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One of them represented the gynecologist accused of sexual assault by 200 patients.
- Gaetz’s former wingman pleading guilty and having the charges against him dropped from 33 to six in exchange for cooperating with prosecutors;
- The news that Gaetz had allegedly paid the women he compensated through online payment platforms, leaving a digital paper trail;
- The news that the feds are additionally looking into possible obstruction of justice charges;
- His former wingman reportedly giving the feds “years of Venmo transactions” and “thousands of photos and videos”;
- Being heckled on the street by strangers shouting, “People think you’re a pedophile!”
Gaetz has denied any and all allegations against him. And while the last month has seemingly brought a lull in developments re: his plight, which might lead some to believe the congressman, recently wed, is in the legal clear, a new report from The Daily Beast suggests that’s probably not the case:
While the federal sex crimes investigation into Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) has not fueled the kinds of explosive headlines it generated when the news first broke in late March, the case shows no signs of a slowdown. In fact, legal experts told The Daily Beast, the perceived lull is nothing outside the norm and can be chalked up to a number of factors—including a wide range of charges that investigators could be exploring. Although Gaetz and his allies like to interpret the lack of charges as an indication of innocence, the delays could just as easily suggest that the charges that could be coming down the pike are extremely grave and complex.
And if you were looking for an indication of just how seriously Gaetz himself is taking the prospect of charges, look no further than the high-powered team of attorneys the beleaguered Florida man has brought on for his defense.
That team, according to reporter Roger Sollenberger, includes attorney Marc Mukasey, who has defended the Trump Organization in a number of high-profile battles, as well as Isabelle Kirshner, a top criminal defense lawyer who represented Robert Hadden, the ex-Columbia University gynecologist accused by 200 patients of sexual assault. (In 2016, Hadden pleaded guilty to committing a criminal sexual act and forcibly touching two patients. He lost his medical license, but didn’t have to serve time in prison.) Meanwhile, Gaetz’s campaign has retained the services of New York trial lawyer Marc Fernich, who has the distinction of having defended some of history’s most notorious criminals, including monster Jeffrey Epstein, Mexican drug lord Joaquín Guzmán (a.k.a. El Chapo), and Keith Raniere, who was sentenced to 120 years in prison for running the NXIVM sex cult where women were branded and forced into sexual slavery.
All of which suggests Gaetz is taking the possibility of winding up in major legal trouble quite seriously!
Tristan Snell, a former assistant New York attorney general, told The Daily Beast that the lineup suggests the congressman is “anticipating a trial.”
“It looks like a scorched-earth approach,” Snell told The Daily Beast. “These are all big out-of-town lawyers. If your goal is to resolve something, you typically hire the top criminal defense attorney in the district, someone who’s a repeat customer there and has a good working relationship with that U.S. attorney’s office. But these attorneys can go down there, burn down the building, and not have to worry about going back in the next day.”
A spokesperson for Gaetz declined The Daily Beast’s request for comment. A lawyer familiar with the investigation told Sollenberger the defense team quite clearly reflects not just the gravity of the allegations but the scope of what the feds are looking into. “This is a sitting congressman, and they’ll fight everything tooth and nail,” the attorney said. “You’ve got to keep in mind there are a number of crimes under investigation here. There’s the [alleged] sex trafficking, prostitution, obstruction of justice, and the [Department of Justice] Public Integrity Unit has an even larger case with the political influence and marijuana stuff. And on top of that, it seems campaign finance as well.”
Demonstrators gathered in front of the Governor's Mansion in Austin to protest against Senate Bill 8, an anti-abortion bill that Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law this morning. (photo: Evan L'Roy/The Texas Tribune)
Several have been filed. Here’s a guide to which ones will go where, and when.
Dahlia Lithwick: I think the question you and I have probably received the most in the last two weeks is: “How do I even watch SB 8 unfold?” I think there was a collective sigh when Dr. Alan Braid admitted in the pages of the Washington Post that he had in fact performed an illegal—under SB 8—termination of a pregnancy, inviting litigation. Two helpful litigants, both out of state, came forward to sue him.
I think there are a lot of lanes here and folks are confused about timing. So let’s walk through it:
-We’ve still got the ongoing challenge by the providers that the Supreme Court refused to enjoin. That’s going to be heard in December at the Fifth Circuit.
-We have the Biden Administration—the Justice Department has brought a suit that has not resulted in immediate injunction. That is to be heard next week.
-We have a new suit, filed Thursday night by the same group of providers who filed the Fifth Circuit case, saying they’re seeking this extraordinary relief, a petition for cert before judgment.
