Nobody Should Believe Me - Episode 4: The Whistleblower

Episode Date: October 9, 2026

As the fallout from John Cox’s case fractures the staff at Children’s Wisconsin, communication breaks down and other children are left at risk. With NBC journalist Mike Hixenbaugh’s reporting helping fuel the growing divide, the story of John Cox becomes part of a much larger battle over child abuse pediatrics and whose voices get heard. Featuring Expert: Matthew Torbenson, Deputy District Attorney with the Milwaukee County District Attorney's Office Mark Hudson, Child Abuse Pediatrician *** To support the show, go to Patreon.com/NobodyShouldBelieveMe or subscribe on Apple Podcasts where you can get all episodes early and ad-free and access exclusive ethical true crime bonus content. Try out Andrea’s Podcaster Coaching App: https://studio.com/apps/andrea/podcaster Order Andrea’s book The Mother Next Door: Medicine, Deception, and Munchausen by Proxy: https://read.macmillan.com/lp/the-mother-next-door-9781250284273/ View our sponsors: https://www.nobodyshouldbelieveme.com/sponsors/ Remember that using our codes helps advertisers know you’re listening and helps us keep making the show!   Subscribe on YouTube where we have bonus content: https://www.youtube.com/@NobodyShouldBelieveMePod Follow Andrea on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreadunlop/ Buy Andrea's books: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Andrea-Dunlop/author/B005VFWJPI For more information and resources on Munchausen by Proxy, please visit: https://www.munchausensupport.com/ The American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children’s MBP Practice Guidelines: https://apsac.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Munchausen-by-Proxy-Clinical-and-Case-Management-Guidance-.pdf Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

True Story Media. Hello, it's Andrea, and before we jump in to our final episode today, I wanted to let you know that John Cox, Sadie DeBrosi, and Mike Hicks and Bodd did not respond to requests for comment. We did hear from Children's Wisconsin, who sent us a response that I am going to read now. So Children's Wisconsin says, quote, diagnosing child abuse is extremely difficult in the situations our team confront are heartbreaking. As nationally recognized leaders in pediatric health and child advocacy, we take take seriously our obligations as mandatory reporters and are wholly committed to the continuous

work of ensuring our systems and processes reflect the best in evidence-based practices to prevent, identify, report, and treat child abuse and maltreatment. This is highly collaborative work among our child advocacy and protection services team, emergency department, and other physicians, nurses, social workers, and many others who have dedicated their careers to the health and welfare of kids. This also includes the district attorney's office with whom we meet and communicate with regularly. By adhering to practices mandated by law, as well as our strong systems and collective expertise, we are united by our responsibility and our commitment to care for kids and families. Any suggestion that a member of our team would intentionally take actions to place a child

at risk is fundamentally in conflict with our values and core mission. End quote. Now here's the episode. There's an old saying that a lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth can get its shoes on. Because getting to the truth takes time, and getting evidence that would satisfy the burden to make a charging decision, especially takes time. The reality is, for all the ink that's been spilt on wrongful convictions, most prosecutors aren't going to press charges unless they're pretty sure they can win, that they have enough to prove something beyond a reasonable doubt. This isn't because prosecutors are inherently noble. Mileage may vary on that one, but because in addition to hopefully being motivated by justice, their careers and reputations

depend on not taking weak cases to court. In the John Cox case, Matthew Torpenson had more than enough evidence when John Cox was charged in January of 2020, and things only got more damning from there after the nurse hotline call was revealed. And by the time the whole truth came out about John Cox later in 2021, the lie he had told about what happened in the lead-up to the injuries he inflicted on baby algae, hadn't just made it halfway around the world. It had taken on a life of its own.

The links that John Cox goes to continue to try to present himself as wrongly accused. Because, you know, you reach a deferred prosecution agreement. And then, you know, as soon as that timeline is up, the next thing he does is turn around. and sue the hospital. Making everything worse, like, they obviously just continued to dig their heels in. I mean, do you have any sort of just insight

into that posture that he took on this case? I have suspicions. I think it was his reputation and his career at stake, and so he could not let his lie control the narrative of what took place. And so he had to keep pressing his own narrative forward to try and save his career

and his reputation. Despite how damning the truth about John Cox really was, it was his version of the story that LG's injuries were the result of an accidental rollover, that he was the victim of a conspiracy, not only within the hospital where he worked, but among police, CPS, and the prosecutor's office, it was this lie that stuck.

John Cox wasn't going to take accountability for his actions, and as a result, it wasn't only baby LG who got hurt. I'm Andrea Dunlop. And this is part four of our Nobody Should Believe Me special report on the John Cox case. If you have questions about this series or suggestions for other cases that you'd like a special report on, let us know at hello at nobody should believe me.com. We love hearing from you. As always, if you want to listen ad-free, have access to the show's full archive,

and get two bonus episodes each month. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts or on Patreon. We are a 100% listener-supported show, and we appreciate all of you who tune in each week. We'll be right back. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager.

Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2,600 to speak to an advisor. Free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with eye-gaming Ontario. Despite his certainty about John Cox's guilt, Matthew was torn up over the toll that the case had taken on the hospital, its staff, and most importantly, the children in his community.

