Crime Weekly - S3 Ep162: Maya Kowalski: The Court Rules in Favor Of....(Part 3)

Episode Date: December 1, 2023

Maya Kowalski was ten years old when her father brought her to Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital in October of 2016. The previous year, Maya had been diagnosed with a rare neurological condition called Complex Regional Pain Syndrome which caused her excruciating pain. Consistent therapy and ketamine treatments had gotten Maya’s condition under control, but she would have flare ups from time to time, and one of these flare ups brought her to the emergency room at All Children's Hospital, complaining of pain in her stomach. Maya would remain at the hospital for the next several months, against the wishes of herself and her parents, lawyers would later say. Her mother Beata Kowalski was accused of neglect and medical abuse, and by the time Maya was finally allowed to go home, her mother was dead, having taken her own life after being forbidden from seeing her sick daughter for 87 days. Maya’s family would go on to sue Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital, claiming it’s actions led to Beata Kowalski taking her own life, devastated that she could not see her daughter and that she was being accused of abusing Maya. The Kowalski family also alleged that Maya was medically kidnapped, battered and abused while in the hospital’s care. This lawsuit would bring to the light deeper issues at Johns Hopkins, issues that affected far more than the Kowalski family and lead many of us to ask the question; if you can’t trust those who take an oath to do no harm, who can you trust? Try our coffee!! - www.CriminalCoffeeCo.com Become a Patreon member -- > https://www.patreon.com/CrimeWeekly Shop for your Crime Weekly gear here --> https://crimeweeklypodcast.com/shop Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/CrimeWeeklyPodcast Website: CrimeWeeklyPodcast.com Instagram: @CrimeWeeklyPod Twitter: @CrimeWeeklyPod Facebook: @CrimeWeeklyPod ADS: 1. Cozy Earth Here’s our gift to you this holiday season! Go to CozyEarth.com and enter code CRIME WEEKLY to save up to 40% on your next order.  2. PDS Debt Right now, PDS Debt is offering a free debt analysis, and it only takes 30 seconds. Head over to PDSDebt.com/CRIME to get your free debt assessment today.  3. PrettyLitter So many people count on Pretty Litter to keep their house smelling fresh and clean, and you can too! Go to PrettyLitter.com/CRIMEWEEKLY to save 20% on your FIRST order. 4. SkyLight Frames As a limited time offer for our listeners, get $15 off your purchase of a SkyLight Frame when you go to SkyLightFrame.com/WEEKLY.  5. Embrace Pet Insurance Don’t wait for the unexpected to happen - Join the massive community of pet owners who trust Embrace Pet Insurance to protect their pet. Head to EmbracePetInsurance.com/CRIMEWEEKLY so they know we sent you and sign up today. 

Dear McDonald's, your breakfast menu, fire. Tens across the board. I could be happy with anything, even though I order the same thing every time. Thanks for not judging me. I'll try something new next time. Maybe. Score a two for $5 deal on a sausage McMuffin with egg and more. Limited time only.

Price and participation may vary. Cannot be combined with any other offer. Single item at regular price. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Crime Weekly. I'm Stephanie Harlow. And I'm Derek Levasseur. So today we are diving in to the third and final part of the Maya Kowalski case.

We're just going to get right into it. But I do know really quickly that I want to talk to you about something very important. And that something is criminal coffee, but not just about the coffee. It's also about the fact that, I mean, by the time this comes out, it's going to be December. Um, cause we're recording this in the last few days in November, it's going to be December. That means it's down to the line for Christmas gifting. And you know what your friends and family would love? Criminal coffee. They will love criminal coffee. And you know what, you might not know what roast they would like. You know, maybe you don't know them specifically. Maybe you want them to be able to pick it out themselves. Maybe they want K-cups. Maybe they want K-cups. All right.

But that's perfect because we have criminal coffee gift cards now. Okay. What is the, listen, coffee is the best gift anytime of year, but especially Christmas. It's cozy. It makes you warm. Christmas and coffee go together like peanut butter and jelly or peanut butter and bananas. If you're me. Ew. Peanut butter and honey. What was that look for?

Peanut butter and honey? You don't do peanut butter and honey? No. Have you ever had peanut butter and bananas? Of course. Who hasn't? I am great. Elvis Presley's favorite sandwich.

Is it really? Yeah. Fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches. banana sandwiches it's so freaking good yeah you just make it like a grilled cheese thinly slice the bananas put them in there with peanut butter grill it it's all melty and delicious i listen my chicken shit the chicken salad didn't hit well a lot of people didn't never heard that one before i promise uncrustables right who doesn't love an uncrustable the best i'm not a fan what you wouldn't be you wouldn't be because you're just a cold-hearted person because anyone with any type of heart loves uncrustables yo that's like children's food man exactly that's

the point stephanie it's like you saying you like goger like i'm not sucking yogurt out of some plastic tube it's so weird you know what i don't put those in the same category, okay? Okay. Shout out everyone in the comments who's an adult who still crack open an Uncrustable in a rush. Because I'll tell you right now, we put them in the fridge and we obviously defrost them so they're not frozen when the time to eat. And I definitely steal out of that drawer all the time.

And Uncrustables, honey and peanut butter, forget about it. It's a game over. But anyway, I digress. We're on criminal coffee here. Gift cards. Gift cards, also important about the gift cards, a portion of the proceeds, same exact algorithm we're using to find out how much to pull out of the sales for the bags and the K-cups. Same thing applies to the gift card. So if you give that gift card to someone you can print out the picture of the gift card It's all digital you get the code immediately Let them know that not only are you giving them the purchase of the the purchase of a criminal coffee? Kate a bag or a k-cup box. They are also now donating to fund our next cold case. So double whammy. It's not

Available that this is important though the gift cards and i just thought about this literally right now as we're recording it won't work with the merch yet because for those of you don't know it's two different stores i don't know it would have to be set up by j and r marketing because for the those of you who haven't figured out when you click the merch store it brings you to a completely separate site. It looks like our site, but it's a completely separate site. So if you try to punch in that code at checkout, it's not going to work. And we do do discounts that work on both websites, but that's like a collaborative effort where

I'm like, hey, Albert Frost, put it on there. Where every time you buy a gift card, it's going to generate a code and I won't even have that code. I would have to update them every day with like whoever bought a gift card. So let us know in the comments if you want gift cards for criminal coffee merch, and then we'll talk to J and R about it. Yeah. We'll let Stephanie handle that. All right, let's do this. Yes, let's do it. Let's do it. I'm going to get right into it. If you haven't seen or listened to the first two parts, you should do that because I'm not going to catch you up because there's just way too much information. Like honestly, long episode tonight. There's so much information in this case that I didn't realize until I was like me deep into it. This could have been eight parts, but

well, we're here now. So we're just going to dive right in. We kind of left off where Maya's mother, Beta Kowalski, had taken her own life. And even after Beta took her own life and removed herself from the equation, the lawyers from Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital continued to argue during the next dependency hearing that Maya should be kept away from her family. It was then that the Kowalski attorney handed Judge Lee Hayworth, otherwise known as the No Hug Judge, Judge Lee Hayworth was handed the message that Beata had left behind. You know, the one where she stated that his heart was an iceberg. Accurate. After solemnly reading this note, Judge Hayworth ruled that Jack Kowalski could bring Maya to Rhode Island,

where she would be evaluated by Dr. Pradeep Chopra. Dr. Chopra is a professor at Brown University. He has actually studied CRPS for many, many years, and he's treated roughly 125,000 CRPS patients in his 20-year career. So that's a lot of patients, man. That's a lot of patients. When he was breaking it down during the trial, he was like, well, I see about five a day over the course of 20 years. That's about 125,000. So some might say he knows what he's talking about. And we're going to go in more into depth about this later, but Dr. Shropra would report that Maya's symptoms and response to treatments was consistent with CRPS and that the hospital's diagnosis of Munchausen by proxy was incorrect. Surprise, surprise. At that point, Judge Hayworth remanded Maya back to the care of Jack Kowalski. Too little,

too late, I would say to the no hug judge, but what do I know? And the judge noted in his decision that Maya and Beata had a very close and loving relationship. Hayworth said that on the recommendations of the hospital, the court had deprived Maya of a meaningful education, holiday celebrations, free communication with friends and relatives, and frequent access to the comforts offered her by her Catholic religion. Because I found out when I was watching the trial that the priest had come in and they you know those little wafers that you take for for communion what is a communion yeah yeah the bread yeah the body of christ yeah they wouldn't even let her have that because they thought like that beata had put like ketamine in there. They're so ridiculous. So ridiculous. And I like how the judge

after making all of these stupid decisions, finally, when he's like, okay, Maya can go home. He's like, well, Maya was deprived all of these things by the court, but on the recommendation of the hospital. So it's not my fault. It's not our fault. Everyone's now trying to shift blame. Because remember, when Kathy Beattie was talking, she was like, well, it's not the hospital's decision what happens with Maya. It's, you know, CPS and it's the court. And now the court's like, well, it's not our fault. Okay. They gave us these recommendations. And so we followed them. No one wants to take accountability when shit goes wrong. Isn't it great?

Everybody wants to take accountability, and everyone wants to take their credit when everything goes well. But when stuff goes wrong, I never see so many fingers pointing. In January of 2017, Maya finally left All Children's Hospital. When she was wheeled out of there, she weighed less than when she had arrived and she was dead while she was still in the hospital, which is another terrible thing because, you know, once again, she can't have family and stuff with her. So she's informed of this and she's still stuck in the hospital for, I think, several days. But when she gets home and walks into the place where she grew up, where she lived with her mother and sees that her mother's not there, I think it becomes

more real, especially for an 11-year-old child at that point. And for a while, all Maya did was cry. As a newly single parent, Jack Kowalski did all that he could to make up for the loss of Beata, who had been Maya's number one advocate when it came to her medical care. Jack took Maya to physical therapy appointments. He installed solar panels in their pool so that she could do her hydrotherapy at home. And he gave Maya a little Yorkie teacup poodle to keep her company and bring her comfort. A month after Maya was returned to her father, psychologist Dr. Toshana Duncan released her final report. She had done examinations of Beata Kowalski before Beata died, obviously, and the report was finally released after Beata died. And Dr. Duncan disagreed with Dr. Sally Smith's diagnosis of Munchausen by proxy.

Dr. Duncan had spoken to Beata three times at the end of 2016. She'd also spoken to Maya, Kyle, Jack. She talked to family members. She talked to friends of the family. She talked to neighbors. It was very in-depth. And her summary said, quote, information gathered as part of this evaluation revealed no evidence that Beata has ever suffered from mental health problems. Individuals who were interviewed as part of this

evaluation described Beata as a loving, attentive mother who would do whatever she deemed necessary to make sure Maya received the best medical care, including strongly advocating for Maya, it appears at times. Beata has been verbally forceful and came across as rude and demanding. This examiner observed some of these behaviors firsthand when Beata was expressing significant concern that her daughter was not getting the care she needed that had been prescribed by medical doctors such as Dr. Kirkpatrick and Dr. Hanna, who specialize in CRPS. This evaluator has been provided with no evidence

that would support the conclusion that Bieda has falsified her daughter's medical condition for any psychological purposes. In the absence of credible medical evidence establishing that Maya does not suffer from a medical condition, fictitious disorder by proxy safely is ruled out, end quote. Fictitious disorder by proxy is just another name for Munchausen's by proxy. The same day the report came out, the Department of Children and Families moved to close the case. During the trial, depositions from Jack and Maya Kowalski were played for the court. And Jack said that, you know, at that time he was no longer seeing signs of CRPS in Maya. And Maya said that she hadn't really experienced much pain or flare-ups from CRPS throughout

2019, although she did have one relapse in 2018 where she had to be hospitalized for one week. However, she didn't receive any ketamine treatments in those years. So there was some ketamine treatments that she was getting, light ketamine treatments after she left the hospital, but eventually she stopped those, and then she hadn't had any ketamine for a few years by the time this trial started. In 2018, the Kowalskis sued All Children's Hospital, Suncoast, which is the company Dr. Sally Smith worked for. They also sued Dr. Sally Smith, as well as social worker Catherine Beattie. Initially, All Children's

Hospital declined to comment on the allegations, but in court filings, their attorneys claimed that the hospital staff had good reason to suspect that Maya was a victim of Munchausen by proxy, and they had a legal requirement to report it. The lawsuit accused Dr. Sally Smith of exaggerating Beata's behavior to justify an incorrect diagnosis, and some statistics would be shown to prove that Dr. Smith was a bit too willing to give out the diagnosis of Munchausen by proxy. According to a report published by the American Academy of Pediatrics, Munchausen by proxy is pretty rare and is reported in fewer than two cases per 100,000 children. Yet, according to court documents, Dr. Smith,

well, she's diagnosed between 10 to 20 cases of Munchausen by proxy throughout her career. The report said that the best estimates suggest healthcare professionals will encounter at least one case in their career. And this caused one of the Kowalski attorneys to state, quote, if you're a doctor and you even run across one in your entire career, it's unusual. 10 to 20, something is up, end quote. Dr. Mark Feldman, a Munchausen syndrome expert, admitted that it was plausible that an established child abuse expert could have encountered that many cases. signs, such as bouts of illnesses that begin when the offending parent is alone with the child, mysterious ailments among other members of the family, and miraculous improvements once the child is separated from the offending parent. And I think we can safely say that there was no mysterious illnesses happening with Maya's brother Kyle, and that there was not a miraculous improvement when Beata was prevented from

seeing her daughter for over three months. That's the biggest thing for me, right? Like, I'm not a doctor. I'm not a physician. I don't pretend to be. I'm just a human being like everybody else. And we hit on it last episode where it was one of those things where Maya had been separated from her mother for an extended period of time. And when Maya didn't even know that she was being filmed, was still displaying the same symptoms that she had before being separated from her mother, including dystonia. Am I saying that right?