-We have these two civil suits against Dr. Braid.
-And then after all, we have Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.
Mark, can you please draw a map of the world of SB8 and what is going to happen first, if you can, and what, if anything, is going to happen before Dobbs?
Mark Joseph Stern: Sure. So let’s start with the state lawsuits. Two different out-of-state lawyers have filed suits in Texas state court against Dr. Alan Braid, who wrote a piece in the Washington Post acknowledging that he performed an abortion after six weeks in Texas in violation of SB8. Those cases are now going to be litigated in Texas state courts, and the doctor is going to raise as a defense, among other things, the fact that Roe v. Wade is still the law of the land. And so it is just not constitutionally permissible for him to be punished for performing an abortion that is legal under binding Supreme Court precedent.
Let’s assume that both of these state courts are on the level and are going to acknowledge Roe as binding precedent. In that case, they will presumably throw out the lawsuits, but that doesn’t mean that SB 8 is over or that it’s enjoined. Because the way this law is written, it’s essentially impossible for any Texas state court to block it across the state. It has to be litigated in each individual case. And so no matter the outcome of these particular Texas lawsuits, SB 8 will still be in effect.
This particular doctor may be off the hook because he’ll raise the constitutional right to an abortion as a defense, but everybody else in Texas will still be under the thumb of SB8. It will continue to work its way through the Texas court system, probably very slowly.
Then we have the Justice Department lawsuit. The Justice Department lawsuit, I think, is one of the stronger suits we’ve seen, because the Justice Department representing the United States can sue Texas directly. It can say “We are filing suit against the state of Texas, including all of its agents,” which would presumably encompass anyone who sued under SB8. That’s something a private plaintiff can’t do. Only the United States gets to sue an individual state because the Supreme Court has said sovereign immunity is not a problem in this context. And so that case is currently sitting before a federal judge in Texas, and that judge will soon hold a hearing on whether or not to issue a preliminary injunction blocking SB 8 throughout the entire state of Texas by issuing a decision directly against Texas. But we have to sit on our hands and wait for that because the federal judge is not rushing it. The Justice Department asked him to rush it, but he said, ‘No, I’m going to take my time on this.” And so we’re all waiting for early October, when that case will move forward.
Then we have the petition before the Supreme Court, which is really part of the same case that we all freaked out about in early September. This is the same lawsuit that was filed against state court judges and clerks in Texas. That was the first bite at the apple, the first effort by abortion providers to block SB8. As you recall, they went to a federal judge, the same judge who’s hearing the DOJ suit, and they said, “Please block this law.” The Fifth Circuit swooped in before the judge could do anything and prevented him from doing anything. The providers went to the Supreme Court and by a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court threw up its hands and said, “We can’t do anything later.” A couple weeks later, the Fifth Circuit issued a decision saying, “Well, we really think you sued the wrong people. We don’t think that you can sue state judges and state court clerks. And so we are going to hold onto this case and will decide this question formally in a couple of months.”
So now, the providers have gone back up to the Supreme Court and said, “Look, we get that you ruled against us last time and we’re not asking for ruling on the merits. We’re not asking you to issue a shadow docket decision just saying up-or-down vote, whether SB8 can be blocked and should be blocked. All we’re saying, all we’re asking is for you to say that we sued the right people, that some of the folks we sued can be sued, and thus bring this case back down to the original federal judge who was hearing it in the first place and clear away all of these obstacles so that he can decide on the merits, whether to issue an injunction.”
That’s the lay of the land for SB8 and all the while, we’ve got Dobbs in the background, which is a completely different case, not directly related to the Texas case at all. That’s a challenge to Mississippi’s 15 week abortion ban. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in that case on Dec. 1 and probably issue a decision in June of 2022.
Lithwick: I think that’s the lay of the land, and I think anybody who expects instant relief or clarity in the coming days is probably going to be disappointed. At minimum, what I’m hearing you say is we may get an injunction in the Justice Department suit and the Supreme Court may act quickly on this second petition that came in on Thursday night.
Stern: Yes, that’s right. And so if the court does act quickly and rules favorably for the providers here, that case will go back down to the federal judge who will then have two different lawsuits against SB 8 before him, the one filed by these abortion providers and the one filed by the Justice Department. And it seems like we can bet that this particular judge, Judge Pitman, an Obama appointee, a friend of reproductive rights, will issue an injunction eventually, probably in October blocking SB 8. The big question mark then is what does the Fifth Circuit do? Because the Fifth Circuit is extremely conservative. I think there’s a chance that no matter what Judge Pittman does, some Trump appointees on the Fifth Circuit will find a way to reinstate SB8.
