S07 E10: The Stakes

- 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. - I want a better future for children and for their families, and part of my dismay about the many media stories

centering the medical kidnapping narrative, is that I know enough to see exactly how this type of advocacy is moving us further away from just that.

I will always be thorough in my reporting.

I'll always do my very best to be fair, but I will never be neutral. I'm here because I know the stakes, and because I believe that stories can move us in a way that statistics and data as valuable

as those things are we'll never do. - We know the power of a story. When I talk about vaccines, I've talked for years, I've given lots of keynote talks on how you address vaccine hesitancy and how you counter it,

and the way you counter it is stories. I'm a big believer in the anecdotal lead,

“and the, you know, because that's what people understand,”

and it's stories resonate in an emotional way with us. So if you want to actually convey something that happened and help it connect with them in that logos, paythos ethos way of getting the paythos, you've got to tell a story.

And in this case, I needed a story that matched the kinds of stories that you hear where it's not true, right? It's the seemingly nice middle-class family. - When Tara Haley was writing her piece

on abusive head trauma, she knew she had the facts on her side. The scientific consensus, the peer reviewed research and the data, but she also knew that leading with that would be bringing a knife to a gunfight. She knew she needed to talk to someone who'd been there.

This is a mom who, she didn't even remote.

It never would have occurred to her to question her husband.

She had no point in the beginning did she think, oh, you know, is that really what happened, honey? You know, like she did not question, she didn't have any reason to suspect that her husband had done anything.

This father is not somebody who had like this long history of abuse, either. You know, it's really easy, especially with a crying baby or when you're frustrated in the moment to just get, just to lose your temper, right?

The problem is that babies are so fragile

“that losing your temper can have catastrophic effects, right?”

So that's one way in which it is very different from the medical abuse is more calculated, right? There's a lot of manipulation and calculation going on there whereas shaking baby cases, there can be a history of abuse but there doesn't have to be.

Sometimes there truly is a bad moment of losing your temper. This story which Tara opens her piece with struck me right away because it was identical in structure to so many stories I'd read about false allegations with one huge difference.

You actually find out what happened to the baby. These conversations around child abuse are not ideological debates happening in ivory towers. There's stories with life or death consequences. We've heard from a lot of experts this season

and today we're talking to two people with a different kind of expertise, the kind that comes from living it. 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 and you could never make it through your day,

I'm Andrea Dunlop and this is nobody should believe me. (gentle music) The mother who spoke to Tara for her story also agreed to speak with us. We're using a pseudonym, Nicole, to protect her privacy.

- So it was a little over five years ago now. I had a few of my girlfriends over for what we call like a friend's giving dinner. And I was upstairs at the time we had just under three year old daughter

and a two month old daughter. And as upstairs with my girlfriends having dinner, my husband at the time, I'll just refer to him as my ex now because he is. But my ex had my two daughters down stairs in the basement

and just like to watch them and put on the show. So I could hang out with my girlfriends for an hour as all new moms need some free time. And so we're just eating and he brings up my two month old daughter and we're all just passing her around

'cause she's so cute, everyone loves this year. She gets a little bit fussy so I just ask him to take her back and he goes back downstairs. Probably less than 10 minutes later, he's upstairs.

And I go downstairs and my youngest daughter had pooped

“through her blanket so she was kind of swaddled”

and she had, it was like a weird green color that was on the floor.

And I was like, "Hi, I've never seen that color before."

But okay, you know, just clean it up and change your diaper and good to go. And so we go back upstairs, he goes down to her room with her. I sit back down at the table with my friends and he immediately comes back down the hallway

and now there's like a little bit more urgency in his voice and concern in his voice. So immediately I'm in mom mode and I run down the hallway and my youngest daughter's on her changing table

and she is having a seizure and she becomes pretty much, she looked like a ghost, she was completely pale and she wasn't moving after the seizure. And so I pick her up, I run down the hallway

and I'm screaming to my friends, I said, "Call 911." Call 911, just not breathing. And so we finally get 911 on the phone and I'm, it's cold at this time in November.

In my dire situation of hoping that something can shock her back to life, I run her outside onto my porch because I think the cold will help. In that moment, I don't know, my child's not breathing.

I don't really know what to do at this moment. And so I run back inside, 911 is on the call, I lay her down in our office and they're telling me how to do CPR.

I've never done this on an infant.

I didn't know how to do it and I should have known as a mom but you don't think of these things ever happening. So anyway, she's, the dispatcher is running me through this

“and doing it on my daughter and I remember at one point,”

and I've probably been doing it for a few minutes and it felt like an eternity. But at one point, I remember stopping being like, she's dead, she's dead. And,

yeah, that was probably the hardest thing ever. So anyways, I see the ambulance lights, like the fire trucks and everything coming down are called a sock. So I pick her up and I run her outside

to the first firefighter I can see, paramedic I can see. And I'm like, take her, take her. She's not breathing, he grabs her, brings her back inside. They're testing my car oxygen.

She's literally at like 40% or below oxygen levels. And so they give her oxygen, they're like, we're gonna take her straight to the hospital down the street. So I jump in the ambulance with her. At this point, I don't know where my ex is.

I don't know where my other daughter is. I don't know where my friends are. I'm just jumping in the ambulance and I'm going to whatever hospital she's going to. So I'm with her.

And we get to the hospital. I just let everyone do their thing. There's probably 20 people in the room, just putting needles in her head and just all these things going on

with my sweet little, two-month-old perfect baby. So she still looks super pale. I don't know what's going on, obviously. My ex arrives, I don't know, probably five minutes later. And we're standing in the room,

the doctors are like, what's going on? What happened? And I have no idea at this point. I said, she's downstairs. She had poop through her diaper.

