where all the multi-disciplinary team members can get together and we can

case staff cases. We also have an emergency MDT process where if there's something that we need on a more emergent basis, whether it's a Friday night, a weekend, whatever it may be, we can get together and collaborate out for the fall and to make sure that everyone's getting the information they need so that they can make the decisions that we have to make. And there's the other common idea that caps rushed to judgment and cry abuse when

there isn't enough evidence. Have you ever had a case where there were people on the MDT and a multi-disciplinary team or there was a child abuse pediatrician who made a finding of abuse, made a diagnosis of abuse and then you either thought there wasn't enough evidence or you just thought it was an accident and it wasn't something that would qualify. Is there ever that

disagreement? I've never had a case where there's been a diagnosis of abuse and the perpetrators

given an accidental explanation that would in any way account for the nature of her severity of the injuries. The main case they cover in detail in the preventionist involved in mother, Amanda Serenovsky, who claims she received a flawed abuse of head trauma diagnosis that was really the result of an accidental injury caused by her two-year-old. And this idea that accidental injuries are mistaken for abuse comes up second time in Nearys Interview with Torbetson. One of the studies

that I saw was about playground injuries and it just makes me wonder because obviously a abuse of head trauma is a thing. People shake their babies and it causes this pattern of symptoms. I don't doubt that. But are there other things that could also cause those symptoms for instance? The study that looked at playground injuries a lot of those were videotaped. It was

parents like filming their kids on the playground and they fell and that they went in and they

had the same consolation of symptoms. But they weren't even being prosecuted because they knew

“you know that there was a document that would happen. It was documented. Yeah. So there I think there”

are studies that are important in knowledge. So there's a study it's often used by defense attorneys and it talks about acipital false falls to the back of your head. And this particular study talks about eight children that were hospitalized is the result of falls to the back of their head much like a playground fall. And those children had subterled bleeding and right now hammering out what the study doesn't really delve into in details. What was the pattern of the

subterled bleeding? What was the pattern on the right on the right on the right on the right on hammering? Both are critically important. I give an example when I write talk about these cases we're about in retinal averaging. I compared to my car and whether I have a dent in my car right. So my daughter is a teenager and if I have a single dent in my car because I've been at this conference and she's driving my car this week that's probably from her right. It's whether she

left it out or it was caused by whatever that you know that's like one retinal hammer. So I can be caused by many things. A shopping car whatever it might be. But when you have retinal hammering that isn't the pattern of a piece of head trauma it's like a car that's been in a hail storm. It's everywhere it's covered. There's only one thing in the world that causes that specific

“pattern. And that's how I compare it. And so when you have these studies they don't get into”

great detail oftentimes about what that pattern is. But what's also really important about this study and it's critically important to know is that seven of these eight children who fell backwards and hit their head and suffered the sub-dural bleeding all returned to baseline within hours of being at the hospital and all of them were discharged the same day. The one child that actually died was involved in a fall with more rotation and more forces because that child was pushed

over another child that was like hunch over on the ground. And so there were forces involved and with that child going further and it came around harder than the otherwise wood. The AP's technical report on abusive head trauma specifies that there is a 0.12% chance of a short fall leading to a serious or fatal injury. And the study that Mary mentions about playground injuries is from a forensic pathologist named Dr. John J. Plunkett who passed away in 2018.

This was the single study Plunkett participated in and he is its sole author. It involved a total of 15 subjects, none of whom obviously or infants. This paper is a favorite amongst abusive head trauma denialists but has been roundly discredited by the broader medical establishment. Plunkett was a notorious child abuse denialist who did not believe that even violent shaking could kill the baby. When asked in a deposition with the basis for his outlier beliefs were he referenced

cadavers, they've been based on goats," different goats. The lawyer asked him to clarify his last statement. Goats, he said, "G-O-A-T-S," infant baboons. I guess that's it. In the same deposition the lawyer asked Plunkett about a man convicted for shaking his infant daughter to death who wrote a letter to the judge following his conviction saying specifically that Plunkett, the expert his team had hired, was wrong that he'd been innocent. He did it.

Plunkett stuck to his guns and said this had been a false confession. Neri also asked Matthew about the idea of which is not supported by any data that caps our overdue diagnosing abuse.

What would you say to people who are critical of the profession? Like, you know,

in saying that like, there's overdiagnosis or, you know, um, misdiagnosis happening.

