“You Guys Have it Completely Wrong”

- True story, media.

“- I don't remember exactly how she said it,”

but I said, you're taking her and I said,

I work in the ER, I know when kids are abused, I know sometimes it's difficult, I said, but you guys have this completely wrong. What happens when the person being reported for abuse by hospital is not only a doctor himself,

but a doctor at the hospital who reports him. And what happens when that case is litigated in the media, long before it ever sees a courtroom. The voice you just heard is Dr. John Cox, an ER physician at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin,

who is charged with abusing a baby girl that he and his wife were in the process of adopting. The story broke in the national news as part of NBC's Do-No harm series, a company of stories from journalist Mike Hicks

and Baw, which purports to be about misdiagnosis of child abuse. But like the other cases included in this series, including, of course, my sister, Megan Carter's,

a closer look reveals that the most crucial information

about the case never made it in to Hicks and Baw's reporting. For one thing, while Hicks and Baw's coverage presented the Dr. John Cox case as a wrongful accusation, evidence of an out-of-control system, much like in my sister's case,

Hicks and Baw's coverage landed into the middle of an active criminal investigation. And he never did circle back to say how it all ended. - A plea deal today in the case of a Milwaukee area, Dr. Accused of intentionally hurting his daughter.

Dr. John Cox pleaded no contest today to child neglect a lesser charge that resulted no jail time. - This outcome and the actual evidence, the lead to it, were blip in the media coverage of this case.

Much more of it was focused on John himself, and the fact that he didn't seem much like a child to be certain. - Parents who are intentionally abusing their children, do not then bring them in for medical care, saying, "I think I hurt this baby."

Like that just doesn't fit for me. So that's where all that stacked, plus really knowing John's character, it just doesn't fit. - For me and for many, many other people,

John is a measuring stick of goodness. He is the person in safety, his wife, are the people to whom I aspire to put that amount of good into the world. - The story of Dr. John Cox hits on a visceral fear

“that people we know and love can surprise us in the worst way.”

That perhaps people who are not otherwise monstrous could do something terrible to a child. And this story, perhaps more than any other I've covered, shows exactly who pays the price when the media gets things wrong.

I'm Andrea Dummup, and this is the nobody should believe me, special report. As the show is grown over the years, there are many stories that we and you have wanted to deep dive on,

something more than would fit in one of our case files episodes, but there aren't quite a full season. In these special reports, we're going to be bringing you one case, all the facts, all the plants. So yes, that means just like with our full seasons,

if you are subscribed to our show on Apple Podcasts or Patreon, you can binge this four-part series ad-free right now.

And as always, subscribers also get access

to our subscribers, exclusive twice monthly show, nobody should believe me after hours. And if you're not a subscriber, just stay tuned and listen for free, tweak.

We appreciate all of you so much for supporting the journalism of this independent show. We'll be right back with part one of our special report on John Cox. Hixon-Boss coverage of the John Cox case

is prominently placed on the Juno harm homepage, where I have spent an unfortunate amount of time under the blazing headline. An ER doctor was charged with abusing his baby, but 15 medical experts say there's no proof.

It's a compelling headline,

“but the truth is a lot more complicated.”

If you listen to our last season, you may remember hearing from Matthew Torbinson. - I'm a deputy just a attorney in Milwaukee County. I've prosecuted child maltreatment cases for 22 years now. I supervise our sense of crimes

in our child protection advocacy unit, our domestic violence unit, and that I handle directly all child homicide cases where it is either child abuse or child neglect, that is the result of the child passing away.

- I originally reached out to Matthew to interview him about his expertise on abusive head trauma. But I soon found out that we both have a bit of a history with my kicks and buzz reporting. The case of Dr. John Cox,

the heroic ER doctor accused of hurting his baby, would forever change the way Matthew looked at his work and leave him questioning everything.

- So I was notified by the Waluettos of Police Department

“that they had a case involving an emergency room physician”

and an infant child 29 days old who had bruising in a linear fashion on both arms. One bruising the back that was also linear in nature and then a repeat skeletal survey demonstrated that the child had a left-clavical fracture.