And then the next time I saw her, she's having a seizure. And so, and he, what my ex was not saying anything, either. And at this point, I'm like,

people process trauma and really difficult situations in very different ways. But we were both officers in military in our past. We should be pretty work well under some pressure.

Obviously, this is the first time one of our children

has been through something quite traumatic. So that's, it's a different beast, obviously.

“So I just thought, maybe that's how he's handling the situation.”

Nicole's daughter was discovered to have a large brain hemorrhage and had to be life-flighted to a bigger children's hospital. - They won't let us fly with her. We have to drive up their separate. It's probably like a 30 minute drive for us.

So put her in the helicopter. And then I start sprinting to the truck. I'm like, hurry up. We need to get to the hospital like time now. And my ex is just not like,

Now I'm trying to get there before they do, which I know we're not going to, but that's where my head's at. And as we get in the truck, and we start driving to the hospital.

And the whole time I'm thinking,

“I'm looking up at the sky and I'm trying to see the helicopter.”

And I just don't know if my daughter is going to be alive or dead when I get to the hospital. And I'm just crying. I don't know how to process these emotions. I don't know what to expect when we get there.

And I'm saying all these things out loud. I'm like, what happened? How could this happen? And he's not really saying anything. The one thing he told me was,

he came upstairs to get a pinky from me and my friends, which he actually did. He, I remember him coming upstairs, being like, hey, throw me the pinky. And I threw it to him and he went downstairs.

When he was walking back downstairs, he saw my, or he heard my youngest daughter cry, like a really weird cry. And he saw my oldest daughter, like sitting awkwardly around her on the couch.

So he, he's kind of explaining to me that he thinks that my, my almost three year old daughter was maybe jumping on the couch and hit her in the head when he came up to get the pinky. So this is the story that I'm being told.

And I am firmly believing the story

“as the only thing that could have possibly caused”

this situation. And so we get to the hospital. I am sprinting to trauma and we get there. We're met immediately by a social worker.

And that's never happened to me before.

I'm like, oh, that maybe this is normal for children's hospitals, not sure. But we're just waiting outside the room where she's getting evaluated. I'm like, is she alive?

Is she dead? Can somebody tell me anything? And no one's really telling me anything. Nicole's daughter is transferred to the ICU and they're surrounded by doctors and nurses.

And it's clear that these medical professionals are not buying the story that parents came in with. They keep asking a baffled Nicole, what happened to this baby? And of course, I'm still the one talking.

And my ex is not saying anything. I'm now telling him the story that he told B. And the car right up to the hospital because that is the only explanation in my mind that could obviously, like I said before,

could cause the situation. And just for like context as well, we had a great marriage. And he was a phenomenal father, very hands-on, very supportive. I thought we had like a really beautiful life.

And we loved our two daughters so much. And so the thought of him having anything to do with it,

never cross my mind at all,

even when they're interrogating us at all. I am defending myself, I'm defending my husband. And it became pretty clear that everyone on the other side of things thought maybe we had something to do with it.

I didn't know anything about, I guess shaken maybe or abusive head drama at the time. Obviously, you get a little briefing when you leave the hospital with your newborn baby. Hey, the crying period, purple period of crying, things like that.

Yeah, but you never think about

“what are the injuries associated with a baby and shaken?”

Things like that. The next few days pass in excruciating tension as Nicole's tiny daughter clings to life. Finally, on the fourth day, they're able to examine her daughter's eyes

where they discover a significant retinal hemorrhaging. The doctors continue to give Nicole only the briefest updates as the picture grows more concerning for abusive injuries.

The head ophthalmologist basically came by the room

and was like, can I talk to you in a hallway? I'm like, yeah, sure, no problem. So I go out there and he's like, just immediately just goes, what happened to this little baby?

And I'm like, excuse me, I'm like, I told everyone what has happened. We had nothing to do with this. I just need you to take care of her. And it was just so like a polling that that was his,

I don't know, interaction with me as the mom and learning such horrible news. So he's, he needs like, well, good luck to you.

it's clear to Nicole that the doctors think she's lying,

“but she genuinely doesn't know how to answer the questions”

they're asking. We had the child abuse pediatricians and their team sit down with us and go over things in detail as well, like the stories that we were telling the doctors earlier. So obviously there's a lot on our plate

and a lot on our minds. And I don't wanna say anything that is gonna make things worse as far as like possible criminal proceedings that are happening in the background that I don't know about.

- Had you spoken to the police? So we're sort of talking about this conversation at day four at that point had the police become involved and did you spoken to the police?

- Yeah, so it was like basically DCFS right off the bat

and they came like the next day or that night, I'm not sure it was pretty quick. And then it was a detective from like our local police department where we lived that had reached out and was just saying like, hey, I'm just gonna be

coordinating a community CFS just want you guys to know I may have to interview both of you at some point things like that. So I was like, okay, no problem. What ever you guys need?

Just let us know, obviously nothing to hide here. - Nicole's daughter was still in the pick you and now they were being investigated for abuse and then everything changed in an instant. - I get a call for my ex and I'm like,

oh, that's probably him just saying he's on his way back to the hospital, not sure. It's my answer it and it's actually him and he is crying and he says my name, he says, Nicole, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry.

I shook her twice and I truly felt (chuckles)

“and if I like the best way to describe that moment”

was like my heart shattered into a million pieces

on the floor in front of me and I started hyperventilating and like shaking and just crying, I couldn't process what he just told me. And the nurses came in because it sounds like the detective may be told the child abuse pediatrician

that my ex had confessed and so it sounds like they maybe gave the nurses at the hospital warning that I was about to find out. And so they came in, they laid me down. They, I called my family, obviously everyone just lost it,

couldn't believe it, so they let my mom come up and be with me in the hospital for the last four days with her just a lot going on and - I can't really explain it but it's truly the most horrific thing to happen to our family and to my sweet daughter.