Following John Cox's plea deal, Matthew met with members of the Capps team and several higher-ups in the ER department. Matthew followed up with a letter to the hospital administration, hoping that an honest daring of the truth might mitigate the fractured trust between the ER staff and the child advocacy staff. I offered her to come in and meet with the staff at Churton's Hospital, Wisconsin, provide all the information we had about the case with the investigation uncovered, but also to answer questions that anyone had relative to the investigation, how things unfolded. And I never even got a response to the letter. As we've mentioned in the previous episodes, Mike Hickson-Boss reporting included a number of anonymous accounts from John Cox's colleagues about their mistrust of the child advocacy team. But in early 2022, months after Matthew's attempts to smooth out the tensions at children's,

he received a very different account from someone on the ER staff. A letter from a whistleblower reported dire concerns about the escalating feud between the emergency department doctors and the child advocacy doctors. Far from the hospital in its admins engaging in some kind of conspiracy against Dr. Cox, this whistleblower told Torbenson that the hospital was supporting the retaliatory actions of the ER doctors to the detriment of the child advocacy team and the children they serve. They told him that anyone who spoke up on the child advocacy team's behalf or criticized the ER department was being threatened. The treatment of Dr. Lynn Sheets in particular was so abhorrent, the letter writer said,

that they were looking for work elsewhere. The letter writer was hoping that Torbenson could do something to help. They wrote, quote, Surely someone is willing to advocate for the injured and dead children who suffer because of the emergency department's intentional mishandling of cases. There are obvious cases where children and families have been harmed, and if it has not already happened, there will be child deaths if the situation is allowed to continue. End quote.

They go on to say that the administration was burying Midas reports. These are used to document safety or patient care concerns in hospital settings from the child advocacy team about abuse cases that were being mishandled by the ER department. The letter writer said that this was all. all in retaliation for the perceived role that the child advocacy team had in the John Cox case. As to why the hospital would favor emergency medicine over the child advocacy team, the letter writer speculated that the department that generates more revenue gets the most support. There are claims floating around in the media that child abuse pediatricians are incentivized to diagnose abuse

because their programs are often partially funded by government grants. But it's a claim that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Child Abuse Pediatrics is the lowest paid subspecialty in the field because it's not a revenue generator for hospitals. It's one of the issues contributing to the significant workforce shortage. And the concerns that this letter writer is expressing, these are corroborated by Mike Hicks and Boz reporting. In his original piece, he writes, quote, Cox's ordeal has opened a rift at Children's Wisconsin, where some treating physicians say they are so alarmed by what's happened to him that they now hesitate to refer injured children for evaluations by child abuse pediatricians, fearing that an abuse specialist might jump

to the wrong conclusion and needlessly report parents to child protective services, end quote. All of the things that John Cox would claim in his lawsuit were happening to him, the harassment, the retaliation, the destruction of mental health, reputation, and career, were, according to the source who wrote to Torbenson, actually happening to his one-time mentor, Dr. Lynn Sheets, the woman who had put her personal feelings, aside to do the right thing. Now she was paying the price. The whistleblower also points out that contrary to what had been said in the press, there had

never been anything but high praise for Sheets and her team before the Cox case. And unlike all of the anonymous complaints Hicksonbot reported on, this claim was shorted up by an outside source. There have been a larger review of our Child Debees team, both in the state of Wisconsin and relative to Milwaukee. It was, I mean, I think we stood out as an example of what you want regarding children who are suspected of being abused and neglected, the type of services you want to be provided to those children, as well as children who may have a mimic or may have a rare medical condition and are going to be seen by the Capp's doctor who's going to rule out abuse and neglect. we received very high praise from this independent national organization regarding their program. But beyond Dr. Lynn Sheets, someone far more vulnerable was paying the price for John's PR tour, children.

I do think that as a result of the John Cox case, there were cases, there were clear cases of child abuse and child neglect being missed by the emergency room physicians or referrals not being made appropriately. Meanwhile, other defense attorneys in Wisconsin were citing Mike Hicksendbaugh's reporting in their motions, in one instance to assert that the Capps team was colluding with the prosecutor's office. What happened at Children's Wisconsin and in the community more broadly is exactly the outcome that the American Academy of Pediatrics had warned about. Concerns journalist Mike Hicksonbaugh openly mocked and dismissed in his tweets, framing his reporting as a benign call for second opinions. He ignores, of course, that the cases he'd covered, had gotten second opinions. Abuse was confirmed by an outside child abuse pediatrician in the Melissa Bright case, which was the central subject of the Do No Harm podcast. In my sister's case, Hicks and

Ba zeroed in on the fact that the doctor who evaluated my niece wasn't a child abuse pediatrician, but completely omitted that there was a 37-page single-spaced report detailing the abuse my niece had suffered written by Dr. Carol Jenny, one of the most experienced and decorated child abuse pediatricians in the entire field. In John's case, there had been a second opinion from the blind review done by a cap at his hospital and a third opinion from an out-of-state cap. For some reason, these second and third opinions don't count for Hicks-inbaugh. The only opinions he puts weight on are those coming from doctors who deny abuse, people like Dr. Julie Mack, Dr. Joseph Scheller, and Dr. Eli Neuberger, no matter how outside the medical and scientific consensus these doctors are.