- From the jump, this case was fraught because the people being asked to evaluate the child's injuries were John Cox's colleagues. - There was an initial review at Children's Hospital was gone to buy the caps team, the child abuse pediatricians

were involved in an initial review, but they actually took a number of cautionary steps to make sure that there was nobody who knew of Dr. Cox who was making an evaluation of child abuse in this case. And so they brought on a nurse practitioner

who actually worked in a different county to do an evaluation of the child and that nurse practitioner concluded that the injuries were not consistent with the history that was provided by Dr. Cox

“and were consistent with a mechanism of abuse.”

- Dr. John Cox and his wife, Dr. Sadie DeBrosi, a pediatric oncologist, started the process to adopt LG as we'll be referring to her when she was born in April of 2019. They'd matched with the birth parents through a Catholic charity.

LG would be the couple's third adopted child.

They were already raising two boys who were then four and two. Their younger son was born with Spina Bifida and required daily medical care. There was no reported history of violence in the home, so it's easy to see why people would be shocked

that this couple was the subject of a child abuse investigation. They probably seemed like heroes to most people who knew them. On May 6, 2019, John's wife Sadie took their two boys to Washington, D.C., where she would be testifying

before Congress for an increase in Spina Bifida funding. According to my kicks and bars reporting on the case, on the evening of May 8, a friend of John's

“came over to the house to watch the Milwaukee Bucks game.”

The friend spoke to Hicks and Bob and told him that it was almost annoying how D.C., John was with LG. You could tell he was genuinely in love for the friend told Hicks and Bob. After the game, the friend went home

and John and the baby were on their own to the night. Cox later told police that because he often worked overnight shifts at the hospital, his wife Sadie was usually the one up with the baby at night. But with Sadie out of town, John kept to 13

with a feed around 10 or 11 p.m. and then one at 2 a.m. The baby, he said usually woke up for the day around 5 or 6 a.m. Sadie was scheduled to return on May 9th around noon, but at 6 a.m. that morning, she got a panic phone call from John.

John reported that the baby had a woken at 5 a.m. and that he'd brought her in bed for a cuddle. He said he'd been scrolling his phone and accidentally nodded off only to be woken by the baby's cries around 6 a.m. John then reportedly noticed that the baby wasn't using her left arm

and became concerned that he'd rolled over on her. The couple hopped on FaceTime and will Sadie didn't notice any obvious injuries. She urged John to take the baby to their regular pediatrician, Dr. Palmerance.

There's a phone call according to Dr. Cox initially.

His first phone call is Dr. Dr. L Palmerance.

Who is the pediatrician for the child? And initially Dr. Cox says that Dr. Palmerance doesn't answer the phone. There's eventually a phone call that gets through to Dr. Palmerance and he agrees to see the child and meet with Dr. Cox. He performs a physical evaluation of the child

and everything that he's seeing in that physical evaluation tells him that this child needs to be evaluated for physical abuse. John brought LG in because of her arm and his concern that he'd broken her collarbone by rolling over on her. But when Dr. Albert Palmerance examined the baby,

he also noticed linear bruising on each of the girl's arms and on her lower right back. According to the police report during the appointment, John joked that one of the bruises might have come from setting the baby down on her pacifier. Dr. Palmerance was not only the regular pediatrician for John's children,

but had trained John during his residency, reportedly became emotional and told John that they needed to make a report to the child advocacy team. Just to cover all the bases. John said he understood he'd had training in child abuse himself and he worked in a pediatric ER.

He'd made referrals himself. Dr. Palmerance page, the on-call doctor, Hilary Pesca, and Pesca, a colleague of John's told him she'd keep him updated. So then at this point, Dr. Palmerance steps away and said, you know, because of his personal relationship with the parents.

Is that right? Yeah, he makes a referral to the child abuse team at Children's Hospital, Wisconsin. He takes photographs to show the linear fashion of the bruising and the locations of the bruising on the child and also forward those photographs onto the cap's team.