- There are so many mirrors of these other parent stories. The rush to the hospital, the frigid reception from doctors, the horror of being suspected of abuse.

“But these stories don't have a call like this.”

There's no moment of revelation, only the search for another different kind of doctor, one who frequents courtrooms rather than exam rooms, to provide some other explanation for the injury. Male abusers are far more common in abusive head trauma

and fracture cases, but almost all of the people doing the advocacy, speaking with the media and building community around false allegations, are women. Certainly some of them know or at least should know that their male partners were responsible.

People like Viviana Graham and Ashley Finigan, but how many others are like Nicole,

women who had never suspect,

who couldn't imagine there has been harming their child, how many find groups like fractured families and go down a rabbit hole of junk science in order to grasp desperately for a reason to believe that their beloved partner didn't hurt their baby.

We all like to think that it could never be us. We think we'd know. We think we wouldn't be susceptible to conspiratorial thinking when faced with a horrific reality. But the truth is, we cannot really know

if we'd be willing to face the horrible truth until that horrible truth arrives at our door. This moment of revelation changed Nicole's life forever and she walked away from the situation with quite the opposite reaction

to many of the other parents we've talked about this season. There's been a lot of actually good come out of it in the sense that the child abuse pediatrician and her team handled it the best. They weren't blaming any of us, they weren't acting like,

they weren't interrogating any of us. They truly were just trying to like understand. And I felt like they handled it the best way.

and like help her after we learned my ex confessed and we learned it was him that actually took her and caused these injuries. And so I've been a couple of times I've lectured with her at the university where that children's hospital is

to new medical school students and things like that. So we could explain to them how they should be treating parents and cases of suspected child abuse

“and what the most important things are in those moments.”

And that's to one, provide status and update to the parent, like you don't know who did what.

The most important thing is to take care of the child

or the victim or the injured person. So like their job is not, obviously everyone wants to know what happened. And everyone cares about a kid who comes in seriously injured obviously.

So I get that aspect but there's definitely a better way to go about it. And so I think actually we've gotten a lot of really good feedback from that and it has been pretty helpful. So I do appreciate that we can try to change

how other parents are treated in these situations who had nothing to do with it. So and I tried to explain to them as well.

“I think it's really important that the way that you treat”

the family and the parents can absolutely either negatively or positively affect that child's future care after their discharge from the hospital.

I could have never seen those eye surgeons ever again

in my life and been fine. But because they are the best in the state of what they do and in the nation, I was not going to allow my daughter to have care less than that. So I had no problem sucking it up

and seeing them and all for follow-up appointments and everything like that because she got the best care. Yes, they treated me horribly but like there other people probably aren't the same way and I wouldn't blame them for finding other doctors or whatever.

Did the demeanor of the treating physicians change after that moment of revelation? Yes, yes it did. Yes, so those last I'd say four days in the hospital were a lot better for me as a parent

because I was getting more explanations of what she was dealing with, what her diagnoses are, what the outcomes could be. They were just giving me more detail and I felt like I was able to actually ask questions without feeling like that could be used again.

It was me in a way, you know what I mean? So yeah, it was huge. And it's really sad that I had to get to that point and wish, you know. But again, I understand in cases of horrible abuse of a child, they're all very upset and concerned as well.

It was heartbreaking to hear Nicole talk about the experiences she had in the hospital when the doctors were treating her daughter and while I agree with her that it might be very human of them to act that way, it doesn't make it helpful or compassionate. Interestingly, in all my conversations with CAPS,

I find them to be some of the least judgmental people I've spoken to about abuse. CAPS are made of tough stuff, they have to be. They develop a necessary tolerance to looking into the darkest corners of humanity.

So it tracks that it would shake them up less than their colleagues. I asked Nicole if that reflected her experience with the CAP in her case. I'll do, I do think she had a difference, like, I don't know really how to word it,

but maybe like a different perception of the situation just based on what she's dealt with. Like she's maybe seen situations where it looks like child abuse, but then they realize later it's not. It really is something so odd, so whatever.

But she's also, you know, regularly testifying and trials of similar shaken baby situations. So she's seen it all. She knows what defenses trying to do or say.

And, you know, one in a million chance

that things this happening and she doesn't put up with it. It's like, "I, my job, her job is to rule out child abuse." So she is looking for every way or every diagnosis possible that is not shaken baby or child abuse related injury.

“So they're, yeah, I think it is very helpful”

that she specifically is in the child abuse field when looking at something like an injury like this

- Do you think that it's better for parents who are in your situation, who are the non-offending parent, who maybe does show up at the hospital, not having any idea what happened? I mean, do you think it's better?

If there's a child abuse pediatrician on staff, versus, you know, obviously there are many hospitals in the country that do not have a child abuse pediatrician on staff.

“- Yeah, no, I think it is in my specific experience,”

it was very useful, just because of the difference and how we retreated and how I really felt like they were trying to rule out everything that could have happened or what she was dealing with versus trauma-saw.

These things are the first hospital before she was life-lighted.

So a brain hemorrhage without blonde trauma so immediately, you know, abuse of head trauma situation happened. So, you know, I don't know enough about medical terminology or diagnoses or things like that with like brain hemorrhages but it does obviously make a lot more sense

when you could put all the pieces together. So, a day four, you're waiting for the eye exam because the retinal hemorrhaging along with the brain hemorrhage and with the child abuse pediatrician, they know it to look for, you know, they see this all the time, everyday.

