A defamation lawsuit against Rachel Maddow and other MSNBC hosts will proceed after a federal judge ruled that they made "verifiably false" claims about a doctor they dubbed the "uterus collector," The Free Beacon reported. The network's parent company faces a $30 million lawsuit from the Georgia-based gynecologist.
NBCUniversal will have to answer for the decision to proceed with a story about Dr. Mahendra Amin that turned out to be false. Maddow, along with Chris Hayes and Nicolle Wallace, ran with the story that he was performing unnecessary medical procedures on women detained at Georgia's Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility.
A supposed whistleblower came forward with the allegations that he was performing "mass hysterectomies" on several women, suggesting a motive such as mass sterilization. Rather than check the story, Maddow and others at MSNBC ran with it.
Perhaps the folks over at MSNBC were sucked in by the allure of such a made-to-order villain story presented by the former Immigration and Customs Enforcement nurse Dawn Wooten. She worked at the facility with Amin where this allegedly took place.
Maddow, whose salary is notably $30 million annually, revisited the story several times on her popular MSNBC program."When I met all these women who had had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp," Maddow claimed.
"The nurse says she and her fellow nurses, quote, questioned among ourselves like goodness he’s taking everybody’s stuff out that’s his specialty, he’s the uterus collector … He’s taking all their uteruses out, or he’s taking their tubes out," Maddow later said.
Unfortunately for them, it was all too good to be true, and Amin sued for defamation in September 2021. After a Senate inquiry into the matter, it turned out that Amin actually only performed two hysterectomies, and both were found to be medically necessary.
Moreover, the nurse who originally came forward with the allegations admitted they were made on hearsay alone. This was clearly more than just sloppy reporting.
Before the story was published or aired, it passed NBCUniversal’s standards department review despite its many problems. During discovery, the network admitted it was aware of the issues in internal communications.
"We just don’t know if any of this is true," NBCUniversal's deputy director of standards, Chris Scholl, told Hayes in a conference call on Sept. 16, 2020. This admission came the day after the network broadcast a story on Wooten's claims about Amin.
"The guy has a pretty clean record," Scholl said. The NBC News veteran also admitted Wooten "has no direct knowledge of this stuff" and "kind of has a beef."
Despite these red flags and others, Maddow, Hayes, and Wallace continued to cover the story. In her ruling, Judge Lisa Godbey Wood of the Southern District of Georgia found that they all made "verifiably false" claims on air.
MSNBC and other establishment media networks are no longer letting the truth get in the way of a good story. In this case, they attempted to smear the reputation of a respected doctor and will have to pay the price for it.