Attendees pray at an "Evangelicals for Trump" event in Miami, Florida, on January 3. (photo: Marco Bello/Getty)
Abortion isn’t the only victory conservative evangelicals have won in 2021.
Six days later, religious conservatives celebrated another critical legislative victory, one that signaled a new frontier in their movement. In the east Texas city of Tyler, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed the Election Integrity Protection Act of 2021, passed in late August after Democrats fled the state in a futile effort to stop it. The new law severely restricts voting access in Texas, with the biggest impact on voters of color; Abbott hailed it as a “good paradigm for other states to follow.”
Also in attendance were his lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, and state Sen. Bryan Hughes, key architects of both the voter and abortion bills and heroes to evangelical Christians. Patrick is well known to religious-right voters for his opposition to reproductive and LGBTQ rights and promotion of “Christian values.” The mood was jubilant.
The Christian right’s ability to mobilize its own voters has long made it one of the most potent forces in American politics. But this year, evangelical leaders have embraced a new strategy, one with direct roots in the outcome of the 2020 election: Religious activists have taken up the cause of “election integrity,” pushing bills to crack down on voter fraud, even though no evidence of widespread fraud in US elections exists. In the process, they’ve helped restrict ballot access for millions of Americans — the most regressive wave of voting measures since the Jim Crow era — and drawn a direct connection between their new cause and their core religious beliefs.
The goal is to protect the gains made by the Christian right during Donald Trump’s presidency, especially in the federal courts, and to restore the White House and Congress to Republican control. The biggest prize, of course, is the US Supreme Court, where — not coincidentally — all three of Trump’s appointees declined to block the Texas abortion bill from taking effect, signaling their willingness to overturn Roe v. Wade.
White evangelicals were Trump’s most loyal supporters in 2020, giving him 84 percent of their vote, according to the Pew Research Center. Many saw Trump as anointed by God to save America at a critical juncture in its history, and they viewed his loss in cataclysmic terms. A January survey by the American Enterprise Institute found that evangelical conservatives were far more inclined than other Republicans to believe Trump’s lies about widespread election fraud, as well as wild conspiracy theories about QAnon, antifa, and the “deep state.” The fervent evangelical support for Trump during his presidency has now morphed into support for his “big lie” — and for voter suppression bills that are a direct outgrowth of Trump’s continued insistence that the election was stolen from him.
Across the country, Christian-right groups that saw their influence bloom during Trump’s presidency have taken up the cause not just in statehouses and fundraising appeals but also in churches and prayer calls with followers. The Christian voter mobilization group My Faith Votes, for example, has launched an initiative called Election Integrity Now, complete with a prayer guide with seven ways to ask God “to protect America’s elections and deliver trustworthy results.”
“The 2020 elections revealed genuine concerns in the election process that could threaten election integrity and the very foundation of our Constitutional Republic. Yet, even more dangerous than election fraud is that many Christians have lost confidence in the election system,” the group’s CEO, Jason Yates, said in announcing the initiative.
It is also becoming evident to pollsters, demographers, and religious-right leaders themselves that the model first pioneered by the Christian Coalition in the Reagan era — ensuring that religious conservatives registered to vote and turned out in overwhelming numbers on Election Day — isn’t working as well as it used to.
White evangelical Protestants now make up 14 percent of Americans, down from 23 percent in 2006, “the most precipitous drop in affiliation” for any religious group, according to a 2020 survey from the Public Religion Research Institute. Even though white evangelicals made up 34 percent of Trump’s voters, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of election data, their support wasn’t sufficient to propel him to reelection. “Without such broad support for Trump among White evangelicals, [Joe] Biden would have beaten him by more than 20 points,” the Pew analysts wrote earlier this year.
Trump’s defeat proves that even massive conservative Christian turnout is no longer enough to win. The strategy white evangelical supporters have coalesced around to supplement it: election laws built on the lie that the other side’s ability to turn out voters must be “fraudulent.”
The new battlefront opened in Georgia immediately after the 2020 election.
As Trump tried to strong-arm state election officials to throw out the ballots of 11,780 Georgians and declare him the winner of the state’s 16 Electoral College votes, the Family Policy Alliance of Georgia sent a fundraising email to its supporters in December: “Election reform is coming to Georgia, and we are all in!”
Cole Muzio, the group’s executive director, acknowledged that this was new territory for his organization. “As you know, this is not one of our ‘core issues’,” he wrote. “However, issues like life, religious freedom, and school choice will never win if the vote is being diluted by radical leftists exploiting the system to cheat.”
