Nobody Should Believe Me - S07 E08: Anatomy of a Conspiracy Theory

Episode Date: May 14, 2026

Why do all of these stories purporting false allegations of child abuse sound the same? If enough people have experienced the same thing, that must mean it’s true, right?  The truth is, as soon as you do a little digging, these cases begin to unravel. By taking a closer look into the cases featured in Serial’s The Preventionist and Mike Hixenbaugh’s Do No Harm, the copy and paste storytelling becomes apparent. Featuring: Tara Haelle, Science Journalist Dr. Jill Glick, Child Abuse Pediatrician *** Read No, shaken baby syndrome has not been discredited by Tara Haelle: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/shaken-baby-syndrome-diagnosis-real 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. Conspiracy theories are most effective when they contain just enough of the truth to seem real. Q&ON was predicated on the idea that global elites, particularly democratic politicians, were trafficking children and participating in satanic abuse, and that President Trump was going to come into office and bring them all to justice. And as we now know, thanks to the deluge of horrors that continue to emerge from

the Epstein files, elites from across the political spectrum were indeed up to many disturbing things. But as for the people who were supposed to bring them to justice, well, that's suddenly the last thing they seem interested in doing. That's another thing about conspiracy theories. They tend to include some projection, and they take hold when they do for a reason. The specifics may be very wrong, but the cultural anxieties that fuel them are very real. We've broken down a number of specific cases this season of parents who are presented as falsely accused of abuse because of a doctor's misdiagnosis. But there is no evidence in any of these cases that the doctors who diagnosed abuse were

wrong. And these cases are not outliers in the media coverage. They're the rule. There's no way I can investigate every single story about an allegedly falsely accused parent, But every single time I have, from Take Care of Maya to my Kixenba's Do No Harm series, to the preventionist, to Daphne Chen's work, they've all been just like this. The parents' stories fall apart the moment you take a closer look. So why does this media narrative persist? Court records provided to us from these parents who spent thousands of dollars to fight the state in court also reveal some doctors coming to such far-reaching conclusions without thorough investigations.

Notice they say parents' prevent. provided the court records they're referring to. And that's the first clue that you might not be getting the whole story. Child abuse investigations are complex and hidden beneath layers of very necessary privacy and confidentiality protections. These stories are challenging to cover, unless you're not actually interested in telling the truth. Then you can actually benefit from this interconnected web of silence.

State officials can't comment on active cases. DCF and doctors can't comment, period. and the victims, well, they're too little to speak for themselves. And the very people speaking on their behalf and controlling access to most of the evidence are the one suspected of harming them. But still, how can all these people have the same story if there isn't something to it? All these parents who got the same wrong diagnosis from the same doctor who have nearly identical stories about shrill child abuse pediatricians pronouncing abuse

after a 10-minute visit, only to have that diagnosis debunked once the child was taken to a proper specialist. And it's allegedly happening everywhere, as the producer of Take Care of Maya, Caitlin Keating, remarks on in a podcast interview. Now that the trial has started, it's like I'm getting messages basically every hour from people saying,

this happened to me, I don't have money, I can't hire a lawyer, can you help me? That consistency has to mean something, right? It's not like all these falsely accused parents are coordinating this coverage together. It's not like they're in cahoots with these specialists who save the day. That's crazy.

Right? 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,

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and feeling like I'm the only one in the media who seems to care that none of it's actually true. I've gotten used to people yelling at me about Munchausen by proxy and how I'm villainizing heroic moms like Biotta Kowalski, Dedy Blanchard, and my own sister. But as I started to look into the other cases in these stories and into all these lawsuits, so many of them were about fractures and abusive head trauma, forms of abuse that are far less exotic than Munchausen by proxy. And that's how I found Tara. I like to joke with people when they asked me how I became a science and health reporter and I tell them I had a baby.

Because I was in grad school for photojournalism and I got married and we wanted a child and I was in my 30s and, you know, tick, tick, tick. That's journalist Tara Haley, perhaps the only other person in the media as obsessed with child abuse denialism as I am. We're around the same age and we both ended up here after a career pivot brought on by pregnancy. This was in 2010, which was when they finally retracted the Wakefield study on MMR and autism. And so I had questions about vaccines. And I started asking those questions. Because I was, A, in journalism school as a graduate student and had the time to do it, and two, because I have a journalist mindset, which is sort of similar to an investigator's mindset or a scientist's mindset, when I started trying to, quote unquote, do my

own research, instead of coming across things that looked suspect and then concluding that vaccines were dangerous, which a lot of moms who, quote, do their own research do, the more I learned, the more I realized I didn't know. Tara was really speaking my language here because, yes, curiosity, intellectual rigor, hooray. I started interviewing everybody across the vaccine spectrum from the founder of the biggest anti-vaccine organization in the country, all the way to the. the man who invented the rotavirus vaccine, who was the most outspoken vaccine advocate there was, and everybody in between. I talked to school nurses. I talked to parents. I talked to parents of

kids who had been lost vaccine preventable diseases. I talked to parents who said that their children had been affected by vaccine injuries. My thesis ended up being on vaccines and the anti-vaccine movement and the information about vaccines. And I kind of give a lay of the land in terms of understanding a lot of the arguments that get used in anti-vaccine settings, basically. The anti-vax movement has been gaining momentum for years. And with RFK Jr., a diehard anti-vaxxer, who also doesn't believe in germ theory, installed as the director of Health and Human Services, it's safe to say that it's having a heyday. So, fast forward a few years, and I'm writing regularly for NPR, and at this point I cover a lot of pediatric things in general. Vaccines were sort of my gateway

drug to pediatrics and maternal health. And I was attending the American Academy of Pediatrics meeting. And I saw a story on shaken baby, on abusive head trauma. And I already had a decent working professional relationship with the people at AAP who would connect me with experts. And when I started to look into it, that was when I discovered these arguments against it. But different from the vaccine thing, I recognized the arguments. The arguments were the exact same tactics. I had spent two years exploring with vaccines. I didn't have to go through the whole let me look into this because I recognized them. They were the same tactics. And then I found the Venn diagram. And the Venn diagram was that one of the alternative explanations for a shaken baby is

vaccine injury. The connection between the anti-vax movement and abuse denialism is not incidental. Dr. David Ayyub, a diagnostic radiologist and prominent anti-vaccism, who once accused the Vaccine Alliance of committing a genocide with their vaccination efforts in poor nations, made a career pivot in the aughts to working as a defense expert witness in child abuse cases. He and a small cadre of fringe doctors who do this work have been incredibly successful in spreading the idea that the clinical diagnosis of abuse in abusive head trauma and fracture cases is fraudulent. Dr. David Ayub and his work are very popular in the Fractured Families Facebook group, the online community we mentioned in the last episode.

And he's big into another theory that's popular with this group, the idea that infantile rickets is being mistaken for abuse. A number of parents in the Fractured Families group post about working with Iube, and according to these posts, he'll write a report for around $2,500. When a journalist from ProPublica named David Armstrong wrote a lengthy piece on David Ayub several years ago, members of fractured families brainstormed about how to help clear his name. One member wrote in a 2018 post, quote, Maybe we can figure out a way to discredit David Armstrong, but using the real facts instead of the ones he made up, like the specialists due to us. Another member posted an even more acerbic taste on Armstrong's piece. David Armstrong isn't getting the last laugh. All the pro-parental rights and pro-informed consent Facebook groups are sharing the article on David Ayub and learning about infantile rickets.