It seems to me in reading this series that there appears to be no such thing as a correct diagnosis of abuse. And Hicksenbaugh, at least publicly, has never flinched, never appeared to reflect on the possibility that he's gotten it wrong. He seems immune to the idea that his reporting has stoked unnecessary fears in parents seeking medical care for their children, or that he violated the privacy of child abuse victims by putting their full names and photographs in his stories. Hicksenbaugh frequently describes child abuse pediatricians as having extraordinary power. But I'm always left wondering, what power? That people take their medical opinions seriously? Why shouldn't they?

The widely shared medical consensus is that caps are a much-needed subspecialty, and that there is extensive science and literature to support their work. Children suffer in their absence, and so do parents, who are more likely to be wrongly accused of abuse, not less. The divisiveness about caps is generated by, by media like Hicksenbaugh and by parents' rights activists. There is no data or academic literature to suggest that Capp's overdiagnose abuse. There's nothing but anecdotes and fear-mongering.

And while lawsuits like Johns accuse them of tearing families apart and ruining reputations and lives, this is divorced from reality. Here again is child abuse pediatrician, Dr. Mark Hudson. I just don't have that power, it turns out. I also get to call up the prosecutor and tell them how to lay out their prosecution. all of those things. I think that there is just a fair about a sort of mythology that goes along with that. Do childhood-leafediatricians tend to work relatively closely with child reduction and law enforcement and attorneys and things like that? I think the answer is yes. But at the end of the day, that's not me

doing their job, but that is me making sure that I am passing along the best medical information we have in making sure that they understand that in the context of what's going on. And I would hope we'd all kind of want that, right? Like, I don't know a lot of cops that went to med school or rotating through the unit that does child abuse. Is it reasonable that they might need some education about what's happening here and what the significance of these findings is medically? And what about all of those anonymous accounts from doctors in Hicks and Boz's piece?

So this idea that the Caps doctors at Children's of Wisconsin, we're essentially pressuring the ER doctors into confirming cases of abuse. Like, you have not seen any evidence of that. No, and in fact, I don't know why they would even say that would exist because the ER doctor's role is to respond to that emergency situation, hopefully stabilize the child, hopefully save the child's life. But then the case gets passed on to the additional experts. So they're giving an initial diagnosis based on what they're seeing at that point in time. but as more lab results are coming in, as more x-rays and imaging studies are being received, then additional diagnoses are being made in that case.

And that's no longer necessarily being done by the emergency room physician. It's been passed on to an attending physician or maybe a hospitalist or the Capps doctor. There was a specific allegation made by some of the anonymous sources Hickson-Boss spoke to that the child abuse team was looking through emergency room records that hadn't been referred to their department, insinuating that they were just looking for abuse where there was no sign of it. But the reality of what was happening at Children's was much different and much darker. If the child advocacy team was looking through records, it was because the ER team, by their own admission to Hicksinbaugh and by the account of the whistleblower who reached out to Matthew,

had stopped referring concerning cases to child advocacy. And so I do think that the doctors with the Caps team were looking at some cases where children were admitted to the hospital with really significant injuries, really severe injuries, because I think that they felt they had a responsibility to make sure that those cases were properly being followed up on. They knew about the divide that existed between the emergency room physicians and the Capps team as a result of the Cox case, and that led to a breakdown in communication in the hospital. And ultimately, it was the children of our community who paid the price because there was not any communication taking place from the EER physicians on many

cases to the CAPS team. And so I think the CAPS team was looking at some cases when cases were brought to their attention by someone else within the hospital or however it came to their attention to examine those files and to make sure that proper diagnoses were being made in those cases. A commentary published in the AAP's journal Pediatrics on child abuse pediatrics, zeros in on the phenomenon that exists within medicine that treats child abuse injuries differently than other areas of medicine. They write, quote, there remains a subtle but pervasive view that at best is characterized as ambivalence about and at worst is turning away from the problem of child maltreatment as a bona fide medical problem comparable to other

subspecialty type diagnoses. This ambivalence towards child abuse has been referred to in the past as gaze aversion, which captures the collective failure to confront the issue directly in an effective manner, end quote. Though his lawsuit accused Dr. Cox's colleagues in child advocacy of conspiring to ruin his life, I find it hard to believe that any of his colleagues wanted to believe that he had abused a baby. It's just that when the evidence was in, only some of them were willing to look, and others averted their gaze. crying into a margarita. This happened to me recently and my producer Mariah at one point said,

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And in the process of doing this refresh, I was confronted with some clothes that I have not worn in years, and in some cases, gasp have not worn at all. So what to do? Cycle them in and out of my closet forever? Put them in the back of my car with the intention to take them to the consignment shop, but actually just drive around with them for months until they end up back in my closet. Well, our new sponsor, Vinted has a much better idea. Vinted is a secondhand marketplace app.