Muzio’s organization is affiliated with Focus on the Family, the Christian-right icon known for opposing LGBTQ and reproductive rights. Elsewhere, Muzio acknowledged launching his group in 2017 after “seeing that our state was rapidly moving ‘blue’ and that the Church had been weakened greatly.”
Throughout Georgia’s runoff elections for two Senate seats, which would determine control of the legislative body, the Family Policy Alliance repeatedly attacked Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock as hostile to Christians, but particularly Warnock, a minister who leads the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once presided.
“Raphael Warnock holds the title of ‘pastor’,” the group wrote in one Facebook post. (The group has recently rebranded itself as the Frontline Policy Council.) “Yet, he OPPOSES what God’s Word clearly says about Life. His radical pro-abortion views are disgusting, wrong, anti-science, and anti-Scripture. Quite simply, he’s Unfit for the Pulpit and Unfit for the Senate.” A voter guide titled “Which Candidate Stands Firm on the Word of God?” accused Warnock of being a Marxist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Israel — all lies — and attacked his views supporting abortion and transgender rights. Muzio initially agreed to an interview for this story but ultimately didn’t respond to requests to speak.
When Democrats stunned even themselves by winning both seats in the January 5 runoff, Georgia Republicans sprang into action, introducing a slate of bills that would, among other things, eliminate drop-box sites, impose more restrictive rules for absentee ballots, and prohibit judges from extending voting hours at precincts experiencing long waits, all under the guise of stopping fraud. Another objective was to defeat Warnock, who is up for reelection in 2022.
The flurry of legislation overtly became about religion and race, pitting white evangelical Republicans against Black church leaders, whose flocks are predominantly Democratic. One provision would have eliminated Sunday voting, a potentially dire blow to get-out-the-vote efforts of Black churches and their “souls to the polls” events that have been at the core of Black voter mobilization for decades.
A national outcry led legislators to nix that provision. But Republican lawmakers ignored the objections of the state’s Black pastors to the bill’s many other restrictive provisions. Black leaders couldn’t even get a meeting with GOP leaders, said Rev. Timothy McDonald III, senior pastor of the First Iconium Baptist Church in Atlanta. “They didn’t pay any of us any mind.”
Less than two months after the bill was introduced, Gov. Brian Kemp signed a 98-page law that criminalizes providing water or food to voters standing in line and empowers state officials to replace local election officials — for example, the Democratic registrar of voters in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta — with appointees from their own party. The impact would be greatest on Black voters. “It is How to Steal an Election 101,” McDonald said.
The ceremonial signing served only to highlight the bill’s racial overtones. It took place behind closed doors, with Kemp flanked by six white male legislators, sitting under a painting of a plantation. When state Rep. Park Cannon, a Black Democrat, knocked on the door to gain entry to the event, she was arrested for obstructing law enforcement and disrupting the General Assembly.
On the Family Policy Alliance website, Muzio denounced “the deranged media” and “Pretend-governor Stacey Abrams” — the Democratic candidate who narrowly lost to Kemp in 2018 — for their “outlandish and inflammatory rhetoric.” He called the claim that the bill is racist “wrong, disingenuous, a form of voter suppression, and, in fact, racist on its face.”
His words signaled a subtle reframing, echoing the Christian right’s perspective on almost every other issue in the culture wars: Progressives were the real overreachers, and evangelical Christians the true victims. The Georgia law didn’t suppress the votes of Democrats and people of color, Muzio was saying; it prevented the votes of religious conservatives from being suppressed.
Even as Black church leaders mobilized to contest the Georgia law in court, conservative groups were gearing up to replicate it in other states.
National organizations aligned with the Christian right embraced “election integrity” with fervor. In March, Heritage Action for America, a sister organization of the right-wing policy hub the Heritage Foundation, announced it would pour at least $10 million into lobbying and TV and online ads about the urgent need to “protect the rights of every American to a fair election.” In a video obtained by Mother Jones, a Heritage Action official admitted that the organization drafted the legislation in many states, including Georgia, and helped organize support.
At the same time, evangelical leaders opposed measures that would make it easier to vote. Advocates particularly targeted the For the People Act, which would create nationwide automatic voter registration, restore voting rights of the formerly incarcerated, and expand voting by mail and early voting, while shoring up the security of election infrastructure. The Phyllis Schlafly Eagles — an offshoot of the group once headed by the late conservative figure best known for helping kill the Equal Rights Amendment — claimed (falsely) that the bill “would enshrine Democrat ballot stuffing into federal law forever.” The Family Research Council called it “a federal power grab that cripples states’ ability to run elections and increases the likelihood of voter fraud” (another lie). Other conservative activists contended that the act’s financial disclosure requirements violated First Amendment protections for religious speech.