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We all like to think we know what we would do in one of these moments. As I read through a count after a count this season of a woman defending her husband in the face of mounting evidence

that he'd put her baby in the hospital, I found myself thinking that if my husband did something like this, he'd be lucky if the cops got to him first. And in the abstract, I feel this way because it's easy and comforting to think

that the choice would be clear that it would just be black and white.

But I've never been where Nicole has been.

I've never had to face that precipice. I've never had my partner tear my world apart the way that Nicole stood. I'm curious, kind of, so you know, you have this moment of revelation with your ex.

And then how did things play out from there

“in terms of criminal charges, custody, all of that kind of thing?”

- Yeah, that is one of the hardest parts of all of it as well. Because he was such a good dad, such a good husband, couldn't believe it. Obviously, I had a protective order couldn't be around my youngest daughter at all.

So, had to move to a different location, went to jail that night that he could fast. His family went and got him out of jail. I was waiting around for his criminal proceedings to happen and to finish up with

to kind of make my final decision on what I was going to do. And I know that sounds crazy, but I think it's really difficult to be in that situation to know what to do, especially because we had just such a great family and you don't know if it's best for the kids,

and I'm like, well, I'll always be around the kids

when he's with them if we stay together, so I can keep them safe. So there's always thoughts going through your mind and you don't actually know what the right decision is going to be.

So, his criminal proceedings happened. He pled down and it was a class A-vistimeter instead of a felony. And he got six days in jail because that's all the paid time off that he had.

Yeah, worked for a defense contractor and I ever lost his security clearance or his job. And how to do like, gosh, how many hours of community, 40 hours of community service? And that was pretty much it.

So there was nothing put in place to protect me or my kids. So, I mean, after, yeah, I did file for the divorce basically a week after his sentencing and how long, what kind of time period was that?

I imagine that took some time to play out. Maybe four months, four or five months. Nothing is put in place to like protect basically the victim or like the protective parent of the victim. So, he proceeded to find me for joint custody

of my children for like a year and a half because he thought that he had any shot in that. And I also had to fight with the state because DCFS closed the case as soon as like, they did a video review of my home with me

and saw like I was a protective parent and the kids were safe so they closed the case. So DCFS could not help me in the divorce

“with like, did they make a determination about him, though?”

I mean, obviously, right, or no? Because he wasn't living at our house, I think they were like, oh, we just need to see if the mom is. Okay, so that was really unhelpful. I had to pay a lot of money out of my pocket

for my divorce attorney and we had to find-- - And there was no move. There was no move to terminate his, right? It said, oh, no, there wasn't. No, and that's another thing.

I just didn't know if that was going to be the right thing for my children. Were you surprised that more didn't happen as a result of that in terms of consequences for him? - I am, but also to the degree, I'm not,

because while I'm waiting for something that's happening for those four or five months, I'm like speaking to the prosecutor, I'm like, I don't know what the future looks like for my family type things.

- I thought back to my conversations with Alan and Roxana when I was listening to this story. Where is the line?

“When do we say someone can never be safe around children again?”

When do we give them a chance to earn that trust back? Knowing that taking the parent out of that child's life is going to hurt the child too. How do we balance those things? And this is the real gray area.

Not the ones the abuse denialists talk about,

where they intimate, the doctors can never know

what happened to a baby. But the one we all have to live in, where the questions are not so simple. For another family, redemption and reconciliation might have been possible.

But once the court case was over, Nicole's story took another turn. - And so this is a part that I hate to tell, but this just kind of shows you, people are hiding like an evil side to themselves.

It was right after his sentencing. I went to a sentencing with him. Right after a sentencing, he just gets up and walks out. Doesn't even wait for me.

We get to the truck, I get in. We're driving home, okay. So mind you, the night that this happened, he had a couple drinks of alcohol. I don't know how many,

“I just remember seeing him earlier that day,”

when my dad was over watching football, I saw him have some drinks. When we're driving home from his sentencing, I'm like, you will not ever drink a drop of alcohol in our home with our children ever again.

Whenever you're allowed back home,

that's never happening out of the, out of the question.

And he, like, lost it, just got so upset. I'm like, oh, so haven't learned your lesson. Okay, I'm not saying that was the cause of it, but let's just try to avoid things that maybe aren't the best. Again, he's not allowed inside my home.

Trots me up the house and, like, excuse my language. He says, he turns and looks at me.

Turns and looks at me and says, get the fuck out of my truck. I want a fucking divorce. There's no conversation about it. And proceeds kick me out of his truck.

“And I said, so you just used me to get out of a felony.”

He says, your damn fucking ride I did, get the fuck out. So yeah. Yeah, so that's who I was dealing with all along. Did not know. Obviously knowing what I know now,

I would have let him rot in prison and terminated his parental rights,

knowing that there really was never any chance

to save our family all along. Was that something that he used basically in his legal defense of, like, look, I still have this intact family and my wife is still standing by me.

And he was letting me go to the prosecutor saying, like, I don't know what's happening with our family. All these things, I don't. He is the provider for our family at this point. I was like getting my grad degree, things like that.

So he definitely, definitely used me

“in the worst way possible at given what he has done”

to my child and my children and to me. And to what he put us through and then to do that to me at the end of all of it, pretty awful, pretty evil. And so honestly, I'm just going to tut my own horn.

I'm really proud of myself for always putting my kids first

and letting them still have our relationship with their dad, no matter, like, how horrible he was in that whole situation. So, yeah, it's just tough, you know? What is clear from Nicole's story and where her path diverges from the others

is that she was always going to put her children first. How is your daughter doing how was her recovery? Obviously, you're really rough right off the bat. She was a very healthy baby, very alert, very engaging. And then I remember leaving the hospital

and she was kind of barely opening her eyes. She wasn't really able to turn her neck. We already started physical therapy before we left the hospital. She just wasn't interacting.