With the turned in feet? Yeah. The dystonia was the most easiest thing for just the normal human eye to see where it's like without being able to feel what she feels, that was one of the things that you could observe. Yeah, those lesions. Those lesions too. Yeah.

And I'm saying from the camera angle that I could see, the dystonia was very prevalent to me. It was almost like her toes were pointing at each other. And to have a young girl who doesn't know she's being recorded at the time, keep her feet in that position for the sake of just like throwing people off. You try to do that for like an hour, nevermind all day. It's very uncomfortable, very painful. So clearly, like you said, there wasn't this miraculous change in her physical ability and her wellness

after leaving her mother, which should have been a clear indication that, hey, maybe we're not right about this one. Maybe there's something more going on here. But they doubled down on it instead of looking at it that way. And in fact, we're going to see that Maya got worse, right? Yeah, that's fair. Although the hospital attorneys are going to argue this,

and this is going to be their main argument, she was actually better. They're going to attribute Maya's recovery in the years following her being at All Children's Hospital. And they're going to say that was because they helped her and they got her off the ketamine and that's what made her better. And that's going to be basically their main argument. But I personally don't think that's true, but what does it matter? Anyways, Dr. Feldman, the Monshausen's expert, he said he would have expected Maya to show improvement during her lengthy stay at All Children's Hospital if Munchausen was to blame.

He said, quote, I would want to have seen some evidence for improvement sooner. Three and a half months is a long time. End quote. Yeah, exactly. That's what we just said. Right. I mean, and this is coming from an expert. So I would expect the two words like, okay, we have something going on up in here. And this even happens with any type of troubleshooting

you do. Okay, let's eliminate a variable that we believe is causing the issue and see if anything changes. Obviously, the variable here was Beata, right? That's what they thought or who they thought was the root of this issue. They removed her from the equation, wouldn't even let her hug her own daughter, right? There was no physical contact, wouldn't even allow her to eat bread that would be given by the church. It wouldn't even have to be given by Beata, but just wouldn't allow any type of contact between the two. And yet there might've been some better days, but overall there wasn't this drastic improvement. Like this physician said, there wasn't the improvement you would

expect to see if the variable causing the issue was in fact Beata. And so I get it. And that's coming from a doctor. Yeah, there was no improvement. And we're going to talk about this a little bit later, but I actually looked it up after we finished recording last week because I was like, yo, this girl had to have been under so much stress, depression, anxiety being in this hospital, right? Because I hate being in hospitals as a grown woman. I don't like it there. There's just a weird energy in a hospital, especially if you're there long term.

I don't like it. I'm not happy. And this is a child who's being taken away from her family. So not only is she alone in this hospital, but she's away from her family. It had to have been very mentally taxing. And I looked it up and I said, does stress, anxiety, things like that, do they exacerbate the issue with CRPS? And yes, of course. Of course it does, right? As stress and anxiety exacerbate most medical conditions. You know, it's a mind over matter thing. Like what happens in your mind

does physiologically represent itself in some way. So I would say like they were doing her more harm than anything, but either way, let's take our first break and we will come back and continue talking about this. All right. We are back from break. Derek has something to say. Yeah, this is, this is related to the episode, but not necessarily tied into what you were just talking about. I'm looking for my pen. I can't find it now, but I made a note of this the other day because I was looking up some stuff on Maya Kowalski and I started accidentally stumbling on some Twitter handles. I'm not even going to give them the time of day,

but I didn't even realize this was a thing that there's some hardcore like Maya Kowalski haters out there. I wasn't aware of this. Morons, absolute morons. It's so weird to me. It's really weird. And the big thing they were harping on, i don't know all the details i just don't care but they were harping on i guess the fact that at one point her her attorney said she wasn't able to make it in because she wasn't feeling good but there were some photos taken of her out with some friends the night before i think it was the prom whatever it was i really don't give a shit but it's just a point of like i don't really have anywhere to go with this as people are morons. Like this girl who has gone through all of this, right? This is the thing that you're going to hang your hat on that she felt decent enough when

her entire fucking childhood was spent in a hospital or in massive amounts of pain when all her friends and family were out hanging out and doing all the things that you take for granted. But she feels good enough to go out with her friends and look and dress up one night. And you're like making it seem like. Well, and she pretty much, she pretty much explained that during, during the trial, she was like, yeah, it was like a prom. And I had told my boyfriend I was going to go and I wasn't feeling great, but I put on the dress and, you know, took pictures and I did my best. But also we've heard these doctors, these CRPS doctors explain,

like anything else, there's good days and there's bad days. And you never know when you're going to have a good or a bad day. Exactly. Well, I saw this and I was like, I definitely have to address this in the next CW because it aggravated the shit out of me. And I'm like, you know what? I have a platform where I can actually say this. So I'm not going to even say the Twitter handles because some of them had some decent followings. I don't want to give them any clout or any type of hate. Hate groups do attract quite a bit of a following. I will also say when I was watching the trial, because, you know, it's like there was like 30 something days of this trial went on for six weeks. And when you're watching it on Law and Crime, it shows you, because when it was live,

and it shows you the comments of people talking when it was live, and a lot of people had a problem with the amount. They were like, how dare she sue a children's hospital? Who is this helping? And it's like, I guess the children's hospital should have thought about that before being a bunch of dickheads and doing a bunch of things they

didn't have to do, right? Like that's not our problem. And it seemed like they had an issue that she was going to get a ton of money. And I will say that like people seem to have empathy for others until they are envious of them, right? So when somebody like you, I've seen this happen with YouTube creators too, like you'll love your favorite YouTube creator and they're relatable and they're great. And then they start to get big and they start to get a following. And then it's almost like, you're like, Oh, you're not just mine anymore. Like you're successful now. Like I can't relate to you as much. And I don't like you now. And now I'm going to talk shit about you on Reddit.

Well, and I don't want to, I don't know for certain, so don't hold me to this. But my understanding of this would be that a lot of the money is going to come from insurance companies is obviously they have protections for this, especially hospitals with malpractice suits and all these things. It's not coming out of think of like the budget for Johns Hopkins. And, you know, I see where. I don't think it really matters. Johns Hopkins is a huge network of hospitals a huge network of hospitals and this will be invaluable to them

Because I promise you it won't happen again Because this is going to hurt if this is going to hurt them and they'll be like we cannot have this happen again the point i'm trying to make is anyone who's trying to paint the narrative that Timmy or tammy who are currently in the hospital being treated that their care isn't going to be as efficient or as effective because of this money, that's inaccurate. I don't believe that's the case. And if I'm wrong and someone can prove that to me, I will absolutely apologize for it.

But my understanding is this money, first and foremost, they have the money. But secondly, it's going to come from a pot through insurance. That's what I would assume. But again, I'm not an expert on it by any means. I would think that this lawsuit is going to ensure that Timmy and Tammy get the best care at any Johns Hopkins hospital now. Because once again, they do not want to get sued and be paying out over $200 million again. They don't want that.

So they're going to really be minding their P's and Q's. And maybe they'll actually put some policies in a place that they can follow this time. Yeah, I definitely make some changes. Some people are definitely getting fired. But anyone who's trying to paint the narrative like there's this pot of money put aside for the kids that are going through these illnesses or whatever they're dealing with, and that pot is where this money is going to come from, I don't believe that's the case. And listen, we're going to get into some of what the defense says. And I'll even admit, looking at the medical records,

I don't blame the people at all children's hospitals for thinking initially, maybe this could be munchausen, there's red flags. I don't blame them for that. I applaud them for that. What I blame them for is when they figured out that she actually did have CRPS, because I mean, they're charging her for CRPS treatments. When they figured out that she actually did, when they monitored her for 48 hours and she didn't just get up and start doing TikTok dances in her hospital room when she thought no one was watching. When they figured out that she wasn't faking her symptoms, which was pretty early on, they continued down that path. That's the problem.

Agreed. Looking for signs of child abuse or neglect is not a problem. Nobody's saying it is. When you decided to die on that hill for whatever reason, and we're going to discuss what some of their motives might have been, when you decided to do that. That's where you come into like malpractice areas. Let's think about it from a true crime perspective, right? Something that everybody here is very familiar with. Let's change it up. Let's change professions. Detectives, right? When they go into a case and it's an unsolved case, it's a mystery. They don't know what happened. So they have to explore all angles,

even the more unlikely scenarios. One of them would have been this Munchausen by proxy, right? And once you start to navigate those different possibilities in a criminal setting, you start to rule things out because exculpatory evidence presents itself and you can say, okay, that's not it. This isn't it. That isn't it. And you start to narrow down the possibilities of what occurred during this crime. Well, we see it sometimes in law enforcement where if the detective goes in there with a preconceived idea of who's responsible or what happened, they're going to look for evidence that supports their theory instead of what actually they should be focusing on, which is the evidence that takes them to where the case should go. And I think something similar happened here where you had a lot of confirmation bias,

where anytime there was any indication at all, even a small one, they magnified it to say, oh, see, this proves our theory. It's Munchausen by proxy. Instead of saying, okay, that's one indication that there could be something there. But what about all these other things that suggest it's not? Well, we're not going to acknowledge those. We're just going to push those to the side. Any other expert, any other piece of evidence, we're going to just cancel them out as not being credible. And we're going to keep focusing on the little things that we see here and there that say, yep, see, we were right. So they went into this thinking, oh, this is definitely Munchausen by proxy. And their whole investigation was contingent on that, finding things that supported that narrative, that supported that theory, instead of really objectively just trying to follow the breadcrumbs and seeing what the truth really was.

And so we see it in investigative work, too. And that's what what was her name again? Susan Smith. Am I saying that right? Sally Smith. Sally Smith. Sally Smith. That's what I feel like she was doing. I don't necessarily think she went into this with like a malicious intention, but she is, you could tell my opinion, she's this very prideful person and the woman, I wouldn't say woman, but she prides herself on being like the expert in this field and being able to find and identify these Munchausen by proxy cases. She's become kind of like an expert in it. So she feels like, hey, I'm the ultimate authority on this. No one's going to tell me if it is or it isn't because I'm the number one person in this field. So she goes into it with

this sense, I guess I would call it an ego, where if she identifies Munchausen by proxy, that's what it is because she's always right. So she's going to look for all the signs that point to that and ignore the ones that don't. Exactly. And so you can even tell she gets offended by certain questioning in our previous episode because she is the, in her opinion, the top expert in this field as far as what she does. And I feel like this was more of a reputation thing for her. She was determined against all odds, regardless of what other doctors said otherwise,

she was going to prove that she was right. I also think this is a big trap in creating your entire identity around something, right? Like you're so good at this. And I have no doubt that she was good, that she did the training, that she understood the signs. But it became, I think, like her entire identity. And when you create this entire identity about yourself where you don't really have other things that you can pull from, if that's challenged, you personally feel challenged.

So you're unable to hear constructive criticism because this is all you have and you hold it around you like armor. And so when somebody comes at the thing that you're saying, you feel like they're coming at you. And so now no one can hear logic and constructive and helpful criticism because they are personally feeling attacked instead of just their idea or their theory being questioned. I agree. It's an issue. Yeah.

Ego. So now that we're talking about Dr. Smith, the lawsuit accused Dr. Sally Smith and the others of medical malpractice, holding Maya against her will, dismissing the advice of her treating doctors, ignoring all the signs that Beata Kowalski was on the verge of a breakdown and forbidding Maya access to her rosary and her prayer book. Dr. Smith and her employer, Suncoast, settled with the Kowalskis for $2.5 million. But I will say Dr. Smith didn't seem to face any professional repercussions for her part in what had happened, and she ended up retiring in 2023. Most likely once that Netflix documentary came out, she was like, I'm all set, you know, because she did say she was getting like threatening emails, things like that. We don't need to do that, guys. We don't need to do that. Okay, because that's not going to help anybody. You're not going to threaten Sally Smith and make her

turn her life around. So I think she just withdrew from public life at that point because she was, you know, feeling the pressure and the heat from the general public. But I wonder if that Netflix documentary hadn't come out and if she still had settled this 2.5 million lawsuit, she probably would have just kept on doing what she was always doing. She would not have left this field and she didn't get fired. So that's interesting to me. An attorney for Johns Hopkins announced that the hospital still trusts Smith saying, quote, Dr. Smith is very competent, very professional and very valued member of our medical staff. She's an independent pediatrician who's on our staff as a consultant and an admitting physician, end quote. I wonder if this attorney who went to law school understands the contradiction in what he just said, because they try so hard to make it seem like Dr. Smith worked for that hospital. Dr. Smith did not work for that hospital. Dr. Smith worked for Suncoast. She was a consultant. She was the person they called in. Okay, so like if my pipes burst in my basement, I'm going to call a plumber. If I own an apartment building with 55 units and I work with Joe the

plumber down the street, don't we actually know a Joe the plumber? We do know Joe the plumber out of Florida. Shout out Joe the plumber. Shout out. I don't think he listens to the episodes, but his wife does. Yeah. Well, I think he listens. I mean, he lies and says he doesn't. That is true. I actually, you know what, Joe? I think you listen too. What's up, Joe? So anyways, if I own an apartment building with 50 units and anytime I need a plumber for any of those units, I call Joe the plumber. That does not mean that Joe the plumber is my employee. Okay?