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seller fees, you keep every dollar you earn and you can see what's in the closet again. We've talked a lot about the ways in which journalism, like Hicks and boss, can endanger children by causing a chilling effect on reporting. The American Academy of Pediatrics warned of the mistrust this could sew between parents and pediatricians and that this too could endanger children. From Matthews' perspective, the rift in the hospital was having dire consequences. I had known firsthand through cases that had come into my child abuse unit that kids with abusive head trauma who died as a result of that abusive head trauma, kids who suffered immersion burns inflicted by a caretaker, those cases were not being directed.

by the ER is highly concerning for child abuse and we're in some cases being missed by the EER and information was not being relayed to law enforcement in a way that was helpful to the investigations and it was a disservice to children in this community and I thought that there was an opportunity to mend bridges and whether it was me involved or not what I really wanted everyone at the hospital to know especially on the ER staff was to know the truth about what happened in this case. I asked for a meeting with the emergency room physicians about those three specific cases and then about the dynamics that were taking place because I had concerns that these three cases, which were extraordinary cases, should be easy calls regarding child abuse,

were cases that resulted in a lack of investigation being done up front that could have, and in some cases did impede our ability to bring proper criminal charges and hold individuals who abuse children accountable to the fullest extent of the law. And if we're missing it at that level, it really scared me about the cases that weren't coming to my attention. As we discussed in depth last season, the issues with Mike Hicks and Bo's reporting on Dr. John Cox aren't isolated. They're systemic. While it's true that Hicksenbaugh couldn't have known about the nurse phone call at the time of his reporting, because no one did, I don't think that this detail would have made a difference.

because I don't think, at least for the purposes of this series, that Mike Hicks and Bob found any amount of evidence of a parent's guilt convincing. The Do No Harm series may masquerade as a social justice story, but it's really a science denialist story. Remember that handy acronym we covered last season, Flick? Well, it maps pretty well onto not only this story, but all of the stories in the series. As a reminder, here's science journalist Tara Haley walking us through Flick. F-L-I-C, fake experts, unrealistic expectations, expecting the science to be 100% accurate, cherry-picking, right, logical fallacies, which is a whole big, there's a whole bunch of different logical fallacies, and I would throw cognitive biases in there as well, and conspiracy theories.

Those are the five. And, you know, I've, having written about denialist type stuff for so many years now, I've tried to come up with one that's not in that list, and there isn't. It's that simple. Fake experts, logical fallacies, impossible expectations, cherry-picking conspiracy theories. Every set of denialist philosophies that you can come up with, those are the hallmarks of it. So the John Cox case. Does it flick? Fake experts. 15 experts, but none of them from child abuse medicine, except for Dr. Eli Neuberger, a notorious denialist. So check. Logical fallacy. If any doctor says it was an abuse, that's exculpatory.

Impossible expectations. The hospital and CPS went to extraordinary links to confirm abuse, including not only a blind review but the hiring of an outside cap. But this was not enough for Hicks andbaugh. Cherry-picking. Only the reports from the defense experts were given weight. Conspiracy theory. The child advocacy team was conspiring with CPS and law enforcement to ruin John Cox's life and career rather than admit they'd made an error. And this brought me back to my original burning question about Hicksenbaugh. Is a single one of the stories featured in Do No Harm a credible example of a false allegation of abuse? So far, the cases we've covered are Megan Carter's, Melissa Brights, the Jeremy and Viviana Graham case, and now the John Cox case. So what are the others?

And do they flick? We've only got three more to go at this point, so let's do it. In addition to those we've covered, there's Jessica Baez-Lergio. A Texas woman who claimed that her three-year-old sister climbed into the bathtub by herself and simply sat in scalding water long enough to get second and third-degree burns while she screamed and waited for Jessica to pull her out. This is the story that she told Hicksenbaugh anyway. So, Flick, Fick, FIts, a forensic pathologist called Dr. Shaku Tees,

a defense expert witness popular with fractured families, an advocacy group devoted to helping parents fight child abuse allegations. Logical fallacy. Mike Hicksonbaugh points to a similar case that involved an overturned appeal that happened to involve the same cap as this case as evidence that anything involving this doctor should be suspect. In this case, by the way, like many of the others, had a second opinion from a child abuse pediatrician who confirmed the abuse diagnosis. The perpetrator in this case, Jessica Biaslergio, ultimately pled guilty and went to prison for a short time. Her judicial confession reads, quote, on or about the 27th day of June, 2015 in Dallas County, Texas, I did unlawfully then and there

recklessly caused serious bodily injury to a child 14 years of age or younger, here and after called the complainant by placing complainant in hot water. I further judicially confess that I committed the offense with which I stand charged exactly as alleged in the indictment in this cause. The single other medical child abuse case that Hicksonbach covers is the Ajay James case. Here's a clip from NBC's coverage. Age was a single mom. She and Harper's father had separated,

and he left the country for work about a year after she was born. Premature babies often leave the hospital with serious health problems, and as a first-time mom, Agey lived in fear of something going wrong. She repeatedly raised concerns with doctors, and years later,

she would be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Those first months at home were a blur of repeated hospital visits. surgery, medications, oxygen support, physical therapy, and at-home nursing care. And this was their life together for almost two years, until Hurricane Harvey came to Houston. Eventually they were rescued by boat and taken to Texas Children's Hospital West Campus. This wasn't their regular hospital, and these weren't Harper's doctors. And very soon, some doctors there identified a new threat to the girl's safety, but it wasn't the hurricane.