Mr. represented in the media, this is not a situation

“where Dr. Palmerance sees the child and says nothing to see here.”

Everything seems normal. He also felt that there was enough of a reason to refer the child out. Absolutely, and when he's seeing the child, he doesn't know about the classical fracture yet. He just sees the linear bruises on both arms

and the linear bruise on the child's back. And so it's the bruising alone that causes him to make the referral to the cap's team. After his visit with Palmerance, John took LG with him to pick Sadie

in their two boys up at the airport.

Later that afternoon, Sadie brought LG in for X-rays recommended by Palmerance on account of the babies' decreased use of her left arm.

“Palmerance had also been asked by the child that Vixie team to make a referral to CPS,”

which he did. That evening, John and Sadie got an initial visit from CPS, who reported that the bruises on the baby seemed "underwhelming." After leaving the couple's house, the CPS worker called her supervisor and said that the safety plan wasn't needed. John and Sadie were asked to bring LG to the child

that Vixie centered following day to be evaluated by the child abuse team.

But by the next morning, the plan had changed.

John got a call from a CPS worker, telling him that because he and his wife worked at the hospital, she was going to take LG to her appointment instead. This wasn't a normal investigation for the child advocacy team. This was their colleague and friend. This was anything but business is usual. So that team is instructed by the head of the team at the time,

who is Dr. Lynn Sheets. She instructs the e-child abuse pediatrician to review the case to document the injuries and take a detailed medical history from Dr. Cox, but to not provide any ultimate opinions on the case because they do in fact work with Dr. Cox. So to essentially gather all the information and document as well as possible, the pattern of the injuries, the location of the injuries and the medical history provided by Dr. Cox.

Dr. Hilary Peska notes the bruises and orders of follow-up skeletal survey and labs to screen for blood disorders that could cause bruising through normal care and handling. But because she knows John, she doesn't weigh in on whether or not the injuries or diagnostic of abuse. After LG's follow-up is it, CPS contacted the police. Now there were dual active investigations into John, and this time CPS did put a safety plan in place.

John and Saiti could no longer be alone with their children. Saiti's parents moved in with the couple to provide supervision. The child advocacy team knew there was a massive conflict of interest in evaluating the child of one of their colleagues, so they called in someone from a different county, Dr. Rita Ventura,

“to evaluate LG. Do you know why a nurse practitioner was brought in in this case?”

And this was someone with training in child abuse. This is not a super uncommon thing to have the person doing an evaluation, not be a child abuse pediatrician because they're just not that many of them. Yeah, and she's actually a doctor. She's just a doctor on nursing, but she's specialized training in the diagnosis of child maltreatment and did child abuse evaluations. In fact, all the time, it was just in a different jurisdiction that she did them

outside of Milwaukee County. And so she was specifically brought in because she had expertise in this area and did not know Dr. Cox. And so she did the evaluation, and she concluded that the injuries were consistent with abuse and not consistent with the history that was provided by Dr. Cox. Meanwhile, John and Saiti went on the defense. On May 14, they filed a grievance against Dr. Ventura, who'd performed the examination, and demanded to know who had signed off on it.

Meanwhile, the birth parents of LG and the charity that had organized her adoption were informed about the investigation. Because the adoption was still pending, the birth parents still had legal rights. And now, they wanted LG to be removed from John and Saiti. An emotional moment that Saiti recalls in Hicks and Moss reporting. Listening to this tape of Saiti is heart-wrenching, and I'm a stranger. So I can't imagine what it was like for their colleagues,

being caught between their duty to the baby whose injuries her caregivers could not adequately explain, and knowing what the outcome could be for John, who they, by all accounts, liked and admired. Hicks and Moss reporting, as it often does, frames this abuse diagnosis as an overzealous power move by child abuse doctors who are rushing to judgment. But in this particular case, everyone appears to have gone the extra mile to be sure. After Dr. Ventura's abuse determination,

they took another step. Dr. Sheets did another thing too, which I thought was

review the case, but she removed all identifiers. So they didn't know who the people were that

“were involved. So you had a cap doctor looking at it, not knowing the individuals that are involved.”