So he says in the statement, Dr. Smith is very competent, very professional, and very valued member of our medical staff. And then he goes on to say she's an independent pediatrician who is on our staff as a consultant. Those two things are contradictory. She's not on medical staff. And then he goes on to say, she's an independent pediatrician who is on our staff as a consultant. Those two things are contradictory. She's not on your staff if she's a consultant, okay? So they keep trying to make it seem like she has more privileges at the hospital than she actually does.

She's not on your staff, okay? She's not. Anyways, yes, that was the statement from the lawyer of the hospital to once again die on the Dr. Sally Smith Hill and act as if she did nothing wrong. And then next, after settling that lawsuit with Dr. Sally Smith and Suncoast, the Kowalskis went after Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital. We will prove that from July 7, 2015 through January 13, 2017, Johns Hopkins missed a diagnosis of complex regional pain syndrome on seven different occasions when Maya was in for their care. We will prove that they misdiagnosed Maya's symptoms from October 7th through the end of the year,

wrongfully accusing Beata and Jack Kowalski of child abuse, and alleging and attempting to show that Maya had a mental disorder. And she was crazy. She was making it up. We'll prove that they realized their error pretty quickly. Upon realizing their error, for the next three and a half months, they took every step in the world to attempt to force

the Kowalskis to agree with the wrongful diagnosis. By January 13th, when Maya was finally left out of the hospital, unsurprisingly, this family was a wreck. Maya was not let out of the hospital even after her mother committed suicide on January 7th. Now the story with Beata Kowalski is a complex one, but we will prove that the continued allegations that she was crazy and she was trying to harm her own children, both Kyle and Maya, and the systematic, the knowledge

of the systematic abuse of her child in the hospital caused her, at the end, to lose completely and utterly her ability to control the maternal instinct, and that that outweighed the survival instinct. In the process, they caused Beata Kowalski, her wife, denied Jack a loving wife, denied both Kyle and Maya a loving, caring, and amazing mother. They caused just terrific and permanent psychological injury, as one may expect, a permanent aggravation, and we'll explain the medicine behind that, of the CRPS. Now the CRPS didn't start with Johns Hopkins. It started about three or four days before Johns Hopkins. But the evidence will show that something that could have been a controllable, manageable disease was aggravated to the point where

throughout periods in her life she will be incapacitated. And through all of it, she and her brother and her father will have post-traumatic issues and problems. We've alleged fraud in that they intentionally deceived or attempted to deceive in the proof of the matter. We also alleged fraud in that they billed $536,000 for the treatment of CRPS and yet never treated her for CRPS and took multiple positions, especially to them, especially to Maya, that she did not have CRPS. Yet they billed over half a million dollars to the healthcare provider and Kowalski's for the treatment of it. So I think for our purposes, the most important thing to take from that clip, from this portion of opening statements during the trial, is that all children's hospitals continue to

insist that Maya did not have CRPS, yet they billed her insurance company over $500,000 for CRPS treatments. Yep. So I was going to weigh in on it too, but that's my big takeaway. And also just the hurt for Maya. You can see every time he mentions her mother, it's tough. It's tough and no amount of money is going to be out of back. And you can tell going forward, and he says it, there's going to be psychological trauma to Maya, Jack, and Kyle for the rest of their lives.

So someone's got to pay. Someone's got to pay for that. And it's going to be the hospital. Yeah, and Maya did say, like, I have a chronic health condition, and I'm terrified of going to doctors and hospitals. Oh, yeah, no doubt. They said that there was, like, they always make sure to not be in the vicinity of all children's hospital just in case something happens. She has a relapse or something goes down, anything.

So that is not the closest hospital to them. Is that like terrifying for them? So, yeah, I mean, and this is very common. I mean, historically we've seen, especially certain populations, especially minorities and things because of the way that the government and the healthcare system treated them back in, you know, the twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, um, with syphilis studies and things like that, just taking advantage of them, they developed the same kind of PTSD towards the medical system. We don't trust you people. We have found that you experiment on us, that you lie to us, that you don't have our best interests in mind. And that's generational. That gets passed down, right?

Just like traditions, just like words of wisdom from your parents, that fear of the medical system will get passed down because to these people, it is very, very real and present. And there's a sense of danger and they want to protect their children. So they pass that down. So this is not just something that's like, oh, she had a bad experience. She'll move on. No, this was traumatic to the point where she'll never get over it. And why would she? Agreed. Completely agree with everything you said. Okay, well, let's take our next break. We'll be right back. All right, so next you're going to hear from Howard Hunter.

He is an attorney for All Children's Hospital. We had no reason to wish this family harm, and we still don't. Indeed, there's a tragic outcome in this case in terms of Mrs. Kowalski's suicide and we regret very much that that happened. The issue here however is who's responsible for it and we're going to go over the facts of that and what the facts don't show in terms of any connection between what was done by all children's and that tragic result. As of

October 7th, we had the Kowalskis seeking out care at all children's, as I've said. We believe the evidence is going to show you that care was reasonable and necessary and appropriate. And indeed, we're going to suggest to you the evidence I'm about to discuss with you will show that what went before the treatment that went before did not necessarily fall into that category. Any of those three categories. And that is the reason, one of the big reasons, that we're here today. Now, as of this date, as of this date,

as of the time that Maya Kowalski was discharged from all children's, we believe that, in fact, she had been set on a path of therapy that has enabled her to resume function, to get out of a wheelchair, to be relatively pain-free, and to be in a situation of participating in her school and in society as she does today. So yeah, like I alluded to earlier, it's the position of the hospital that they did everything right. And in fact, the treatment that they provided Maya may have saved her life, allowed her to continue on and have a full life. So it's almost like, well,

we gave you your life back. So, I mean, a life for a life, you know, your mother died, but you got your life back because of us. So can we just call it like even here, you know, and he's very specific to be like, it wasn't our fault that that B.A. Dekowalski died. And, you know, they're trying to just shift everything off again. You know what it sounds like to me? It sounds like the lawyer is saying in a lawyer-ish way, listen, we weren't wrong. We do believe that it could have been Munchausen by proxy. And unfortunately, the result of us identifying that and calling it out resulted in Beata taking her own life, but make no mistake about it.

Us creating that separation is ultimately the reason why Maya is living the life that she's living right now. So although we don't like the fact that this happened and we regret the fact that Beata took her life, if it wasn't for our intervention, she wouldn't be here right now. Maya wouldn't be in the position that she's in right now to sit in front of you in this courtroom. They're not going to say that in that way because that sounds harsh, but it sounded to me like he was passively saying, this is what we believed happened. This is how we treated her. And because of that, she's okay now. Unfortunately, Beata got called out. She took her own life. We wish that didn't

happen, but hey, if it wasn't for us, we did our job. Yeah. We did our job. Maya should be thanking us. That was my, that was my takeaway from it. Yeah. I mean, I could be wrong, but that's how I took it. If I'm a jury member, that's how I took it. Yeah. It's real rough. Um, real rough. So this, this lawyer, Howard Hunter, he claimed that when Maya was admitted on October 7th, she was complaining of intense stomach pain. She was screaming and crying. He said she was cursing at the staff and presenting what he called a very challenging situation

for the hospital staff. She had pain in her extremities. Her whole body was hypersensitive to touch. Her legs were atrophied from disuse due to being in a wheelchair for several months, he said. And that's funny because, well, yeah, I'm not going to talk about that right now, but he's claiming her legs are atrophied because her parents like forced her into a wheelchair and made her like sit in this wheelchair. And that's why her legs were doing that because she just hadn't used them for months. Not because she couldn't use them because can you imagine can you imagine a

9 10 11 year old child being told by their parents you can't walk sit in this wheelchair is she going to literally do that maybe when her parents are around but when they're not she's gonna be like i gotta get out of this wheelchair so her legs wouldn't be atrophied from disuse because she's forced into a wheelchair 24 7 i also think something that needs to be said is when, if you're to believe that Maya was under the situation where she was being coerced or manipulated by her parents, they didn't expect for this type of separation to occur. They went there to get ketamine or whatever it was. So if they were doing what the hospital had theorized, then they would have gotten the ketamine or whatever they wanted and gotten out

of there. That didn't happen. There was this immediate separation that clearly wasn't anticipated by Jack or Beata. So the reason they were lied to and told if they took her from the hospital, they'd be arrested. Right. So here's the point I'm trying to make. If this was some premeditated thing, they would have prepped Maya for this. And clearly they didn't anticipate this. So there would have been no premeditation. And to your point, with this immediate separation occurring unbeknownst to them, they didn't expect it to happen. That would be where you'd have that crack in the armor, that chink in the armor, I guess you would say, where Maya may inform one of the hospital staff that something's

going on at home because she wasn't prepared to be taken away from her parents like that. Yeah. She's going to say things like, oh my God, thank you so much for saving me. I can finally get out of this wheelchair. Like you don't even understand. My parents have been telling me to stay in this wheelchair and I don't understand why, because I can walk. Thank you. And I mean, Maya did say some things to staff, but not like that she said things like you know I really don't like taking all this medication I really don't like stuff like my kids don't like taking cough medicine either exactly man every time my kids are sick or have a fever I gotta get the Tylenol and they're like oh my god I don't want to take this like my son

yeah my son's like just let me have a fever I'd rather have a want to take this. Like my son is like- I need water. Dad, I need water if I'm going to take it. Yeah. My son's like, just let me have a fever. I'd rather have a fever than take this. Yep. Okay. So it's just pretty normal stuff that she can find out. Tenley's crying. Dad, I got to take water after every sip. I'm like, dude, it's like one tablespoon.

Are you serious right now? Dude, and why don't they just shoot it down? Like that liquid Tylenol? Shoot it down. Trust me. Yeah, I'm with you. Why are you sipping at it like a hummingbird, man? She'll take a sip.

She'll take a sip and then she takes a swig of her water. I'm like, this is so dramatic right now. Same, man. This is so dramatic right now. And then the faces. Yeah, it's like, you're ridiculous. Sometimes the gagging, like. But if I say we'll get a toy at Target,

when they get done, right down the hatch, no problem. Yeah, yeah. No, I don't do the bribery toy thing. Oh, that's all I got. That's the only tool I got. Take it. Yeah. Yeah. No, I don't do the bribery toy thing. Oh, that's all I got. That's the only toy I got. Take it. Yeah. Take it right now.

So he also said, you know, her legs are atrophied due from disuse being in a wheelchair. She had dystonia and she was demanding pain medication in large quantities. So he's saying Maya was demanding pain medication in large quantities before Beata Kowalski even arrived because it was Jack who brought her in. Is that weird? Because if it's Beata who's like the driving force behind this, wouldn't it be like Beata showing up and then she's demanding pain medication? Or is this child in so much pain and she knows exactly what will help that and that is what she's asking for. And you idiots are looking at her like she's got three heads and not doing what she needs. So when Beata Kowalski finally arrived at the hospital, she forbade the medical staff from touching Maya, even though, according to

Howard Hunter, all they wanted to do was assess and monitor Maya. And Beata insisted that before any examination was done, Maya needed to be given a large dose of ketamine. Now, Howard Hunter is like, listen, ketamine is bad news, guys. It's scary. He's like, it is approved by the FDA for use as an anesthetic, but it is not approved for use in children or for use in high doses as treatment for CRPS or chronic pain. He said the issue is not ketamine itself, but it was how it was used and the quantity it was used in. He said Beato was telling the staff to give Maya a dose of 1,500 milligrams of ketamine, which is a very large dose,

many times the maximum dose that all children's policies allowed. When Maya was admitted to the ER, she was seen by Dr. Leila Behar-Posey, who didn't feel that she had sufficient tools in the ER that would allow her to give Maya that much ketamine safely. There weren't things that she could do to monitor Maya to make sure that there wasn't respiratory problems, which as far as I can tell, ketamine is not like opioids. It doesn't cause respiratory depression. That's kind of like one of the benefits that it has. So kind of sounds like he's talking out of his ass here,

but Dr. Bayar-Pozy also said she'd never seen a condition like Maya's and she'd never heard of a child being given that high a dose of ketamine. And this doctor found out then when she went in the medical records that Maya had been given tens of thousands of milligrams of ketamine over this doctor found out then when she went in the medical records that Maya had been given tens of thousands of milligrams of ketamine over the previous nine months and Maya's treating

physician Dr. Hanna had given her 1200 milligrams of ketamine the day before that she'd gone into the hospital and at that time allegedly he had told Beata he was no longer comfortable administering this much ketamine to Maya at his outpatient clinic. And that is why he suggested that they bring her to all children's because he's like, it's a hospital. They have this this stuff on hand. You know, they they can help you. And apparently that was wrong because they could not. that over the nine months preceding this, that he had given her a gradually increasing doses of ketamine, 12, 15, over 20 milligrams per kilogram per hour,

which is dozens of times the safe and effective dose that was approved by the hospital and that is talked about by the FDA. And it's never been written up in the literature. You'll hear Dr. Hannah say, either by deposition or by admission on that witness stand, that this was at or near the highest per capita dosage he had ever given any patient. It wasn't working. So what had happened was that he had maxed out with this ketamine dosage. He had centered all children. And Mrs. Kowalski, despite what he had told her, despite what happened over the last nine months, was demanding even more.

