Nobody Should Believe Me - S07 E07: Selling a Story

Episode Date: May 7, 2026

Stories of “false” allegations of child abuse build on each other to paint the picture of a widespread problem that can affect anyone who brings there child into a hospital. None have made more of an impact than those featured in Take Care of Maya. The first half of this season was dedicated to John Stewart, and 15-month-old Knowellan Kelly, but what about the other 3 families shown at the end of Take Care of Maya? A story is spun about how these parents were wronged by the system, but there’s a stark omission of what actually happened to their children–how they ended up at the hospital in the first place. Today we look at the truth behind the narrative about Dr. Sally Smith.  Featuring: Matthew Torbenson, Assistant District Attorney Dr. Jill Glick, Child Abuse Pediatrician Dr. Sally Smith, Child Abuse Pediatrician *** 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 Please note that this show discusses child abuse, which may be difficult for some listeners. For resources about abusive head trauma, go to shakenbaby.org. The spate of media coverage and lawsuits attacking child abuse pediatricians follow a particular kind of logic.

If you can round up a few parents who say they were falsely accused by a certain doctor, this is evidence in and of itself that the doctor is the problem. I've also noticed a trend of using one big splashy story. Often as not, it's a complicated munchausen by proxy story like Justina Pelletier, Maya Kowalski, or the Stelts case in Pennsylvania, as sort of a Trojan horse to usher in a series of other, quote,

falsely accused parents in rapid succession, usually including even less detail and nuance than the more headline-grabbing main anecdote. And in this way, the issue is made to look systemic. Wisconsin DA Matthew Torbenson has noticed this as well. I think it's because people highlight one particular case and then make the circumstances of that case seem as though that's how every case and every situation exists. So I think what the defense does really well in this area, they grab the media's attention and they send a message out through the media. And if that media narrative that they're selling proves to be false, the media does nothing to correct that narrative. They just move on to the next story in the next case.

The Kowalski v. Johns Hopkins trial was aired on court TV, where it was called The Take Care of Maya trial. And news of the initial $261 million verdict made a ton of headlines. People magazine and New York magazine ran splashy features on the family's victory. But news of the appellate courts ruling vacating the verdict barely made headlines. And after my appearance on court TV... And I'm wondering if there should have been perhaps a little more of a dialogue, a little more open-minded. on the part of the hospital to do a little more investigating before taking a nine-year-old, ten-year-old away from her family.

Well, I would very much challenge the idea that this was a snap decision. Fortunately, you had an experienced child abuse pediatrician working on this case, Dr. Sally Smith, and again, there was a threat to Maya's life in this case. I don't know that people completely understand that because their understanding of munchausen by proxy abuse is very low in general. in general. I wasn't holding my breath for anyone else to issue retractions. I've spent years now trying to get the journalists who cover these stories to pay attention

to everything they're missing about these cases. And there's one journalist in particular who's become something of a bet noir, and that is Mike Hicksonbach, who presented my sister, Megan Carter, as a wrongly accused parent in his do-no-harm series, despite the prolific evidence of abuse in this case. I covered all of that way back in season two, and as it turns out, my son's Matthew had a memorable run-in-in with Mike Hicksenbach as well. I think they're selling a story and they're not selling the truth, to be blunt about it. And I think it causes a disservice to children.

I think it causes a disservice to the public, quite honestly. Mike Hicksenbaum wrote the story about John Cox and said that there were 15 doctors that disagreed with the child abuse diagnosis. As soon as Matthew mentioned this name, I recognize the story and that blazing headline. An ER doctor was charged with abusing his baby, but 15 medical experts say there's no proof. Mike Hicksenbog's reporting on this case is littered with unattributed quotes from doctors at the hospital where Cox worked about an out-of-control child abuse team.

Many of the doctors that he says disagreed with the diagnosis actually initially agreed with the diagnosis. They were just friends with the Cox family and had great sympathy for John Cox, who was a doctor in the same facility. And so they second-guessed their own decisions when they were initially reported as abuse. But the thing that really bothered me about Mike Hicksabom and his reporting on that story is we found out that the defendant, or John Cox, actually lied. He lied to medical professionals. He lied to law enforcement. He said that he fell asleep with the child, fell asleep with him during the night, that he woke up in the morning with her, put her in the crux of his arm, was reading on his cell phone, fell asleep and rolled over on top of her.

And then he provided photographs of a reenactment that he did. The reenactment that he did was physically impossible. That child would have suffocated based on the reenactment photographs that he showed. So that was one of the first major concerns about that. But none of those photographs were shared publicly. None of those photographs were talked to with medical professionals. Hicksenbach's lengthy piece includes statements from the hospital, CPS, and Torbenson himself, explaining why they can't comment.

But most of the story is the first-person account of John Coffey. and his wife, who is also a doctor, explaining that this was an innocent injury. Hicksenbach's piece describes Cox accidentally falling asleep, cuddling his daughter, and then waking up in a panic. He writes, quote, She wasn't in distress, but he said he could tell from the way she was moving her left arm that she might have a broken collarbone, a common injury in infants that typically heals on its own without medical treatment. End quote. The piece goes on to describe Cox calling his wife to confer with her about whether or not he should take the child to the doctor.

But the bigger problem for Mike Hicksenbaum was the defendant actually called a online nurse the morning right before he took the child in to see the doctor and reported that she had been up crying for 12 hours straight. She was inconsolable. That she met in essence that he was at his wit's end taking care of her, a completely contradictory medical history than what he provided to anybody else. a medical history that would support a caretaker becoming really frustrated with a child who had been awake and who would not stop crying and who was unconsolable. Hicksenbach attempts to make the case that this was a misdiagnosis of abuse based in part on some medical literature that classifies clavicle injuries in young children as not being in and of themselves specifically concerning for abuse when compared to an injury such as a posterior rib fracture. Hicksenbach also notes that a dermatologist determined that the bruises on the baby were actually birth marks. But there are other factors that go into diagnosing abusive injuries, chiefly whether the injuries match the caregiver's history.