And this belief that the diagnosis of abusive head trauma is not scientifically sound, despite the fact that this is pretty easily debunked from a scientific perspective. has spread nonetheless. I was seeing these headlines coming out constantly saying that shaken baby has been discredited. Shaken baby is questioned, you know, all these things. And none of them were true. It was like saying that vaccines had been questioned or the CDC schedule had been questioned. And I knew it wasn't true because I had seen the evidence.

I had been immersed in the research. And I thought, okay, you know what? You keep waiting for the quote unquote right time to do this, Tara. And that's never going to happen. You just have to do it. And bless her, Tara did. Her extraordinarily thorough piece entitled, No, Shaken Baby Syndrome hasn't been discredited,

was published by Science News in July of 2025. This piece lays out the extensive science around the diagnosis, which is the subject of broad consensus amongst doctors across various pediatric subspecialties, including radiologists, ophthalmologist, orthopedist, and child abuse doctors. And publications throughout the nation immediately issued retractions, and apologies to the doctors they dragged through the mutt. Kidding.

But like me, Tara has noticed not just the prevalence of these abuse denialism stories, but the similarities in the stories themselves. Tara, if you were going to write a bad medical kidnapping story, like what are the elements that you see? Because I wonder if they're the same ones that I see. I mean, first you have a very sympathetic parent. And when I say sympathetic, it's probably going to be a white parent. it's probably going to be a middle class or upper middle class parent.

They're going to live in a suburb or a nice part of the city. They have other kids. They have a good job. Maybe they're a teacher or a librarian or maybe they volunteer at nonprofits. They're a good Christian family, right, that would never do anything to harm their children. So you've got to have the right sympathetic portrait. And that's not to say that there aren't, I mean, I feel like I do have to qualify. Is there, has there ever been a case, at least with Shaken Baby, for example, where someone was inappropriately accused of it?

I'm sure there has been, because there's been murder and rape and burglary that have, you know, every single crime has people that have been found guilty or been accused inappropriately who were not. But they're the minority of cases, is what I mean. Although they also tend to be the people who are members of minoritized and oppressed groups. Research indicates that abusive head. trauma is underreported and less likely to be diagnosed in babies of white intact families than in families of color or single-parent families. There are the occasional families of color that appear in these media stories, but white families dominate. All of the perpetrators featured in Take Care of Maya are white, and the founders of fractured families, Holly Simonton, Rebecca Winoosick,

Raina Tyson, and Brea Huber are all white women. Another thing is, I will go and ask them which doctors I should talk to. And the doctors who will talk to me are the doctors who will only give me the information that that family has allowed those doctors to give me. I think a lot of people don't realize a doctor can talk to the media if they have permission from the family. And the family can control exactly what they can and can't share. They can have, it's not like hip is not binary. It's not all or nothing. They can say, I give you permission to share this information, but not that information.

And so it's easy for a journalist to get one-sided information from a doctor who sounds authoritative and not get any information from a doctor who might have other information that you're lacking because of HIPAA. And that's legal. And that is how it should be in the sense that we want to protect people's medical information. I mean, HIPAA is an appropriate law, but I don't think all journalists who are doing these stories recognize how it can be manipulated by the parents. and the parents may or may not even be savvy enough to intentionally do it. All the parents have to do is go to the doctor that's sympathetic to their cause and say, hey, can you talk to this reporter about X, Y, Z? And then just say that.

So you're going to have that. You're always going to have the alternative explanations or the, for medical kidnapping in particular, you're going to have these weird conditions that are rare that we don't know a lot about, that are hard to get definitive blood tests for, things like pots, which is a real condition but can also be misused. This is something we've unpacked on the show before, the way that the legitimate experiences and frustrations of people with rare or poorly understood conditions can be so easily exploited by abusers to provide a cover. And it would appear that nearly every family in the fractured families group has received a diagnosis of a rare disorder. And much like in Munchausen by proxy cases, the media, stories tend to focus on the experience of the parents and what they've been through.

You're going to have neighbors and friends talking about what a nice family they are and all the stress that they've gone through. Sometimes those friends and neighbors will be people who have set up fundraisers to help the family pay for the medical bills, right? You're going to have the kids' friends' parents talking about how sad it is that this child has this horrible disease. And, you know, so those are some of the elements that I noticed. when we go in there. And what we don't see are actual medical records, or if we do, it's very, very, very limited views of them.

We don't hear independent experts who are not associated with the case who will tell you how rare that condition is and what the likelihood is of it being there. And I don't know if that's because the reporters don't seek them out or because they can't find outside experts to give that perspective. I'm not sure which it is. But if you can't get someone who's involved with the case to talk, you ought to at least have an expert on there who can talk about this condition more broadly,

who is not involved in the case. This characterizes nearly every one of these medical kidnapping stories. Sympathetic portrayals of white middle class parents told in such a way where they are controlling the reporter's access to the information. The only records they share are the ones that fit their narrative. The only doctors you hear from are the ones they allow to speak to the information. the media, and outside doctors or research that support their story are often curiously anonymized. Stories will say doctors disagreed or refer to a prominent pediatric neurologist or a child abuse

expert without directly quoting or naming them, and this, I've come to believe, is deliberate. Because the doctors they mean are the doctors we talked about with DA Matthew Torbenson and others who make the rounds in these online groups, doctors who specialize in child abuse, specifically who specialize in explaining it away. And the Fractured Families members adore these doctors, referred to in one post as second opinion heroes. One of the most common types of posts in the Fractured Families Facebook group is parents looking for experts to diagnose what's really wrong with their child. Because in the dogma of this group, there's no such thing as a

legitimate abuse diagnosis. Every parent who says they were falsely accused of abuse appears to be accepted and supported at face value, whether the members know anything about them or not. One of the most chilling types of posts in this group is a member posting a news story about a stranger who's been arrested for child abuse. Viviana Graham recently posted a news story about a doctor in Ohio who was arrested for assault after his 10-week-old baby was discovered to have fractures in his arms, legs, and ribs. Viviana writes, quote, What's your take on this?

Sounds like some metabolic bone issues. Other members of the group agree that this must be a wrongful accusation. Highly doubt this is abuse, one writes. This dad needs help. There are few details in the article Viviana linked to with this post, but court documents about the case,

which is still pending, reveal that the father made admissions to the police that he had harmed his son. He told investigators that he estimated he'd hurt the child two to three times per one. beginning when the child was around four weeks old, before finally seeking out medical attention in January of this year, when the baby was discovered to have at least 10 broken bones. Neither confessions nor criminal convictions are enough to convince some members. One member shares a story from

October of last year about a father who confessed to breaking his child's bones, writing, I don't know, something feels off about the way he, quote, confessed. The pictures don't scream abusive to me. In the world of fractured families, every abuse diagnosis is wrong. Every family separation unnecessary and unjust. If there's physical evidence, a child has been harmed, there must be an alternate medical explanation. If there's a confession, it must have been coerced. If there's a conviction, it's necessarily a wrongful one. Fractured families is a world in which no one abuses their children, and any doctor who says otherwise is a monster. Members get especially activated if a news story involves the same cap who diagnosed their child.