It was her mom. Ajeet brought her daughter to Texas Children's in August of 2017, and the two were separated due to ongoing suspicions of medical child abuse, which were confirmed after her daughter dramatically improved upon separation, and after her thousands of pages of medical records were reviewed by a child abuse pediatrician. Hicks and Boz story quotes Maxine Eichner, a law professor at the University of North Carolina, who's a prominent critic of the very existence of Munchausen by proxy abuse. And of course, he quotes Dr. Eli Newberger. This piece relies on a host of logical fallacies inherent to MVP denialism, that the doctor who originally diagnosed abuse wasn't a psychiatrist, that a psychiatric evaluation didn't turn up a munchausen by proxy diagnosis, that the child abuse pediatrician who reviewed the records wasn't the child's treating physician and that the child may have had some legitimate underlying health issues. Hicksenbaugh cherry picks select entries from the child's 9,000 pages of medical

records to underline this point, such as that one whole whole, home health nurse reported witnessing a seizure one time. And as in my sister's case, he uses the fact that Ege wasn't charged with the crime as proof that the abuse didn't happen. Psychiatrist Dr. Mark Feldman, one of the most renowned Munchausen by proxy experts in the world, reviewed the records in this case after Ege sued the hospital for defamation. Hicks and Bob buries a quote from Feldman in the piece saying that the overwhelming evidence from thousands of pages of medical records demonstrated that Age constantly provided information that was almost never replicated in a hospital or other clinical setting.

Feldman also told Hicksenbaugh, quote, I have found no evidence that Texas children's or its staff acted with malice or negligence and that the separation from Ms. James was clearly in the child's best interests. While Hicksendbaugh's reporting on this case is a frustrating read, this story does have a happy ending. While CPS eventually dropped its case against the mother, the child ended up in the primary care of her paternal grandparents,

who praise the work of the child abuse team and say that they gave the little girl her life back. They report that the girl who spent much of her early years hospitalized was now thriving and not receiving any specialized medical care. Lastly, there's Tim and Anne-Marie Timmerman. Anne-Marie Timmerman is also a member of fractured families and was active in advocating with the Texas State Legislature for Second Opinion Laws.

Like Melissa Bright, Anne-Marie Timmerman shares emotional audio captured while her baby was being removed from her custody. Oh, please don't remove my baby. Please. Please don't remove my baby. Please. Always come to court. We have, would they have to go to court somewhere?

I have one-thirty. I want to get all of you guys' names. I already was aware of it. No, please don't run here. Okay. Please don't remove my baby. No, we're not. I can't do that.

The Timmerman's four-month-old son was temporarily removed from their custody after they brought him to Texas Children's Hospital. Similarly to John Cox, the father, Tim, who was reportedly alone with the baby. at the time while his wife was catching up on sleep, said that he fell asleep in a chair with his son and then awoke to the baby in acute distress. In the account Anne-Marie Timmerman gives Hicksenbaugh, she describes her husband waking up at 3 a.m. with their son limp in his arms, eyes rolling back in his head. She says she then jumped in the car to take him to the hospital, one hand on the wheel,

the other holding her infant son. According to the Timmermans, the neurosurgeon, who initially treated their son, said that he had a small brain bleed, and he allegedly told them at that time that it could be an injury sustained at birth. Their son was evaluated by a child abuse pediatrician who discovered that the child also had retinal hemorrhaging and was subsequently diagnosed with abusive head trauma. As a reminder, the diagnosis of abusive head trauma is the subject of wide medical consensus, not just amongst caps, but among pediatric radiologists, ophthalmologists, and neurologists. Hicksenbaugh's article talks about how much Anne-Marie and Tim wanted to have a baby, and reports that neither Anne-Marie nor the child's grandparents felt that Tim would be capable of harming a baby.

Hicksin-bah includes quotes from the three defense experts in the case, who he acknowledges have all written articles challenging the diagnosis of shaken baby or abusive head trauma, Dr. Joseph Scheller, Dr. Julie Mack, and Dr. Marvin Miller. The starker reality that Hicks-in-Baw doesn't include is that all three of these experts are way outside the medical consensus on the diagnosis of shaken baby, abusive head trauma, and that they regularly provide alternate theories as defense expert witnesses. All three are popular experts in the fractured family space. There are no public records available on this case. According to a post on fractured families, Anne-Marie Timmerman had them expunged before they reached out to the media.