And when you looked at that medical history and combined with the fact that the child had fingertip bruises on the child's back, linear bruises on the child's arms that would be consistent with grab marks, and then a fractured clavicle, which would be consistent with where the thumb would go in that exact manner of holding the child, I mean, it was diagnostic for abuse, and Hicks and Baum ran from doing any follow-up stories on it once that false history came out. And as soon as we found that false history, the attorneys that were representing Mr. Cox from Chicago,

the high-powered law firm, they got off the case and he chose to resolve the case. So when you say he chose to resolve the case, he took a plea? He took a plea to a deferred prosecution agreement. So he admitted to a child neglect charge. And we did that for a number of reasons in this particular case, but he did enter into a plea agreement where he did, he entered a plea, did a deferred prosecution agreement, had to meet a number of conditions.

I've probably spent far too much of my one precious life thinking about why my Kicksenbog, a journalist who has once been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, chose to lionize abusive parents. I work in an ER. I know when kids are abused. I know sometimes it's difficult. I said, but you guys have this completely wrong.

Me and John went upstairs when we sat on the floor and helped her. We told her how much we loved her, and that we would do everything we could for the rest of our lives to try and get her to come home. But why let the facts interrupt an emotional arc like that? The volume of these stories of falsely accused parents presented side by side does a lot of work in making it look as though there must be something going on. And then the media stories begin to build on one another. Take care of Maya's producer Caitlin Keating has said that the Kowalski story

is representative of thousands of other families across the country who are experiencing the same thing. TBD on where she got those numbers, but she told the rap in a 2023 interview, quote, there's rarely an hour that goes by that we're not getting a tweet, direct message, email, phone call, or letter. It really shows you how widespread this problem is, and just how many people are experiencing something similar, end quote. Well, Well, you've now heard John's story of being falsely accused by Sally Smith. What about the three others? They find broken ribs.

They find a brain bleed. They found old and new brain bleeds. And I was like, what do you mean? Like she has this. I brought her here for bruises. And that's when I met Sally Smith. They're frantic, they're desperate. And one thing that they all had in common was Dr. Sally Smith and Johns Hopkins, all children's

hospital. It turns out the connection between these families. goes deeper than their animus for Dr. Sally Smith and their moment in the limelight. So today, we ask, is the flood of families who contacted Caitlin Keating evidence of a widespread problem of false allegations, or is it something else entirely?

People believe their eyes. That's something that is so central to this topic because we do believe the people that we love when they're telling us something. If we didn't, you could never make it through your day. I'm Andrea Dunlop, and this is Nobody Should Believe Me. Insurance isn't one-size-fits-all, and shopping for it shouldn't feel like squeezing into something that just doesn't fit.

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Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you find your favorite podcasts. About an hour in to take care of Maya, the film diverges from its main thread of the Kowalski story. to introduce four other parents who claim they were falsely accused of abuse by Dr. Sally Smith. Here's journalist Daphne Chen in the film. It was January 2019 when I hit publish on that piece about the Kowalski family, and I kind of thought I'd move on to the next thing. But that was when the call started coming in and the email started coming in, and I realized that this was a lot bigger than just the Kowalski's.

John is the sole male voice. He's listed simply as father. The film doesn't say what happened to Nolan. The most we get is this brief snippet from John. He's not breathing. He barely has a pulse. The film is more concerned with what John went through. I spent over 300 days in jail before they finally dropped the charges.

They ruined my life because of it. The stories of the three other families, are similarly opaque and told in rapid-fire clips, meant to present a pattern not of abuse by the parents, but is evidence of abuse by the system. And the film renders the children in these cases all but invisible. Save for some loving images of them with their parents. John's biological daughter is featured in a brief shot of him braiding her hair.

Nolan's very existence is never mentioned. One of the other parents we meet is Carly Bryan. Carly and her then-fiance Eric Miller were arrested in August of 2019, after bringing their daughter to Johns Hopkins All-Childrens. Here's Carly in the film. She started throwing up, then she started getting little bruises. I'm rushing to the hospital. Even in this very brief snippet, Carly strays from the basic facts of the case.

Because Carly did not rush her daughter to the hospital. No one did. Carly reported to the police that she'd brought her daughter to Johns Hopkins All-Childerns for blood work at the recommendation of her pediatrician after she broached concerns about the child vomiting during her two-month well visit. Carly reported that the pediatrician had told her there was no rush, but that she should take her in. Here's Carly speaking with Detective Karen Frank. I'd been in there already three or four times for the concern on her being sick.

Okay. So as soon as you called and said that she was vomiting, they said bring her in. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Carly reported issues with the child vomiting in the weeks leading up to the two-month visit. And then today she had bruises, and we thought there may be inner bleeding. Right here she had on her wrist.

It was like little dots. They said could be just blood under the, that maybe she had a blood disorder or something. And we didn't want to give her her immunizations about knowing what's going on with her. It was when Carly's baby was evaluated by a nurse practitioner at Johns Hopkins All Children's that the extent of her injuries begin to emerge.

And now there were questions for the parents. And they'd be asked by police officers. Did she fall or anything? No, you know, I've been trying to think of anything. I'm trying to, they said tomorrow they'll know, like, looking at them are like a time frame on when maybe it happened. Maybe what happened? What does they tell you? They didn't tell me much, just that it was some sort of trauma. They'll know more tomorrow on what they may think happen.

She's never, like, she all I could think of is, like, she's always on her swing or, you know, the swing. Okay. Or she likes to be rocked all the time, and maybe whoever holds. in her. I don't know about the, that's what I've been driving myself crazy, trying to figure out. If it's trauma to the head, I just can't think of, I never dropped her, she never hit her head on anything. When the baby was examined at the hospital, doctors found a number of serious injuries, including bilateral subdural hemorrhages, bleeding on the child's brain, a bruise on her left buttocks, an injury to one of the child's ribs, a tibial spiral fracture on the child's right

leg and linear bruises on the child's arm. Carly, who had been home with the baby on maternity leave and was her primary caregiver, had no explanation for the serious injuries her two-month-old had sustained. Do you think, so you don't think anybody else may have harmed or nobody else watches her just besides you? Recently, that's why I'm trying to figure out when it happened, because recently I did have a friend in town. And she, I mean, I never left her alone with her, though.