In early February, the Family Research Council’s president, Tony Perkins, led a discussion at the influential megachurch Cornerstone Chapel in Virginia with Michael Farris, a longtime conservative activist and now president of the Christian-right legal powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom.
Declaring election integrity “vital for our future,” Farris claimed to have undertaken a “thorough study” of the 2020 election and to have found “constitutional irregularities in many, many states,” particularly in those where the election was close. He claimed the “central problem was the failure to follow the preestablished process in counting the votes” and insisted that if votes had been properly tallied, Trump would have won. Neither Farris nor his organization has ever provided proof of those accusations, and they did not respond to Reveal’s requests for Farris to share them.
The Family Research Council also deployed Kenneth Blackwell, its senior fellow for human rights and constitutional governance, who has long been a central player in the movement to limit voting access, dating back to his tenure as Ohio secretary of state, when civil rights advocates accused him of suppressing voters of color in the 2004 presidential election and helping Republicans keep the White House.
In a March appearance in the Family Research Council’s video series “Pray Vote Stand,” Blackwell, who is Black, called the For the People Act a “heist” and a “power grab” that would “stifle individual religious liberty and the centrality of God in our lives.” Mostly, Blackwell urged religious voters to stay engaged. “We must claw back the responsibility and the authority of local governments and state legislatures” to control elections or else, he contended, Democrats would create “one-party control much like they have in Cuba, Venezuela, and Russia.”
My Faith Votes’ national honorary chair, talk show host and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, took credit for helping get 9 million new Christian voters to the polls in 2020 and promised, “in 2021, we will be doubling down.” Ralph Reed, chair of the national Faith & Freedom Coalition, beseeched potential donors: “Though news of the radical left’s scheming is hard to read, remember that — thanks to your support and the support of Christian patriots like you — we still have a chance to save America in the 2022 midterm elections, and we will make the most of it.”
Republican lawmakers did their part to stoke the fires. At the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s national Road to Majority conference in June, for example, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham portrayed Democratic victories in 2022 and 2024 as an existential threat that would lead to statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico and the end of the Electoral College. “Winning in 2022 is the only option available for conservatism,” he said. “We need you to get people out of your churches into that voting booth.”
There were plenty of true believers. A June Washington Post/ABC News poll found that while only 30 percent of all respondents favored passing “new laws making it harder for people to vote fraudulently,” 51 percent of white evangelicals supported such legislation. While 62 percent of all Americans expressed support for “new laws making it easier for people to vote,” only 43 percent of white evangelicals did.
By that time, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, 17 states already had enacted 28 new laws suppressing voting rights. And then came Texas.
During this year’s Texas legislative session, it wasn’t the anti-abortion Heartbeat Act that was deemed the greater threat by Texas Democrats, but voter integrity legislation. The abortion bill, targeting not just abortion but anyone helping a woman in the state obtain one, made it through the legislature relatively unscathed and was signed into law May 19. Republicans’ attempt to pass a voter bill — including criminal penalties on election officials who send unsolicited mail-ballot applications and new powers for partisan poll watchers — required two special legislative sessions, after Democrats ran out the clock on the first bill, then fled the state for a month in protest.
At the first special session in July, many of the demonstrators on the statehouse grounds opposed the voting legislation. But Lori Gallagher of Williamson County, Texas, was there to show her support. The group she co-founded, the Texas Constitutionalists, describes itself as “grassroots conservatives with a mission to educate ourselves and our neighbors to be actively involved in Texas State and County government to secure our vote and restore our representational Republic.” But she saw its mission in starkly religious terms.
“I believe that the divine hand of providence was present when our constitutional and founding documents were formed,” she said. “I believe that’s the divine intersection between voting rights. The people’s voice — that comes from God. Your freedom comes from God. Liberty comes from God.”
Inside the hearing room, with just two minutes to speak, Don Garner, executive director of the Texas Faith & Freedom Coalition, focused more on politics, echoing Christian-right talking points that have become familiar this year. Election integrity is “foundational to the freedoms we enjoy,” he declared. “Nothing suppresses voting more than the erosion of trust or confidence in the election process itself.”
But Garner’s brief remarks had far less impact than his relationships. For 10 years, he served as the state director and national field director of the Capitol Commission, a network of organizations in state capitols that hosts Bible studies and other events with lawmakers. The goal: “making disciples of Jesus Christ in the Capitol communities of the world,” according to its website. His current organization, formed in March 2020, keeps voters informed “about important issues relevant to faith-based communities” and “supports Biblical principles.”