You had the nurse practitioner with a child abuse experience also looking at it. Both of them coming independently to the same conclusion. The grievance cox and debris filed against Dr. Ventura challenged her qualifications and claimed that she hadn't taken a proper medical history. The history, however, was exactly the problem. And what is the history that Dr. Cox is giving in these initial appointments? What is he saying happened? The initial history that Dr. Cox

provides is that the child woke up and was fussy that he brings the child into bed with him to sue the child that he puts the child in the crux of his arm and while the child is in the crux of his arm, he's looking at his cell phone and reading the morning news. And then he claims that he fell asleep that he woke up to the child's cries and that when he woke up to the child's cries, he was on top of the child. A small sidebar about co-sleeping because I can hear all of my

fellow parents' clench right now. The American Academy of Pediatrics does recommend against co-sleeping while also acknowledging that many parents will at some point do it. Furthermore, these recommendations very globally and co-sleeping is near universal in many other countries. The specific risk of co-sleeping is smothering and strangulation and there are many factors that affect this risk. Soft surfaces falling asleep in an armchair rather than on a mattress, pillows and blankets on the bed,

and whether or not the parent is under the influence of alcohol or drugs. The story John told about bringing a fussy baby into bed for a cuddle is relatable to many parents, but did it actually explain the baby's injuries? It's not a plausible explanation for the linear bruises on the arm or the back, so we can already say that's not it. What he was providing

that explanation for ultimately was the left-clavical fracture and that actually has been studied

pretty extensively and there's a study of its 4,670 infants who died in a co-sleeping setting. 3,218 of those infants had a complete skeletal survey after they passed away. Not a single one of those children had a clavical fracture as a result of co-sleeping. There were 10 cases total where there were fractured bones in the child's body, but none of them were clavical fractures. So what he's already telling us when we look at the studies and when we look at the research

without even seeing the photographs of his re-enactment without even getting more details about how long it was that he rolled over and was on top with the child. We're already looking at an implausible situation just as it relates to the clavical fracture. The clavical fracture didn't actually show up on initial x-rays, but in a follow-up skeletal survey 10 days later. There's nuance to when and how these injuries are detected and dated, which will dive into in a future episode.

But in the beginning it was the bruises on the baby that were the source of the concern. What's John's explanation for the bruising? So if he comes in and the bruising is the injury and that's the injury that he's seeking to explain and he's telling this co-sleeping story,

“even he's telling the co-sleeping story before the clavical injury is discovered?”

Yes, he's telling the co-sleeping story before the clavical injury is discovered. But it's interesting, he's giving that history because he notices that the child is not using the left arm. Dr. Cox is a person who actually has a lot of experience with looking at child abuse related injuries in the context of the emergency room setting. He was actually the mentee of Dr. Lynn Sheets and he did a lot of research in the emergency room setting

related to injuries that are being detected in the emergency room setting that are concerning for child abuse, like bruising. Child abuse pediatricians are often portrayed, including by Hicks and Baugh, as all powerful lone wolves. But structurally, they're just not.

Caps are never the first doctor to evaluate a child. They're only there because someone else

is concerned about abuse. ER doctors like John are often the first line of defense, as he says himself. "I work in the ER. I know when kids are abused." Dr. Lynn Sheets, the capit children's Wisconsin, had done groundbreaking work on Sentinel injuries, seemingly minor injuries in infants that are shown to be precursors to more serious abuse. John had learned from Sheets directly that it was dangerous to ignore bruising on an infant

if the parents' story didn't make sense. And John's story had some holes.

“The explanation he gives for the bruises is quite honestly something that matches the mechanism”

for the bruises. He says he panics after he notices that he was sleeping on top of the child and so he picks up the child and he describes almost like a squeezing fashion, which is exactly how these bruises would have been inflicted on the child's arms. And that would also be something

the fingers and grabbing tightly. He knows the mechanism and he knows how it has to be explained.