“So I left the hospital with doctors telling me”

they don't know what's going to happen. And me accepting that I now had a special needs child and that I was now single mom. So a lot of things to deal with in eight days there. But anyways, yeah, she had right heap of pleasure.

So, you know, muscle weakness on the right side of her body just permanent brain damage on the back left part of her brain. So they're really worried about, like, gross motor skills and vision. She's got pale optic nerves in both of her eyes.

We just don't know how that's gonna affect her vision one day but right now she can see. So that's wonderful news. She's grown out of that heap of pleasure. She can run and walk normally

and the doctors told me she never would.

And she had about when she was like at one or so, she started to get pneumonia. Kind of frequently. And so I took her to her primary care pediatrician who is wonderful. And he was like, let's go get her tests at her swallowing tested

and then we found out she had a swallowing disorder because of the brain damage. So it was like her flap wasn't closing quickly enough so she was aspirating. And so we did feeding therapy for a while,

had to thicken all of her liquids for a couple of years and she grew out of that. So she's doing great. She can eat everything. She's running and walking normally.

She's been tested because she's gonna go to kindergarten in the next year. And she's been tested so she's gonna go to regular kindergarten and not special education program. Nothing wrong with it but it's very great

that with her background, she could go to a regular school. But yeah, you would see her and you would think that she is at a completely normal five year old kid. That has never gone through what she's gone through so. She is a miracle and the doctors told me that quite often.

She had, she was on anti-seizure meds twice a day for about four years. She kind of regressed a little bit with the seizures here and there but we leaned her off of the medicine. She hasn't had one sense in over a year.

So she's doing great with that too.

which is the neurologist in the high surgeons and that's it. She's doing great. Groups like fractured families

“and the endless media coverage spreading misinformation”

about child abuse medicine and those who practice it seek to erase stories like Nicole's. Experts such as Dr. Joseph Scheller, Dr. John Plunkett and Dr. Michael Hallick, along with so many others, deny the very existence of a story like this.

They argue on the stand for a fee that injuries like the ones Nicole's has been confessed to inflicting on their daughter aren't possible. And the doctors on the front lines, the people the most well trained to protect children

who are harmed, these people are trying to drive them out of existence, insisting that somehow we'd be safer without them. But we wouldn't be.

“If I ever found myself in a situation where abuse was suspected”

I want an expert. I want a cap because if it's not abuse, they're the one most likely to rule it out. And if it is, then I want to know what happened to my child. There's been a lot of fear mongering about this profession

and it's not that these doctors are perfect, but they're the best at what they do and we need them. Not long after I got that fateful email from John Stewart about Dr. Sally Smith, you know the one. Dear Ms. Skydeed, one of you journalists,

I got a really different type of email, also about Sally.

Kyle, who will only be referring to by his first name,

told me he'd reached out to Sally once years before, but he'd just been thinking about her again and when he Googled her, he was dismayed to find the internet ablaze with stories trashing her. He asked if I was still in touch with her and wrote quote,

"Please let her know that Kyle from those emails is still doing fine and is still so grateful. He knows she is no villain. She was the only one who was trying to help him. The only one who could see through what was really happening.

I asked Kyle if he'd be willing to share his story with us. Unfortunately, he was up for it." She took me to Florida when I was a year and a half

thinking or hoping that the other side of my family would never have anything

to do with me and that it would just be her and me. Kyle had it to mulch his childhood from the get-go, but eventually settled in Florida with his mother, who, like so many other perpetrators, had sought to isolate him. And she had been always so bitter that my father and my grandmother

had always stayed in contact and tried so much to separate us that when it finally happened on its own, she was just thrilled. As far as Kyle could recall, things started to take a turn when he was around eight years old, and the school he was attending flagged him for possible ADHD symptoms. Because this isn't Florida, I'm Florida's always been really big on school choice.

And my mother told me, "Well, you can't go back to the same school you did in third grade, because they do not have a good program for kids with learning disabilities." So we're going to go to a different school in a different district. It was still a normal public school, it wasn't a special school or anything like that, but they, I guess they had special program for kids with learning disabilities,

which it turned out, if I'm remembering correctly, it was just for 30 minutes a day I would go into this office with other kids, and they would let us play video games because they didn't know what to do. Interestingly, Kyle was eventually formally diagnosed with ADHD as an adult,

but not only did his mother never pursue an official diagnosis in his childhood,

in a pattern common to MVP cases, she used the possibility of ADHD as a jumping off point taskly. I mother then went online and started looking in because she felt newly empowered as the parent of a kid with learning disability, and so she would go online to different parent groups.

“And from only I think I can imagine, is that she looked into autism and more severe”

developmental or learning disabilities that would, the most appealing thing in the world for her, mean that she would have to be involved in my life well and to adulthood, that I would always need her in my life that I could not function independently. I remember she had never used the internet before this, but from fourth grade on, she was always online in these different groups. As with so many cases we've talked about on this show,

Kyle's mother's identity quickly became consumed with her allegedly special needs child. She started going to like, conferences in Orlando, and I didn't think much of it all, because in my mind this ADHD and autism thing all started at the same time, and they all were just sort of bundled into this one thing, and like whatever, they started me on Adderall, which whatever, I didn't really think anything about it. But starting when I was in fifth grade,