So, I mean, I was always in the house. So, like, I feel like I would have heard if she had been hurt. After the nurse practitioner flagged the abuse concerns and a DCF and police investigation were initiated, Dr. Sally Smith did her evaluation on August 21st. Dr. Smith's explanation of the significance of these injuries is excerpted in the police report. The bruising on the arm was consistent with a high-force grasp. The spiral fracture on the baby's leg was a result of twisting or jerking the lower shin to the ankle. In addition, the baby appeared to have suffered two significant brain injuries from shaking,

causing bleeding and swelling on the brain, which had also been the cause of the vomiting. Dr. Smith also told police that these incidents would likely have caused the baby to lose consciousness and could have also caused seizures. She said these injuries would be extremely painful and evident to any caregiver who was present when they happened. We didn't hear an explanation of any of these injuries in the film. And this omission does a lot of work. Presumably, if viewers were presented with the child's actual condition, they might wonder what happened to the baby. But the film just completely skirts the fact that someone badly injured a two-month-old baby, just as it omits any mention of Nolan or his death.

The question in this case wasn't if, just who. So you said you worked six days a week? Yeah. So Carly's usually at home? Yeah. Okay. That's Carly's fiancé and the father of her baby, Eric Miller. When you come home from work, do you take over?

I take a shower. She lets me eat my food if I need some food real quick. She lets you eat your food. Okay. Yeah, she lets me. Just pick it up on your wording. Yeah, she lets me eat some food real quick. And I mean, we have like little things like I do all the dishes. Like I try to take care. So like if there's something that needs done before I get that done, if her bottles need clean, I clean them.

And then I try to take over the baby and go from there. Carly and Eric were interviewed by the police on August 21st. According to police reports, Carly did not appear upset when she was told about the child's injuries. Here she is recounting that moment in the film. And I was like, what do you mean? Like she has this, I brought her here for bruises. Carly maintains in the interview that she doesn't know what happened to the baby and tosses out a number of ideas, that she bounced the baby too vigorously, that she strapped her into her car seat too tight,

that she might have dropped her phone on the baby's head. This case immediately presented timeline issues because the baby's injuries weren't reported right away, so it left a lengthy period during which the injuries could have happened. However, both parents told the police that no one else had been alone with their baby. Anybody else alone with the baby? Alone with the baby, no, not without me or... Okay. And what brought you here is because the baby has a couple of injuries, right?

I do you know how... about them? No. I was unaware of them until today. Carly called me, and we had seen the bruise. And she thought it was from the car seat. Carly thought on her, this little bruise on her arm that she had. Okay.

And Carly thought it was from the car seat. Eric Miller had a bit of a checkered past. He'd racked up arrests for home and vehicular burglary seven to eight years prior. But according to his boss at the plant nursery where he worked, that was all in the past. And how has he been as an employee? Awesome. As a person? Good.

He's a good person. He's a good person. You could tell when he started with us that he was very unsure of himself. He'd been into trouble. He needed a place to get a fresh start to be able to actually put his better foot forward. And I would say over the course of the next year and a half to two years, you could see him grow up. You could see him actually kind of blossom into one of those people that you knew had good intentions. He was wanting to leave the, yes, I was a troubled youth, yes, we all do stupid things in our youth.

Correct. Behind him. And he's been the epitome of a responsible person. He makes it to work every day. He's never late. He hardly ever calls off. I mean, if he does, you know there really is something wrong. There wasn't evidence beyond a reasonable doubt implicating one parent over the other.

and neither of them offered any insight into how these serious injuries had happened. In the Netflix film, Carly says this. They tried to divide her father and I. They wanted us to argue. They wanted us to blame each other. But of course, someone was to blame. Someone had seriously hurt their baby. And on August 23rd,

A Venice couple being charged with child neglect after a two-month-old child suffered severe injuries while in their care. Both parents were arrested. for child neglect with great bodily harm, the only option in a case like this. I cannot tell you for sure who hurt this baby, but the film presents this case as though no one did, and that's certainly not true. Carly and Eric's case is presented as a wrongful accusation

because criminal charges against them were eventually dropped. Prosecutors are pretty loathe, understandably, to pursue a case where a perpetrator can't be identified, and in the absence of a criminal path, it becomes a DCF issue. According to her Facebook, Carly and Eric eventually accepted a case plan from DCF that included a psychological evaluation, anger management, parenting classes, and couples therapy. And the couple wasn't reunited with their daughter for many months as they worked their way through dependency court hearings. In a Facebook post on January 15, 2020, Carly posts a Herald Tribune article about Dr. Sally Smith and includes an update on her own case. She writes, Dr. Sally Smith is the only doctor in the ER to claim it was abuse.

And Carly goes on to offer her take on the real cause of the injuries to her baby, saying that they happened during her delivery. I asked Dr. Jill Glick about the idea that birth trauma might be mistaken for abuse. Certainly, it's another spaghetti thrown against the wall, right? It's another one, well, let's try this, well, let's try that. And I think any reasonable person listening to this to say, who's had a child and taking care of a child, if they have a serious injury, you would notice it. I mean, the child will have pain.

And also we know from our science that bones heal a certain way. And when you look on x-ray, you see new bone formation. So if it occurred at birth and at seven weeks, there should be new bone formation. So it's an acute fracture. A lot of times what we try to make sure there's no bias with things is we don't give a history and we just say what's going on with this fracture to a radiologist for instance or so like that. And they'll say, oh, read it. This is an acute fracture.

How old is this radiographically? Oh, three to five days, right? Or something like that. I mean, so again, the science argues against that. And it's just unfortunate that this kind of weaves through because I will tell you, one of the challenges for our system again is that when there's a case and there's a defense attorney, he, she, they can pull in experts to make these arguments. the prosecutor has the treating physicians.

And Dr. Sally Smith confirmed this as well. Well, one would only have to examine the child and look at the characteristics of the bruising because bruising doesn't last for two months unless it's been absolutely horrendous in the first place. And one could look at the radiology images, fractures heal in a fair way. predictable pattern with new bone being formed around the fracture. And just to add here, Dr. Smith is commenting solely on information that is already publicly available about this child's injuries. You can typically not necessarily narrow down to a day or two, but you can narrow down

to a few days worth of. There's a certain time frame in the beginning that there's bleeding and swelling of the area around the broken bone. and then the next thing that happens is you start to get little hints of new bone being formed. And then it forms into a whole thing called a callous, which is basically bone all around the fracture to stabilize it and heal it and put the bone back together. And then all of that extra bone that was present to stabilize and heal the bone is reabsorbed so that the bone goes back essentially to its original shape and size.