“And so he's giving the explanation, but after the co-stepping incident is reported according to him.”

So he's saying, "I heard the child cry. I realized I had rolled over on the child and I grabbed them in such a way that it squeezed and caused those bruises." Yeah, in a panic state, I picked up the child and squeezed her because I was concerned about her welfare. Much of the media coverage of the John Cox case is hyper-focused on the question of whether or not John seems like a person who would abuse a child. There are a number

of anonymous colleagues quoted in my kicks and vase piece and friends talking to the local press about what a good person he is. What the media coverage spends much less time on is what actually happened to this baby. Because babies can't speak for themselves, the story the parent comes

“in with and whether or not it matches the injuries to the child is the crux of child to be”

as medicine. The story is everything. And beyond all of the medical nuance, there are things about John's story that just don't quite square. In the scenario John is describing, he knows the baby is breathing because she's crying, so he's not picking her up and squeezing her to revive her, and LG was only four weeks old when this happened, and she'd been born premature, meaning that she was even more fragile. And on top of that, John said he was worried

she was hurt. Why would he pick her up like this? When asked if he'd supported the baby's head when he picked her up, John told police that it had been the heat of the moment and that he couldn't recall. He described himself as panicking, but he was a parent of two other children and a doctor in a pediatric ER. And this story wouldn't turn out to be the whole truth. Not by a mile. A big focus of John Cox's defense and of the media coverage of the case were the supposed

15 experts who said there was no evidence of abuse. And we'll get to them. But not only did the initial child abuse expert diagnosed this as abuse, that diagnosis was confirmed by a blind review done by the hospital. What makes this case so unique and what led to the extraordinary fallout was the fact that many of the people being asked way in on whether or not John Cox had abused LG or his friends and colleagues. In addition to being his children's regular pediatrician,

Dr. Albert Pomeranz had trained John during his residency. Dr. Lynn Sheetz had been one of his mentors.

If you have never had to consider whether or not someone you know and love is capable of hurting a child,

I can tell you that I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy. The day that I first put a name to what I was seeing in my family was one of the worst days of my life. It's only competition is those following days when I realized that no one was going to do anything about it. To think that John's colleagues could coldly neutrally look at the facts in this case is fanciful. Doctors are human and to think that one of their own could be capable of this kind of harm must

have been devastating. The media, frankly, did a lot of PR for John Cox in this case. Most of the coverage was extremely sympathetic to him, with photos of him smiling with his other two children, John and Sadie looking bereft in LG's empty nursery and friends talking about what a good guy he is. I understand why it would be so hard to believe that John Cox would hurt a baby. But evidence-based medicine isn't about belief. And while there are plenty of child abuse

cases that are accompanied by history of violence in the perpetrator, there are also plenty that are not. You have exactly the kind of family that people do not want to believe what abuse their children. You have two married physicians, you know, pediatric oncologist is the wife like it's just like the most sort of heroic thing that most of us can imagine. And then, you know,

“they have two adopted children. And so I think there's also this sort of like one of them has this,”

you know, it has to find a bit of it. They have this medical complexity. So you just can you can imagine

how the community sees this couple, right? Like this is heroic, couple loving would never harm

their children. And I think that that's just an understandable emotional reaction and it's a really dangerous one. And it strikes at the heart of bias, right? Like we talk about in evaluating these cases, like not inserting race, not inserting gender in the assessments that we make in case or someone

for allegedly committing a crime or a doctor, like in this case, for allegedly committing physical abuse or actually committing physical abuse of a child. And what bias happens in those type of cases and what steps are taken to assess bias and remove bias from the equation. And on the one hand,

“I think you have the caps team who really took a number of affirmative steps to make sure that”

bias did not in any way, shape or form, play a role in the decisions that were made. And then on the other hand, I think you have all the doctors that he was seeking out who all had a relationship with them in some way, shape or form. And definitely we're asserting emotion and bias in their assessments. Throughout his do-no-harm series, which is largely focused on white middle-class parents who been accused of or charged with abuse. My kicks and ball likes to gesture at the issues of racial

and economic disparity that exist in child welfare. But he never seems to consider the flip side.