A foundational belief of this group is that child abuse pediatrics is not a real subspecialty, and that these doctors are never to be trusted. There are many posts in the group talking not only about how caps aren't trustworthy as medical professionals, but accusing them of kidnapping and harming children. Some in the group refer to caps as child abducting pediatricians. And while many of the major news stories around these families shy away from the more conspiracy-laden terminology. It's fully in the open on fractured families, where there are frequent shared posts from medical kidnap.com. Media stories about false allegations in places like serial, NBC, ProPublica, and others purport to be challenging individual child abuse pediatricians and the way they do their

work, trying to cast people like Dr. Sally Smith, Dr. Deborah Jensen, and Dr. Nancy Harper as dangerous doctors who go too far. But a close rate of these stories reveals that they're actually following medical kidnapping conspiracy theory logic, that there is no right way to do the job of a child abuse pediatrician. If they disagree with colleagues, they're rogue outliers. If there's consensus among the doctors, it's evidence of a conspiracy or improper influence. And if they disagree with a quack doctor who's been hired by the family, then they're either arrogant or engaging in a cover-up. I find it ironic that the very thing that journalists and readers of these stories think are being disregarded is actually the most important thing that the doctors consider.

So what is it that they think is being disregarded? The parent's narrative. The parents' narrative is the most important part of the diagnosis. The whole point of what these child abuse pediatricians is doing is looking very carefully at all the information, the entire medical narrative. It's called a medical history, is the formal term. That is the core of what the child abuse pediatricians use when they're looking at the injuries. They say, okay, parent says X, Y, Z happened. This order, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. I'm going to look at this child and see, do injuries A, B, C, D, EFG add up to what would happen if

one, two, three, four, five, six, seven happened. And they don't. And this is where we get into the talking point of she only spoke to us for 10 minutes and called it abuse that gets repeated over and over again, the rush to judgment that isn't actually happening. A visit with a cap may indeed be brief, but it's happening in concert with an exam, record reviews, consultation with treating physicians, a CPS investigation, and often a police investigation. And the parent's narrative isn't disregarded. It's a key piece of evidence. I think the reason that journalists get sucked into these stories, one, our justice system is imperfect.

There are a lot of problems in our justice system, including a lot of discrimination and institutional racism and discrimination against people with less money. I mean, we all know the data on what, you know, which people actually can defend effectively, you know, which rapists get off the hook and which ones don't and so forth. So we have a system that really can be unjust. And as watchdogs, journalists take their job as a watchdog very seriously. It's sort of a point of pride for us, right? You know, what's the word? Speak truth to power and give voice to the voiceless. And, I mean, that's what motivates a lot of journalists to go into this job.

And so if they're trying to fight for what they perceive as justice and fight for what's, you know, to uncover what's unjust, their mindset going into the case is to lean toward innocence. They're looking for the victim and they're looking for the underdog. Journalists love to champion an underdog. And what I think happens is they get confused about who the underdog is. The underdog should be the child. And they see the underdog as the parent. The child is completely forgotten. The child is a side issue.

The child is a tool, is a prop for the child. And that sounds harsh, but that's how these stories are written. The types of journalists that are reporting on these stories being predominantly crime and forensic journalists, they have written about all the cases of exonerations that happen. The actual Innocence Project is a good program that really has exonerated a lot of people who truly didn't commit the crimes. And then that narrative gets confused with these narratives. It gets conflated. True story. I was presenting at a conference recently where I got to meet a bunch of lovely listeners and one of them was so excited to let me know that she was wearing some very cute,

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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. Now I have a favorite new product from Thrive. They're brilliant eyebreaker. These waterproof eye shadow highlighter sticks come in 32 shades and they could not be easier to slap on and blend perfectly. You do not need eye shadow brushes or even a steady hand. These are so easy to

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point, I don't know if every single one of the parents in these stories is guilty, but the way these stories are constructed is a huge problem. There's this fantastic blog post that was written on science blogs years ago that was like the five tactics. of denialists, basically. And one of them is using fake experts. And so what's interesting is what they do is they don't just deny expertise. They deny the validity of true expertise and then offer up their own experts and say these are the real experts. And those tactics, it's that they were originally written by Mark and Chris Hoofnagle.

And Mark and Chris used to do this on the facts. science blogs and they came up with these five tactics and then later on john cook a researcher kind of turned them into flick fl iCC but they are fake experts unrealistic expectations expecting the science to be a hundred percent 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 have have a 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. This mnemonic device is extremely handy in looking at how these arguments of the allegedly falsely accused parents are constructed, as well as the media stories. that feature them. Starting from the top, fake experts, check. We've already discussed a number of what DA Matthew Torbenson refers to as frequent flyers, people like Dr. Julie Mack, Dr. Joseph Scheller, and Dr. David I.U. Recommending doctors who are willing to provide alternate explanations of abusive injuries appears to be one of the main functions of the Fractured Families Facebook group. These experts appear to be willing to give made-to-order diagnoses of what they refer to as abuse mimics. I asked child abuse pediatrician and ER physician, Dr. Jill Glick, about this.

And I hate that term mimic. I think it's really been introduced in the law because we don't talk about mimics of pneumonia or mimics of this or that or the other. We just talk about it could be this virus or this could be this bacteria. So to summarize that these things that they introduce is speculative is just to throw off the court. The court is not a medical arena. It's a legal arena. And God bless everybody who goes in there, hopefully they're intellectually honest, but it's not. It's about winning. It's not about anything more than that. Many of these doctors are seemingly willing to testify that any child has something like rickets, macrocephaly, Ellers-Danlo's syndrome, temporary osteogenesis imperfecta, or low vitamin D

to explain away abusive injuries. With price tags ranging from about 1,500 to 5,000 for a report, often offered without seeing the child, and tens of thousands more for court depositions and testimony. Such a group of doctors also exist in much-housand-by-proxy cases, people like Dr. Richard Bowles, Dr. Eli Neuberger, and Dr. Anthony Kirkpatrick, to name a few, who seemed to pop up in an inordinate number of very clear abuse cases to say that it was not abuse. These doctors are spoken of with reverence in fractured families. They're cast as the targets of a witch-hunt by a medical establishment who wants to cover up the truth about abusive head trauma.

And not for the rather more logical reason that the medical establishment is unhappy with these doctors because they're unethical quacks. Here's Dr. Jill Glick again. You know, what really bothers me the most is that colleagues, the people went through medical school, go into court and lie and misrepresent. Oh, I should say they might have their own belief, but it's that evidence-based. And in court, as an expert, if you look at the AMA, you look at anybody who talks about an expert, when you go to court, you should be able to testify on either side of the, the facts of the case. And that's not the case here. This is about winning and losing and I don't know if it's about money, glory or what, but it's personal belief. And that's how it should be prefaced. This is not standard of care. This is my own personal belief. And that's now how it's done. It's imbalanced.

And what bothers me next layer is that there isn't any medical, like American Bar Association, set up in place to say to report someone that's providing irresponsible testimony. And these victimized experts make very good money doing this work. In 2022, Dr. Scheller said during a deposition that he makes more than $350,000 a year testifying for the defense in abusive head trauma and lead paint cases, and that this work makes up 75% of his income. There's a lot of chatter in the Fractured Families Group about how much retaining these experts costs.