“This is just the last question. It's like, are there things that people are missing?”

People are not getting like, what is it that you would want to say? Have you want to address that? I think someone commented on it this morning and I think our society, unfortunately, is a Twitter or an ex-esciede. They read the short story. They read the headline and to really have a critical understanding of a piece of head trauma. You have to know the research. You have to know the history. You have to know the process that's involved in making the medical diagnosis because it is a

involved process by experts in the field who have studied and have the experience in the knowledge

base to make that diagnosis and it's not something that's hastily done. In fact, it's just

the opposite. It's done with so much care, so much caution, because I think everyone involved realizes what you're doing in the significance of what you're doing when you say this child was

“used. Remember that last scene or acronym? See for conspiracy theory. So the people at this conference.”

Is this some sort of Kabul? How often really are you with a lot of the people who frequent these conferences that so are very, like specialists and experts in the NSF at trauma? In terms of what capacity, what's in the difference? Like, is it a community and people know each other? I mean, I feel like, obviously, like, we went to Genesis presentations today and I know also she has a number of, like, lawsuits and a really weird really trying to get a comprehensive picture. You're very

complicated, you know, story and a very nuanced mind speaking to as many dozens of people as we can. But like, are you familiar with some of those people that frequently give talks at conferences, like Dr. Jensen or, you know, some of these heavy hitters? I guess we've been experts in their field for a long time. It feels like a community sort of. It feels like a community being here. So I'm familiar with people based on my experience of them being experts in their particular field.

So Dr. Levine was here, for example, and he is one of the preeminent experts in ophthalmology. And anytime I can listen to him speak, I feel like I learned more and more about a specialty field that helps me be a better advocate and make better decisions in my job. I feel the same way about Dr. Sandy Narang, for example, who is one of the preeminent experts in a piece of head trauma. So there are names that I recognize at this conference. One of the things I really appreciate about

this conference is that it makes me better at my job, but it also helps me learn more every time

“about something that I think is really critical that everybody should know more about if they're”

going to practice in this and do it. As this conversation is wrapping up, they mentioned that Diane Mirri is headed for an interview with Dr. Mary Clyde Pierce, a very well-respected expert on

abusive head trauma. This is another interview that never made it in. But audio from a social worker

who'd once worked with Dr. Jensen and thought she was wrong about a bunch of hasn't-by-proxy case that he couldn't remember any of the details of. Well, that made the cut. I asked the team at Serial about the choice to emit Torpen's interview. They told me, quote, "Mr. Torpen's in is one of more than 160 people we spoke to during the course of reporting our series. Each interview provided our team with valuable insight, but of course not every source was quoted directly in

the story. It is standard practice for us to speak with more sources than our name, and we remain confident that the role of legal and medical professionals are represented fairly in the series." Now, not using every interview in a show of this size is standard. However, given the scope of their reporting, it's notable that the preventionist does not cite a single peer-reviewed study data set or named expert to support its central suggestion that there is significant uncertainty

and potential error in how cases of suspected abuse are diagnosed. It begs the question, what else was left on the cutting room floor? Given that they ended up with only three very short episodes. So if you or anyone you know has been interviewed by Serial, we're all ears.

in the other cases they touch on. And though it spends a lot of time on Maya's case, the omissions could fill a book. And perhaps most gallingly, it presents Dr. Anthony Kirkpatrick as a credible expert on Maya's alleged condition of CRPS. Instead of, as a man who runs an all-cash ketamine clinic where he charges patients and plenty of parents, upwards of $10,000 for ketamine infusions for a condition that they may or may not have.

And Daphne Chen, who first broke the Maya qualsky story, actually didn't interview with Dr.

Glick for her USA today article entitled "Vad Medicine." But instead of asking for her expertise on child abuse medicine, she asked her to opine on a made-up anecdote about Sally Smith. I have to tell you I got a call and this happens a lot that in someone wants to talk to me and interview me about something. And against my best interest or best judgment, I will talk to people. And so she called me up and I had no idea what, you know, she had these cases. I had nothing,

I knew nothing about Maya and I knew nothing about all these cases at all. And she was talking about child abuse pediatrics. And she just said, you know, there are these statements about child abuse pediatrics coming in and, you know, just being accusatory and all that. And I go, that's really sad to hear because that's bad medicine. You know, a bad medicine to come in and be a mean person and accuse people. We don't do that. Good, that's bad medicine.