Maybe he should be asking himself the opposite question. What if he did really abuse his child? And he was able to get away with it because he was well-to-do employed, Caucasian, presented well in the emergency room? He doesn't ask that question. And that's the question in this case, right? That strikes at the heart of this case. Was Dr. Cox getting preferential treatment from the individuals that he was seeking because of who he was in relation

to the hospital. How important he was to the hospital, how respected he was in the hospital. And the relationships that he had established with the very people that he wanted evaluating the child. John Cox's defense relied on an extremely common logical fallacy about child abuse, that if any doctor who weighs in feels that certain injuries are not indicative of abuse, it means that the accused is innocent. So can you kind of walk through what other opinions about

“this case were shared with you as "exculpatory"? And I think the word "exculpatory" is doing a lot”

of inappropriate work in a lot of these pieces because I think like a second opinion that says

it's not abuse versus these other opinions that are, that's not "exculpatory". That's not a smoking gun. It's presented like a smoking gun, but it's not. So there was one physician that worked with Dr. Cox that was not affiliated with the CAPS team that worked in pediatric that evaluated the child. And he's the one that really commented on the observations that he had with Dr. Cox and the child while in the evaluation room. And the "clavical fracture" wasn't known at that time when he's

conducting that evaluation. And he is simply talking about the loving relationship that he's observing with his own eyes and using that as a big portion of his assessment. That carries very little weight with me for the reasons we already discussed. Then we had the dermatologists who

“evaluated the child who also documented all of the bruises that were documented previously,”

agreed that they were bruises, but accepted some of the accidental explanations that were given by Dr. Cox for how those bruises could have happened. For example, he said that he may have been patting the child during burping on her back and his wedding ring may have caused the injury. That was accepted. I rejected that pretty quickly because whenever we pat on the back, we're not that that's not an area that makes connection. And if it is, it's not hard enough to bruise.

And if it's hard enough to bruise, then our fingers should also be causing bruises too, not just the wedding ring. And so that same dermatologists also said that the child we're guarding the linear bruise on the back may have rolled over on a pacifier. And there was photographs of the pacifier taken. Well, the pacifier is curvy linear. It's not straight lined. And so if the child rolled over on the pacifier, you'd expect to see a curve bruise, you would not expect to see

a straight line as what we see on the child's back. So that didn't pass muster with me either with regards to the dermatologist's explanation. The other thing is the dermatologist is trying to say whether something's a bruise or not a bruise or a mimic for a bruise or some other condition. They're not trained to say how it happened. And so when I'm evaluating the opinions and the speculation of the dermatologist, I'm giving very little weight to her speculation because like I said,

those examples didn't make sense to me. I thought that I could clearly handle those on cross-examination of her. In addition to pomerance, John and Sadie took LG to two other doctors before she was removed

from their home. The first was dermatologist Dr. Yvonne Chu, who is referred to John and Sadie

by their pediatrician Dr. pomerance and saw LG on May 13th a couple of days after the incident. The other was a pediatrician called Dr. Craig Leach, who is also affiliated with children's hospital of Wisconsin. This visit appears to be the result of the grievance filed by John on May 14th

history because she hadn't spoken directly to John. The police report notes that Dr. Leach's