Republican state Sen. Bryan Hughes, an author of the voting restriction and anti-abortion bills, is one of about a dozen Texas legislators who serve on Garner’s advisory council. In an interview, Garner said Hughes is “a close friend and someone that I work very closely with on all kinds of things.”
The Texas House sponsor of the voting bill, state Rep. Briscoe Cain, is another close ally. As the legislation was moving, Garner said he talked to Cain or his staff “every couple of days, all session long.” Garner said his coalition’s clout comes from its grassroots volunteers who show up when needed, canvassing 310,000 homes in the last election cycle and planning to hit twice as many next year. Lawmakers know “we’re actually getting out there and knocking on doors.”
Conservative Christian voters, Garner said, have always had concerns about election integrity, but especially so after the 2020 election.
“Obviously, there were a lot of concerns afterward and among people on the right that maybe there had been improprieties, and certainly, people felt like it at least needed to be investigated,” Garner said. “Because of everything that — the way everything fell out, certainly it raised the level of concern.”
Even as Trump and his evangelical allies basked in their legislative victories in Texas, they used those concerns to promote their future political prospects. In a conference call for the national religious group Intercessors for America the day after the abortion law took effect, Trump wasted no time in lambasting the Biden administration, saying, without specificity or evidence, that “what they’re doing to Christianity, it’s a very sad, sad thing for our country.”
Robert Morris, pastor of the Gateway megachurch in Dallas, closed the call with a plea: “I pray, Lord, that you will do something … for our election system, that we’ll never have another election stolen from us,” he intoned. “So, Lord, whatever we need to do to fix the electoral process, I pray for that, I pray for our country, and I pray for President Trump and his family … in Jesus’s mighty name.”
Hacked data shows that vast sums of money are being extracted from people concerned about or suffering from COVID-19 but resistant to vaccinations. (photo: Soohee Cho/The Intercept)
The data also reveals that 72,000 people paid at least $6.7 million for Covid-19 consultations promoted by America’s Frontline Doctors and vaccine conspiracist Simone Gold.
America’s Frontline Doctors, a right-wing group founded last year to promote pro-Trump doctors during the coronavirus pandemic, is working in tandem with a small network of health care companies to sow distrust in the Covid-19 vaccine, dupe tens of thousands of people into seeking ineffective treatments for the disease, and then sell consultations and millions of dollars’ worth of those medications. The data indicate patients spent at least $15 million — and potentially much more — on consultations and medications combined.
The Intercept has obtained hundreds of thousands of records from two companies, CadenceHealth.us and Ravkoo, revealing just how the lucrative operation works. America’s Frontline Doctors, or AFLDS, has been spreading highly politicized misinformation about Covid-19 since the summer of 2020 and refers its many followers to its telemedicine partner SpeakWithAnMD.com, which uses Cadence Health as a platform. People who sign up then pay $90 for a phone consultation with “AFLDS-trained physicians” who prescribe treatments such as hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin to prevent and treat Covid-19. The drugs are delivered by Ravkoo, a service that works with local pharmacies to ship drugs to patients’ doors. Of course, that’s if patients ever get the consultation; many customers told Time they never received the call after paying.
The data from the Cadence Health and Ravkoo sites was provided to The Intercept by an anonymous hacker who said the sites were “hilariously easy” to hack, despite promises of patient privacy. It was corroborated by comparing it to publicly available information. The Intercept is not publishing any individual patient data and has taken steps to secure the data. After The Intercept reached out, Cadence Health’s Roque Espinal-Valdez said he shut the platform down, not wanting any part in profiting off of Covid-19 “quackery.”
America’s Frontline Doctors, which debuted in the summer of 2020, has close ties to a network of right-wing efforts to undermine public health during the pandemic, including the Tea Party Patriots. AFLDS’s founder, physician Simone Gold, was arrested and charged after the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6. She and other doctors have appeared in widely shared videos arguing that the drugs hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin — which are primarily used to treat malaria in humans and parasitic worms in livestock, respectively — are effective treatments for Covid-19, despite warnings from the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention against using them.
The extremely partisan group also misleads people about Covid-19 vaccines, which they refer to as “experimental biological agents,” and against public health measures like vaccine mandates, masking, social distancing, and restrictions on businesses. In a video titled “The Truth About Covid-19 Vaccines,” which has received over 1.3 million views, Gold falsely argues that Covid-19 is not very deadly and that the vaccines are more dangerous than the virus itself. Over 690,000 Americans so far have died from the virus, and unvaccinated people now make up 99 percent of recent Covid-19 deaths.