“And in good medicine, I'll tell you what I do. And I think she put this in article. You know,”

I'll walk in and, you know, what regardless of abuse or not, you walk into a parent's room and a kid's soft food. I feel sorry for the parent. And so when my residents have been with me, I'll walk

in and the first things I try to do is instead of standing over the parent, I'll try to sit down.

And I listened to you sleep last night. Did you get breakfast? Did you have a cup of coffee? I know that if someone's tired or whatever, it's not a good moment. So, and then we'll talk a little bit how the night was whatever and try to engage and try to be in just a nice person. And then get into it. There's been times I've taken a parent for a walk into another room. My chair calls me a force of nature. I mean, I have a strong, you know, personality

because I need to. Right? I need to confront people at times. I have to be directed times. But I also learned that there is compassion and empathy that I give to every all my parents because if I couldn't do that, Andrea, I could not do this word. And neither could Dr. Smith or any other child to be his pediatrician. But again, there's no right way to be a cap according to these stories. See, impossible expectations. And this brings us to the

next part of our handy acronym from Terra. Cherry picking. Cherry picking quotes, cherry picking documents, cherry picking doctors to present as credible despite their fringe status, cherry picking statistics, and ignoring everything else that could actually help the audience understand what really happened to the child. Every journalist has a lens. We all make editorial choices. We all have a certain angle of approach, believing out context that turns a story on

“its head is something else. If you have to omit the real details of what happened to a child.”

The discrepancies in the parent's story, the details of the actual process doctors go through

to get to an abuse diagnosis, which is never a single opinion, never a ten minute conversation.

And on top of that, you also have to omit. The scientific consensus around that diagnosis, the context around the investigation, and the people from different agencies who independently found compelling evidence of abuse in order to make something look like a false allegation, I would contend that what you have is probably not a false allegation of abuse. If you omit enough from a story, it's just deception. Abuses curse and twin,

and string and enough of those stories together, and my friend, you have yourself a conspiracy theory. Serials the preventionist gets much of its DNA from an earlier podcast that aired in 2020. Do no harm from my kicks and ball. My white whale. It's hard to overstate how integral this

“particular work is to my own origin story. I viscerally remember opening my podcast app when”

this show was advertised to be in 2020, and feeling incandescent with anger when I saw the show or for do no harm, and that anger very quickly became an idea, this podcast. So thanks to my kicks and ball for that, I guess. But despite all of that, I hadn't actually ever listened to do no harm until I was making this season, and nor had I read the rest of my kicks and balls reporting for NBC that didn't concern my family members. To be honest, I hadn't really

planned on opening my kicks and ball file while reporting on this season, but Hicks and Ball also covered Viviana Graham's story. And then, by coincidence, we ended up interviewing Matthew Torbinson,

but as we discussed earlier ended up with a no-contest plea. And then Megan, my sister,

“popped up in the fractured family's group, giving people advice and commiserating about evil”

caps, and I am all out of red strength. In the end, I decided to finally listen to do no harm,

and read the rest of the stories my kid written about falsely accused parents. My kicks and ball who's a father of four begins the series with an anecdote about his own experience taking his daughter to the urgent care after he'd accidentally dislocated her elbow by swinging her around. The doctor told him that this is a common injury and he shouldn't beat himself up, which he says he did anyway. When I started reporting this story,

I thought it was about one family, and a system determined to protect their children, but I soon discovered it was much bigger. This is a story about what happens when our efforts to save the most vulnerable among us is what puts them in danger. And as I met more parents, I thought a lot about my daughters hurt arm. I started to imagine how things might have gone differently. What if her injury had been more serious? What if the doctor had made different assumptions

about me based on my race or how much money I make? What if the guilt I'd felt about hurting my child was the least of my problems? This is a fair question, but this is not the question that the series actually engages with. It touches briefly on the story of a black family, but the bulk of the series is devoted to the story of Melissa and Dylan Bright, a white, married, middle-class, vocally-Christian family with two college-educated parents. Similar to Hickson

“bought himself and the majority of the other families he's covered in his series. And I think”

that this is revealing. Storytelling is the most powerful when we can plug ourselves into it.