But based on Anne-Marie's Facebook post, the alternate theory provided in court for the injuries appears to have been the ever popular big head theory and the idea that the hemorrhages might have been sustained at birth. I ran this by a couple of caps, and the idea of a four-month-old baby suddenly becoming unresponsive and having a pattern of hemorrhaging associated with abusive head trauma due to a birth injury is not plausible. The type of subdural hemorrhage sustained at birth wouldn't be mistaken for abusive head trauma. An experienced cap I asked about this reporting was very blunt, saying, quote, there is no credence to this made-up. story."

However, the Timmermans, a white middle class married couple, reportedly spent $200,000 in their efforts to get their son back. And when it comes to the justice system, unfortunately, money talks. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and Game Sense remind you to play responsibly, 19 plus to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly.

If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, Please contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor, free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. If you like your true crime, like you like your coffee, Red-Handed is the podcast for you. It's dark, intense, and might just keep you up all night. I'm Hannah. I'm Saruti. And every week on Red-Handed, we break down a different, fascinating case.

From the most recent U.S. trials, everyone is obsessing over, like Brendan Banfield, Aaron Reid and Ellen Greenberg. To the most unbelievable stories from around the world, like Erin Patterson, the Australian woman who poisoned her in-laws with mushrooms. Or the controversial case of Lucy Letby, the UK's now most prolific child killer. Or is she? We have our doubts. There's nothing we love more than digging into every detail of the cases we cover,

getting beyond a basic analysis and cutting to the heart of the story. Red Handed has over 400 episodes ready to binge right now. Plus, be sure to check out our weekly sister show, shorthand, where we unpack everything, from the Black Death to Area 51. If you're looking for smart, detailed true crime with personality, check out Red-Handed wherever you get your podcasts. John Cox eventually settled his lawsuit against Children's Wisconsin out of court.

And while he perhaps suffered reputational damage with the few people who knew the truth, he's far more likely to be remembered as that poor guy who was the victim of his evil child advocacy co-workers who conspired with CPS and the police. to destroy him for reasons. John and Sadie are no longer working at children's, but they're both still working in medicine.

According to his LinkedIn, Dr. Cox is the medical director of security health plan, a large HMO in Wisconsin. And as of 2025, Sadie is the medical director for Evelyn, a publicly traded company on track to pull in $2.6 billion in revenue this year. The media coverage of the couple was almost uniformly sympathetic. The blowback appeared to go quite handily, in the other direction. I've gotten more hate mail from the handling of this case than I've received on any other

case. Probably all the cases combined that I've handled in my career. So, and I, if I receive that much hate mail, then I can only imagine what the individuals at the hospital who, and the, you know, the irony to me in this case is Dr. Lynch-sheets, who received so much hatred regarding this matter. actually, I think, worked incredibly hard to make sure that there was no bias in this case and to make sure that the individuals that were making a call on whether or not this was abuse or not were not in any way associated with Dr. Cox. And one of the things that sticks out vividly in my mind, I think I talked about it the last

time you and I talked, is the fact that when I informed her that Child Protective Services had hired Dr. Nancy Harper to perform an independent review of this case. And Dr. Harper concluded that the injuries to the child were consistent with abuse. Dr. She's had no knowledge of that. She had no, she was shocked when I provided her information that there was an outside independent doctor that was hired through child protective services that provided this opinion. And no one, until now, followed up on what happened to the children caught in the crosshairs of these feuding adults. The reporting on this case led to a structural problem for our community and led to the dissension at our hospital. and the divisiveness that existed and it may still exist to a certain extent to this day.

That story and the media coverage caused way more harm to children than it did good. And especially when you consider the fact that there was no follow-up reporting done by Hicksenbaugh when the lie was revealed by Dr. Cox and that he had been lied to this entire time by Dr. Cox. You know, it didn't fit his narrative anymore. It was not a story to follow anymore because it, It wasn't about the child abuse pediatricians. It would have been about Dr. Cox being a liar. As you can imagine, I'm pretty skeptical when I see stories about parents

who've supposedly been falsely accused of abuse. But this doesn't mean that it never happens. It doesn't mean that there aren't any issues with the child welfare system that couldn't use a diligent ethical spotlight from the media. I think the first thing that the media could do is recognize the constraints that exist maybe on one side more than the other or maybe should exist on both sides. So the doctors who provided treatment to this child can't comment publicly. The records are confidential, and they can't reveal those records to an outside source,

which is what was done by all the defense experts in this particular case, or done by Dr. Cox or his wife. Somebody took all of the personal reports and revealed this information. I can't comment on the case until it's closed. I'm under ethical duties to protect actually his rights. to a fair trial and also the victim's rights to privacy and dignity and respect. And so, you know, I have the ability to talk about everything now, but that's years and years after the fact and everyone's moved on to the next story

that's taking place within the community. And maybe if just the media commented on the constraints that the sides were under, there would be at least a little kernel of understanding that the parties aren't able to talk about this and that there is more to it. You know, I, I wish, I thought about a multitude of times emailing Mike Hicks and Boggs saying, I filed this motion. I, it proves that he did not tell the truth. He resolved the case.