That certain foods, they didn't work with my body right, and they would go into my brain, and like they, they were digested in certain chemicals that would go into my brain, and they would impair my brain function, and that is why I was the way I was. So I now, there was a whole list of things I couldn't eat. I don't even remember what the internal logic was of things I couldn't, or couldn't eat. The umbrella was just gluten-free, gluten-free

casing free, which is just no dairy and no any sort of grain that had gluten, but it was also a whole host of other things, certain food diets, certain artificial sugars and sweeteners, just basically all I would know is that my mother would tell me what I could eat. I didn't think about it that much, but since I still visiting my father at this point in my life, I remember there's this weird interval where it was like, don't tell him you're on a diet. If you, if, whenever you're eating

“with him, try and order the things that you know you're allowed to eat, if you have to eat something”

you're not allowed to to hide the diet, go ahead, but just for the two days you're with him, and as little as possible. And I can just remember like we'd be in a motel and I'd be calling my mother and be like, yeah well I had to eat these pizza flavored pringles because he'd be

get suspicious if I didn't eat them, but of course the real story was I was never following my diet

when I was with my father. And I was also going through a whole bunch of different medications and new supplements that she'd read about online, and you know she had the pill box out for me, and I would just take the pills. Sometimes I get new ones, sometimes they change dosage, I didn't really ask. And that probably contributed to my appetite dropping, and I guess the appetite loss, combined with a various cryptid diet, means that I was barely growing between the ages of like

nine to 12 to 13 potentially. I didn't notice. I mean I had never been nine to 13 for it.

I didn't know what my weight or height was supposed to be. I was always conscious that I was a

skinny kid, but I didn't think much of it. And something that sanded out only in high size,

“as I remember it was in sixth grade, like a social studies class, and we were talking, they had”

like a movie going, and it was talking about like starving kits in Africa, and it would just be and my teacher was pointing to either a slide, or a movie, it's like what you can see, how skinny their arms and legs were. And then I just remember his eyes sort of like pausing when he looked at me. And I'm looking now, I was like, "Oh, I look pretty skinny too, but I'm not starving. I don't think." [Music]

Pre-teen boys notoriously eat like locus, and for good reason, they're supposed to be growing. But Kiles' special diet was beginning to take a huge toll on his health. Kiles' mom was putting him on numerous medications that she'd read about online, and the situation was treacherous for another reason. Kiles' mom had something else in common with many other perpetrators. She put herself through nursing school, while I was from the ages of like five to eight, I think,

and it's always the juxtaposition of how focused and together and my mother must have been

“in the early years of my life is just so start between what I knew her as, and my adolescence”

and early adulthood. And what I know her as from my adolescence is that someone that could never have been that together or organized, she just her mental state slowly degraded to be less and less functional, and she'd get more and more paranoid, she couldn't keep work relationship to her job, but I think just motherhood and the drive to be a good mother providing, it just her source of identity fueled her, which I think then just made the idea of being the mother to a disabled child

who would always need her just became all the more appealing. Do you think, can I ask, do you think it was about being a good mother? Do you think it was about being seen? That's a good mother. I think it was both, I mean, being seen, I know as the year to when on being seen was the

and like we're here and Florida away from all her family, I don't remember her really having

regular friends or to my knowledge, she's never had a real relationship after divorcing my father.

“She wasn't really performing, there's no one to perform for, I think. I think just the idea of”

motherhood and being needed meant something to her, having being the only one that took care of me, taking like she could have easily, whatever happened between her and my father, she could have easily taken me to her family back in Ohio, or like a couple hours drive away. If she needed help or support, if she needed help, taking care of her now child as a single mother, it was there, she didn't want that. For whatever reason that wasn't appealing, she wanted being the one solely

responsible for raising a child meant so much to her. In addition to the restrictive diet and unnecessary medications, Kyle was subject to intense educational psychological and emotional abuse.

“His mother told him he would never be capable of living an independent life, that no one loved him.”

Somehow, through sheer will and extraordinary resilience, Kyle made it through school and eventually out of his mother's house. And in an eerie echo of other stories we've told on this show, Kyle only realized what had happened to him when he discovered a box of papers at his mother's house. There was a series of folders just about me when I was in school. And I really, really, really didn't want to read that because this is when I was still in the mindset that there had been

a diagnosis. It was mistaken. And I didn't want to read all these documentations saying, yeah, this kid is disabled. Yes, he has autism. Yes, he can't do this or that. I thought, you know,

this was the big binder of documentation that you always had proving that I had this or was that

at triadio. And I didn't, I didn't want to. But next day, I just, like, okay, let's get it over with. I need to flip through these, see what these people with school were actually saying about me. And first things I noticed, like, okay, it's the email from the teacher. Like, way, all of these teachers were saying that they didn't think I needed this extra help. And it was just my mother yelling at them and reporting them for violating IEP program or whatever. Like, that's

weird. And then I found the first thing I was after the note from the teachers. It was a dependency petition. And a couple of pages in the middle were missing. But it was just like the front page, how they were bringing the petition in my name. Like many other survivors, Kyle's memory of events is not crystal clear. And the intervention that happened when he was a teenager was news to him. I'm like, when did this happen? It said it was when I was 13. And I did

“I remembered, I do remember. And this is the only part I do remember. Some one had come to the door”

when I was on the loan. And I have no idea what I talked to her about. But I remember afterward, my mother calling me from a gas station saying, "Just tell me what you told her I won't be mad." And then from there, it was just reports who all signed at the bottom by Dr. Sally Smith. And I was just reading from top to bottom each one. And I can't really explain how I processed this, or what was really going through my mind. But I just, my mind cannot stop racing. I have no recollection

whatsoever of this being in connection with child protective services. Or I had no knowledge that this had been going on despite, obviously having spoken to a CPS officer. I don't know if she interviewed herself that way when I was on the loan. And I have no idea how it was in my mother's custody, the entire time. This was happening, especially as I later found out, that my mother had been in content of court refusing to show up for many times. But it was just the letters,

the reports from Sally Smith's saying, "First impressions, I was very concerned because

child did not seem to have any symptoms of any type of developmental disorder or autism." And she would list through the change in my weight percentile from the years I was on the

should be growing or not growing. But just going through the record she had, apparently I went, I stayed basically the same weight for three years. So I went from what was the 75th percentile for my age when I was nine until like the bottom 15th or 10th percentile when I was 11. And but then in a follow-up reports, it mentioned how I gained 20 pounds in between.