And what Mike describes here is relatable to every parent. Every parent has accidentally hurt their child or witnessed their child hurting themselves and felt horrible about it. Every single one of us, when my daughter was two, she ran headlong into my in-laws coffee table and had a shiner for weeks. So I think Mike sharing this story is telling us how he's approaching the question. In this series, we've told the stories of parents who rushed to hospitals with injured

babies. Only to discover that some of the doctors they thought were treating their children were actually working in tandem with law enforcement. Two very different stories. But they both deal with the trust we place in professionals. And what happens when that trust is betrayed? And according to Mike, he talked to many families for this reporting and heard from hundreds more after it aired. The written series do no harm that we wrote in collaboration between

the Houston Chronicle and NBC News. We spotlighted several families. And in the end, we talked with, you know, close to 70 families who shared similar experiences, mostly in Texas, but also in states across the country. So it's striking them that of the handful of families who made the cut for his reporting. Four of them are members of fractured families, Viviana and Megan, as well as Melissa Bright and Ann Marie Timberman. And though Mike gestures at racial disparities

in child abuse investigations, most of the families he covers are white. So what evidence does Mike have that doctors falsely accuse the brights? And you hear it in the tape. And when CPS comes

to take the kids and Melissa is saying, why? But we had the second opinion, the radiologist said,

you know, she pointed to actual research papers that shows you can get to school fractures from a shortfall. And so Melissa's story did potentially match. But when they raised that question with the CPS worker, what's the response? Well, we still have what we have from Texas children's hospital. And you see that in case after case where the the child welfare agency has seated authority to the physicians who have no, you know, authority to remove kids.

Actually, neither of these entities have the authority to remove kids. Only the courts have that.

“And remember that plunket study that Neary asked Matthew about from the goats and baboons guy.”

Mike uses that same study to shore up the idea that the doctors who made the abuse diagnosis in the bright case were wrong. And that second opinion he mentions, that came from a name that will be familiar to you by now. Dr. Julie Mac. Mike presents her in the series as simply a Harvard trained radiologist. In his written reporting, he addresses Max reputation as a child abuse denialist and includes a link to a hospital statement about her. But he makes no mention of

this in the series. And this brings us to an extremely common talking point in these circles. Of course, we're not saying child abuse doesn't exist, just that it didn't happen in this case. The other cases, Hicks and Bach covers are littered with these same experts and others popular with fractured families. According to their Facebook posts, both Viviana Graham and Anne Marie Timmerman also used Dr. Julie Mac and Dr. Joseph Scheller. So the point Hicks and Bach is making

implicitly is that these doctors are the ones we should trust over child abuse pediatricians.

and that they work with law enforcement and CPS too closely to be trusted. The child abuse pediatricians are often as in Texas grant funded by the state child welfare agency, same in other states. And in those contracts, the child abuse pediatricians are

“the medical authority for CPS. And I think there are times when CPS case workers who are more”

experienced may be pushed back, but it's tough. So who should be making the medical decisions instead? CPS case workers or cherry picked experts who don't believe in the existence of child abuse? I'm inclined to think that Hicks and Bach believes it should be the latter, given the way he treats Mac's second opinion in the bright case and given this comment he makes in his interview. I also completely understand why we have child abuse pediatricians, why that subspecialty

exists. I think there are some conversations that maybe could be had about the interplay between child abuse pediatricians and CPS, giving CPS autonomy to speak with additional doctors, other subspecialists, and making sure that the reports from child abuse pediatricians have the appropriate level of nuance. And so I have seen reports in cases where they say these injuries are diagnostic of abuse. And you cover health care, that means this is it. These injuries can only be

abuse and that's almost never the case. You can almost never just declare these are abuse and not

an accident. As we've discussed throughout this episode, there is a robust body of peer-reviewed science that is a subject of wide medical consensus on how to diagnose abusive injuries like spiral fractures, posterior rib fractures, and abusive head trauma. And doctors see accidental injuries like the ones my kicks and bod describes at the beginning of the series all day every day. There is plenty of very real data about what various injuries look like, and any baby being

treated for these injuries will also be seen by subspecialists such as neurologists, ophthalmologists, ER physicians, and others. And a cap-doing in evaluation will consult with those physicians. What's underneath this is a medical kidnapping talking point. That child abuse pediatric isn't a real

“subspecialty. The subspecialist Mike is talking about. Are people like Mac and Scheller?”

