OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
A federal judge said this week that a defamation case against MSNBC can proceed and has a high likelihood of success after ruling that network hosts, including Rachel Maddow, made “verifiably false” statements about a doctor suing for defamation.
In 2020, Dr. Mahendra Amin, an obstetrician-gynecologist working at the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia, faced serious allegations when a nurse at the facility made a whistleblower complaint. The complaint accused Amin of performing unnecessary hysterectomies on migrant women detained at the center, Fox News reported.
NBC reporters Jacob Soboroff and Julia Ainsley investigated to verify the whistleblower’s allegations against Amin, the report said. Despite facing initial skepticism from NBCUniversal’s standards department, they published an article on the matter.
Subsequently, MSNBC aired a series of reports referring to Amin as the “uterus collector,” though the whistleblower’s claims were never conclusively proven true.
“NBC investigated the whistleblower letter’s accusations; that investigation did not corroborate the accusations and even undermined some; NBC republished the letter’s accusations anyway,” U.S. District Judge Lisa Godbey Wood of the Southern District of Georgia, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote on June 26 in a 108-page summary.
The lawsuit claims that MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace defamed him by making “multiple statements” on-air that were allegedly false. Wallace was the first MSNBC host to discuss the whistleblower’s accusations against Amin and referred to him by name.
“We are following breaking news today. It’s about an alarming new whistleblower complaint that alleges, quote, high numbers of female detainees, detained immigrants, at an ICE detention center in Georgia received questionable hysterectomies while in ICE custody,” Wallace told “Deadline: White House” viewers.
But court documents said that Amin “performed only two hysterectomies on women detained at the facility.”
That same evening, “All In With Chris Hayes” featured an interview with the whistleblower. Hayes’ MSNBC program interviewed a lawyer who asserted that as many as 15 immigrant women were subjected to unnecessary hysterectomies or other procedures.
Maddow, the biggest star at MSNBC, reportedly earns $30 million per year despite only hosting her program once a week. She amplified the whistleblower claims by passionately covering them on “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
MSNBC regularly informed viewers of an ICE statement that “accusations will be fully investigated by an independent office, however, ICE vehemently disputes the implication that detainees are used for experimental medical procedures.” Maddow also featured a statement from Amin, in which he vehemently refuted the whistleblower’s claims.
The court document claims that Maddow “initially questioned reporting on the allegations” and then suggested there was a lot of “jumping to conclusions around the complaint” while proceeding to cover it anyway. “All In with Chris Hayes” did a follow-up later in the week, Fox News reported.
Amin requested that NBC retract what he deemed “false and defamatory” statements made during four MSNBC broadcasts, but his request was unsuccessful. Further, the United States Senate conducted an investigation into the whistleblower’s allegations but was unable to substantiate the claims made against him.
The judge detailed that “undisputed evidence has established” that “there were no mass hysterectomies or high numbers of hysterectomies at the facility,” “Dr. Amin performed only two hysterectomies on female detainees from the ICDC,” and the doctor is not a “uterus collector.”
“The Court must look to each of the statements in the context of the entire broadcast or social media post to assess the construction placed upon it by the average viewer,” the judge wrote.
“Viewed in their entirety, the September 15, 2020 episodes of ‘Deadline: White House,’ ‘All In With Chris Hayes,’ and ‘The Rachel Maddow Show’ accuse Plaintiff of performing mass hysterectomies on detainee women. It does not matter that NBC did not make these accusations directly, but only republished the whistleblower letter’s allegations,” the judge continued. “If accusations against a plaintiff are ‘based entirely on hearsay,’ ‘[t]he fact that the charges made were based upon hearsay in no manner relieves the defendant of liability. Charges based upon hearsay are the equivalent in law to direct charges.’”
The judge instructed the jury to determine if MSNBC’s hosts engaged in “actual malice.”