See, the way he phrased that was that Dr. Hanna was like, no more ketamine for Maya. And then despite that, Beata was like, oh, I'm going to go behind his back and go to all children's hospital and get some. That is not what happened. And we know that that's not what happened because these people called both Dr. Kirkpatrick and Dr. Hanna when, you know, Dr. Sally Smith was doing her report and stuff. And Dr. Hannah was like, yes, she is getting ketamine treatments. She can have ketamine. This is how we're treating it. So it wasn't like he said, no more ketamine for Maya. Get the hell out of here. And then Bieda was like just seeking drugs for her child. He was like, I don't feel comfortable doing this in an outpatient setting anymore because

of these high doses. Go to the hospital. At the end of his opening statement, the all children's hospital lawyer, Howard Hunter said, quote, we don't have to get it right. We just have to be reasonable, end quote. And I found that to be, I mean, it's true legally, I suppose, but I found it to be a little concerning to me that this is going to be the stance of the hospital. Like, we don't need to get it right. We just have to do what we reasonably believe to be right. Because it's leaving a little bit too much open for interpretation, right?

Like, based on what who thinks is right. Who is determining what's right in this situation? What is right? Isn't that very subjective? But it does kind of take a little bit of the burden off of them where it's like we make mistakes, but we tried to do what was right, which is fine. Once again, it's not an issue that you would look at this small child getting high doses of ketamine and have a red flag go off and bring DCFS in, which they did. And DCFS talked to Dr. Hanna and Dr red flag go off and bring DCFS in, which they did. And DCFS talked to Dr. Hanna and Dr. Kirkpatrick and then told the hospital, there's nothing here,

move on. But then they decided not to move on and they decided to continue going. And then they called DCF again and lied about how Beata Kowalski was acting and that she was giving IV meds to Maya at home. That stuff wasn't true. So what's happening here is you guys thought you saw something. DCFS told you like, back off. There's nothing here. We're the people who would know. And instead of being like, okay, they called in Dr. Sally Smith, who they knew would go hard like a pit bull no matter what. And they exaggerated the situation to make it seem worse when they call Child Protective again. That's an issue. That is an issue. I mean, it's really simple. We don't have to get it right, just what we think is reasonably right. I think in most cases that may be true,

especially if you're trying to diagnose an illness. But in those situations, you're usually consulting with the patient or their parents if they're underage, if they're not consenting adult. In this case, when your prognosis or your, I should say, diagnosis is that the parents are intentionally making the child sick, it's not about what you think is right or what you think is reasonably right, it should be a collective decision-making process amongst multiple doctors, some outside of your own practice. So you're getting independent opinions because we don't have the luxury of consulting with the parent in that case because they're basically being diagnosed as the problem. So you really do got to get this right because you're talking about separating a child from the parents, which is outside, in my opinion, the scope of the hospital. They are

supposed to be the, I guess I would call it the report writers. They're supposed to write up what they observe, but they shouldn't be the decision makers in that situation. And if you ask them, they are not the decision makers. It's the court. But the problem is that's why you need- It's DCFS and the court, right? And they're just following orders like the Nazis. But that's why you need differing opinions. That's why you need dissenting opinions and you have to come together collectively. So when that report is written to the court or DCYF, whatever it might be, they're getting your side of it and also the opinions of others who do not agree with you. And as we've already established in part one and two, that did

not happen here. Basically, Johns Hopkins, Sally Smith decided what information made the report that ultimately the court would base the decision off of. Remember that doctor I had mentioned a couple minutes ago, the Munchausen specialist or expert, he said, yes, it's fine to see signs of this, but then you call in somebody who's an expert on this specific condition, Munchausen by proxy. You call somebody in and then they're going to look for all the telltale signs, not just the, oh, I think that the parent's making the kid sick, and there's these little things that are making me think, that you call somebody in who that's all they do, and then they can investigate, and then they can give their opinion. They did not do this. Dr. Sally Smith is not a Munchausen by proxy specialist or expert by any means. She's a

pediatric child abuse specialist, whatever that made-up term is that Florida came up with in 2009. She's not an expert on Munchausen by proxy. So they dropped the ball many times here. And there were many psychiatrists and psychologists who were like, no, she doesn't have Munchausen by proxy. And there was many doctors and specialists who said, yes, Maya does have CRPS. They ignored all of those things because it didn't fit their narrative. And Howard Hunter, the lawyer, he basically was like, hey, if this ketamine was working so well for Maya, well, why was she still in pain? Why was she still having relapses? I don't know, dude, because it's a chronic freaking condition

that doesn't have a cure. Maybe that's why. And he said when she left the hospital, she was in better condition than when she checked in. Case in point, he said, at the age of 17, while this trial is happening, Maya is attending school. She's hanging out with friends. She's able to walk on her own. She's living a better life after all children's hospital than she was before. Now, he seems to completely be ignoring all of the literature that says, and we're going to talk about this in a little bit too, I'll give you exact stats, but basically the literature on CRPS says this condition in children is drastically different than this condition in adults. If a child has this condition,

it is very likely that it will improve as they get older and they'll grow out of it because a child's brain is changing, their hormones are fluctuating. They haven't become the complete human that they're supposed to be yet. They're not done developing. So it is very likely that they will grow out of it. They may have relapses still, but they're not going to be in daily pain. He's completely ignoring that. He wants to talk about the facts that support his case, but he wants to conveniently ignore the ones that do not. So John Wassener, who was the Kowalski family doctor,

he testified that they had tried multiple solutions to fix Maya's pain before the family brought her to Mexico for the ketamine coma. And as far as he could tell, this treatment had helped Maya significantly. He also testified that in his opinion, the standard of Maya's care was compromised when doctors at All Children's Hospital suspected her mother of having monoschlems by proxy. Now, the court would also hear from Dr. Pradeep Chopra, who remember, he's the one from Brown University. He had seen and treated about 125,000 CRPS patients in his career, and he confirmed that Maya did have CRPS. CRPS is one of the few pain conditions that you can literally see. I mean, if I say I have a

headache, you can't see the headache. If I say I have knee pain, you can't see that. But CRPS is one of the conditions you can actually see. When I say that these patients have pain, we're talking about the world's worst pain. I mean, this pain is worse than amputation pain. This pain is worse than childbirth pain. The gentleman on the jury won't understand that, I'm sure. This pain is so bad, so bad. The worst part about this pain is that, you know, if I stub my toe, it looks like the world is going to come to an end, okay? But I know that this is going to go away in a few minutes. But CRPS pain does not go away. It's there 24 hours, 7 days of the week, and it just stays on and on and on.

And the worst part is that there's no known treatment to this. We try all sorts of things. Some work, some don't work. But this is such a, this is often known as a suicide condition. Because these patients, the pain is so bad, they can't sleep, they can't eat, they can't work, their families don't believe them because you don't think like somebody, the general impression is, oh your pain, take a Tylenol and you'll get better. This is not Tylenol pain, this is your hand in a hot stove, that's exactly what they described as. In fact, patients describe it as if their hand is inside a hot fire stove.

And they can't take it out. That's the thing. So I just want to clarify that this is, when I say pain, it's not a small itty-bitty pain in the joints. Unfortunately, most doctors don't know about CRPS. They may have read about it and they must have blown it off as being an extremely rare condition. Unfortunately, most doctors don't know about CRPS. They may have read about it and they must have blown it off as being an extremely rare condition. I don't need to bother with it. I'll probably never see it. But unfortunately, it is a very common condition. And if they miss the diagnosis, they think it's an arthritic pain

or they think it's some sort of a muscle pain and they get prescribed some of these itty bitty pain medicines. This is an interesting phenomenon. There is a difference between young women, especially, versus adults. Usually young women, and CRPS is by the way very much more common in women than in men. When they present with it, it is often stamped as being psychological or anxiety or making it up or some sort of psychiatric diagnosis. You really don't have pain, you're just seeking attention. In adults, it's a whole different situation. In adults, it is taken much more seriously. They are offered different treatments and different

specialists who can then look at it more carefully. And that is the big... That's the big difference between younger patients and adults. And so what is the effect on these children, younger patients, for having their pain denied by physicians repeatedly? Well, put yourself in their shoes. Let's say you're a 12-year-old girl who develops this CRPS in her left leg from doing acrobatics or something, rollerblading or something. And then now you have this severe pain.

And obviously the first thing your parents are going to do is put something on it, give you some Motrin to leave and all that. It doesn't go away. It doesn't go away. And now it's becoming excruciating and it's becoming red, hot, swollen, and you can't even wear clothes. So then your parents take you to the doctor, and then the doctor, again, has no clue what's going on, not sure what's going on.

Eventually, you go from doctor to doctor because they have to go to an orthopedic. The orthopedic sends them to a neurosurgeon. The neurosurgeon sends them to a physiatrist, and it continues the cycle, and eventually they'll get to one person, and that one person will say, I know this condition. it's CRPS.

And then they go on to, you know, getting the treatment that they need. All right, before we dive back into it, let's take a quick break. So that was interesting to hear from Dr. Shapra. I think he did a good job of explaining how painful it is. And I think he also did a good job of explaining how frustrating it is for these patients, especially children, because they go into the hospitals, they go into doctor after doctor after doctor, and these doctors have no experience with CRPS. As he said, they may have read about it. They may have come across it briefly. And then they're like, oh, I'm never going to see this.

I don't really need to know that much about this. And they almost forget about it. And so they can't diagnose what's happening. And because they can't physically see what's happening, they immediately assume it's mental. And so you're a kid being told, you're not really feeling this pain. It's all in your head. You need to go to a psychiatrist. We need to put you on medication, but we're not going to help what actually needs to be taken care of. And that's going to add to the pain and the stress. Too bad we couldn't get Dr. Shopper on. He's like seven minutes away from me.

I really like him too. He's literally like seven minutes from here. Yeah, give him a call. Brown, have to call him up. Yeah. So then the subject of social worker Catherine Beattie came up. And Jack Kowalski testified what Maya had told him about her interactions with Beattie. And then one of the hospital's attorneys stood up and he said,

hey, I don't even know if what you're talking about even sounds like child abuse. But many of these things that they're talking about, that Kathy Beattie told her that, first of all, that she was afraid of Kathy Beattty and didn't like her. That's just not a statement of child abuse. She wanted to take her computer away apparently because she was worried about use on improper websites. Again, I don't believe that's an act of child abuse. There are several other statements that they've gone through here that if you look at them and say is this an act of child abuse it may be something the child doesn't like

it may be something that's discourteous but rising to the level of something that's admissible because it is a statement of child abuse many of the things that you've just heard there did not fit into that category so if you're going to enter an order in addition to going through the requirements of the statute under subsection 23 to make it admissible, you have to find that it is an act of child abuse and that it would be relevant to

an issue in this case. And I believe that there's a very limited scope of these that might possibly be used in that section. And here's the thing with this defense team. Oh, they are annoying. The reason this trial was as long and drawn out as it was, and I was screaming at my computer today because I was like, shut up. There's going to be a witness that comes up soon that we're going to talk about. It ended up being like the plaintiff, which would be the Kowalskis, their star witness. And this witness was going to talk about something that goes beyond Maya's case. He's going to talk about real like toxic shit happening at the hospital, like fully at the hospital, just like culture issues and bad things going on. And this defense team objected literally every other sentence. The judge was even getting annoyed at some point. And I just don't,

I don't like it. Oh, so he talked about her tablet being taken away. He says, and this is what the defense claims, that Maya's tablet was taken from her because they were worried she was going to be looking up porn sites on it. Now tell me that's not the most ridiculous thing you've ever heard of. First of all, it's a hospital. I've worked for businesses before. They can block those sites and they probably do. Those things are automatically blocked. Like when I worked at Verizon, there were certain things we couldn't access. We couldn't access any adult sites. We couldn't access any streaming services on like the Wi-Fi network and stuff because they didn't want us watching Netflix when we're supposed to be working.