Who never diagnosed abuse? Because in Scheller's case, they don't believe it's a medical diagnosis

a doctor can make. And Scheller has never diagnosed a case of abusive head trauma. But don't worry, Mike Hicks-and-Bott isn't a conspiracy theorist or anything. I've heard from a lot of these people actually, there's a current, you know, offshoot of the QAnon conspiracy that says, you know, CPS agencies are actual, the trafficking children. It is complete nonsense. There's no evidence. That's the case. These agencies make mistakes. There are bad actors in them.

But this is the exact conspiracy that Mike Hicks-and-Bott is joking. Medicalcognop.com, a site entirely devoted to this another QAnon adjacent and anti-vax conspiracy theories. Love says work. After being featured in Do Know Harm, Ann Marie Timmerman told her story to medicalkitnap.com, and their editor positions Hicks-and-Bott's coverage as a hopeful sign

that the mainstream media is finally getting with the program. The editor writes, quote,

"This is a story, representative of many other thousands of stories happening all across this country every day that every single person living in the U.S. needs to hear and understand if there is any hope of ending this kind of medical tyranny." Timmerman writes a first-person account of her experience and says of the doctor in their case, quote, "She used CPS to medically kidnapped our baby." Another parent who appeared in my Kicks-and-Bott's work, Ali Parker,

is a regular contributor to medicalkitnap.com, where she's written about, among other things, my sister Megan Carter and the quote, "Rogue Washington Doctor" intent on medically kidnapping her child. And while my Kicks-and-Bott might not use this exact language, this is the story he's telling. So if he thinks this theory is, quote, "complete nonsense," then why is he using their experts and their talking points in his reporting? I suspect he's trying to have it both ways,

and he's surprised that the doctors aren't thinking him. The reaction from those other heart surgeons, they would say, "Yeah, that's a problem. They could do it better. That's outside the standard of care." In this case, when we've highlighted legitimate real problems with individual cases of reports from child abuse pediatricians, cases where they overstate the evidence,

“misstate the evidence, fail to report a bleeding disorder that's key,”

use hyperbole like saying a child looks like they were thrown from a second story building a phrase that has no basis in science. When I've highlighted these things, I would expect a similar kind of response, you know what? Thanks for pointing that out. That's outside the standard of care. Mike's expectation, the caps should thank him for insisting that they treat the opinions of

especially when he's treating people like plunk it and Mac as credible, is just really something, as though this is a debate club and not a conversation with life or death consequences. And from here, Mike makes the leap to another familiar medical kidnapping talking point about caps being some kind of cabal. The child abuse pediatrician that I've heard from, it's a small,

close-knit group of physicians, and they've been very critical of the reporting. I want to make

clear as nobody disputes that the doctors and the social workers should have contacted CPS

“in both the bright and the Butler case. I think, you know, when a child comes into the hospital,”

and they have serious injuries, it makes sense, you know, do the investigation. Our series was really focused on investigating what went wrong after that point. And so, you know, there's been, I think some criticism I see out there that, you know, telling these kinds of stories will make people hesitant to report or somehow that we're arguing that doctors shouldn't notify CPS about concerning injuries. I don't think anyone makes that case. I know the bright's down at

the Butler's down, their lawyers don't, Dr. Julie Mac doesn't say that. Dr. Julie Mac doesn't say that, but her actions and her reputation rather speak for themselves. If it walks like an abuse denialist, if it quacks, like an abuse denialist. And since there's no data that child abuse pediatricians are diagnosing abuse at higher rates or making a significant number of errors,

“Mike tries to position this as a well-intentioned over reaction. After the Miami-Herald did”

investigations showing children dying in the care of CPS or after being reported to CPS. In the aftermath of that, the states instituted this very aggressive, I'll say, better safe than sorry approach, where we're going to do whatever it takes to protect children. And they vastly expanded the number of removals, mostly cases of neglect or suspicion of neglect. The collect is an entirely separate issue from what Mike is talking about, which is children with

abusive injuries that landed them in the hospital. I've never heard a child abuse pediatrician,

and I've talked to many of them, used the phrase "better safe than sorry." There's no evidence that this is the approach that any of these doctors are taking. Caps rule out abuse more than half the time, and they rule out abuse more often than their less well-trained colleagues.

