Some of MSNBC’s top hosts may have to appear in court to testify about their alleged role in defaming a Georgia-based OB-GYN physician.
The lawsuit claims that hosts Rachel Maddow, Nicolle Wallace, and Chris Hayes made “verifiably false” claims saying that a Georgia doctor performed hysterectomies that were not necessary at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement center during the first Trump administration, Fox News reported.
Obstetrician and gynecologist Dr. Mahendra Amin was accused by a whistleblower nurse at the Irwin County Detention Center, where he provided medical care, of performing unneeded surgeries.
NBC News published the report even though its standards department had reservations about the veracity of the claims. Nevertheless, far-left MSNBC covered it heavily with a series of reports calling the doctor the “uterus collector” on September 15, 2020.
The doctor filed a lawsuit against the parent company of MSNBC, NBCUniversal, in which he accused the network of falsely portraying him as “an abusive, unethical, and dishonest physician who treated and operated on immigrant women in an abusive fashion, without consent, and motivated by profit instead of quality healthcare.”
“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 said in a decision last year in which she said that a jury could reasonably find actual malice.
“Amin believes ‘false and defamatory’ statements published with actual malice that caused him significant damage were said six times on ‘Deadline: White House,’ seven times on ‘All in with Chris Hayes’ and 10 times on ‘The Rachel Maddow Show,’” the Fox News report said.
Wallace was the first on MSNBC to report on the doctor on her show, “Deadline: White House,” during the 2020 presidential election campaign cycle.
The lawsuit accuses her of making “multiple statements” that were defamatory against Amin.
“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,” she said to begin her report.
Wallace then said that rumors were “swirling around on social media” for days but her team allegedly “confirmed” it.
“Our new reporting, Nicolle, is based on conversations with four lawyers who represented clients in this facility over the past three years, and they’re able to really broaden this story out and explain why the whistleblower Dawn Wooten heard what she did. The lawyers tell us that they knew of women who were afraid to go to this doctor, and they identified him,” reporter Julia Ainsley said.
“His name is Mahendra Amin,” the reporter said. “These women would be taken from the facility to his practice, some said that they came back bruised, that he was overly harsh, they called him abusive… there were women that were told they needed a hysterectomy because they had cancer.”
She said the reports were “alarming” as she interviewed the whistleblower, Whooten, who called him the “uterus collector.”
“That’s how the detainees referred to this physician,” the whistleblower said.
Wallace said that the report was “unbelievably disturbing” and insinuated that it was “just the tip of the iceberg.”
Meanwhile, Maddow continued the claims against Amin on her program.
“The allegation here is that this is a federal facility, and they have been sending immigrant women, in their care, in their custody, to a doctor who has removed their reproductive organs for no medical reason and without them consenting to it,” she said.
Court documents in the case said that Amin “performed only two hysterectomies on women detained at the facility,” that “both were medically necessary,” and “the patients were informed and consented to the procedures” in the two cases.
“MSNBC and its writers, reporters, and broadcasters abandoned journalistic integrity and negligently and recklessly published the false and defamatory broadcasts,” the lawsuit said.
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