They can block specific things from being accessed. The reason, in my opinion, allegedly, that Maya's tablet was taken away from her was so she could not communicate with her mother or any outside sources. And once again, this is a 10-year-old kid. She turned 11 there. She doesn't have her tablet. What the hell is she supposed to do? You know? What is she supposed to do? 100% the case. 100% the case. They were trying to eliminate all contact with, you could see it from the phone call that we heard last

week. They just did not want Maya and Beata speaking at all or talking at all in any way because they genuinely felt like Beata was the problem. I don't think they did at some point. I genuinely just feel like at some point they were like, we have to make it look like she's the problem. And therefore we have to limit the contact because that's what we said we were going to do with Munchausen by proxy. Right. Well, not even get into intent.

Either way, they were just trying to, I think that the reason they took away the iPad is for the reason you said, which is we don't want her talking to Beata. So we're going to cut off any type of device or any type of means she has of talking to her. And the iPad would be one of them. That's not monitored. That's not monitored. Yeah. And you'd think if there was a real risk of Maya looking at these adult sites, they would be like, well, actually, yes, she did have her tablet for like a week.

And she was on Pornhub. So 24-7, man. So yeah, we had to take it away. No. There's no evidence of that. There's no sign that Maya was doing anything untoward. I was going to ask you, where did that come from? Did they catch her looking at something? Literally, no, they did not. And where it came from was when Kowalski's attorneys were like, yo, you guys limited her means of communication. You took

away her iPad. I believe, in my opinion, the legal team was like, oh, shit, we got to figure out a reason, a justification for why we did that. Well, just say this. Everybody can understand wanting to protect a child from pornography, right? Everyone can understand that. But it's like, you have no basis or foundation for that. So you just look stupid. You look stupid. Anyways, moving on. To summarize the entire, I think this, like I said, nine-week trial, here were the points made by each side. Lawyers for the Kowalskis said that the family were hardworking, loving, they were doing everything right when they walked into that emergency room, when they walked into the wrong emergency room, where the doctors there were supposed to do no harm and instead blew up their entire lives. By what pressures they put on Beata Kowalski, they took her out of the game. And she was, without a doubt, the quarterback of this team. Jack is an amazing man. But Beata was a force of nature. And Beata was capable of incredible amounts of work, tenderness, love, compassion, but she was

also of an Eastern European background and she could be brusque, but she was a lioness protecting her family. And we get into eventually what happened on that October 7th afternoon and evening. And I want you to think about one thing. If Johns Hopkins had not changed its diagnosis that quickly over that particular day, for reasons we'll get into, none of this would have happened. And that's medical malpractice. They did absolutely no research. They did not bring in experts. They did not have anybody who knew what they were doing examine Maya. And from the Kowalski

standpoint, six days before they had been back in with the same complaints, which is gastroparesis which is from CRPS, right? And here they come in six days later and it's completely changed. Now they're somehow treated like criminals. They're treated as though there's something wrong with them, even though, and consider it from their point of view, they've been coming to this hospital since literally before any of the CRPS symptoms started. They'd been going there for 15 months and they'd never had a problem. They had support. And let me tell you, I don't think that everybody at Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital was bad, wrong, or evil. There were some good people over there. Some of their outpatient doctors were superb, but something was very wrong with this hospital.

So this is the lawyer for the Kowalskis. This is the same guy that you like the way he talks and you like the way he does depositions. I like that. Yeah, I like him. He's good. Yeah. I did have to speed up that clip a little bit, though, because he talks slow. He continued on to say that there was a culture of silence at all children's hospital. And he referred back to the testimony of Dr. Joseph Corcoran, who had served as the chief medical officer at Brandon Medical Hospital.

Dr. Corcoran had heard about the Kowalski case through friends and he'd offered to testify on behalf of the family and he refused to take any payment. Now, the reason that he did this is because he was very familiar. I mean, he's got a list of achievements and experience in this field of identifying problems in hospital management. And if you want to listen to his testimony, he talks about it for like 20 minutes. But he realized that there was something very wrong with what was going on with this hospital. And that's why he wanted to help them and he would not take any money for it. Now the defense,

as soon as they heard that Dr. Corcoran was gonna testify, they filed a motion to limit his testimony. And at first we were all like, why? Like, why do they care so much about this guy? And it didn't take long to figure out why, as this specific person would become the star witness for the Kowalski family. Corcoran would list off his lengthy resume to explain why he was qualified to review the policies and procedures at all children's hospital and this

included working for Sunrise Hospital in the Vegas area where his job was to pay attention to clinical care and safety. So and that's not the only thing like I could it would take an entire video to tell you all the hospitals he worked for, all his jobs there. But basically, he's pretty much an expert in like keeping the culture and the care of patients at hospitals above board. And he said that based on the hospital's own policy, first of all, the family had a right to remove their daughter from the hospital and refuse treatment.

And he like showed you where it said that in their policy. And let me tell you, like this guy was allowed to talk for 20 minutes about his credential, but when he was actually testifying, the defense objected after every other sentence. And most of these objections were overruled. And that's when the judge started to get annoyed. And sometimes even before like the lawyer would finish like stating what his objection was, the judge would be like overruled. He's just over it. Throughout the trial, Corcoran would be called to the stand more than once, including towards the end, after the defense team, the defense for the hospital, opened up the door to what's called an immediate jeopardy report that the Joint Commission of the hospital had written. So an

immediate jeopardy citation is the most severe and egregious threat to the health and safety of recipients, like patients. And the immediate jeopardy at this hospital revealed many disturbing things. I'm touching the tip of the iceberg, like surgeons not washing their hands, children who died because of bad practices, spreads of infectious diseases, administrative negligence, things like that. And the defense team for the hospital, they were like, oh no, that's just the heart department. That's not the whole hospital. But when the Kowalski's legal team found out about this report, they were like, well, why don't you let us be the deciding factor of this? Because just three days ago, y'all were telling us that this hospital was board

certified. It was well run. There were no issues. So if that wasn't true, well, we need to know that. And we need to know if it was just the heart department. And we demand to see the paperwork you have on this. That's why I kind of want to deal with the Joint Commission issue. Yes, we would demand, request the Joint Commission Triennial Survey that was just referenced, and the self-report that was referenced earlier, and any other associated Joint Commission or federal agency findings during that time, because both were referenced in Mr. Anderson's testimony, Mr. Witness Anderson's testimony.

And we can set, I don't know if we need the deposition, but we need the documents. And Judge, if they were left with the idea and the expert's testimony that this hospital was well-run and they had been approved, there was a governmental and an industry approval process, and they passed with flying colors. Now, if that

was not true, then this is a very serious matter. We've had difficulty throughout this case, getting documents from the defense, and we would really like to see all of those. Gotcha. You can see how excited the first lawyer was. He referenced it twice. You brought it up. You brought it up. I wish the cameras were on the other side because they must have been like, fuck. Well, the defense attorney after that, have been like fuck well the defense attorney after that he was like well i mean we can get this but it's not like i could just wave a magic wand and have it like i can't have

within an hour like i gotta you know he's thinking like oh shit like i gotta i gotta figure something out right and i liked how the uh the one lawyer was like we've had trouble getting shit from these people for the whole time which is very common when you're dealing with like a, you know, a Goliath, like a big corporation, like all children's hospitals. He's like, we don't even need the depositions. We just need the affidavit. We just need the documents. That's all we need.

We need to see exactly what this covers, right? So the Joint Commission, for those who don't know, it's a not-for-profit organization, and they're supposed to regularly evaluate hospitals to make sure they're in compliance with the regulations and conditions of running a healthcare facility according to federal guidelines and state guidelines. And the Joint Commission forms the foundation and backbone of the accreditation process. So if you have issues like the IJ, which is an immediate jeopardy citation, that's going to threaten a lot for your hospital, including federal funding. So, you know, hospitals try at all costs to not get those. Now, here are some of the issues that Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital exhibited

before, during, and after Maya's time there, because that was another thing the defense said. You don't even know if this IJ happened when she was there. You don't even know if these issues were even anywhere near her department. You don't know, blah, blah, blah, blah. So here's what was going on. So again, the board has the ultimate responsibility to make sure that everything is running as expected. It was demonstrated through this process that there was poor communication where problems were not shared appropriately they weren't shared between remember we talked about divisions they weren't shared laterally they weren't shared up and they were certainly not getting shared to the board so the board really

was not able to do its job of overseeing the quality of care. And then if we move down to the third primary bullet point, there's a smaller one in between, that's why I said primary, but it begins with structuring of risk management to report directly to the health system. When Ms. Green or Ms., references reporting directly to the health system. What is she referencing there? She's talking about having a direct link of communication to Johns Hopkins health system in Baltimore. Prior to all of this, Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital was the only one of the Hopkins-affiliated hospitals that didn't have that link. In other words, at Johns Hopkins, everything was, by design, kept locally and was supposed to be managed locally. This gave them

an opportunity and access to the expertise that is, that candidly, is one of the things that Johns Hopkins is really known for around quality and patient safety. So it was giving them access to that expertise. So just so I make sure I understand, there are several Johns Hopkins hospitals within the Johns Hopkins health system. Correct. Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital is one of them. That's correct. And it was discovered during this process that Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital was the only Johns Hopkins health system hospital where risk management at the hospital level was not reporting to the system.

Is that right? That's correct. And then the last I'd like to focus to on this page is the last bullet point. It says massive education campaign on speaking up and speaking out. Have you had an opportunity to hear Ms. Green discuss this campaign? I did. What was the genesis of this massive education campaign? So she described that members of the care team in a variety of positions,

if they raised awareness of something not working, whether it's an outcome or whether it's a glitch. Number one, it was difficult to get an audience in place, kind of like see something, say something. And it was to change that. It was to encourage people to speak up when they see something wrong. Was this because there was a culture of retaliation and retribution previously? Yes, sir. You're not leading the culture of collusion. I'm going to go on to the time-out instances.

If you could repeat your answer just in case. Yes, there was a, she spoke of a culture of retaliation and retribution. Against internal employees. That's correct. Anyone who spoke up did so at significant risk. So here's where it all comes falling down, right? Because now it's not just an issue with Maya and the Kowalski family. It seems to be that shit's going down

at all children's hospital and anybody who stands up and is like, hey, something's going on, they get in trouble or they get fired. This hospital had an issue with lashing out at any employee who felt it was necessary to speak out when they thought something was happening. And that was not congruent with hospital policy and our quality patient care. The Kowalski legal team said during their closing arguments that in this culture of silence, you're going to get a situation where someone like a Kathy Beatty can run wild. No one's going to catch her or slow her down because there was no accountability at all children's hospital. The Kowalski legal team ended up getting the documents that they wanted, and they told Judge

Carroll, listen, we got a stack of papers, eight to 10 inches thick, that correlate with fixing cultural issues at all children's hospital and not just with their heart institute, as the defense had claimed. The documents revealed that several nurse practitioners had brought up issues as early as 2015. And during that time, eight key executives were forced out as the hospital introduced a massive reeducation campaign, which encouraged employees to speak up and speak out. Even Mark Zimmerman, a lawyer who represented Maya while she was being held at ACH, he said the facility and specifically Catherine Beattie put up barriers for him to access his client. And that's obviously an issue, right? Because this is her

legal right, Maya, to be able to speak to her lawyer. And sometimes they wouldn't let him in. And if he was able to see her and visit her, they would stand outside the door so they could listen. Kathy Beattie would stand outside the door so that she could listen. So Maya's getting worse treatment than a prisoner because even prisoners in prison are allowed to meet with their counsel privately. Yeah, attorney client privilege. Not at ACH apparently. Mark Anderson also testified. He was the chief operating officer for a Wisconsin children's hospital and he reviewed HR records from ACH, All Children's Hospital, and it showed that Catherine Beattie had, you know, a few disciplinary marks on her file, including a time she got into an argument with a co-worker

and had to receive counseling for her actions. There was multiple times where she was like not doing what she should be, and yet she remained there at the hospital. Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital put up the defense that Maya had come into their care in October when she was in real bad condition. She was weak. She was emaciated. And they were able to essentially save her life. They got weight back on her. You know, they weaned her off the ketamine. They claimed that when she had entered the hospital, she was on a long list of different meds and they were able to get her off most of those prescriptions. They

had also made claims that ketamine was bad and dangerous, that Maya could have died or become addicted and dependent to it. And ultimately, it was all Children's Hospital's belief that they'd saved Maya's life, or at least that she was better when she left them than when she'd arrived. Now, real quick, I know we're going to go to a clip here, but just to kind of summarize, because you went over a lot there. And I know we're going to talk about it right now with this clip a little bit more because they're obviously disputing what was said. But what it sounds like to me is that this wasn't an individual issue. This was an institutional issue. And this is what these reports started to show, that this wasn't just

someone that they were, there wasn't only Maya who was being mistreated. This was more of a organizational issue that was happening throughout the hospital. So it was actually this whole situation with Maya opened a can of worms for Johns Hopkins. It was what it sounds like here. It starts to expose a bigger issue than just Maya Kowalski and the treatment of her and her family. Yeah. And at the end of the trial, when the judge ruled in the Kowalski's favor and, you know, awarded them the money, he was like, so I'm doing this. He's like, but I will tell you there is going to have to be like, we're going to be looking deeper into some of these things that came up in this trial

because it goes beyond the scope of this. Yeah. He was like, it's very concerning. Basically, there's just no checks and balances in place. Right. So in a typical environment, you have multiple people, multiple brains. If one of your coworkers does something like, I don't know, call DCFS and make up things to make it seem like a mother's abusing her child when she's not. Another coworker might be like, hey, I don't really know if this is like a good idea. Like, is this really the best option? But because everyone's afraid of breaking the status quo, everyone's afraid of speaking up because they've seen what happens. No one's doing anything. They're just letting everyone do what they want. There's no checks

and balances. All right. So let's hear this clip. And I suggest to you that before what Johns Hopkins did to this family, it would have been in control and they would have gone on with their lives to the same successes and they would have overcome this disease. And they could have gone on very, very happily with Beata there and each of them able to live their lives as they wanted to. Afterwards, coming out, what do we know? Well, we know that mom's gone, daughter is so weak she can barely keep herself upright in the car and needs pillows to be able to support herself. We know her CRPS is immeasurably worse. We

know the family is in tatters. They have lost in many ways everything that made them up. They still have the love for each other, but they lost the driving force. Nothing was cured. Nothing was made better. Nothing was done to justify that time in there, except, of course, make Johns Hopkins a little more money, about $534,000 worth. Here you see she still had the dystonia.