So if a fracture in a two-month-old is two months old, therefore occurred during the delivery process, I mean, first of all, hopefully somebody would have noticed that in the newborn nursery. And then in terms of the brain scenario, well, babies can sustain, mostly in vaginal deliveries, they can sustain subdural hemorrhage, usually across the back of the brain, during delivery. Those are almost universally gone within three weeks to four weeks after the delivery. They are almost universally asymptomatic. And vast majority of the infant literature about subdural hematomas would suggest that they don't result in sustained hematomous. being present in a pattern typical of abusive head trauma for weeks or months.

In the comments on Carly's Facebook post, a woman called Viviana Graham comments that Dr. Smith was also her abusing cap and tags yet another woman called Ashley Finnegan, who replies that Carly is actually a friend of hers. And if those names sound familiar, it's because they belong to the two other parents, along with John, who are featured in Take Care of Maya. Carly posts again in August in a private Facebook group associated with the advocacy organization, Fractured Families. There she reports that her daughter still isn't home after 10 months. She has another court date coming up, and she asks the group what they think about putting cameras up around the house to prevent her from being taken away again. Viviana Graham chines in with her favorite brand of security camera, and another woman weighs in about how she installed cameras to monitor CPS interactions and, quote, keep them from lying.

And that woman is Megan Carter, my sister. So how do all these people know each other, you might ask? Well, it turns out being investigated for child abuse is quite a group bonding activity. So I'm back with an update about my new favorite makeup brand Thrive Cosmetics. I have already raved to you about their liquid lash extensions mascara, which has been my favorite for years. I love a dramatic lash, but I am not trying to spend hours in a salon getting extensions, so this is the perfect fit. And one of my favorite things about this mascara besides the look is that it slides right off with warm water, so you do not have to scrub your poor eyes and pull out half of your own lashes taking it off.

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We instantly called 911. We did what you're taught to do. That's Ashley Finnegan in Take Care of Maya. Like the other parents, including the Kowalskies, Ashley positions herself as on a mission to affect systemic change. There's been so many cases, so many families that have been affected and wrongly accused. How many times are you allowed to be wrong and destroy lives

before they say, okay, that's enough? It's time that we change some things. What is it truly going to take? But before we get into Ashley's activism, I want to back up and talk about her case, because once again, these details are entirely omitted from the film. On the evening of December 12, 2017, 29-year-old Ashley Finnegan got into an argument

with her boyfriend and the father of her two-month-old daughter, 34-year-old George Glashenko. George was going through Ashley's phone and saw a Facebook friend request that made him angry. He then went into the bedroom to confront Ashley, who was either laying on the bed or getting ready to get into it. to the shower, according to the parents' shifting accounts. What happened next is even murkier, but it resulted in a 911 call at 915 p.m.

Their daughter had been struck in the head and was bleeding. According to Ashley and George, the baby's injury happened when George accidentally threw a cell phone at her head. Here's Ashley speaking to the police. The reason why we wanted to speak to, okay, is we got the medical reports where what injuries are. And I think what you were hearing from that doctor is they understand that those injuries were not caused by a cell phone being thrown. Well, this is. You can literally see it. I took pictures myself last night of the cell phone next to her face.

Like you can see it. I saw that with my own eyes. Now, if there's something else, I don't know about that. And that's what I'm like, I'm trying to ask questions. If there's something else, I have the right to know about it too. Regardless of the circumstances of it, I should have the right to know what's wrong with her. And what we're saying to you is there's, we know based on the evidence, the physical evidence, that there's more to the start than what you have told us. Okay.

And we wanted to have a choice to speak to you about that, okay? Okay. And, you know, and that's the reason why we hear. Okay, what happened to happen, it's tragic. You cannot change it. I can't. I can't. So there's no point of lying about it.

Yeah. And what I saw and what happened is what happened. He whipped the cell phone and it hit her in the face. That's bad enough. But there's nothing else to that though. If there's something else in the back of her head, that's something that I, that is unbeknownst to me. That was my first day back to work.

I literally dropped her off at 8 o'clock in the morning and he picked her up. I had been home for 25 minutes. Tops. I literally walked in, got my oldest started her homework, was messing with the baby. The baby was playing this Rudolph game that we, I had a craft party of her.

craft party over the weekend, it was still taped to the door, playing with the baby, I sat on the couch with while my two-year-old was playing the Rudolph game, and then I put the kids to bed, went upstairs to go lay her down, take a shower, and that's when that happened. The story that Ashley tells is extremely hard to make sense of. She claims that the infant was on the bed, and wearing a bright pink onesie, according to the police reports. But George threw his phone at the baby by accident and simply didn't see her there. Even as a non-medical professional, who's nonetheless, been in the presence of babies, this is tough to picture. At the hospital, a CT and MRI showed a depression in the baby's skull and a fracture. The baby ended up needing surgery, where doctors found evidence of shearing injuries, likely from shaking, on her brain in addition to the skull fracture.

But Ashley was insistent. So we wanted to have a chance to talk to you because it's just not matching up. And because we're involved. The injuries and the weight and the, and the, and the, the cell phone. It's, yeah. It does match it. Perfect.

I look for the x-rays. You can literally see the line. And that's what he's talking about. You can literally see the ridges from my cell phone case. So I'll... Now, but the back one, I haven't seen. Like, just what the lady said today. But when you look at it on that x-ray, it looks like where her head is just fusing together.

Because you know, their head isn't all the way together anyways. Yeah. And that's what I don't know. I'm like, I want to know, like, is this old? How you tell, like, what would call? You know what I'm saying? And I haven't even got an answer to that yet. We hear you.

So, let me just. just tell you what, because we're law enforcement, okay? And before we can talk to you, we got to read your rights, okay? So I want to do that at this time, and then I have a chance to talk to you. Okay, well, I have a question. Is George Arne in custody? Yes. So what did he get arrested for? For aggravated child abuse?