Thousands for a report, tens of thousands to testify plus travel costs. One of the most prominent experts in this group, Dr. Michael Hall, Halleck often offers testimony and reports pro bono. However, he has perhaps the most significant financial ties to the group. Dr. Michael Halleck is a fascinating and controversial figure. Earlier in his career, Hollick conducted influential research on vitamin D, metabolism, and deficiency. You know how all your orange juice has vitamin D in it? That's partly thanks to his research. But he's also been in quite a lot of trouble over the years for giving rather Utre medical advice, like telling patients to avoid using excessive sunscreen.

especially after it was discovered that he'd accepted funding from the Indoor Tanning Association and pharmaceutical companies that offer vitamin D testing and supplements. This controversy led to him resigning from Boston University's dermatology department, though he remained on the faculty for endocrinology. And then, in the 2010s, he took up a new line of contrarianism, offering unproven theories that babies and young children with Eller's Danlo's syndrome can get multiple fractures through normal care and handling, leading to their parents being falsely accused of abuse.

There are numerous problems with this theory. For one thing, hypermobile Eller-Standlo's syndrome is a clinical diagnosis that cannot be definitively made in infants. Pollock appears to circumvent this hurdle by diagnosing, or sometimes just suggesting, that the parents have age EDS, and therefore the baby is likely to also have it. Also, there's no science to support a connection between EDS and fractures in infancy. Research has shown a moderately increased risk of fractures in ambulatory children with EDS, usually in the limbs, not in their skin. their skull or ribs, like many abuse cases, and these fractures happen from an identifiable traumatic event. The difference is, according to an expert I spoke to, because their hypermobile joints make them

fall down more, meaning that this is not applicable at all to babies. These are not unexplained fractures, and in a cohort study of children formally diagnosed with EDS and generalized joint hypermobility, there was not a single instance of a fracture in a child under one-year-old. And according to a lengthy article in ProPublica by David Armstrong, which unpacks another case from the Fractured Families group in detail, Hollick has never concluded that a single one of the hundreds of cases he's evaluated was abuse, something he talks about in a recorded meeting with the board of fractured families that was posted on YouTube.

And so of these more than 100 families that have come to me who had been accused of child abuse, I started to look at extenuating circumstances and potential other causes. And one of them, of course, on my radar screen was Earless D'Andler syndrome. And when I began to realize is that this bone fragility associated with adults, you would automatically assume people would have accepted it for infants. Nobody had ever published this. So we decided to look at all of the cases that we had, and we have 72 cases of infants that presented.

with fractures in multiple stages of healing, and were diagnosed as due to non-accidental trauma, which of course is a euphemistic term for parents abusing their children. Spoiler, he didn't confirm a single case of abuse in this sample. David Armstrong's piece goes on to say that, quote, Hollick regularly diagnoses children with EDS without seeing them in person. I already know on the phone they have EDS, he said, adding that he questions the parents about potential symptoms.

I almost don't have to ask. I know the answer." End quote. EDS is a connective tissue disorder with a number of subtypes. The most common and most commonly invoked in abuse cases by doctors like Hollick being hyper-mobile EDS, which there's no genetic test for. Given the range of subtypes and often complex diagnostic criteria, EDS is difficult to diagnose, making it especially frightening that suspected abusers have latched on to it. Because we know from Munchausen by proxy cases where abusers infiltrate a rare disease,

this can significantly skew the data. In 2017, Dr. Hollick was barred by Boston Medical Center for evaluating or treating children, a turn of events which only seems to have deepened the devotion of the fractured families members, making him a sort of martyr figure. He now relies on donations of families he's helped to keep his clinic open.

Most families in this group appear to be hiring multiple experts whenever they can, which really adds up. I tried to prose that when I was talking to a denialist, And I made that comment that they're making money. I was told, oh, but the people who are child abuse pediatricians, it's also their job. They're also making money because it's their job to testify. And I'm like, talk about false balance.

Holy false balance, Batman. I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It is not the same thing to say that someone who willingly offers themselves up as a defense expert and accepts $100,000 to go and. testify it for the case. But my point is, it's not the same thing to say that that is the same as a child abuse pediatrician who was literally like they're subpoenaed. They're not getting paid more money to be at the court than they would be in the hospital. That's an example of the kind of false balance that you will see the actual denialist use in trying to claim that they're

just the same as the doctors on the quote-unquote other side. And it's not, it's not true. And I can't believe that there are journalists who will fall for that because to me it's really obvious. I'm not going to treat a child abuse pediatrician who is subpoenaed to testify for a case of a child that she actually treated or he actually treated who is talking about that case and is getting paid the exact same amount of money they would if they were sitting in their office talking to a family. That's not the same as someone who's getting $160,000 to say, nope, that's not a real diagnosis. So on to logical fallacies. And there are many to choose from. We've already talked about the many ways in which child abuse doctors are set up to be wrong every time. But a big logical fallacy that the media coverage relies on is the idea that if a parent isn't criminally convicted of child abuse,

that that means no abuse happened. As we've discussed at length, the lack of criminal conviction for child abuse or any other crime is not exculpatory. Lots of people commit crimes and get away with them. For instance, in the U.S., only an estimated 2 to 6% of rape cases end up with a criminal conviction. In Florida, where the cases were discussing this season took place, the clearance rate for murder hovers somewhere between 50 and 60 percent, and clearance rates only account for criminal charges, not criminal convictions. And according to earlier research,

only a small minority of child fatalities from abusive head trauma result in a criminal conviction. And my colleagues in the media aren't naive about all of this. They're not presenting this nuance on purpose. Interestingly, when I originally reached out to district attorney Matthew Torbenson for an interview, He said he'd be up for it, but was feeling a bit wary because he'd recently done a lengthy interview with Serial podcast, and they hadn't used any of it. In case you missed it, we covered Cereal's latest podcast, The Preventionist, a few months back. It's virtually identical in structure to all of these anti-cap pieces.

And I have a sense that the story they were telling would have looked pretty different if they'd included Matthew's interview, which he also recorded and shared with us. I've reviewed over 100, abuse of head trauma cases drug. We have issued charges on 68 of those 100 cases. In approximately half those cases, there were homicide cases. The other half are not homicides. In half those cases, the babies died? About half, yeah. It's a little over 20.

I don't have the exact number. So 68 out of 100. So in the other cases, were those cases that were referred to you, and then you just didn't have the evidence, or you weren't sure if it was a case of Aht? A case is not going to make it to me if there's, concern that it's not abusive head trauma. So medical professionals on average with Children's Hospital, Wisconsin, in my experience, about a third of the cases that they review, they can say,

this is actually not abuse. In about a third of the cases that they review, they say, this may be abuse, it may not be abuse. They are extraordinarily careful in making the diagnosis of abuse. So in that one third of cases where they do say definitively, this is abuse and the cases being referred to me, I still may not be able to identify who the perpetrator was that committed that abuse, because oftentimes these cases involve numerous injuries to the infant over a long period of time. And, for example, there are cases where children are shaken numerous times. And so when you have a timeline of events that takes place over a week or weeks, you have that child in the care of multiple different individuals.

And establishing who is the perpetrator in that context can be really difficult. In the preventionist, as in all of these stories, the cap Dr. Deborah Jensen is painted as being overzealous in diagnosing abuse. And the series gives the impression that she's a powerful lone wolf, which she fundamentally is not. Can you describe a little bit about how a multidisciplinary team works? Do you ever work with multidisciplinary teams in terms of when these cases are referred to you in a medical context? Absolutely. So there will be child protective services that are involved. There will be law enforcement that will be involved. They have a requirement under Wisconsin law to information share, so their investigative reports should be shared with each side.