“The evidence that Hicks and Bob appears to be relying on is these parent stories and their unscientific”

alternate theories. Hicks and Bob's reporting has been influential in the move for second opinion laws that have been passed in Texas. Make sure we can protect kids like Sharon Matthews, who really were being abused while also protecting the rights of parents like the rights and the botlers who, you know, who weren't. And so it's tricky and there's efforts to perform that. I've gotten pretty good reaction from lawmakers. Mike presents as being very progressive,

and it's possible that this started with some genuinely held belief. I'll probably never know,

but he's done in Calculable Damage, and rather than disappear the children like so many of these stories do, he put them front in center, including the full names of every child, along with photos and videos of them, some of them from the hospital and in various states of undress. Even if he thinks the harm to these children was done by doctors and CPS, this feels like an indefensible choice. Mike closes his interview with another telling self-insert

about the panic that he's been so instrumental in engineering. I feel like I am hyper vigilant now and if you go to the hospital and that incident has happened and they say, hey, they've got two fractures okay. You know, that's when you start to think about, okay, documentation, document, document. There are a lot of kids, families who have gone through this, you know, and not gotten their kids back. Lives have been destroyed and it's hard to take all that in and think about it. It's a good reminder

just to love on my kids and to spend good time with them and to not, you know, spend too much time worrying, because you don't know what tomorrow holds. Maybe this reporting genuinely left Hicks and Ball with this fear and it does tap into something visceral. The idea of having your children take it away. But the reality of these cases tells us something very different that someone like Hicks and Ball, or like me, college educated,

married, white parents who can afford to hire expensive attorneys and experts like Scheller, are very unlikely to have our children taken away, regardless of our culpability for their injuries. There are parents who get wrongly suspected of abuse. I'm just not convinced that Hicks and Ball has found any of them. He can give all the lip service he wants to not being an abuse denialist, but if it walks like one. Maybe he did this because stories like this play well, or maybe he's

support and resources, it's still hard. Most of us would never harm our kids in a moment of anger,

“but I think most of us can relate with needing to walk away and take a breather,”

or needing a partner to take over with an insoluble infant in the middle of the night. Most of us cannot imagine breaking our children's bones or shaking them, and we like to think that the people who do those things must be unrecognizable monsters. Certainly not. Nice white moms like Melissa Bright. Certainly not. Nice white moms. Like my sister Megan. Mike Hicks and Ball covers two months hasn't by proxy stories in his series, and he

buries a quote in his sympathetic, credulous portrayal of Ashley James from Dr. Mark Feldman, who reviewed the medical records in her daughter's case. He writes quote, "In response to emailed questions from reporters Feldman said that the overwhelming evidence from thousands of pages of medical records demonstrated that James constantly provided information that was

almost never replicated in a hospital or other clinical setting." Mark also spoke to Hicks and

“Ball at length and gave him additional context about this case, which he sought permission from”

the court to speak to Hicks and Ball about, but none of that made it in. And then there is the story I know the most about. My sister, Megan Carter's. "A joint king five and NBC News investigation has found some Washington state children were needlessly torn apart from their parents after a Tacoma doctor said they were abused." The top child abuse expert at Mary Bridge said Megan Carter manipulated providers and withheld medications that the mom wanted attention. And

to get it, she wanted her daughter sick. "Do you want your daughter be said?" "Absolutely not." Mike Hicks and Ball co-reported along with local journalist Taylor Miffendoreski, a sympathetic

portrayal of my sister in early 2020. After the state had just lost its dependency case to remove

her two children, and in the midst of an ongoing criminal investigation into her for suspected abuse of her daughter. Despite all his issues with child abuse pediatricians and their