So that's what you guys are here to arrest me, too. On December 14th, George was arrested for aggravated child abuse. The affidavit notes that the injuries the child had sustained could result in permanent. disability. Ashley had a troubled history with the father of her other children and was a recovering addict who'd been to jail before, and she seemed intent on defending George. I already talked to my lawyer, and he said if they're coming up there, they're coming to arrest you. Okay. So in saying all that, are you willing to talk to us? I mean, if I'm going to go to jail anyways, what's the point? Because the story's not going to

change. Do you understand? Like, the version, what I saw with my own eyes, with that cell phone being thrown, is what happened. If something occurred before, where I got home, I don't know. That's all I can say. What I'm telling you is that what the medical people have told us is that injury was not caused by that phone. It was a very high impact force that hit. You can throw a baseball at 70 miles an hour. According to the medical doctors, they're saying there's no way a cell phone would cause that damage and that's why I read that. Such a lot. That's just I know I don't have it. Okay.

I know what happened. You can literally see the imprint in my case. When you see the broken bone, it's like this. Like the ribs on the side of my cell phone case. You can see where the tip of the cell phone hit her forehead. I mean, nothing is going to change that from being a fact. So that's why he was asking you, if you're willing to speak to us. That's going to be the same thing I say, though.

Okay. But there's more information that we would like to get a timeline and things like that of exactly leading up to it. And it all hinges on you. And really, I mean, if there's anything more to that? No, that's it. Because you literally at the same. Ashley was also arrested on December 14th for aggravated child abuse, accessory after the fact, and neglect of a child with great bodily harm.

The affidavit notes that her lies about the victim's injury delayed necessary medical trauma care. So what did George have to say? I was cooking a pizza, and I picked up the old lady's phone and started going through, which I do every month. while she does it with me and then I noticed that she had I don't know if she friend requested or she accepted the request of I forget the guy's name somebody she knows in the past and I got jealous and through the phone not meaning to hit her or anybody okay that was in your bedroom yes I went to throw up down on the bed or the floor or whatever not aiming at anybody and baby

was on the bed, I didn't know. Where was she at? Ashley. Yeah. On the bed. I thought the baby was in, I guess, whatever they're called. Okay, the vasinet thing. Cario.

Carole. The house and that, yeah. The baby was on the bed. The story changed as to whether Ashley was on the bed or on her way into the shower. And whether or not George was standing in the doorway and tossed the phone or standing directly over the baby and spiked the phone into her head without seeing. seeing her. And Ashley's immediate actions afterwards are equally hard to square.

How long, how long from the time the baby got hit to, you guys called 911? Instantly. Like, I told you everything that just happened. He grabbed her up. I was like, oh my God, you hit the baby. He picked her up and immediately. With the baby bleeding immediately. Yeah, she was bleeding.

And she just this cry that she cried, like that painful cry. And he's trying to like coddle her and grabbing the washrag. There, you guys had laughed as soon as you called 911. You know, the rescue came, we were there. Yeah, we came straight. Your house was wide open. Yeah, the door doesn't latch it anyway. Okay. Well, that makes sense.

Your home is the deputy outside to stand by? Because we had no idea what was going on. Okay. Well, we needed to, you know, collect, you know, pictures. There was blood on, there was blood on a blanket that was seen. Because they looked through the house. When they walked through the house, they're looking around with rescue. They didn't notice.

Okay. With that, did you give them permission? to go back into the home? No, no, I didn't even know that they were there. Okay. Do you give us permission to go there and take four days? No, it does. You're not consenting to that.

No, I don't see why it's necessary. Well, it is necessary because we don't know what happening with this child exactly. So that's why I'm asking you for consent to. Just to take a photograph of the bed and the bloody blanket. Her blanket? Her blanket? I mean, I don't care if you take pictures of that. No, we're not going through the home.

We're not searching for anything. There's nothing. It doesn't matter. There's nothing that, nobody would get in any trouble. There's nothing in there that you guys would find that anybody would get in trouble. It's just the point. Would you give us consent? To take pictures. I don't give you consent to go and search my house.

I give you consent to take pictures with us there. With you there? Yeah. Well, at this point, that's why I was either going to ask you for consent and have you give me a written consent to go there, take photographs. Because our crime sheet's going to come here. The text is going to come here to take pictures of your daughter and then to go. I'm so freaked out. This is crazy.

Okay. He can't get in trouble for an accident, can he? This is crazy. They did call 911, as they say in the film. But then, opted not to wait for the ambulance and got in the car to drive to a Venice hospital instead. Reportedly, on the car ride over, Ashley was overheard telling George to just say it was an accident

and not to go back to the house because he'd be arrested. Yeah. Well, that's why I'm here to investigate. I mean, just like my mom said it would be like, What if the baby, I mean, I didn't even lie. That's a crazy thing. What if the baby would have threw a toy in here? I just want to clear up some things.

What I would hurt is that there was a disarguement between you two about on Facebook. He was getting into the shower. He saw something on my phone and it pissed him off me through the phone. He didn't know, no, he didn't know the baby was in the bed. Did he throw it at you though? No, I was getting into the shower. I just got home from work.

The baby was left alone on the bed? Yes, I was just set her down. Okay. And he chucked the phone into the bed and it That's where I hit the baby. This is crazy. Is that what you're telling me? Yes.

Throughout her interviews, Ashley takes the posture that everyone is making too big of a deal out of her two-month-old baby having brain injuries that required surgery, and according to doctors could cause permanent disability. According to Ashley, the doctors are the real problem. This is like a nightmare, and then two days into it now they're saying that there's another fracture. And I'm like, how two days later are you guys just noticing it? And no one said anything to me until this afternoon. No other doctor.

They even came in this morning and showed me MRIs because she had an MRI and done this morning. They never said anything about it. And then later, like 30 minutes later, another doctor comes in the child protective doctor and is literally like screaming in my face. About what? About the baby. A doctor, yeah. The doctor was like, yeah, she literally yelled at me.

Because she's like, she started, first off, she was just saying things that weren't true. She's like, well, the first verse, she was very abrasive. She's like, the first version of your stories you were laying in your bed. I said, I never, that's a lie. I've never once said that to anyone. I've talked to everybody here too much. And then she's like, the baby was whining. Cry, she was upset.

She's in pain. I was like, oh my God, I feel so bad. She's in pain. She's like, well, what do you expect? She has tears on the brain. Like, no, she doesn't. She just has the fracture. And then the doctor walks over and starts looking at the back of her head.

