MSNBC may finally be getting some payback for its insane hatred towards Donald Trump.
A $30 million defamation lawsuit against a Democratic mouthpiece was recently approved by a Georgia judge.
She ruled that Rachel Maddow and friends, encouraged by executives at parent company NBCUniversal, recklessly promoted false stories about gynecologists working in migrant facilities performing “mass hysterectomies” on women during the Trump administration, most of which were unnecessary.
But while reporters breathlessly pounded out one shocking story after another about so-called “uterus collectors” online and on TV, TV publicists privately expressed doubts in text messages, emails and conference calls about the veracity of the stories coming from nurse “whistleblowers.”
In the end, the source of the hysterical “gotcha” reports, Dawn Wootton, an outraged former nurse for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, admitted that her story about Dr. Mahendra Amin, who treated patients at an ICE facility in Georgia, was based on “hearsay.”
(She still started a GoFundMe to raise $100,000, according to the lawsuit.)
During the discovery process in the case, doubts that executives and reporters had about the matter came to light.
“We have no idea whether this is true or not,” Chris Scholl, NBCUniversal’s vice president of standards and an NBC News veteran, said in a Sept. 16, 2020, conference call with Hayes, according to the lawsuit.
According to court documents, Maddow “initially questioned the reporting of the allegations” and suggested they were “jumping to conclusions” about the complaints, but continued reporting anyway. “All In with Chris Hayes” broke the story later that week.
In a conference call with Hayes after the show aired, Scholl said:
Wootton’s assertion is accurate and it doesn’t matter whether Amin is “a good doctor or a timid doctor.”
“This guy has very little criminal history,” Scholl said of Amin during the conference call, adding that Wootton “has no direct knowledge of this matter” and is “a little frustrated” but declined to elaborate.
Despite Scholl’s concerns, Hayes, Maddow and Nicolle Wallace aired a segment on Wootton’s allegations on MSNBC’s evening show.
The chance to discredit anything even remotely connected to then-President Trump seemed too attractive to pass up.
But in a ruling last month, Judge Lisa Godby Wood of the Southern District of Georgia found that Maddow, Hayes and Wallace had made 39 “verifiably false” allegations about Dr. Amin.
“In the end, we are left with the conclusion that NBC investigated the allegations in the whistleblower’s letter, that its investigation did not support the allegations and even denied some of them, and yet NBC republished the allegations in the letter,” Judge Wood wrote in a scathing 108-page decision on June 26.
She ordered a jury trial to determine whether MSNBC acted with “actual malice.”
This is a fancy way of saying that reporters who pretended to have personally vetted the story were promoting a flavorful fiction and allegedly defamatory of innocent medical professionals in order to advance a nasty left-wing agenda.
Days after the MSNBC series, dozens of Democratic senators called for an investigation into Amin and the ICE facility.
But the investigation failed to confirm what network representatives desperately hoped would be true.
“The Subcommittee did not substantiate the allegations of mass hysterectomies on ICDC detainees. Records show that Dr. Amin performed two hysterectomies on ICDC detainees between 2017 and 2019. Both procedures were determined by ICE to be medically necessary,” the Senate report concludes.
In 2021, Dr. Amin sued NBC.
The lawsuit alleges that after MSNBC defamed Dr. Amin, he “suffered public hatred, contempt, scorn and ridicule, including being stalked, subject to name-calling, hateful comments, death threats and bomb threats.”
I hope that Maddow and her fiction publishing collaborators will publicly apologize to the doctors they have slandered and to the public they have repeatedly lied to.
And they should be fired immediately.
They appear to have committed journalistic misconduct. Their gleeful attempt to ruin a man who performed an honorable job brings shame on the entire profession. This is not a victimless crime.
Let’s be honest with you guys, for once in your life, stand up for the truth.