“alleged over-zellisness, this piece of tax doctor Elizabeth Woods for not being a child abuse”

pediatrician. And positions that as a reason not to trust her judgment in this case. But one of many things Hicks and Ball's article leaves out is that there was a child abuse pediatrician who reviewed the more than 70,000 pages of records my then five-year-old niece had accumulated. Dr. Carol Jenny is one of the most well-respected caps in the field, and she co-wrote the literal book on medical child abuse. It is not hyperbally to say

that she's one of the most credible experts you could possibly have in a case like this. Hicks and Ball cherry picks a single document to shore up the idea that Megan was wrongly accused of abuse. A juvenile court decision from Judge Susan Amity. This document contains a number of factual inaccuracies, including the repeated assertion that Dr. Woods and Dr. Jenny had claimed that my sister was a victim of medical child abuse, which the judge used to describe it their

opinions on the case. Here I am talking with Dr. Jenny about this a couple of years ago. I was put on the stand when I didn't have a complete record. On the other hand, the record was so compelling. There was no doubt in my mind as to what I testified, and the rubber stamp, I guess you can say if the evidence is there, it's there. And if we both quoted the same evidence, there you go. I would really like, would be for the news, whoever is interested, to go back

to the court. Well, not even the court, because that was only half the evidence. But go back to the people that have my final report, get permission from the parents to have it released, and read the whole 37 pages. Single-spaced. Good I wrote. After my many years of research into medical child abuse, I can tell you that a report like Dr. Jenny's is the evidence in a montage and by proxy case. MVP is not oriented around a single event. It's a pattern that often

goes back years by the time it's reported. There was also video evidence of the case in my sister dumping an anticoagulant medication she was supposed to be giving her daughter, after which the little girl developed a life-threatening blood clot. Hicks and bought entirely leaves out the fact that Megan had been investigated once before for the abuse, and that she'd had a baby who died in between then and now. He also leaves out the fact that by the time the report from Mary

Bridge Children's happened after numerous instances of life-threatening sepsis, three other hospitals had reported Megan at various times over the years. All just a coincidence, I guess. And he doesn't not know these things. They're public record, and he knows there are concerned family members because I told him that myself. He ignored me. I suspect that all of these horrifying details of Megan's case were suppressed in order to present his readers with a more palatable

vision of the world. One in which nice middle-class white moms like Megan don't do terrible

saved my niece's life, and Hicks and Vaughn made Dr. Woods' life hell for it. I'd never

“read Hicks and Vaughn's other work until now. And to be honest, I thought I'd find that a couple”

of these were credible stories of families who'd been wrongly accused of abuse, and I can't speak to the details of all of these cases. But given what he's relying on, cherry picked documents, parents accounts, and expert reports from abuse nihilists, it begs the question if he's even found one. What is certain is that he's caused a lot of harm in the process. I've got baggage with Hicks and Vaughn

to put it mildly. He has yet to answer my most recent request for comment about his reporting methods

and do no harm. I don't know if he ever will. So, in addition to my more straightforward journalistic

“communications, I want to get this off my chest. My kicks and Vaughn, if you're listening to this,”

if you are so certain that Megan was wrongfully accused of abuse, I challenge you to go and ask her and her husband Andy to authorize the release of Dr. Carol Jenny's report. I know that this is an old story for you, and that you've moved on to other topics. But if you're so sure that you

didn't enable an abuser, you ought to be willing to take a second look, because you had the power

in the situation, as the journalist putting a national spotlight on it, and you remain accountable for its after effects. You included my nieces full name, along with videos and photos of her, including photos of her in the hospital with tubes coming out of her. We have a term for this in the field, medical porn. What you did with this story is worse than bad journalism. You've reinforced the fall story of my nieces' health that my sister is using to abuse her. You are feeding the beast.

You're not just enabling this abuse, you're an active participant, because you know that there's evidence of abuse. You know about Dr. Jenny's report. You know there are concerned family members and a previous investigation and video evidence and reports from other hospitals. You know that none of this was down to just Dr. Woods. You have already demolished these kids' privacy, so if you think you are doing the right thing, if you think the doctors are in error,

why not go get that 37-page report, single-spaced? You know where to find me? I'll wait. Children have no rights under the Constitution to anything and certainly not to being protected against abuse. That's next time, nobody should believe me. Nobody should believe me is written reported and executive produced by me, Andrea Dumla. Our co-executive producer is Mariah Gosset. Our editor is Greta Stromquist, story editing by Nicole Hill. Research and fact checking by

Aaron Agai, additional research by Jessa V. Randall, mixing and engineering by Robin Edgar. Our production manager is Nola Carmich. Music from blue dot sessions sounds snap and slipstream. It's time to start with shopping and business. And close to us, with the check-out with the world best of luck. That's right, the check-out with the world best of luck. The legendary check-out from Shopify is just the shop on your website, a little social media and everything else.

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