And I was like, it's not right there. It's right here. At first, she's on this side of her face, there's staple marks now because when they did her surgery, they staple the protective thing under her. So she's like looking at that, well, what is this? I said, well, it's from the surgery. And then she's looking back here, and I said, it's up here. And she said, no, there's a whole other fracture. That's why what you're saying doesn't make sense.

And I was like, whoa. Like the doctor, I was like, excuse me, why are you yelling? And the doctor was just in here 20 minutes ago. and never said anything about this. Well, I'm telling you, I'm not going to tell you something that isn't true. I said, well, you just told me two minutes ago that I said it was playing in a bed, too. So what do you expect me to not question it? I said, trust me, this is bad enough as it is.

Before appearing and take care of Maya, Ashley's story was picked up by Daphne Chen, who writes this about her interaction with Sally Smith. Quote, she did not introduce herself or explain why she was there. According to Finnegan, Smith claimed her story had been inconsistent and that the child had multiple fractures from multiple blows. At one point, Finnegan said Smith was yelling two inches from my face. Smith left after a nurse rushed into the room. According to Finnegan, she said the nurse later apologized for Smith's bedside manner.

I asked Sally about all of this. The fiction persists in this scenario. Yeah. As I recall, I mean, I was kind of asking my series of questions and trying to see what was happening. beforehand and on, you know, what the child was like the day before and some of the other things we talked about, you know, that would be typical of the history gathering that I would do with the parent at the bedside. I don't have a recording on my phone of introducing myself, but I was introduced myself. And as I recall, Ashley was insistent that the child didn't even really have a

fracture that, you know, that it's not a broken bone. It's not a, you know, it was a fracture, not a broken bone. You know, these kinds of things. There's a fair amount of layperson misunderstanding about broken bones. Anyway, and so I actually pulled up the scan in the room. They have, you know, computer screens and stations in the patient rooms in the ICU where this kid was and showed her the fractures. And there's a thing they do called a 3D reconstruction where it's sort of like an image of the skull that you can see. And it can often be a little more,

make it a little clearer to lay people in particular exactly what the pattern of the fracture was. So, you know, she was insisting that her child barely had any injury oh, why he got brain surgery, or she got brain surgery, I don't know, but anyway. And so I was showing her the scan and saying like it's right here and everything. She was the one that was like a foot or two away from my face, like screaming at me. And not the other way around. And the nurse came in to kind of like stand with me.

like, is this person going to, like, try to punch Dr. Smith or something like that? And basically stayed and came out of the room with me because it was concerned that Ashley was kind of unhinged in there. Of all the stories in this particular compendium, this one is perhaps the most confounding as an example of a false allegation of abuse. There's a lot of conversation in abuse cases about a parent's intent, And it does matter, to a point. But a parent who shakes their child may not mean to hurt them,

and George may not have meant to hurt his baby. But even if we take their story at face value, he flew into a jealous rage after going through his fiance's phone and threw it at their baby's head hard enough that she needed brain surgery. What are we really arguing about here? The charges against Ashley were eventually dropped, but George's weren't. He pled no contest to child abuse. He was sentenced to 25 days in jail.

and two years of house arrest, followed by two years probation. And like other families, they eventually took a case plan and were reunited with their children after a lengthy court battle, during which Ashley showed up with a large group of supporters wearing t-shirts with her daughter's face on it. And well, she's definitely angry at Dr. Sally Smith. Like John, Ashley's convinced the whole system has it out for her. On February 2nd, 2021, as George is coming up on the end of his probation, she writes in the Facebook group, State's attorney hates me and is planning to fight against him getting off early.

I made it clear to her and in court she was a liar and using our case to further her career. My sister chimes in on this post with a bit of legal advice. And then on June 29, 2021, Ashley posts about a journalist called Caitlin Keating, who's looking for four families to feature in a piece she's working on. And she tags a mom she's become close with. Viviana Graham. Are you listening to this podcast and thinking, hey, I also have a lot say, maybe I should start a podcast. Well, I have great news. I created an app with

studio.com to help you do just that. I designed podcaster pro to help you create your podcast, grow your audience, and monetize your show from the ground up. It's like having me as your personal coach right in your pocket. This app is more than just one size fits all lessons. It gives you tailored plans, feedback on everything from outlines to script drafts to full audio episode, and it works right along with you at your own pace. So if you've been thinking about starting a show, now is the time. Studio is running a 20% off site-wide promotion from Tuesday, April 28th through Friday, May 8th. Just go to studio.com backslash Andrea or check out the link in our show notes for more. I can't wait to hear what you create. Almost no one has been more

prolific in the media stories about falsely accused parents than Viviana Graham, who got the most screen time of the four families covered and take care of Maya. She saw us for less than 10 minutes, And then my husband was arrested for aggravated child abuse. You may be noticing a pattern right now in the way these stories are being presented. A 10-minute visit, a rush to judgment by an all-powerful doctor. Probably in the room with us less than 10 minutes. This is the doctor. Yes.

The child abuse doctor. Yes. When the state's expert on abuse got it wrong. It was just sad. I cannot believe we're going to this. It's really destroying families. The last clip is from a local news segment that featured Viviana. The other voice you hear is Vadim Kushner, who's also featured in Daphne Chen's reporting,

and who filed a lawsuit against Dr. Sally Smith and others, and retained former Kowalski attorney Gregory Anderson. Besides Sally Smith and their side-by-side media coverage, Vadim Kushnear, John Stewart, and Viviana's husband, Jeremy Graham, have something else in common, a documented history of domestic violence. Viviana and Jeremy were married in 2006, and their union was, by all accounts, a pretty tumultuous one. According to police reports, Jeremy was arrested for domestic battery in 2010, following an incident where he grabbed and squeezed Viviana by the throat. Viviana filed and then withdrew a domestic violence injunction against her husband, but never pressed criminal charges. Viviana told police that he'd been cheating on her and that he had substance use issues with alcohol and prescription drugs, which he'd gone to rehab for in 2009. The police were also called to the couple's home on September 23, 2015, for a so-called verbal domestic, According to the police reports from this incident, Viviana told the officer that the couple had been arguing more frequently since their baby was born.