“And then the pieces sort of slipped into place because I remember when I was 13.”

From the year between 13 and 14 suddenly, my mother would be taking me to checkers for lunch every day. I could get a big burger but without the bun, none of the catchup and mustard because of the dyes and I could have a sprite because it didn't have the dyes. But you can have all of the

fries you want, grease is good. Kyle was never removed from his mother's custody, but once

eyes were on her, she relented on the food restrictions. Dr Smith's report was clearly flagging this 20 pound gain happened after child protective services was called. Common sense would say that if something changes once apparent is under investigation, it could be just because they're under

“investigation. And what is the whole situation definitely there's nothing to laugh about but”

the part that is worth laughing at is whenever she mentioned my mother in the reports was just a combination of can we please get this woman evaluated as well because I know that is not my authority

but good for my mother has always been paranoid especially after I went into college that I was

talking about her to everyone. I spent my entire life trying to pretend she didn't exist. I would never mention my parents but she would always feel like she would whenever she checked in when he's like who all of you been talking to. I read the reports and you know it was suspected luncheils and by proxy I had to look up what that was and that there had been a word for the thing that was going on that I had just never heard before that there had been someone when I was 13 that had seen me

that had flagged that at the very least I should be evaluated to see if I actually had these conditions as opposed to just trusting it all the individual points where she said these doctors only known these doctors evaluated Kyle the only notes they ever have is that the mother said he has these symptoms and they reported in my record that I had autism based on my mother reports and she had like she wrote four different five different reports throughout the time and each one it's like

every new piece of evidence the mother is giving us is just a doctor saying the mother reported

that Kyle has autism no matter how deep they dug and never there was never a doctor

that ever actually made a diagnosis or even suggested it it was one time when I was nine she told

“my pediatrician she read things online in the groups about the things you need to say”

to have the doctor say this Kyle was stunned that someone had seen and understood what was happening to him when so many others had missed it or even if they'd suspected had stayed silent it had been a tough road for Kyle to separate himself from his mother even when he'd come of age after I turned 18 she did through a whole lot of illegal means get me on disability payments which I was for several months after I had been getting disability payment I was on the

where that it was happening I one time when she I was this is before I went off to college so I was still living with her taking occasional classes at the community college not doing great and I in her room the drawer a bunch of letters addressed to me and it was forms from the the hearing to get me disability benefits and it was just saying a transcript they were all sent to me the letters were addressed to me but I never got them she'd hit them like a transcript saying

the hearing Kyle could not appear and his mother says this is because he cannot be around other people without getting so nervous that he broke down the hives so and he has she brought a note

represent him at the hearing and then because obviously even I represent at the hearing there

“had to be an application with my signature on it I found and her drawer by the desk notepad”

where she just practiced writing my signature over and over again. Dr. Sally Smith reports emphasized the harm Kyle was experiencing beyond his diet the unnecessary medications and treatments the abuse and restriction he was being subjected to in the end Kyle remained in his mother's care but it was only once he had discovered Sally's reports that Kyle realized that this intervention limited as it had been was the reason his mother stopped starving him and my mother just wants to that

now that I know the timeline was okay you magically are able to whatever you want to want you take these enzymes but she still persisted after that to take me to get to speech there

“p. physical therapy special classes for kids with developmental disabilities, basketball classes,”

a special helper at school still forged my signature falsified testimony to get government

benefits into her accounts all on the idea that I was disabled despite never actually having

gotten the diagnosis and at that point it was like okay you could have made excuses up until I was 13 which just she genuinely believed this she she fell into this rabbit hole about difference severe developmental disabilities kids could have and the health they need she thought herself competent to diagnose this and thought you know I love the idea of being a mother with a kid of special needs I want to give all these things he needs

but she was told by a pediatrician specializing in an abuse that these are actually harmful I at least the very least it seems to he should get a full psychological examination

which Dr Smith said at the end of all of her reports a full evaluation which never happens

and from that point on she knew that at the very least it was highly questionable whether I actually had this diagnosis and there was a strong likelihood of potential that everything she was doing was harmful but she just dug in she she stopped the diet because that is she would probably like a consent agreement towards like we will drop this if you

“stop the diet that's the only thing she changed and from that point it makes so much sense”

because at that point on any time any teacher anyone casual comments that I might not be disabled it would just trigger a rage like this the whatever teacher administrator in my IEP counsel of trends when I was in a public high school suggested that I might not need all these accommodations just she was out like I was not she was not allowed on my IEP plan ever again the calculus of whether or not to remove a child is fraught in high stakes but for Kyle at least

he wishes that the intervention had gone further that he'd gotten some of his childhood back

the assumption that being with the parent is always going to be the best solution and should

always be the goal for every situation no matter what time you're seeing it will always feel wrong to me I I I will always breathe that I didn't get those years in a situation away from my parents and as much as I did love my father for the years we were visiting he did several years later this was a few months after I had found doctor Sally's reports doctor Smith's reports I did find out that several months after that my father had died of an overdose