“report contained no new information. Importantly, none of these doctors would have weighed in on the”

more significant entry to broken clavicle because those images weren't available until the 30th. By which time LG had been removed from John and Sadie's custody. Other experts would weigh in on this piece, but we'll get to them. And the defense's expert opinions are up against two doctors with extensive training in child abuse. And while it might seem like a dermatologist would be the best doctor to evaluate a bruise, Matthew points to studies about bruising in the specific context

of child abuse investigations. Dr. Naomi Sugar, who did a study that leads to the line that a lot of people say, those who don't cruise rarely bruise. So if a child is not mobile, if they're not crawling, if they're not precruising or going on furniture, we should not expect a single seeing a single bruise on that child. And if we see a bruise, there should be an explanation for why that bruises on that particular child. So the research starts with that foundation. And then Dr. Lynn Sheets looked at

children in three different categories. She had children who were definitely abused. Children who may have been abused and were not quite sure if their abuse are not. And then children who are definitely not abused. And she looked at the medical records for those children before they suffered for the children that were abused, they abused injuries. And looked for a bruise that was observed on either somewhere on the location on the child's body or a torn frenulum. So the low piece

of tissue that connects our gums and our lips or underneath our tongue. She looked for an injury to one of those areas. And what she found was that there was a high correlation between children who were abused and suffered a really severe injury like a piece of head trauma. And they're being a preceding documented, sentinel injury, a bruise or a torn frenulum in that child's medical history preceding that incident. There was a much smaller percentage of

children in the category of may have been abused. Where there was also a percentage of those children that also had a sentinel injury. But in the children where we could definitively say they were not abused. Not a single one of those children had a sentinel injury in their medical history. The bruising alone had been concerning. And now the

clavicle fracture didn't match John's story. And then there was a third child abuse expert

“reviewed the case. I think another fact that's little known about this case is actually children's”

hospital Wisconsin was not involved with getting Dr. Nancy Harper to review this case. It was actually child protective services that independently sought out Dr. Nancy Harper and hired her and she provided a report to them and then they provided that report to me. I remember actually the first time I talked to Dr. Lynn Sheets and I informed her that Dr. Nancy Harper reviewed this case and authored her report and had come to a conclusion that the injuries were consistent with

abuse. Dr. Sheets had no idea. Dr. Nancy Harper confirmed the diagnosis of abuse, writing in a report that was later excerpt in the press, quote, "In summary there is no medical explanation for her injuries other than trauma." This constellation of injuries including cutaneous trauma and a clavicle fracture is clinically diagnostic of child physical abuse or inflicted injury. So by the time you issue charges, the three evaluations by medical professionals had been had had happened.

So you had the doctor of nursing who did the initial evaluation, the blind review by the CAC team at Wisconsin Children's and then the outside review by Dr. Nancy Harper. So all three of those evaluations came in. They all came to the same conclusion. So you issue charges and he's

“arrested and then what happens after that? I remember probably within, I actually organized him to”

be able to turn himself into out of custody intake court. And I remember within a day of his initial appearance, the story by my kicks and bomb hit the news of the 15 medical professionals say that it's not abuse. Matthew filed charges against John on January 23, 2020. And on the 27th, Mike Hicks and Bos do no harm piece went live. So what this indicates is that in the months between this incident and the charging decision he had been building his case and talking to. I mean

because Mike Hicks and Bos, you know, features, interviews with him, features, interviews, you know,

these sort of source, source from the sources from the hospital. So basically like following this incident

before he's even charged Dr. Cox is building up sort of his his defense sounds like. Yeah,

and the defense attorney asked if he could sit down and he and Dr. Cox, I believe you,

“and Dr. Cox wife met with the head district attorney, John Chism, and tried to have a conversation”

with them about not issuing charges and telling my then boss that I was coming to the wrong decision.

Based on what? Based on probably those what they refer to as 15 expert reports

“and saying that I got it wrong. John Cox had been building his case against the hospital.”

And now it was time for his press tour. So why is it that 15 medical experts are saying there's no

proof of abuse here? Well, because they evaluated the records. This story is part of a larger series

“of reports I've done about the work of child abuse medical specialists. That's next time on nobody should”

believe me. Nobody should believe me is executive produced written and hosted by me, Andrew Dunlop. Our co-executive producer is Mariah Gossett. Our editor is Greta Stromquist, research and fact checking by Erin Agai, additional research by Jessa V Randall. Our production manager is Nola Karmish. Music from blue dot sessions sounds snap and slipstream. (upbeat music)