There are also be a CAC or Child Advocacy Center, so if there's child witnesses, we'll have forensic interviews with those children to further the investigation as well. So, and all of those individuals will come together in information share. We have a weekly MDT every Wednesday where all the multidisciplinary team members can get together and we can case staff cases. We also have an emergency MDT process where if there's something that we need on a more emergent basis, whether it's a Friday night, a weekend, whatever it may be, we can get together and collaborate out for the phone to make sure that everyone's getting the information they need so that they can make the decisions that we have to make. And there's the other common idea that Caps rush to judgment and cry abuse when there isn't enough evidence. Have you ever had a case where there were people on the MDT, the multidisciplinary team,

or there was a child abuse pediatrician who made a finding, of abuse, made a diagnosis of abuse, and then you either thought there wasn't enough evidence or you just thought it was an accident and it wasn't something that would qualify. Is there ever that disagreement? I've never had a case where there's been a diagnosis of abuse and the perpetrators given an accidental explanation that would in any way account for the nature or severity of the injuries. The main case they cover in detail in the preventionist involves a mother, Amanda Surnovsky, who claims she received a flawed abusive head trauma diagnosis that was, was really the result of an accidental injury caused by her two-year-old.

And this idea that accidental injuries are mistaken for abuse comes up a second time in Neri's interview with Torbenson. One of the studies that I saw was about playground injuries. And it just makes me wonder, because obviously abuse of that trauma is a thing. People shake their babies and it causes this pattern of symptoms. I don't doubt that. But are there other things that could also cause those symptoms? for instance, the study that looked at playground injuries, a lot of those were videotaped.

It was parents like filming their kids on the playground and they fell and that they went in and they had the same constellation of symptoms. But they weren't even being prosecuted because they knew, you know, that they... It was documented what happened. It was documented, right. So there are studies that are important to know. So there's a study, it's often used by defense attorneys and it talks about occipital falls, falls to the back of your head.

And this particular study talks about eight children that were hospitalized. is the result of falls to the back of their head, much like a playground fall. And those children had subdural bleeding and retinal hemorrhaging. Now, what the study doesn't really delve into in detail is, what was the pattern of the subdural bleeding and what was the pattern of the retinal hemorrhaging? Both are critically important. I give an example whenever I talk about these cases regarding retinal hemorrhaging. I compare to my car and whether I have a dent in my car, right?

So my daughter is a teenager, and if I have a single dent in my car, because I've been at this conference and she's driving my car this week, That's probably from her, right? It's whether she left it out or it was caused by whatever. That, you know, that's like one retinal hemorrhets. That can be caused by many things. A shopping cart, whatever it might be. But when you have retinal hemorrhaging that is in the pattern of abusive head trauma,

it's like a car that's been in a hail store. It's everywhere. It's covered. There's only one thing in the world that causes that specific pattern. And that's how I compare it. And so when you have these studies, they don't get into great detail. oftentimes about what that pattern is. But what's also really important about this study and it's critically important to know is that seven of these eight children who fell backwards and hit their

head and suffered the subdural bleeding all returned to baseline within hours of being at the hospital and all of them were discharged the same day. The one child that actually died was involved in a fall with more rotation and more forces because that child was pushed over another child that was like hunch over on the ground, and so there were forces involved, and with that child going further and striking the ground harder than they otherwise would. The AAP's technical report on abusive head trauma specifies that there is a 0.12% chance of a shortfall leading to a serious or fatal injury. And the study that Neri mentions about playground injuries is from a forensic pathologist

named Dr. John J. Plunkett, who passed away in 2018. This was the single study Plunkett participated in, and he is its sole author. It involved a total of 15 subjects, none of whom, obviously, were infants. This paper is a favorite amongst abusive head trauma denials, but has been roundly discredited by the broader medical establishment. Plunkett was a notorious child abuse denialist, who did not believe that even violent shaking could kill a baby. When asked in a deposition what the basis for his outlier beliefs were, he referenced a British

medical journal from 1874, and also said, quote, they've been based on studies of infant cadavers. They've been based on goats, different goats. The lawyer asked him to clarify his last statement. Goats, he said, G-O-A-T-S, infant baboons. I guess that's it. In the same deposition, the lawyer asked Plunkett about a man convicted for shaking his infant daughter to death who wrote a letter to the judge following his conviction,

saying specifically that Plunkett, the expert, his team had hired was wrong that he'd been innocent. He did it. Plunkett stuck to his guns and said this had been a false confession. Neri also asked Matthew about the idea, which is not supported by any data, that caps are over-diagnosing abuse. What would you say to people who are critical of the profession, like, you know, and saying that, like, there's over-diagnosis or, you know, misdiagnosis happening?

This is just the last question. It's like, are there things that people are missing? are not getting like what is it that you would want to say how do you want to address that I think someone commented on it this morning and I think our society unfortunately is a Twitter society or an ex-society they read the short story they read the headline and to really have a critical understanding of abusive head trauma you have to know the research you have to know the history you have to know the process that's involved in making the medical diagnosis because it is a involved processed by experts in the field who have studied and have the experience in the knowledge base

to make that diagnosis. And it's not something that's hastily done. In fact, it's just the opposite. It's done with so much care, so much caution, because I think everyone involved realizes what you're doing and the significance of what you're doing when you say this child was abused. Remember that last C in our acronym, C for conspiracy theory? So the people at this conference, is this some sort of cabal? How familiar are you with a lot of the people who frequent these conferences who are very, like, specialists and experts in abusive trauma?

In terms of what capacity, which individual? Like, is it a community? Do people know each other? I mean, I feel like, obviously, like, we went to Jensen's presentation today, and I know also she has a number of, like, lawsuits. And we are really trying to get a comprehensive picture. A very complicated, you know, story in a very nuanced way in speaking to as many dozens of people as we can. But, like, are you familiar with some of those people that frequently give talks at conferences like Dr. Jensen or, you know, some of these, the heavy hitters, I guess, where we've been experts in their field for a long time.

It feels like a community. It feels like a community being here. So I'm familiar with people based on my experience of them being experts in their particular field. So Dr. Levine was here, for example, and he is one of preeminent experts in ophthalmology. And anytime I can listen to him speak, I feel like I learned more and more about a specialty field that I, and it helps me be a better advocate and make better decisions in my job. I feel the same way about Dr. Sandeep Nourang, for example, who is one of the preeminent experts in abusive head trauma. So there are names that I recognize that at this conference.

And one of the things I really appreciate about this conference is that it makes me better at my job, but it also helps me learn more every time about something that I think is really critical that everybody should know more about if they're going to practice in this and do it. As this conversation is wrapping up, they mention that Diane Neri is headed for an interview with Dr. Mary Clyde Pierce, a very well-respected expert on abusive head trauma. This is another interview that never made it in. But audio from a social worker who'd once worked with Dr. Jensen and thought she was wrong about a munchaus of by proxy case that he couldn't remember any of the details of.

Well, that made the cut. I asked the team at Serial about the choice to admit Torbenson's interview. They told me, quote, Mr. Torbenson is one of more than 160 people we spoke to during the course of reporting our series. Each interview provided our team with valuable insight, but of course not every source was quoted directly in the story. It is standard practice for us to speak with more sources than are named, and we remain confident that the role of legal and medical professionals are represented fairly in the series.