You know what? I had four doctors come in talking about dystonia, excuse me, about CRPS, and I could have called more, but I figured you'd had just about all that you needed to hear about CRPS, right? So I didn't call everybody that possibly treated her. I was on a clock a bit. What I did do was try to get through enough of them so you would understand exactly what was going on here and be able to identify it. And then I used video and audio and photographs to demonstrate all of the symptoms. I don't think there's any question but that Maya has and had CRPS, which then raises the

question of why were these doctors on that day, why did they shift from the diagnosis and all of their records up to that point of CRPS and go back to some psychosomatic thing? Why would you do that? Why would you abandon something five or six experts had confirmed and go back to something that you could only find pre-diagnosis and as speculation from a lot of other hospitals? All right, let's take a quick break. We'll be right back. So the Kowalski attorney, Greg Anderson, he said that one of the reasons all children's hospitals claimed that they had to keep Maya there was because they were concerned about Maya withdrawing from the ketamine as they lessened the doses and then stopped it

altogether. Anderson said they acted like ketamine was somehow like an opiate and Maya had to stay there to be monitored as she was weaned off of it because she might be harmed. Take a look at the number of times, the number of times that she had an infusion, which are in green, and all the red are the periods between those infusions. And if you look at the medical records, nothing in those records ever shows a single sign of any withdrawal. There's no shaking and there's no runny nose or jitters. There's no raised blood pressure for no apparent reason. There's nothing to indicate that this child is having withdrawal

symptoms. The proof is in the pudding. I don't know why they brought the addictionologist in here, Dr. Levy, because she simply did not understand the disease and her statements were so far afield and she absolutely could not explain why Maya was able to get through all these, stop from anywhere from a day up to 37 days and never have the single sign of withdrawal. And the reason was there are no withdrawals from Ketamine. There aren't any. There was no reason to keep her there. There was no reason to keep her in the hospital. Maya should have been in and out. So the Kowalski legal team disputed all the points that the defense brought up and they laid out the timeline. They said, yes, before September 23rd of 2015, when Dr.

Anthony Kirkpatrick finally diagnosed Maya with CRPS, there were some doctors and hospitals who suspected that Maya had something called conversion disorder. Conversion disorder is a condition in which a person experiences physical and sensory problems such as paralysis, numbness, blindness, deafness, or seizures with no underlying neurological pathology. Children with conversion disorder are not faking or intentionally producing their physical sensory problems. They are real, but the problems aren't caused by any underlying medical problems. Rather, they're impairments in the normal functioning of the body. Basically, conversion disorder refers to the conversion of

emotional stress into physical symptoms. The Kowalski lawyer, Gregory Anderson, noted that all of this speculation about conversion disorder amongst different medical professionals that Maya would see completely stopped when she was formally diagnosed by legitimate doctors with CRPS. So basically, he's saying, yeah, she did see all these doctors before, and none of them could pinpoint what was wrong with her. But when she finally found doctors who could pinpoint what was wrong with her, all of the other doctors who saw her after would simply have to look into her medical records, see what she was diagnosed with, and then they weren't sitting here like,

oh, what do you have? We don't know, because it was right there. Anderson said that Beata Kowalski was not doctor shopping. She was just looking for second and third opinions until she could find someone who could actually help her daughter. And when she found Dr. Kirkpatrick and Dr. Hanna, there was no more doctor shopping. Anderson said that the staff at All Children's Hospital were offended because Beata was challenging them. And at some point after that, the hospital tried to change the narrative. The Kowalskis walked in with a child who had a terrible disease, and they walked out as Beata being the dangerous enemy and Maya being either a victim of Beata or an equally willing participant making up her own symptoms.

Anderson said that he believed it was when Beata began asking for people's names, asking questions, writing things down and making notes that the staff started to kind of get like a little stressed out and a little worried because within 24 hours of being there, the hospital employees had called risk management. Now, there was a social worker at All Children's Hospital. Her name was Debbie Hanna, and she'd been brought in to talk to Maya and the Kowalskis. And her determination was that they were just like any other family who were struggling with a child that had a tough disease, but she didn't see any abnormal behavior. This is somebody, a social worker who works for All Children's Hospital. And she was called in to do a psychosocial evaluation,

which she started doing it, but she was never allowed to complete her evaluation before risk management took over, and then Dr. Sally Smith was brought in. All Children's Hospital allowed Sally Smith to use their portal to look at Maya's medical records, even though the hospital had not gotten permission from Maya's parents. And since Smith was not an actual employee of the hospital or the actual treating physician of Maya,

this violated Maya's HIPAA rights. Gregory Anderson, the Kowalski lawyer, he said, remember, this is a place where if a person complains, there's retribution, there's a chance they could lose their job. So when Beata started taking control of the situation, you know, kicking ass and taking names, so to speak, they brought in Dr. Sally Smith, who they knew was highly respected and trusted, not just by the hospital,

but by the legal system and law enforcement. And they brought her in to essentially support their narrative so they would not get in trouble for their initial mishandling of Maya's condition. The hospital even brought in another doctor who worked for the state, and even he could not say for sure whether this was a fabricated illness. He suggested getting a pediatric neurological consult to confirm whether there was a physiological basis, and this was never done. And then Sally Smith comes in and

suddenly nothing that any other doctors had said mattered. Attorney Greg Anderson said, remember, this was a hospital that was under immediate jeopardy of losing its license, possibly losing its federal funding. These people at the hospital were all worked up and they didn't want anyone rocking the boat. Anderson told the court during his closing statement that Beata gave her life for her child. As Maya started to get worse and worse,

Beata's anxiety went up until she finally determined that unless something drastic was done, there was a pretty good chance that Maya was going to die in that hospital. She'd already heard the dangers from Dr. Kirkpatrick. She'd already watched as the daughter of a friend of hers had died from CRPS. And she obviously did not want that to happen to Maya. In a message to a friend on November 17th, 2016, Beata said, quote, you're absolutely right. They thought I was making her sick. I guess not.

She's still sick. The docs won't admit it. Their ego is too big. Plus, they did this as a retaliation against me because they knew I was going to go after the ICU attending MD. Filing charges against me with DCF makes them automatically immune, end quote. And she's kind of right there. I mean, it doesn't obviously make them automatically immune because they're in court now, but this way they can say like, oh, this isn't

our decision. That's what DCF said. We're just following their orders to protect this child. But they were the ones who made sure that they had exaggerated what was happening enough where DCF would be like, okay, let's open another case. Beata knew that the options were not great. Maya would die or end up with some foster family. And from then on, her medical care would always happen under the assumption that her symptoms and pain were all in her head. And Greg Anderson, he said there's two bases he's to consider. One, were ACH's actions a substantial factor in Beata's suicide? And he said,

yeah, I think that we can say they were. The second basis was, did Beata operate from an irresistible impulse? And Anderson said, yes, the irresistible impulse in this case was Beata's maternal instinct. There was nothing she could do about it. She was driven to help her child no matter what, and she could not ignore that irresistible impulse. She knew that if she didn't do something, it would only be bad for Maya. Now, in order for monetary damages to be awarded to the Kowalskis, there had to be proof of intentional emotional distress.

And the family's legal team said, yo, there's plenty of evidence of that towards Maya and her family, what Sally Smith did to them, what Kathy Beatty did to them. There's also plenty of evidence to show that Maya was falsely imprisoned by ACH, that the parents were lied to, that Maya had pictures taken of her that were never even put into the record. So where did those pictures go? Who's got those pictures? Because they were never inputted in the hospital system. There's tons of evidence to show that. And there was also medical malpractice happening. And I'm going to switch gears for a minute, and I'm going to go to the defense's argument. So one of all children's hospitals attorneys, his name is Ethan Shapiro, he was like, hey, we're going to need you,

the jury, to reach your decision based on the facts and the law, not sympathy. You know, don't feel bad for these people. Don't use your emotions. Shapiro began walking through the different doctors and treatments the Kowalskis had gone through before ending up at All Children's Hospital in October of 2016. He said before the 4th of July, Maya was kind of sick already. You know, she didn't have the CRPS symptoms, but she had like a bad cough. And the Kowalskis had brought Maya to a doctor named Dr. Hugh Windham. He was an allergist and an immunologist. They brought her there because of this cough. And Dr. Windham looked at Maya's lungs and vitals and said everything looked fine. He felt that it wasn't asthma and something still

wasn't right with Maya though. Like he couldn't figure out what it was, but this cough was just lingering and he couldn't do anything about it. Now this doctor did question the family dynamics because he said Beata and Jack were arguing about whether or not to bring Maya to the ER. The lawyer Shapiro also said that CRPS usually starts with an injury, but when Beata and Jack brought Maya into the Sarasota Memorial Hospital on July 4th, the ER report claims that Maya was brought in because of a cough she'd had. And then they said that the cough had gotten worse the night before when they were at 4th of July celebrations and she'd gotten like super excited as the fireworks were going off and

then she started coughing and she was having trouble breathing. Maya's cough had gotten worse the next day, but the doctor said when she came into the emergency room, there was no cough and there was no rash. Maya was sitting comfortably in bed and she seemed fine. This doctor also noted his concern of a potential psych component. Now, just a few days later, July 6th to July 11th, Maya was in all children's hospital. And by that point, she was in a wheelchair. So just a couple of days after going and seeing the immunologist, just a couple of days after going and seeing the hospital ER about this cough, she's now in a wheelchair. At the hospital, she saw Dr. Joseph Casadante, a pediatric neurologist. This doctor wrote that Maya had

acute weakness, which was unusually presented because it was recurrent and intermittent. He wrote, quote, it would be unusual for it to be intermittent. The acute presentation is often associated with muscle breakdown, end quote. He said she also had what appeared to be a habitual functional cough and Maya's parents were requesting pain medication. Maya was discharged on July 10th, but she was back less than a week later complaining of pain and weakness throughout her whole body. She was examined by Dr. Christine Kilgore who determined that Maya may have psychological pain

or conversion disorder. The defense claims that this started a pattern of unnecessary medications given at high doses. On July 20th, Maya was seen by nurse practitioner Jamie Reed. And Jamie Reed's notes stated that Maya's parents declined a neurological and psychological exam. And after three days, they wanted Maya transferred to a different hospital.