“Misinformation can be really powerful to swindle people into buying products,” Dr. Kolina Koltai, who researches vaccine misinformation in digital communities at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, told The Intercept. “America’s Frontline Doctors are able to scale this up massively.”
The hacked data includes information on 281,000 patients created in the Cadence Health database between July 16 and September 12, 2021 — 90 percent of whom were referred from America’s Frontline Doctors. In just those two months, patients paid an estimated $6.7 million for consultations. The data also includes notes from patients’ phone consultations, which sometimes include medical histories and prescription information.
Roque Espinal, Cadence Health’s CEO, told The Intercept that he was unaware of the scheme and that Cadence Health simply provided a telehealth platform for SpeakWithAnMD.com, its patients, and physicians. “I’m totally flabbergasted. I had to look up exactly who these people were,” he said. “I’m fully vaccinated. My children are fully vaccinated. I’m trying to make heads and tails of this right now.” After talking with The Intercept on Monday, Espinal said he terminated service with SpeakWithAnMD. He added, “I don’t want to be associated with any crap like that. None of that quackery that’s going on.” SpeakWithAnMD’s telemedicine platform, which relies on Cadence Health, is currently down.
“[SpeakWithAnMD] is not part of the anti-vax movement and we do not oppose vaccinations,” Jim Flinn, a public relations agent working for the site’s parent company, Encore Telemedicine, told The Intercept.
“American Frontline Doctor’s [sic] take these issues very seriously,” Thomas Gennaro, a lawyer for America’s Frontline Doctors, told The Intercept in a statement. “For AFLDS, positive patient-physician outcomes and confidentiality is critical. We understand that the information from this was reported to the FBI, and AFLDS launched a third-party audit and are responding to this issue with the utmost attention.”
The hacker also provided records of 340,000 prescriptions that Ravkoo has filled between November 3, 2020, and September 11, 2021 — amounting to an estimated $8.5 million in drug costs. Forty-six percent of the prescriptions are for hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, and another 30 percent are for zinc or azithromycin, two other ineffective medications that the SpeakWithAnMD physicians, who America’s Frontline Doctors claims it trains, prescribe in their Covid-19 consultations.
“We take data breaches very seriously,” Ravkoo CEO Alpesh Patel told The Intercept. Patel claims that Ravkoo stopped doing business with SpeakWithAnMD and AFLDS at the end of August because “the volume over there went up crazy, and we didn’t feel comfortable. And we don’t have that much capacity to fill that many prescriptions.” The hacked data shows that they filled hundreds more prescriptions for AFLDS in the first weeks of September. “That might be refills or prescriptions that got stuck and we had to fill it,” Patel claimed.
The WHO recommends against taking hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 because it’s ineffective and can have negative side effects. Cardiologists warn that hydroxychloroquine taken with azithromycin, a combination that former President Donald Trump publicly supported, increases the risk of dangerous irregular heartbeats that could be fatal. The CDC advised people not to take ivermectin, saying that it can cause “severe illness.” The Food and Drug Administration issued similar warnings and tweeted, “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it,” with a link to an article explaining that taking it for Covid-19 can cause extreme health issues.
At least one of the prescribers is aware that medical experts recommend against using these drugs to prevent or treat Covid-19 but prescribed them anyway, according to patient records. One physician included this disclaimer in their consultation notes with several patients: “I, [physician’s name], have a complete understanding of the recent release from the WHO, FDA, CDC, and NIH on March 5th, 2021 as it pertains to the use and prescribing of Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. I understand that these two medications have been deemed ‘Highly Not Recommended’ by the for-mentioned [sic] medical governing bodies but are not illegal to prescribe. … I have explained that I will not be held legally or medically responsible for an adverse reaction by this patient should they choose to take them and have explained they will not be able to hold me medically neglectful, pursue any form of malpractice, nor any criminal and civilly [sic] suits.”
Beginning last week, the intake form began showing a similar disclaimer to all patients. “As a potential patient, I acknowledge and understand that the Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and Ivermectin have been deemed ‘Highly Not Recommended’ by the WHO, FDA, CDC, and NIH,” the disclaimer says. “Should a patient choose to not disclose their proper medical history, the clinician cannot be held liable nor can any medical license in any state be reviewed or held accountable.” Patients must check a box that says “I understand” to continue.
“In facilitating the doctor/patient relationship, our MD’s are fully licensed and operate within the rules and regulations of the medical profession,” Flinn, the spokesperson for SpeakWithAnMD’s parent company, said. “If a TeleMD in the Speak program decides any FDA medication is appropriate, then the MD can prescribe an FDA-approved medication off-label for any medical condition the TeleMD considers appropriate.”