Now, not using every interview in a show of this size is standard. However, given the scope of their reporting, it's notable that the preventionist does not cite a single peer-reviewed study, data set, or named expert to support its central suggestion that there is significant uncertainty and potential error in how cases of suspected abuse are diagnosed. It begs the question, what else was left on the cutting room floor, given that they ended up with only three very short episodes. So if you or anyone you know has been interviewed by serial, we're all years. Take Care of Maya doesn't tell you anything at all about what happened to the children in the other cases they touch on.

And though it spends a lot of time on Maya's case, the omissions could fill a book. And perhaps most gallingly, it presents Dr. Anthony Kirkpatrick as a credible expert on Maya's alleged condition of CRPS, instead of as a man who runs an all-cash ketamine clinic, where he charges patients and plenty of parents upwards of $10,000 for ketamine infusions for a condition that they may or may not have. And Daphne Chen, who first broke the Maya Kowalski story, actually did an interview with Dr. Glick for her USA Today article entitled Bad Medicine. But instead of asking for her expertise on child abuse medicine, she asked her to opine

on a made-up anecdote about Sally Smith. I have to tell you, I got a call, and this happens a lot, that someone wants to talk to me and interview me about something. And against my best interest or best judgments, I will talk to people. And so she called me up, and I had no idea what, you know, she had these cases. I had nothing, I knew nothing about Maya. I knew nothing about all these cases at all. And she was talking about child abuse pediatrics.

And she said, you know, there was these statements about child abuse pediatricians coming in and, you know, just being accusatory and all that. And I go, that's really sad to hear because that's bad medicine. And, you know, bad medicine to come in and be a mean person and accuse people. We don't do that. That's bad medicine. And in good medicine, I'll tell you what I do. And I think she put this in an article.

You know, I'll walk in and, you know what, regardless of abuse or not, you walk into a parent's room and a kid's suffered, I feel sorry for the parent. And so when my residents have been with me, I'll walk in. And the first things I try to do is instead of standing over the parent, I'll try to sit down. And I'll ask him, did you sleep last? night. Did you get breakfast? Did you have a cup of coffee? I know that if someone's tired or whatever, it's not a good moment. So, and then we'll talk a little bit how the night was or whatever and try to engage and try to be just a nice person. And then get into it. And there's been times I've taken a parent for a walk into another room. My chair calls me a force of nature. I mean, I have a strong

personality because I need to, right? I need to confront people at times. I have to be direct at times. But I also learned that there is compassion and empathy that I give to all my parents. Because if I couldn't do that, Andrea, I could not do this work. And neither could Dr. Smith or any other child abuse pediatrician. But again, there's no right way to be a cap, according to these stories. See, impossible expectations. And this brings us to the next part of our handy acronym from Tara, cherry picking. Cherry-picking quotes, cherry-picking documents, cherry-picking doctors to present as credible, despite their fringe status, cherry-picking statistics, and ignoring everything else that could actually help the audience understand what really happened to the child.

Every journalist has a lens. We all make editorial choices. We all have a certain angle of approach. But leaving out context that turns a story on its head is something else. If you have to admit the real details of what happened to a child, the discrepancies in the parents' story, the details of the actual process doctors go through to get to an abuse diagnosis, which is never a single opinion, never a 10-minute conversation. And on top of that, you also have to omit the scientific consensus around that diagnosis, the context around the investigation, and the people from different agencies who independently found compelling evidence of abuse in order to make something look like a false allegation,

I would contend that what you have is probably not a false allegation of abuse. If you omit enough from a story, it's just deception, abuses cursed twin, and string enough of those stories together, and my friend, you have yourself a conspiracy theory. Cereals The Preventionist gets much of its DNA from an earlier podcast that aired in 2020. Do No Harm from My Kixenbaugh, my white whale. It's hard to overstate how interstate how interstate how interoperable. girl this particular work is to my own origin story. I viscerally remember opening my podcast app when this show was advertised to me in 2020 and feeling incandescent with anger when I saw the show

art for Do No Harm. And that anger very quickly became an idea, this podcast. So thanks to my Kicks and Bo for that, I guess. But despite all of that, I hadn't actually ever listened to Do No Harm until I was making this season. And nor had I read the rest of my Kicks and Bo's reporting for NBC that didn't concern my family members. To be honest, I hadn't really planned on opening my Hicksenbaugh file while reporting on this season. But Hicksenbaugh also covered Viviana Graham's story. And then, by coincidence, we ended up interviewing Matthew Torbenson, who'd been the prosecutor

on the John Cox case, which Hicksenbaugh presented as a false allegation, but as we discussed earlier, ended up with a no-contest plea. And then Megan, my sister, popped up in the Fractured Families Group, giving people advice and commiserating about evil caps. And I am all out of red string. In the end, I decided to finally listen to Do No Harm and read the rest of the stories Mike had written about falsely accused parents. Mike Hicksenbaugh, who's a father of four, begins the series with an anecdote about his own experience taking his daughter to the urgent care after he'd accidentally dislocated her elbow by swinging her around. The doctor told him that this is a common injury and he shouldn't

beat himself up, which he says he did anyway. When I started reporting this story, I thought it was about one family and a system determined to protect their children. But I soon discovered it was much bigger. This is a story about what happens when our efforts to save the most vulnerable among us is what puts them in danger. And as I met more parents, I thought a lot about my daughter's hurt arm. I started to imagine how things might have gone differently. What if her injury had been more serious? What if the doctor had made different assumptions about me based on my race or how much money I make?

What if the guilt I'd felt about hurting my child was the least of my problems? This is a fair question, but this is not the question that the series actually engages with. It touches briefly on the story of a black family, but the bulk of the series is devoted to the story of Melissa and Dylan Bright, a white, married, middle-class, vocally Christian family with two college-educated parents, similar to Hicksenbaugh himself and the majority of the other families he's covered in his series. And I think that this is revealing. Storytelling is the most powerful when we can plug ourselves into it. And what Mike describes here is relatable to every parent.

Every parent has accidentally hurt their child or witnessed their child hurting themselves and felt horrible about it. Every single one of us. When my daughter was two, she ran headlong into my in-law. coffee table and had a Shiner for weeks. So I think Mike sharing this story is telling us how he's approaching the question. In this series, we've told the stories of parents who rushed to hospitals with injured babies, only to discover that some of the doctors they thought were treating their children

were actually working in tandem with law enforcement. Two very different stories. But they both deal with the trust we place in professionals. And what happens when that trust is betrayed? And according to Mike, he talked to many families for this reporting and heard from hundreds more after it aired. The written series, Do No Harm, that we wrote in collaboration between the Houston Chronicle and NBC News, we spotlighted several families. And in the end, you know, we talked with, you know, close to 70 families who shared similar experiences,

mostly in Texas, but also in states across the country. So it's striking, then, that of the handful of families who made people, the cut for his reporting, four of them are members of fractured families, Viviana and Megan, as well as Melissa Bright and Anne-Marie Timmerman. And though Mike gestures at racial disparities in child abuse investigations, most of the families he covers are white. So what evidence does Mike have that doctors falsely accused the brights? And you hear it in the tape. And when CPS comes to take the kids and Melissa is saying, why? But we had the second opinion. The radiologist said, you know, she pointed to actual research papers that shows you can get too school.