Viviana told police that she wanted to leave with the baby and that Jeremy wasn't allowing her to. She said that he had not harmed the child, however, he had anger issues that could cause the baby to be injured. Less than two weeks later, their four-month-old baby landed in the hospital in the first of two incidents. On this occasion, it was determined by police that Jeremy had been feeding the baby alone in his room, while Viviana was cleaning the house. Jeremy told paramedics and later police that the baby had begun gasping for air when he was feeding him a bottle,

then stopped breathing, and went limp for eight minutes before paramedics arrived. This was believed at the time to be a choking incident, and the child was given a chest x-ray and then released. Paramedics were called to the couple's house 19 days later on October 25, 2015. This incident also happened while Jeremy was alone with the baby. The family had just returned from watching football,

at Hooters, when Jeremy reported that the baby started seizing in his play chair, and it was this visit that led to the Child Protection Team report and the call to law enforcement. In the days that followed, the baby would be evaluated by a number of medical professionals, including an ophthalmologist and CPT medical director, Dr. Sally Smith. Much of the specifics of the child's condition are redacted from reports, but it was determined that the baby had no health issues of significance prior to the October 6th incident, which was, in light of the second incident, determined likely to be an instance of abusive head trauma as well. On October 29, Jeremy, who'd hired an attorney, turned himself in and was arrested for aggravated child abuse.

The report cites Smith's findings and the comments Viviana had made several weeks earlier that she feared Jeremy would hurt their baby. During the investigation, the police spoke to a number of people close to the couple, and the police report includes a number of text message exchanges between Viviana and a confidential informant, that paint a troubling picture of the family's home life. In these messages, Viviana expresses frustration at Jeremy for his hair-trigger temper, telling her friend he'd yelled at their three-week-old baby to shut up, and she recounts him getting mad at the baby for crying.

Viviana alludes to an incident right before the so-called verbal domestic on September 23rd, where he'd been violent with her. At one point, Viviana seems to be considering leaving Jeremy, but says she feels guilty for taking her son's father away. She writes of her son, I don't want him to be like him. At one point in the exchange, Jeremy takes Vivianna's phone and responds to her friend who just asked if she was okay.

He writes, No, I beat her ass. Mind your own fucking business. Why don't you concentrate on finding yourself a man and staying out of our business? Viviana confirms in a reply that Jeremy had taken her phone earlier. We talked earlier about Viviana recommending brands of surveillance cameras

to fellow mom Carly in a Facebook discussion. But according to her texts, it wasn't CPS she was meaning to keep an eye on. She writes to her friend, quote, I don't think he's dumb enough to ever do any physical harm, and I have a camera in the house in the baby's room. Her friend replies, it's sad that you even have to think that way. Viviana says, I know.

Viviana seemed to have no illusions about her husband's capacity for anger and violence. But after his arrest, she threw her full support behind him, starting an online fundraiser for their legal bills, railing against her own mother and sister for talking to the police, behind our backs, accusing my husband, and talking to seemingly every media outlet she can get a hold of. And early on, the tack the couple takes is to put doubt not just on whether their baby has medical evidence of being shaken, but on whether or not such a diagnosis exists at all. Jeremy's lawyer offers the police some medical literature casting doubt on the very existence of abusive head trauma.

To hear Viviana tell it, the problem isn't her violent husband. It's a nefarious doctor who's out to get them for, reasons. Since 2016, I've been writing Sally Smith, a Christmas card with our family's picture on it. So she's reminded of a family that she tried to break apart, but didn't. Christmas card doesn't quite capture the spirit of these missives, which include vitriolic notes from Viviana, and in one instance includes a collage of photos of Sally with comments mocking her appearance. In addition to sending her yearly Christmas card, Viviana encouraged other members of the Fractured Families group to send their own, posting Dr. Smith's address and phone number online.

It's interesting because they never have called the child protection team to harass them. They always call my private practice that has nothing to do with anything that I did with the child protection team. And it was actually a couple of years ago that we got like thousands of calls at my office, just people calling in about how can you work with this person and some of them just literally strings of expletives to the poor receptionist that picked up the phone. We would have 20 or 30 voicemails, again, just vitriol. Viviana paints a response that she received from Sally Smith one year as an admission

that Sally had gotten her son's diagnosis wrong. Dear Mr. and Mrs. Graham, I received your card again and just wanted to say, I'm sorry you're still so angry about my part in the investigation regarding your son. there are definitely a disturbing number of abuse and neglected children in Pinellas County. I understand you feel very strongly that your son wasn't one of them. You mentioned in your note that was found to have another diagnosis. And if you have a chance, I would very much like to hear what that was

so I can consider it appropriately next time. I try very hard to be thorough and get it right. But perhaps, I need to be careful to consider the gray areas. But this read is missing some crucial context, according to Sally. Part of the reason I sent something back is to try to see if I could get her to stop. If she could tell me what the medical condition was that her son had, please let me know because I'd like to consider that in other cases if, you know,

it's something I've never heard of or don't know about. So indeed, what was this other medical condition? that Viviana was claiming her son had. Here is what she told journalist Tracy Ortlieb from Parents Magazine. Quote, soon we had appointments scheduled with multiple neurologists outside the Tampa Bay area. Their findings? That in extraordinarily large-headed babies,

the brain takes time in catching up to skull growth and veins frequently rupture and re-rpture. This big head theory, the condition we spoke to Dr. Booz about in the last episode, is a common defense tactic. And as Sally explains, this is something Capp's look for as a possible differential diet. diagnosis. So that is best described as benign enlargement of the subarachnoid spaces. And it is

associated with large heads. I am very familiar with this phenomenon, as are the neurosurgeons at all children. So the chance that that was the sole diagnosis. And I've had scenarios with that where I've said, hey, this is the pattern, but this child has a big head. He had prominent subarachnoid spaces. The little bit of hemorrhage associated with his fall off the couch and the skull fracture that he sustained is typical of benign enlargement of subarachnoid spaces, also known as benign macrocranea, big head. And that's a medical diagnosis that has a pattern of findings associated with it, and it's pretty straightforward whether a person has that or not. Viviana mentions in another post that she also took her son to see a geneticist to be tested