But they said they would need a PICC line put into Maya because they were going to be flying her to Lurie Children's Hospital in Chicago. And all children's hospital declined this, saying, no, there's too big of a risk for infection and respiratory depression during a commercial flight. So Maya was discharged. And the defense, they pretty much go through all the doctors that Maya saw before finding Dr. Kirkpatrick. And they illustrate that there was a pattern throughout these visits of Maya's mother

asking for pain medication and these medical professionals who were seeing Maya believing that there could be some sort of psychological component. There was a difference in behavior when Maya was with her mom versus when Maya was on her own. And she noted attitude of family, attitude of self. And if you're wondering why am I going through all this? Because Mr. Anderson just sat up here and told you, why did all children suddenly have alarms raised? Where did this come from? The pattern is building. It wasn't just them. On the discharge summary from Dr. Kornberg, who you heard from, who by the way, we had to read him, no one was wearing wigs to have a moment of fun, but we had to read his testimony. He flatly denied saying that he was

going to break by his legs. And hisly denied saying that he was going to break my legs, and his nurse practitioner said, that's not anything this kind doctor would do. But now after being seen by pediatric intensivists, neuropsychiatry, neurology, dieticians, undergoing an EMG study where they're putting needles, arms back everywhere, which was fully tolerated without any sense of pain,

this was the discharge diagnosis of Tampa General. Suspected conversion disorder versus factitious disorder. And all they recommended at Tampa General was this. If you go through physical therapy, occupational therapy, it's going to be painful, right? You're going to have to work through this. Non-narcotic medication, maybe some medication for pain control, you're going to improve and recover. That's what Dr. McCain testified to when she was on the stand. My belief is this child is going to recover and be back in school in August. And Dr. Kornberg reinforced it when he said to

the Kowalskis, stop taking these medications including the oxycodone. I'm going to try to orient you to some of these events by what I call little charts because it's a lot of information to take and this is just my sort of demonstrative to show you that in what's less than two months from July 4th we go from wheelchair to hospital, three diagnoses at all children's, Lurie Children's and Tampa General, three world class institutions, multipleties seen by pediatric neurologists, they've all coalesced around the same diagnosis. Suspected conversion disorder, that doesn't mean your pain isn't real, it just means what you need is physical therapy, occupational therapy, and cognitive behavioral therapy,

and you should return to normal. And by the way, not just them, right? Not just them. Defense exhibit, actually this is joint exhibit, the J is joint. Joint exhibit 1066, number three, Dr. Wassenaar, the trusted pediatrician, what did he say? When he saw Maya after being released from Tampa General, he wrote in his record too, there's significant behavioral overlays complicating the assessment, and noted his concern that despite seeing the note from Dr. Kornberg to stop taking the oxycodone, that Maya is still using two milliliters of liquid oxycodone several times a day. And what did he write in his impression

before anyone thought we would be here in court? Join exhibit 1066, his impression. Behavioral disturbance with possible conversion disorder. I'm assuming this is what you were referring to when you said earlier in the episode, hey, based on everything that was documented through all these different doctors, which they're obviously not all idiots, right? You didn't have a problem with them investigating the potential for Munchausen by proxy, because I do think even me listening to it right now, and I'm assuming with a lot of people out there who are watching or listening, does look a little bit like there could be something there. There could be something there definitely worth it. If they hadn't investigated it, I would be questioning them

with the totality of what was just discussed. Exactly. So yes, hearing it all laid out like that, you're like, yeah, I could see as a human being, I would be a little like side eye in it. Doctors are telling you don't take this medication. Mom's still giving it. But what this defense team is failing to once again address is the fact that Maya had a condition that, first of all, is pretty rare and is very rare in children. And not only that, but she's being treated with something that is not standard, you know? And ketamine, because I read a bunch of stuff about CRPS, ketamine doesn't even work in all CRPS patients. It works in some, it doesn't in others. It's basically just like a trial and error. Does this help you? This helps some people,

does it help you? It happened to help her. But because these doctors that she was seeing weren't CRPS specialists, because it's a disease that's not widely known about even in the medical field, they wouldn't be able to diagnose her with it. And that's why they were going from doctor to doctor. And really, the asking for pain medication on behalf of Beata and Jack makes perfect sense because at that point, all you know, you don't know what's wrong with their kid, but you know that she's in incredible pain, right? You know she's in incredible pain. And you would at least like her to have some relief from that while you keep bringing her

to doctors, hoping that one of them will be able to tell you what happened. And eventually, they did find Dr. Kirkpatrick, who was able to be like, yes, I've seen this before. I know what this is. It's CRPS and let's start working on it. And as soon as they met with Dr. Kirkpatrick and then Dr. Hannah, Maya started getting better. She would have some relapses, but she started getting better and her pain became more manageable. We heard both doctors testify to that. So once again, they're trying to show us and the jury, this is why all children's hospital was worried. That's not what's in question here, my dude. We understand why they were worried. We get it. What we don't get is calling child protective more than once, exaggerating things that happened to make sure that a case was opened, and then continuing to

lie and die on that hill and torture this family and torture that child even when you yourself saw that she did have CRPS because you monitored her for 48 hours and she couldn't get out of the bed by herself and she couldn't do anything by herself even when she thought no one was watching. You proved over the course of these three months that this child did have CRPS or at least that she wasn't making up her symptoms. And at that point, that Munchausen by proxy diagnosis should have just been gone in a way. And then you bring her parents back and you say, hey, let's be a team here. Like we should have been from the beginning and figure out how to help your daughter. They charged them for half a million dollars for CRPS treatment. Over half a million dollars.

536. Yes, they did. I was rounding to the nearest hundredth but yes yes they did exactly well so they they believe at least the the kowalski family believes that they did that because they were giving her crps treatments but also it was like a higher cost for those treatments and when the hospital you know testified about this they were like yeah i mean we were like giving your CRPS treatments. We were giving her other treatments too. Like you can see there was other charges for stuff.

And it's like, that's not the point. And real quick, because we talked about at the top of the show, I just want to reiterate, I don't think either of us are trying to suggest that hospitals are the villains, the bad guys, right? But just to put it into perspective here, this is one patient over half a million dollars. Just think about that. Think about all the patients they treat on a daily basis, some of them months at a time. So when we talk about money, $2 million, you know, 200 million, it is a lot of money. I'm not sitting here saying it's not. But again, think about that. All the other patients that are in there, some of them

justifiably so, you know, they need the treatment. There's a lot of money coming into these hospitals. So they have some sources to pull from. Again, not saying that it's unjust or whatever, but we all know, we've seen some of the bills that are covered by our insurance companies, and unfortunately not covered by our insurance companies for some people. It's an extraordinary amount of money. You know, you could be in the hospital for, I was our insurance companies for some people.

It's an extraordinary amount of money. You could be in the hospital for, I was in the hospital for 12 days for MRSA, actually. I think I talked about this before. And my bill was over a hundred grand. It was crazy for 12 days. Dude, it is insane. And it's honestly, this is where the next investigation should go into, like the pharmaceutical industry and like the way hospitals bill and stuff. Because I stabbed myself a couple months ago in October. I'm sorry. I'm not trying to laugh. I stabbed myself, man. I was in the middle of a pumpkin patch.

I was bleeding because that knife went deep. Yeah, you saw in the pictures. And then the police were like, oh, we'll call an ambulance. And I'm like, I'm not freaking going anywhere in an ambulance. So you can charge me $3 million to drive me 10 minutes in an ambulance? No, thank you, sir. I can drive myself. Thank you very much. Not at all. Like ridiculous. And I even told the people, I was like, don't you guys have like a needle and thread or something just stitch me up like why is this so hard it seems so

inefficient but yeah it's ridiculous not trying to say hospitals are the bad guys here i'm just saying okay right so hospitals are not the bad guys we need them we need them it just like the the police aren't bad guys but there's bad people inside of these places, right? I would also say institutionally. Like when we talk about police departments and hospitals, it's not necessarily one person, right? It's the organization itself or how it's run itself. It's the institution that needs to be changed. When we talk about pharmaceutical companies and we talk about police departments, policies, procedures,

it's all the same thing. It's a different department, but it has a lot to do with organizations that are in charge of serving the community, right? That's what their main purpose is, to serve the community. Sometimes they forget that. And sometimes the policies that are created

do not even reflect that. So yeah, there's always room for improvement. I wouldn't even say the policies, right? Because during the trial, dude, I watched- I'm talking about police departments as well. Oh, I'm talking about the hospital, right? The policies of the hospital are very straightforward. Every child has the right to have their parents involved in their medical care,

medical decisions. All of the things that they did to Maya violated the hospital policies. That's the point. There was no checks and balances in place for anybody to come out and be like, hey, what you're doing right now is violating hospital policy because everybody just wanted to shut up and not like draw attention to themselves. So the institution itself, yes, from the inside out, if it's rottingting it doesn't matter how much good it provides for the community at the end of the day So as far as why the folks at all children's hospitals suspected there might be some psychological or neurological Component based on my medical records after hearing that not a mystery to me. I completely understand seeing red flags

That's what they're trained to do But as the kowalski's legal team would point out, that's all fine and dandy. Maya saw a bunch of doctors who didn't know anything about CRPS, so they continually misdiagnosed her, which, by the way, is very common for people with CRPS. People don't believe them. They think it's all in their head. They're told it's all in their head. They feel unheard. It makes everything worse. However, when Maya finally did see Dr. Kirk Patrick and Dr. Hannah, both specialists who are experts on CRPS and who do see CRPS patients every day, she was finally diagnosed with CRPS and the mystery was gone. Those concerns about conversion disorder or montasin by proxy should have been put to bed. Yet, the hospital itself continued to treat Maya for CRPS.

They even, remember, facilitated her ketamine infusions. Remember, they did that. They gave her ket remember, facilitated her ketamine infusions. Remember, they did that. They gave her ketamine. They prescribed her ketamine. They put a thing in her vein so that she could get ketamine infusions easier with Dr. Hanna. So why all of a sudden did that change? Why did that change? That is the question. And the defense team is like, well, it didn't change. We were just worried. But the Kowalski's attorneys are like, it changed because Beata came up in there, challenged them. They didn't like her attitude. They didn't like the way she was like ordering them around because she is very like straightforward. And they were worried that

she was going to pose a problem for them on like a higher level. She was going to go for the ICU doctor. She was saying it in that message. Now, the defense team played a video that was taken of Maya at home in May after her discharge from the hospital. So remember, she leaves the hospital in January. This video is taken in May. Use your common sense. How would we be liable for any of those catastrophic numbers when because of the care and treatment, and because of Maya's perseverance as shepherded by her father, we saw this. May 26th. This is now a little more than four months after getting out of all children's. How are we liable for worsening a condition? Let's hear what Dr. Hanna said.

She went back to him. Join Exhibit 1040, number seven. This is on June 8th, so, what is this? February, March, April, May, June. Five, five months after she gets out of all children. So this decrepit condition she left her in, not a drop of ketamine, right? Let's look at that.

Overall, the patient has had 60 to 70% relief since his last visit. What is he comparing to? October 6, quality life of zero, and now through the therapies of all children and the dedication of Maya working with Rachel DeYoung, her outpatient therapist, only warm water therapy and physical therapy, she's got 60 to 70% relief. Look at the next box. Negative allodynia, negative hyperthesia, negative hypersensitivity, negative, negative, negative, negative. What's she doing? Patient reports no hypersensitivity

or allodynia. She's doing pool therapy and physical therapy twice a week. That's their doctor. Not saying that that video changes anything for me, but I got to say some pretty good points were made. You think? They were made? You think good points were made? Okay. So hold on.

I'm going to talk to you about that. Okay. So all children's hospitals saying they made her better, that getting Maya off the ketamine actually ended up improving her quality of life. He also said this is like five, six months after she gets out of the hospital, right? But okay, we're going to ignore the fact that she left the hospital completely weak, low weight, a complete mess. Her brother Kyle got up on the stand and said it was the worst he'd ever seen her.

Her doctors got up on the stand and said it was the worst that they had ever seen her when she left that hospital. So all children's hospital is not responsible for what happened to Maya with her care after she left there in January and before that video was taken. So let me read to you directly from the National Institute of Health. Quote, in general, pediatric CRPS patients have more favorable outcomes compared to adults. Many will have a spontaneous resolution after a few months In a study of the short and long-term outcomes of children with CRPS treated with exercise therapy of 103 children, 92% improved in the six to eight months following an intensive exercise program. 49% of children continued to follow up for a mean

of five years and 88% of them were completely symptom-free and 31% had a relapse of symptoms during that duration that resolved with the reinstitution of an exercise program. Additionally, even when a patient is suffering from CRPS, they're going to have good days when they can do certain things that they could not do on their bad days. Now, nowhere in this literature or any literature does it say that ketamine makes CRPS worse. It does not. It only says that ketamine is more effective in some cases than others. So how would bringing Maya off of ketamine and keeping her locked in a hospital where she was forced to lie alone in a bed being harassed by random nurses and social workers, which by the way, stress and anxiety only exacerbates CRPS, how did that make her better

at all? They cannot take any, any credit for her improvement. Now, when she left the hospital, her weight was low, she was weak, et cetera. But Jack, her father, continued to work with her because at that point he felt like, okay, Beata was doing it all, basically. She was leading it. But now with Beata gone, I have to do what I think Beata would want me to do. And at all costs, I have to do whatever it takes to make her better, including like installing those solar panels in the pool so that Maya could do her hydrotherapy multiple times a day instead of having to go to a facility maybe once or twice a week to do it. So Jack started bringing her to physical therapy regularly, turned their pool into a place where Maya could do her swimming and therapy on a daily basis. Being home and having that stress off of her, being allowed to go outside, be in the sun, live her life, exercise, be free, that's most likely what sped up her recovery.

And while the hospital staff was denying Maya had CRPS, and while they were accusing Jack and Beata Kowalski of child abuse, like we said, they were still billing the family in their insurance company for over $500,000 of CRPS treatments because those came with a higher price tag than other therapies and treatments, allegedly, according to the Kowalskis and their legal team. So yes, you'll see Maya in that video. She looks great, and I'm happy for her. I'm very happy for her. But that doesn't mean she didn't have relapses.

That didn't mean that she didn't have pain sometimes. Even today, she still has pain sometimes. And when that lawyer said, oh, zero ketamine, ketamine-free, that wasn't true. Maya did have some ketamine treatments after leaving the hospital. It just sometimes gets better with time and age as children grow and change and their brains change and their hormones level out and things. It just will get better sometimes. And luckily for Maya, it did.

But you can even see her now in the trial. She doesn't look 100% healthy, does she? She's very pale. She's very thin. She's very thin. She looks kind of- Hey, let's go easy on people who are pale, okay? Continue. I am also pale.