Where's the follow up story? I thought about that. I actually talked to there was a local reporter that was following this case. And I walked into court after I filed my motion amending the witness list. I asked that. reporter. Did you read my motion? And she indicated she did. And I said, don't you think that's a big deal? And she's like, no. So I think about this case in the charge. And it was physical abuse of a child, intentional causation of bodily harm. And you're right. Everyone reads that charge. And if you're

charged with that, I think you immediately internalize, I would never hurt my child intentionally. That's the thought, right? But the acts that he did was an intentional act in squeezing that child hard enough to leave bruises. That's the act that he chose to engage in. That was a conscious, deliberate choice in his part to pick up that child and squeeze in that moment in time. And when you look at the location of the bruises and you know about the clavicle fracture where the thumb would go, that all fits perfectly, unfortunately, with how those injuries would have been inflicted. So was doing that act practically certain to result in those injuries. That's what a jury would be asked. And the answer to that would be, yes, squeezing a child and putting that amount of pressure right there is practically

certain to result in at least some, if not, all those injuries. Does it mean that John Cox doesn't love that child, doesn't care for that child? Absolutely not. I think the vast majority of the people that we see in the courts on child abuse and child neglect cases love their children very much, care for their children very much. They made one bad decision and one moment of time. Sometimes it's extended moments of time. And our response to that isn't a punitive one other than bringing charges to try and prevent it from ever happening again. I think I've talked to you a little bit about my goal.

My goal is to reduce the number of adverse childhood experiences for the children in our community before I die. That's what I hope my child abuse unit does day in and day out. That's what I hope our mission is carried out here, is ultimately just to give parents who may not have all the tools, additional tools to be good, loving, caring parents for their children and not resort to anger or aggression. This is such a sad one because I think, you know, well, the incident itself is, you know, it's horrible to do that to a baby, obviously. but it is also like it's human, it's just on the spectrum of human behavior. It's not, you know, does not need to be the sort of defining that's all John Cox ever is. It sounds like he was a good physician. Sounds like it's very likely he is a good father to his other two children. You know, it doesn't wash all of that away. But the failure to reckon with it and his failure to take accountability for his actions has harmed other children. And some of them we know about, some of them we probably never will know about. And that's a huge tragedy. And those are all his choices. You know, I mean, I think, like, when you talk about, like, intent, he knew he was lying. Yeah, he knew he provided a false medical history.

That was the, that changed the entire nature and course of this case. Yeah, he called the media. He filed a grievance. He told a lie to a whole bunch of experts. He told a lie in court. He told a lie in his lawsuit. It's like he carried and carried and carried that lie. And I'm certain he probably maintained.

it to this day. And I have to say, like, his wife is also, in my opinion, implicated in this because she, you know, and again, all evidence that she's probably a very caring person that, you know, I mean, pediatric oncologist, again, like, that's a really special person who can do that job. My hat is off to anybody who does that line of work. You know, she's caring for a special needs child. She was testifying before Congress. I'm sure she's done a lot of good in her life. And at some point, it seems pretty likely that she understood that her husband was lying. And she has also doubled down on this, been a voice for him in the media, been a voice for him throughout this, joined him in this lawsuit. So she is also, in my opinion, responsible for the harm that came to these children.

She also could have made a different choice. We've talked to other parents who made a different choice. Yeah. And we have to keep our focus on the children, not on the parents. as Mark Hudson reminds us, it's not about what's going on with them. I cringe at the word intent, right? Because A, that's not my job to figure out someone's intent, right? We can talk about what happened, but I can't tell you what someone's intent was, right?

And I want to make a conscious effort that that's not my job to figure out intent, and that's not something anybody can figure out an intent. And furthermore, I've met a lot of people that hurt infants, hurt kids, have hurt kids. And I don't think any of them say, woke up and said, my intention is to hurt this kid. Right. Now, that's different than saying that they're not aware that what they did could cause injury. Right. So I think that when these things happen, I think that the adults are aware that the event that is happening could injure the child.

I don't know if, you know, in the heat of the moment, they want to hurt the child. I don't know that. Sometimes I wonder if I've spent more time thinking about my kicks and boss do no harm series than he ever did. And after looking now at all of these cases, I just wonder, what was the point of all this? What was the problem he was trying to solve with this series? Does he really believe that we're just doing too much to protect kids in this country, that the media cares too much about abused children? I actually think one of the main areas of reform is not in the government, but it's in media and in journalism.

And I will say, in working on this series, I've come to discover that there's a certain genre of investigative journalism that is in some ways low-hanging fruit for reporters. And you see it in state after state. A child was reported to CPS. CPS began investigation. The child later died. And Sharon Matthews case is an example of that. It's horrific.