all fractures from a shortfall. And so Melissa's story did potentially match. But when they raised that question with the CPS worker, what's the response? Well, we still have what we have from Texas Children's Hospital. And you see that in case after case where the child welfare agency has ceded authority to physicians who have no authority to remove kids. Actually, neither of these entities have the authority to remove kids. Only the courts have that. And remember that Plunkett study that Neri asked Matthew about from the goats and baboons guy. Mike uses that same study to shore up the idea that the doctors who made the abuse diagnosis in the bright case were wrong. And that second opinion he mentions, that came from a name that will be familiar

to you by now, Dr. Julie Mack. Mike presents her in the series as simply a Harvard-trained radiologist. In his written reporting, he addresses Mack's reputation as a child abuse denialist and includes a link to a hospital statement about her, but he makes no mention of this in the series. And this brings us to an extremely common talking point in these circles. Of course we're not saying child abuse doesn't exist, just that it didn't happen in this case. The other cases Hicks and Baugh covers

are littered with these same experts and others popular with fractured families. According to their Facebook posts, both Viviana Graham and Anne-Marie Timmerman also used Dr. Julie Mack and Dr. Joseph Scheller. So the point Hicks-in-Baw is making implicitly is that these doctors are the ones we should trust over child abuse pediatricians. And he hits another talking point in his post-series interview

that caps are too powerful and that they work with law enforcement and CPS too closely to be trusted. The child abuse pediatricians are often, as in Texas, grant funded by the state, child welfare agency, same in other states. And in those contracts, the child abuse pediatricians are the medical authority for CPS. And I think there are times when CPS caseworkers who are more experienced, maybe push back, but it's tough. So who should be making the medical decisions instead? CPS caseworkers or cherry-picked experts who don't believe in the existence of child abuse? I'm inclined to think that Hicks and Bogg believes it should be the latter, given the way he treats Max's second opinion in the Bright case, and given this comment he makes in his interview.

I also completely understand why we have child abuse pediatricians, why that subspecialty exists. I think, you know, there could, there's some conversations that maybe could be had about the interplay between child abuse pediatricians and CPS, giving CPS autonomy to, you know, speak with additional doctors, other subspecialists, and making sure that the reports from child abuse pediatricians have the appropriate level of nuance. And so there have, there have, I have seen reports in cases where they say these injuries are diagnostic of abuse. You know, you cover health care. That means this is it.

These injuries can only be abuse. And that's almost never the case. You can almost never just declare these are abuse and not an accident. As we've discussed throughout this episode, there is a robust body of peer-reviewed science that is the subject of wide medical consensus on how to diagnose abusive injuries like spiral fractures, posterior rib fractures, and abusive head trauma. And doctors see accidental injuries like the ones, kicks and bodd describes at the beginning of the series all day every day. There is plenty of

very real data about what various injuries look like. And any baby being treated for these injuries will also be seen by subspecialists, such as neurologists, ophthalmologists, ER physicians, and others. And a cap doing an evaluation will consult with those physicians. What's underneath this is a medical kidnapping talking point, that child abuse pediatrics isn't a real sub-specialty. The sub-specialist Mike is talking about are people like Mack and Scheller, who never diagnose abuse because in Scheller's case, they don't believe it's a medical diagnosis a doctor can make. And Scheller has never diagnosed a case of abusive head trauma. But don't worry, Mike Hicksendop isn't a conspiracy theorist or anything. I've heard from a lot of these people,

actually, there's a current, you know, offshoot of the Q&N conspiracy that says, you know, CPS agencies are actually trafficking children. It is complete nonsense. There's no evidence. That's the case. These agencies make mistakes. There are bad actors in them. But this is the exact conspiracy that Mike Hicksenbach is stoking. MedicalKidnapped.com,

a site entirely devoted to this, another Q&N adjacent and anti-vax conspiracy theories, loves his work. After being featured in Do No Harm, Anne-Marie Timmerman told her story to medical kidnap.com, and their editor positions Hicksenbaugh's coverage

as a hopeful sign that the mainstream media is finally getting with the program. The editor writes, quote, This is a story representative of many other thousands of stories happening all across this country every day that every single person living in the U.S. needs to hear and understand if there is any hope of ending this kind of medical tyranny. Timmerman writes a first-person account of her experience

and says of the doctor in their case, quote, she used CPS to medically kidnap our baby. Another parent who appeared in My Kixenbaugh's work, Ali Parker, is a regular contributor to medical kidnap.com, where she's written about, among other things, my sister Megan Carter and the, quote, rogue Washington doctor intent on medically kidnapping her child. And while my Kixenbaugh might not use this exact language,

this is the story he's telling. So if he thinks this theory is, quote, complete nonsense, then why is he using their experts and their talking points in his reporting? I suspect he's trying to have it both ways, and he's surprised that the doctors aren't thinking him. The reaction from those other heart surgeons, they would say, yeah, that's a problem. They could do it better.

That's outside the standard of care. In this case, when we've highlighted legitimate real problems with individual cases of reports from child abuse pediatricians, cases where they overstate the evidence, misstate the evidence, fail to report a bleeding disorder that's key, use hyperbole like saying a child looks like they were thrown up on a second story building a phrase that has no basis in science. When I've highlighted these things, I would expect, you know, a similar kind of response.

You know what? Thanks for pointing that out. That's outside the standard of care. Mike's expectation that Capps should thank him for insisting that they treat the opinions of abuse denials as their standard of care is really wild. And this endless semantic parsing, especially when he's treating people like play. Blunkett and Mac as credible is just really something, as though this is a debate club and not a conversation with life or death consequences. And from here, Mike makes the leap to another familiar medical kidnapping talking point,

about Capps being some kind of cabal. The child abuse pediatricians that I've heard from, it's a small, close-knit group of physicians, and they've been very critical of the reporting. I want to make clear that nobody disputes that the doctors and the social workers should have contacted CPS in both the Bright and the Butler case. I think, you know, when a child comes into the hospital and they have serious injuries, it makes sense, you know, do the investigation.

Our series was really focused on investigating what went wrong after that point. And so, you know, there's been, I think, some criticism I see out there that, you know, telling these kinds of stories will make people hesitant to report. or somehow that we're arguing that doctors shouldn't notify CPS about concerning injuries. I don't think anyone makes that case. I know the brights don't, the butlers don't, their lawyers don't. Dr. Julie Mack doesn't say that. Dr. Julie Mack doesn't say that, but her actions and her reputation rather speak for themselves.

If it walks like an abuse denialist, if it quacks like an abuse denialist. And since there's no data that child abuse pediatricians are diagnosing abuse at higher rates or making a significant number of errors. Mike tries to position this as a well-intentioned overreaction. 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. Neglect is an entirely separate issue from what Mike is talking about, which is children with abusive injuries that landed them in the hospital. I've never heard a child abuse pediatrician, and I've talked to many of them, use the phrase better safe than sorry. There's no evidence that this is the approach that any of these doctors are taking. Caps rule out abuse more than half the time, and they rule out abuse more often than their less well-trained colleagues. The evidence

that Hicks and Baugh appears to be relying on is these parents' stories and their unscientific alternate theories. Hicksenbaugh's reporting has been influential in the move for second opinion laws that have been passed in Texas. Make sure we can protect kids like Sharon Matthews, who really were being abused while also protecting the rights of parents like the Brights and the Butlers who, you know, who weren't. And so it's tricky and there's efforts to reform that. I've gotten pretty good reaction from lawmakers. Mike presents as being very progressive, and it's possible that this started with some genuinely held belief. I'll probably never know. But he's done incalculable damage.