She's very pale. She's very thin. She's not 100% healthy. She'll never be 100% healthy. And she'll always have to worry about relapses and reoccurrences. She's not cured. It's like cancer. She's in remission.

But that could change at any time, depending. But she is feeling a lot better. And like I said, I read so much literature about CRPS in children. They often just grow out of it. What I will say, though, is as the Kowalski's attorney said early on, if they had just given her what she needed and sent her home, she would probably have improved in, you know, four or five, six months, a year anyways. That was just going to be the natural progression of it. Instead, what they did was keep her there in that bed. They stressed her out. They deprived her of her family. They deprived her of her comforts. They deprived her of her security.

And she never did get better. We saw her in the hospital. Her feet were turned in. She looked terrible. She couldn't walk. What about what they did made her better? When she left the hospital, she couldn't walk. Nothing they did helped her. If anything, they delayed her progress with that disease. Yeah, I think what I was saying earlier, and by no means am I defending the hospital, but I think when that presentation was made, no, they can't take credit for her getting better. But I think at the core of what the hospital was concerned about, and again, I'm speculating here, I'm giving my opinion, was just the amount of medication that she was on and the dosage in which she was on, it was very dangerous and that could have-

Oh, let me address that too. Okay. Because I thought it was going to be addressed in one of those clips, but I must forget on the screen. So remember that the lawyer for the hospital was like oh she was on all these medications and we got her off of them blah blah so then the plaintiff the kowalski's attorney came up and they're like you did what and then they showed side by side like the medications that maya was on when she was entered into the hospital and the medication she was on when she left and they were almost identical so they didn't take her off ketamine they they did take her off the ketamine but the

rest of all the medications because she was on 27 medications and we got her off of those no they did not so so the big thing here it sounded like over these last three parts has been the ketamine that's been kind of a sticking point and i i think at the core if you're to believe that there were good intentions there, they just felt like the ketamine, there was just too much. They didn't think they needed it. No, they thought that Beata was making her sick and making up these symptoms. Yeah, give her the ketamine.

But the ketamine was, but the, yes. But then when they figured out that she did need it and then both her doctors who were CRPS specialists were like, yeah, she does need this. She is on this regimen. That's when the hospital should have backed off and been like, okay, our bad. Y'all do you. Y'all do you. What I see they're trying to convey is that they didn't agree with the fact that Beata

wanted her daughter on all this ketamine. There were multiple doctors saying they didn't need it. She didn't need to be on even oxycodone. And yet Beata was requesting that she be put on these high doses of ketamine to the point where Dr. Hanna had said early on that he didn't feel comfortable giving her any more of this and that she needed to go to a hospital in order to get that amount of ketamine. So again, I'm just saying from their perspective, they were looking at these dosages of ketamine saying, we don't think she needs this. We don't think she needs this. Now, just for the people out there who think I'm trying to defend them, everything they did after that was wrong. I'm not disputing that. So I think in this argument, this clip, what they're trying to say is, hey, now you're disputing it saying that she was still on ketamine afterwards, which would defeat this argument. But it sounded like the way they framed it to the jury was that, hey, after leaving the hospital, remaining off ketamine and just doing, you know, the occupational therapy and a couple other things.

The hydrotherapy, the exercise. She's improved exponentially. And if it were up to her family, she would still be on high doses of ketamine at this point. I think that's the argument they were making. I mean, why would that be? Why would that be the case? Because she was with her family since January. And if it was up to her family,

then they would still be giving her high doses of ketamine. It was up to her family. Right, right. That's what I'm saying. So they're saying if it wasn't for our intervention, she would still be on the high doses of ketamine today when clearly from this video, you can see she doesn't need it.

That's what they're saying. Yeah, she didn't need it at that time, but she did need some sort of pain intervention and ketamine worked, but they were denying that she was even in pain. Right. Correct. It was all in her head. So when you can't admit and accept the root cause, yeah, you're going to be like, Oh, it was ketamine's high. No one's arguing that the ketamine doses were high. That's not even a factor in this trial, right? So I don't even know why he's talking about it. We're not talking about that, dude. Well, he's talking about it because he has to, you know, we can't, and listen, I'm a cop. So, you know, defense attorneys are like, you know, the quote unquote arch nemesis. They're the ones

I'm always competing against, but I understand their role. I've never taken it personal. The lawyer's doing what he can. He's taking his side, his client's side of the argument and their perspective on things and trying to convince a jury of their findings, right? And so you can't blame him for like, what is he supposed to do? Get up there and go, yeah, I know you guys are right.

So I understand where they're coming from. Doesn't mean the jury's going to believe it or the judge is going to believe it, which clearly they didn't. I mean, I could understand if he said, while she was with us for three and a half months, look at her running around like this. Right. That would be a lot more. I agree. No, I'm not, I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just saying from that

video, I could see what, what they were trying to paint. The picture they were trying to paint is right after leaving the hospital, she comes in, she can barely even walk. She, she goes out three months later. She can barely even walk. Yeah. out three months later you can barely even walk well they're saying three months after she's chasing a dog around and her own doctor dr hannah was saying wow look at all this improvement he had last seen her in october this was a few months after that obviously six months after whatever it was he's seeing all these improvements and all at that time she was on was the hydrotherapy and whatever else, occupational therapy once a week, whatever it was. That's what they're saying.

They're saying what we wanted her to do after the hospital, after she was – because they didn't just say, okay, we lost. Here you go, Jack. Here's back your kid. They said, hey, we're going to discharge her, but these are the things we would like her to do outside, outpatient therapy. This is what we'd like her to do. We think she'll continue to see improvement.

And so they're claiming that as a success for them. That's what they're doing. Yeah. Well, that is a false narrative, but that's just my opinion. So now the jury goes to deliberate, right? They've heard both sides. It must've been a very painful trial to sit through because I know it was for me. After two days of deliberation, the jury came back with a verdict and they found the hospital liable for all seven claims levied against it. False imprisonment, battery, medical negligence, fraudulent billing, intentional infliction of emotional distress

to both Maya and Beata, and wrongful death. The family would receive compensatory damages of $211 million, an additional 50K in punitive damages, and in total, the Kowalski family was awarded damages of $211 million and an additional $50K in punitive damages. And in total, the Kowalski family was awarded more than $261 million. Maya met the media outside the courtroom and told them, quote, to me, it was about the answer. Knowing my mom was right.

I want people to know that she wasn't harming me at all. I mean, for the first time, I feel like I got justice, end quote. But the story doesn't end here because Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital isn't going to give up that easily. They have filed for a retrial. Now they're alleging jury misconduct. They claim that the jury foreman, Paul Lenguy, shared information about the case with his wife, who then posted it to social media. Court documents showed that Paul's wife, Yolanda Lenguy, posted on live YouTube feeds from the trial, and she also posted in a Facebook group that largely supported the Kowalski family. She's also accused of meeting with a social media influencer who's connected to the Kowalski family, and she allegedly discussed on social media questions that her husband intended to ask the witnesses during jury deliberation. Quote, the evidence reveals a shocking level of involvement in the case and a palpable bias in favor of plaintiffs on the part

of juror number one's wife, as well as social media posts sharing inside information. Ms. Langei could have only obtained from her husband, end quote. And the plaintiff, the Kowalski family's attorney, they were like, she was at the trial. So she could have just heard, you know, because there's tons of times, too many times where we can't hear the audio for watching from home. It goes mute because the attorneys are at the bench talking to the judge. But people in the courtroom can hear those things. So the plaintiffs, aka the Kowalskis, are like, we don't know where she got this information from. So I don't know what's going to go on with that, man. I hope based on that they don't get a mistrial because that would be ridiculous.

But that's not all because Maya herself has filed a new lawsuit against the hospital claiming she was sexually abused there. An attorney for Maya told the media that she filed a criminal complaint with the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office alleging assault and battery at the hospital between October 8th and October 13th, 2016. And this is not in regards to Kathy Beattie, because according to the lawyer, Greg Anderson, while Maya was imprisoned at the hospital, a man who appeared to be a doctor came into her room, pulled down her pants and underwear, and stared at her and touched her private parts. Anderson said, quote, Maya suppressed this until about four weeks ago, but she did put some notes to both the psychiatrists at the time, Dr. Kausenstein, and later to Dr. Heinzschick, the two female psychiatrists she saw along the way, end quote.

Now, all Children's Hospital has responded to this saying, quote, these allegations originally arose during the trial and were not admitted into the case. As soon as the hospital became aware of the allegations and in accordance with their policies, they immediately initiated an internal investigation and contacted law enforcement last month. Federal privacy laws restrict JHACH from sharing more, but the hospital takes allegations of this nature very seriously and always puts the safety of their patients above all else, end quote. It's almost ludicrous to hear them say that. But yeah, I mean, that's where we're at. So it's still very much like up in the air. Could they get a new trial? They could. They could. If the judge thinks that this jury misconduct is valid and would have made an impact enough, I'm sure they'll probably survey the other jurors and be

like, hey, did Paul, your foreman, convince you to vote this way? Or was it unanimous from the beginning? How do you guys feel? Do you feel like there was pressure? I'm sure they're going to do that. That's going to come into account. Is Maya going to be able to bring this new sexual harassment suit to court? If the hospital's looking into it, are they going to be able to identify the person that did this? Is the person that did this an actual doctor or somebody who's just pretending to be a doctor at all children's hospital, kind of like Sally Smith? Who knows? But it's still very much up in the air. And I think what we're going to see as these next few months go by is that a lot of dirty laundry that all

children's hospital has been suppressing and hiding is going to come out and get like aired out to the public. And what I think is a positive to take from this is Maya's case brought such publicity because it tugged at so many heartstrings. It brought so much publicity that this specific hospital, as well as Johns Hopkins in general, are probably going to be a little bit more careful and cognizant going forward. I agree. I just want to say one more time, if I haven't said it already, and I'm just talking big picture here, without a doubt, let me start by saying Johns Hopkins and All Children's Hospital, wrong in this situation.

Anybody involved with Maya's case hospital wrong in this situation. Anybody involved with Maya's case wrong in this situation. There was clearly more than one person who dropped the ball here all the way up to the courts, you know, ultimately I don't want to people to leave this episode or leave this case, whether they're watching it here on Netflix or whatever, thinking like hospitals are bad. awarded will definitely make some things change and will bring a lot to light. And it may also help other people come forward who have also been mistreated by this hospital or any other hospital for that matter. Because there's no doubt you go to the hospital sometimes and you walk in there and they treat you like you're a third class citizen. Like they're annoyed that you're there. I'm not saying that's everybody's experience, but there's definitely- 100% my experience. There's definitely some things that can be done differently at the hospitals.

I feel like the sense of like, you know, empathy for the patients and stuff. It's kind of like, we're just, it's a factory now, right? And so everyone has their own issues, but I also know families and friends that have had children or even personal experiences where they've had faced life-threatening things and the hospital has saved their lives or their children's lives.

So a lot of good with hospitals overall. I'd like to think that hospitals are a good thing. But to bring it back to this specific case for me, and you said this multiple times, Stephanie, it all went wrong. We have no issue with them investigating the Munchausen syndrome by proxy because it does appear there were some things there that may, you know, check off a couple boxes that that could be the case. But there was a collaborative effort against Beata, more specifically in this case, to just villainize her. And more so, the case was more of proving that they were right than finding out the

truth. And there was a lot of things stacked against Beata and her family, including basically the gatekeepers, the people who were in charge of gathering all the information, dissenting opinions and opinions that supported the Munchausen by proxy theory. They were the gatekeepers of what decided when in the final report that would be reviewed by DCcf and the court in the court So they had no shot beata had no shot. So my final statement on this Is beata was really left with no choice and her way of looking at this I would I would believe would be

She felt she needed to sacrifice her own life To save her daughters. That's my takeaway from this series. And that's sad because it should have never been that case. As you said in the episode, the policies instructed them specifically that if the parents wanted to take their child out of the hospital, they should have been allowed to do so. If that results in Maya ODing on a drug that her parents decided to give her, well, that's something her parents have to live with. That is not the hospital's decision to make. That's where I stand on it. So I, yeah, I mean, I don't have much else to say. I will just say that for me, Johns Hopkins itself has always had a negative connotation. They've been involved in,

not recently to my knowledge, although I'm sure if I looked, there would be, but they've been involved historically with some ethically disgusting behavior. Anybody who's familiar with Henrietta Lacks would understand what I'm saying. For me, Johns Hopkins has just a lot of blood on their hands from the past. And it would be in their best interest to start living on the straight and narrow now because they've done some pretty horrendous things in the past and I would say that this is pretty horrendous and hopefully we don't hear any more horrendous things that they're doing although like I said I think that over the next several months if Maya continues to pursue this and if the judge who was

being serious when he was like we gotta look into this stuff more, if that's true, we're gonna find out a lot more and hopefully that it really kind of just, you know, turns everything inside out and allows this hospital to have a fresh start, move forward, doing the right thing and actually helping people and doing no harm the way they're supposed to. We appreciate you guys being here.

Everyone stay safe out there. Have a good night. Bye.