for Eller's Danlos syndrome, a rare condition that many in the fractured families group claim is frequently mistaken for abuse. More on that later. According to the police reports, Viviana's son had no underlying medical problems. In my kicks-in-box piece about Viviana, he writes that doctors disagreed about the diagnosis, but he leaves out which doctors. These names will be familiar to you from the last episode, as there are two of DA Matthew Torbenson's so-called frequent flyers, Dr. Julie Mack, a radiologist who mostly does mammography, in addition to her defense expert work,

and Dr. Joseph Scheller, who makes his living testifying for the defense and abuse cases and on behalf of lead paint companies. I referred to them in the trial as frequent flyers in the courtroom, and they create a courtroom controversy regarding the medical diagnosis, because, you know, in my mind, in the vast majority of the public. I don't think there's a, there's a controversy about shaken baby syndrome or abusive head trauma. Every single person is talked to about abusive

head trauma or shaken baby syndrome when you are at the hospital and you're leaving with a newborn child. Everyone's educated about the dangers of it. The only time that we hear there's a controversy is in the courtroom when someone's been charged with inflicting abusive head trauma and there's defense experts, a small group of defense experts that appear and testify. Viviana claims in the press that she took her son to see specialists who ruled out child abuse. But according to her Facebook posts, she's never actually met Dr. Scheller. She just sent him some medical records and a CAT scan, and he wrote them a report for a fee of $1,500. Nobody ever pays you back for all the money that you spend on lawyers and experts and attorneys.

And you go into debt. You know, we almost filed for bankruptcy. It's just crazy. Like the other two families in this episode, Viviana and Jeremy eventually took a case plan, criminal charges against Jeremy were dropped. Despite his history of violence and Viviana's direct acknowledgement of the danger he posed to their kid, Viviana was hell-bent on defending her husband. And given that she was the only other adult in the timeline, that makes prosecution tricky. Viviana remains very active online and continues to defend Jeremy and maintains that he

was wrongfully accused, although he is not, in fact, her husband anymore. Dr. Sally Smith stopped receiving the annual Christmas card admonishing her for trying to tear the family apart, because it turns out Jeremy did that all on his own. By June of 2024, it would appear Viviana had finally had enough. She filed for divorce and filed a domestic violence petition against Jeremy. The details of these filings are harrowing. Viviana describes Jeremy pawning off household items to support his addiction to cradham, an over-the-counter stimulant that is listed by the Mayo Clinic as unsafe and ineffective, that is frequently used by people going through opioid withdrawals. Viviana recounts Jeremy ripping their security cameras out, destroying her possessions,

and threatening her in front of their children. She writes, there is no peace in this house when he's home, and says that their nine-year-old is afraid of his father and wants him to stop pawning his things. Viviana writes that she fears for her kid's safety. They'd had two more by then. And the court agreed, granting Viviana an emergency motion for sole custody, citing imminent risk of harm to her children. Viviana's filings include text messages from Jeremy

where he berates her and threatens to stop paying the mortgage and accuses her of cheating, telling her, quote, I have spies everywhere. She includes call logs of him calling over and over again and receipts from the pawn shop. The ways in which domestic abuse and child abuse crossover are both extremely common and very nuanced, and this connection shows up a lot in these stories.

So, after all that, Does Viviana see her interactions with Dr. Smith all those years ago a little differently? Evidently not. Viviana is still active in trying to drum caps out of their jobs, even speaking to Florida lawmakers. In Texas, recent media scrutiny has led some lawmakers to consider introducing a bill next year that would require, in some cases, the states seek an independent second opinion before child is separated from their parents.

That system, though, would provide the oversight accountability that parents deserve. Representative Eskimani believes the additional measure could make sense here in Florida, since we found these pediatricians who serve as the state's experts on abuse often answer to no one and operate independently from region to region. Any position of authority that isn't checked by something else is concerning. Representative Anna Eskimani, who is interviewed in this segment, went on to co-sponsor House Bill 47, which references a similar bill in Arkansas, named Quincy's Law, and calls out similar alleged issues of false allegations surrounding

conditions like Ellers-Danlo's syndrome, osteogenesis imperfecta, rickets, and low vitamin D. There are also similar laws in Texas and Georgia. In February of this year, House Bill 47 passed the Florida House unanimously, and will now go on to Governor Ron DeSantis. Viviana's case is over, and so is her marriage. But she remains dedicated to denying the existence of abuse of head trauma, and she appears to be in good company. Viviana is one of the moderators of the Facebook group associated with fractured families. According to its website, quote, fractured families exist to protect and advocate

for families falsely accused of child abuse due to unexplained fractures in their infants. Not only Viviana, but the majority of the families featured in Take Care of Maya, Ashley, Carly, Viviana, and a number of others featured in brief segments during the credits, are members of this group. Producer Caitlin Keating and Viviana made context sometime in 2020, and Viviana, posts screenshots of her text message with Keating to the group in July of that year. She includes Caitlin's contact information and says other families should reach out if they're comfortable. The very first comment on this post is from my sister, offering to talk to Keating about the medical child abuse angle. Raina Broward Tyson, one of the group's founders, who ends up appearing in the final sequence of Take Care of Maya,

cautions Viviana about sharing screenshots from the group, and offers to create a mock post that could be shared with Keating instead. Fractured family's presence is felt, but not explicitly mentioned, and take care of mine. Viviana posts a few follow-up messages from Keating in the group. Caitlin Keating was clearly very interested in this group and its goings-on and asked a couple of times about getting a behind-the-scenes peek into what they discuss. It doesn't appear that they ever did show her, and I think I can guess why. Which brings me to a question I've wondered all along about Caitlin Keating. Does she really understand who she's platforming?

David Ayyub, who used to be really active in the anti-vaccine movement and is now a shaken baby denialist. That's next time on Nobody Should Believe Me. Nobody Should Believe Me is written, reported, and executive produced by me, Andrea Dunlop. Our co-executive producer is Mariah Gossett. Our editor is Greta Stromquist, story editing by Nicole Hill. Research and fact-checking by Aaron Ajai. Additional research by Jessa V. Randall. Mixing and Engineering by Robin Edgar.

Our production manager is Nola Karmouche. Music from Blue Dot Sessions, Sound Snap, and SlipStream.