And as a result of the intense media tension and the finger pointing at CPS for failing in those cases triggers a reaction. There was just a report out of Florida by a team of investigative reporters there at USA Today in Gatehouse that showed after the Miami Herald did an investigation showing children dying in the care of CPS or after being reported to CPS. In the aftermath of that, the state instituted this very aggressive, I'll say, better safe than sorry approach where we're going to do whatever it takes to protect children. And they vastly expanded the number of removals. mostly cases of neglect or suspicion of neglect, and they overburdened the foster care system

to the point that now children in the most recent years have been being sent to unsafe foster homes. And so you can see the media's role in triggering that unintended consequence. And so, you know, finding a way to be more nuanced in our reporting of these stories as well, CPS is never going to stop every child death. Better Safe Than Sorry is a phrase that comes up a lot in this kind of reporting,

but it's not an official position of any child welfare agency or CAPS team. And again, there's not a scintilla of evidence that caps are over-reporting abuse. And while he's right that CPS is probably never going to stop every child death, shouldn't they try? I think so. The sorry in the Better Safe Than Sorry framework is a child dying or suffering a catastrophic injury, And considering how common abuse is in the United States, it's just bizarre to me that someone would argue that we've over-corrected on protecting children.

Mike Hicksenbaugh cloaks his work behind a journalistic neutrality. Unlike me, he doesn't tell you how he got here. Beyond the story that he shares in his Do No Harm podcast about his child getting an accidental injury, after which doctors treated her and were perfectly nice to Mike the whole time, go figure. I have to resign myself to never knowing why, Mike Hicks and Bod decided to take up for abusers, but the evidence shows that that's exactly

what he's done. What I can tell you is that I don't believe that what happened at Children's Wisconsin was an unforeseeable outcome. A world in which child abuse pediatricians are questioned and dismissed by their colleagues, a world that weighs the potential harm of a parent being falsely accused over the harm or even the death of a child, a world that favors opinions of abuse denialists like Newberger, Scheller, and Mack over not only child abuse abuse, pediatricians, but the American Academy of Pediatrics writ large, that is precisely the world that Hicksenbaugh is advocating for. And make no mistake, he is advocating. Hicksenbaugh is not neutral. Hicksenbaugh's final entry in the series was the podcast, Do No Harm, which launched to

big numbers and rave reviews in November of 2020, smack in the middle of the depths of the COVID pandemic, when fear-mongering about doctors was the last thing we needed. Hicksenbaugh reported these stories years ago, and he's long since moved on. When I googled around to see what he was currently up to, I just about got whiplash. You know, there's a whole range of ways that abuse survivors, children process abuse. Some boys go years and never say anything. In Travis' case, he pretty quickly went to his parents and told them what happened. Travis' father, Tom, says that the next week he went to the pastor of the church that oversaw

their Royal Rangers troop and told him what happened. But instead of calling the police, Travis and his family say the pastor told him he was aware of the reports and that the troop commander was in counseling. That's Hicks and Baugh talking about his reporting for the NBC news series Pastors and Prey, which focuses on the assemblies of God, one of the largest Pentecostal denominations in the country and their decades-long cover-up of child sexual abuse and grooming by clergy. And this pivot made me realize that maybe I've been thinking about my Kicks andbaugh and his motivations all wrong. Maybe his attack on child abuse pediatricians was never about anything other than packaging a story for his audience. Maybe he's just not thinking that much about the

impact of his work beyond how well it plays. Maybe he's not answering any of my questions these past six years, first as a family member, then as a journalist, because he just doesn't really care. The Pastors and Pray series seems like an important story, and I'm glad NBC is devoting resources to it. But Hicks and Bo's focus on it seems like evidence of something else I've noticed about child abuse denialism, that they won't touch child sexual abuse, which is, of course, evaluated by the very same doctors Mike has worked so hard to discredit and drive out of their jobs. And I think the media won't touch it because readers and listeners wouldn't tolerate it. We've come to something of a cultural consensus that child sexual abuse is really, real, common, and underreported, that people getting away with it is the rule, not the exception.

And I'm glad we got there. I just want that acknowledgement for other victims and survivors of abuse as well. Literature on child abuse medicine points out that a significant barrier to progress on prevention is our stubborn insistence on seeing child abuse as a social problem, rather than what it is, a public health crisis that affects our most vulnerable citizens. Hicks and Bo's case for John Cox relied on deep-seated assumptions about who does and does not abuse children. Poor families and families of color are disproportionately reported to child protective services, but child maltreatment is not confined to any particular racial or socioeconomic group, and that's according to the WHO. So where does this all leave us? I hope with a more knowing I, because maybe other journalists are out there

just looking for a story, but I'm not, and I know you're not either. I know that you care about the truth, because after all, I'm here talking about these cases week in and week out, and you're here too, listening and taking the information back out into the world with you. And I hope, in whatever way you can, making the world a little bit better for kids. But actually, I don't have to just hope, because I hear from you, and I know you're doing that. Protecting kids is an uphill battle, but it's one we can't give up on. And we can't help kids if we're unwilling to look at the uncomfortable truce about who's hurting them. We can't avert our gaze. I had no idea when I started making this show that it would find such a big audience. And that's something, isn't it?

After four years on the air, one thing I know about you is, you won't look away. Nobody Should Believe Me is executive produced written and hosted by me, Andrea Dunlop. Our co-executive producer is Mariah Gossett. Our editor is Greta Stromquist, research and fact-checking by Aaron Ajay. Additional research by Jessa V. Randall. Our production manager is Nola Karmouche. Music from Blue Dot Sessions, Sound Snap, and Slipstream.