Kyle went on to claim a future for himself the defied the bleak independent picture his mother had painted not only did he attend college he went on to law school and is now working in a prestigious clerkship for a touch Kyle shared some recommendation letters that his professors had written for him for the gig just like Sally saw him all those years ago these professors saw him too Kyle is a rare talent when wrote hands down the strongest performer in my class his analytical

skills are second to none the other letters are equally effusive praising him for not only his

he asked me to pass on his gratitude to doctor Sally Smith who's report he'd hung on to all these years

I had a better idea I thought that he should tell her Kyle I mean honestly you you really should

“you know realize how much credit you need to take yourself for getting yourself to this position”

because the trauma that you went through you know is is very difficult for people to overcome there's broad range of um you know manifestations of how these kinds of traumatic experiences in childhood end up just you know following people all through their lives and you know serving as

barriers for them to be successful and things like that and honestly especially when you know we

realize how much of this you've had to do on your own I'll just say it's it's very impressive and congratulations I'm getting yourself for you are I'm nothing if not stubborn I thought of you as my champion even if I don't remember meeting you when that holds true you're going through notes did you have notes about me other than the reports I have or because I was surprised you remember when I originally got your email I still worked at the top protection team and so I had access

to the file and I actually pulled the file from the archives to look at the more detailed information I recognized your name but I didn't really remember all the details and so yeah we had

“medical records of yours and I think like the multidisciplinary staffing report some things like that”

as I mentioned I've gotten more in habit of speaking to other people who might help as sort of like tie breakers you know when it seems like this is happening the mother saying it's something else if you can get some people that can or you know some evidence that can you know sort of provide support one way or the other that can be very important so yeah I mean I did have some additional things beyond what I I don't anymore when I left there I was unable to take that information but I

but I did have a little bit of you know sort of background that I had looked at more recently than 2002 I think was when I originally saw you and Sally anything anything you want to say here at the end

“you know I really so happy to see that I'm sure day to day you have issues that you have to deal”

with and things like that but overall I mean from what you're describing of your of your life and your path and especially last four or five years I mean man I feel like you've got a great life before you hopefully and it boards my heart that people who go through trauma like you did as a child overcoming and you know even when people don't help maybe sometimes you know what the effort that you make is the thing that makes a difference and on the outside chance that

you can make a little bit of a difference in one of these children's lives I I think that's that's kind of what I feel like child abuse pediatricians get out of bed for. As Kyle and I were wrapping up this season I got another email from Kyle and attached was a selfie with him and Sally she'd gone to see him perform in a community theater production of Pride and Prejudice. Kyle was Mr. Darcy of all the caps who've gotten dragged through the

mud and lost few years Sally has gotten at the worst and the damage to her reputation and the target this has put on her fellow caps these were not unintended consequences. Back in the summer of 2023 days before the release of Take Care of Maya Holly Simington one of the founders of fractured families posted about the film on the Facebook page which she notes features many families from their group it's going to put a huge spotlight on medical kidnapping she wrote they're going

to be people who watch this who've never heard of a cap or this issue before she encouraged people

who'd received a differential diagnosis to keep sharing their stories and in the years since the

looking for the truth because even in this climate of such intense misinformation and disorientation

“I think people still care about the truth I think the truth still matters I genuinely believe”

that nothing about Take Care of Maya is going to stand the test of time least of all its depiction of Dr. Sally Smith. Ultimately the measure of how much you care about something isn't how loud you are about it it's what you're willing to sacrifice for it and even after everything she's been through one of the things I admire the most about Sally is that she hasn't lost her compassion you might think she'd hold animus for people like John and Viviana who've dedicated their time

to trying to make her life miserable but she really doesn't seem to she understands as I do that what happened in these families was a tragedy and that everyone involved however unpleasant they

“might be is a human being we can hold on to our empathy even for those who do monstrous things”

and I would argue that we should it seems unlikely that there will ever be justice for Nolan Kelly but that doesn't mean we should forget about him abuse can happen for varying reasons sometimes it's compulsive sometimes it happens in a caregiver's worst moment brought on by exhaustion frustration and other circumstances that could have been alleviated before things to go horrible turn but we can't solve any of these problems if we insist on keeping horrible things that happened

to children in the dark how best to protect children can and should be a subject of robust good faith debate but we have to look at it head on and all the while we have to hold on to our humanity

“I think you got to be you got to be pretty compassionate for the people who just happened”

you know the bystanders the non-affending parent and the idea that you know if you're in an intimate relationship with that person or you're not going to likely call them wires left and right and if somebody is insisting that oh this is what happened and it's

perfectly innocent and oh I would never do such a thing and that kind of thing then

that's pretty hard for that person to I mean you know ideally and I saw it a lot where they would get a little that non-affending parent would get more information the medical stuff would be presented in some way to them and they're just like wow I did not think that was even possible but I'm choosing the child you know I thought I knew this guy I thought I knew this woman but whatever that's all about you all take care of you know the case plan and the law enforcement

and stuff I am doing whatever I have to do to protect this baby of mine those people need and deserve a lot of support special thanks to the many experts thinkers and scientists especially the many child abuse pediatricians who lent us their wisdom and their voices this season and to those who bravely shared their personal experiences with our listeners thank you for trusting us

I could never make the show without my incredible team my co-executive producer and partner

true crime or I gossip are incredible researchers and fact checkers Erin Agai and Jessavie Randall are super lit of story editor Nicole Hill are top-notch editor and producer Greta Stromquist and Robin Edgar who makes everything sound perfect last but not least are operations manager Nola Karmuch who is the only reason this show makes it onto the air each week and the only reason I make it anywhere on time I'm so grateful to be working with such brilliant intellectually honest

compassionate people I sleep well at night because this show is in your capable hands I'm Andrea Dunlop and this has been season seven of nobody should believe me and while the season

might be ending the story never does we'll be here with you each week watching it all unfold

you