And rather than disappear the children, like so many of these stories do, he put them front and center, including the full names of every child along with photos and videos of them, some of them from the hospital and in various states of undress. Even if he thinks the harm to these children was done by doctors and CPS, this feels like an indefensible choice. Mike closes his interview with another telling self-insert

about the panic that he's been so, instrumental in engineering. I feel like I am hyper vigilant now. And if you go to the hospital and that incident has happened and they say, hey, they've got two fractures, okay, you know, that's when you start to think about, okay, documentation, document, document, document. There are a lot of kids who, families who have gone through this, you know, and not gotten their kids back. Lives have been destroyed and it's hard to take all that in and think about it. It's a good reminder just to love on my kids and to spend good time with them and to not, you know, spend too much time worrying because you don't know what tomorrow holds.

Maybe this reporting genuinely left Hicks and Baugh with this fear, and it does tap into something visceral, the idea of having your children taken away. But the reality of these cases tells us something very different, that someone like Hicksinbaugh, or like me, college-educated, married, white parents who can afford to hire expensive attorneys and experts like Scheller are very unlikely to have our children taken away, regardless of our culpability for their injuries. There are parents who get wrongly suspected of abuse. I'm just not convinced that Hicksenbaugh has found any of them. He can give all the lip service he wants to not being an abuse denialist, but if it walks like one. Maybe he did this because stories like this play well,

or maybe he's truly not ready to see the world as it is. Parenting is really hard. Even when you have support and resources, it's still hard. Most of us would never harm our kids in a moment of anger. But I think most of us can relate with needing to walk away and take a breather, or needing a partner to take over with an inconsolable infant in the middle of the night. Most of us cannot imagine breaking our children's bones or shaking them. And we like to think that the people who do those things must be unrecognizable monsters.

Certainly not nice white moms like Melissa Bright. certainly not nice white moms like my sister Megan. Mike Hicksonbaugh covers two munchausen by proxy stories in his series, and he buries a quote in his sympathetic, credulous portrayal of Ash J. James from Dr. Mark Feldman, who reviewed the medical records in her daughter's case. He writes, quote, In response to emailed questions from reporters, Feldman said that the overwhelming evidence from thousands of pages of medical records demonstrated that James constantly provided information

that was almost never replicated in a hospital or other clinical setting. End quote. Mark also spoke to Hicksenbaugh at length and gave him additional context about this case, which he sought permission from the court to speak to Hicksenbaugh about, but none of that made it in. And then there is the story I know the most about. My sister, Megan Carter's.

A joint King 5 and NBC News investigation has found some Washington state children were needlessly torn apart from their parents after a Tacoma doctor said they were abused. My name is Dr. Elizabeth Woods. In 2018, Dr. Elizabeth Woods, the top child abuse expert at Marybridge, said Megan Carter manipulated providers and withheld medications that the mom wanted attention. And to get it, she wanted her daughter sick. Do you want your daughter be sick? Absolutely not.

Mike Hickson-Baw co-reported, along with local journalist Taylor Mfenderesky, a sympathetic portrayal of my sister in early 2020, after the state had just lost its dependency. case to remove her two children and in the midst of an ongoing criminal investigation into her for suspected abuse of her daughter. Despite all his issues with child abuse pediatricians and their alleged overzealousness, this piece attacks Dr. Elizabeth Woods for not being a child abuse pediatrician and positions that as a reason not to trust her judgment in this case. But one of many things Hicks and Boz article leaves out is that there was a child abuse pediatrician who reviewed the more than 70,000 pages of records my then-year-old niece had accumulated. Dr. Carol Jenny is one of the most well-respected caps in the field, and she co-wrote the literal book on medical child abuse.

It is not hyperbole to say that she's one of the most credible experts you could possibly have in a case like this. Hicksenbaugh cherry picks a single document to shore up the idea that Megan was wrongly accused of abuse, a juvenile court decision from Judge Susan Amini. This document contains a number of factual inaccuracies, including the repeated assertion that Dr. Woods and Dr. Jenny had claimed that my sister was a victim. of medical child abuse, which the judge used to discredit their opinions on the case. Here I am talking with Dr. Jenny about this a couple of years ago. I was put on the stand when I didn't have a complete record.

On the other hand, the record was so compelling. There was no doubt in my mind as to what I testified. And the rubber stamp, I guess you can say, if the evidence is there, it's there. And if we both quoted the same evidence, there you go. I would really like would be for the news, whoever is interested to go back to the court, well, not even the court, because that was only half the evidence, but go back to the people that have my final report, get permission from the parents to have it released, and read the whole 37 pages, single-spaced that I wrote.

After my many years of research into medical child abuse, I can tell you that a report like Dr. Jennings is the evidence. in a munchausen by proxy case. MBP is not oriented around a single event. It's a pattern that often goes back years by the time it's reported. There was also video evidence of the case in my sister, dumping an anticoagulant medication

she was supposed to be giving her daughter, after which the little girl developed a life-threatening blood clot. Hicksenbaugh entirely leaves out the fact that Megan had been investigated once before for this abuse and that she'd had a baby who died in between then and now. He also leaves out the fact

that by the time the report from Mary Bridge's children happened after numerous instances of life-threatening sepsis, three other hospitals had reported Megan at various times over the years. All just a coincidence, I guess. And he doesn't not know these things. They're public record. And he knows there are concerned family members, because I told him that myself. He ignored me. I suspect that all of these horrifying details of Megan's case were suppressed in order to present his readers with a more palatable vision of the world, one in which nice middle-class white moms like Megan don't do terrible things to their children.

The evidence says that the interventions of Dr. Woods and the other doctors saved my niece's life, and Hicksenbaugh made Dr. Woods' life hell for it. I'd never read Hicks and Bah's other work until now. And to be honest, I thought I'd find that a couple of these were credible stories of families who'd been wrongly accused of abuse.

And I can't speak to the details of all of these cases, but given what he's relying on, cherry-picked documents, parents' accounts, and expert reports from abuse denial It begs the question if he's even found one. What is certain is that he's caused a lot of harm in the process. I've got baggage with Hicksenbaugh, to put it mildly. He has yet to answer my most recent request for comment

about his reporting methods and do no harm. I don't know if he ever will. So, in addition to my more straightforward journalistic communications, I want to get this off my chest. Mike Hicksendbaugh, if you're listening to this, If you are so certain that Megan was wrongfully accused of abuse, I challenge you to go and ask her and her husband, Andy, to authorize the release of Dr. Carol Jenny's report. I know that this is an old story for you and that you've moved on to other topics. But if you're so sure that you didn't enable an abuser, you ought to be willing to take a second look.

Because you had the power in this situation as the journalist putting a national spotlight on it, and you remain accountable for its after effects. You included my niece's full name, along with videos and photos of her, including photos of her in the hospital with tubes coming out of her. We have a term for this in the field. Medical porn. What you did with this story is worse than bad journalism. You've reinforced the false story of my niece's health that my sister is using to abuse her. You are feeding the beast. You're not just enabling this abuse.

You're an active participant. Because you know that there's evidence of abuse. You know about Dr. Jenny's report. You know there are concerned family members and a previous investigation and video evidence and reports from other hospitals. You know that none of this was down to just Dr. Woods. You have already demolished these kids' privacy.

So if you think you are doing the right thing, if you think the doctors are in error, why not go get that 37-page report? Single-spaced. You know where to find me. I'll wait. Children have no rights under the Constitution to anything and certainly not to being protected against abuse. 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.