“Extremely Pro-Trump” Doctors
The foundation for America’s Frontline Doctors was laid in a May 11, 2020, conference call between a senior staffer in Trump’s reelection campaign and the Republican activist group CNP Action. They reportedly discussed finding “extremely pro-Trump” doctors to go on TV and defend Trump’s plan to rapidly reopen the economy despite the more cautious safety guidance coming from the CDC.
Then, on June 24 of last year, Gold started an Arizona nonprofit called the Free Speech Foundation with a million-dollar annual budget and fiscal sponsorship from the Tea Party Patriots Foundation. America’s Frontline Doctors, which is a project of this nonprofit, launched on July 27, 2020. Gold, who NPR confirmed is a licensed physician in California, along with other doctors in white lab coats, held a press conference on the steps of the Supreme Court building where they falsely claimed that a cocktail of hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, and zinc could “cure” Covid-19. Another of the group’s doctors who spoke outside the court was Stella Immanuel, who called the use of masks unnecessary, and quickly earned viral fame when it was revealed that she had previously claimed that the uterine disorder endometriosis is caused by sex with demons that takes place in dreams. The event was livestreamed on Breitbart, and videos of it were viewed millions of times on social media after being shared on Twitter by then-President Trump before tech companies took them down for violating rules against pandemic misinformation. More recently, the group has been promoting ivermectin as a miracle cure for Covid-19.
“[America’s Frontline Doctors] are really good at manipulating science to seem like the vaccine is not safe, or is not tested, or is not necessary, which is why they’ve been particularly impactful in the last year plus,” Koltai said.
But it wasn’t until early 2021, when over 345,000 Americans had already died from the pandemic, that America’s Frontline Doctors started to advertise $90 telehealth consultations to receive prescriptions for alternative treatments to Covid-19 on its site.
On January 3, Gold told a packed, maskless church audience in Tampa, Florida, that America’s Frontline Doctors made “hydroxychloroquine available for the entire nation by going to our website.” A video of the lecture, “The Truth About the Covid-19 Vaccine,” has been viewed 1.3 million times on the video-hosting site Rumble after being removed from YouTube. “Then you can consult with a telemedicine doctor. And whether you have Covid, or you don’t have Covid, or you’re just worried about getting Covid, you can get yourself a prescription and they mail it to you.” She added, “The big fight wasn’t the virus, it was the fear.”
Simultaneously, America’s Frontline Doctors began referring its followers for telemedicine appointments. Its website leads prospective customers through a series of preliminary questions before directing them to SpeakWithAnMD.com. “Find out how to obtain prescription medication for COVID-19 with our AFLDS-trained physicians in three easy steps,” it reads, before a prominent “Get Medication” button.
AFLDS reaches its audience through a variety of social media platforms. Gold, the group’s founder, has more than 340,000 Twitter followers, and she regularly posts anti-vaccine content, such as this video of podcaster Joe Rogan falsely claiming that ivermectin and other drugs that have been shown to be ineffective at treating Covid-19 has cured him of the virus.
On Saturday, Gold started an account on Gab, a social media site popular with right-wing extremists, and she already has more than 36,000 followers who have posted thousands of comments on her page. AFLDS’s Facebook page has 112,00 followers, its Telegram channel has 184,00 subscribers, and 28,000 people are subscribed to the group’s channel on Rumble.
Their anti-vaccine propaganda also shows up in religious email newsletters, like this one from a group called Bridge Connection Ministries, which contains a plug for AFLDS that asks, “Have you been exposed to COVID by someone who was recently VAXXED?”
Cadence Health
The two months’ worth of patient records that The Intercept has access to show that AFLDS referred over 255,000 people to speak with physicians in order to get Covid-19 treatments. Of those people, 72,000 paid $90 for phone consultations, and many of those had follow-up consultations costing $59.99 each. The hacked data from Cadence Health does not include payment data itself, but doing the math, in just that two-month period, patients appear to have paid more than $6.7 million for phone consultations alone. This data does not include all of the $90 phone consultations from January to July, when SpeakWithAnMD appears to have hosted the intake forms for $90 telemedicine consultations directly, according to archived versions of the site. The telemedicine site appears to be billing patients directly and not their insurance companies.
Espinal claims that Cadence Health didn’t collect credit card payments and that the $90 charges for telehealth were made using SpeakWithAnMD’s payment processor. Espinal told The Intercept he charged SpeakWithAnMD a total of $17,500 for using its platform and that SpeakWithAnMD was his first and only customer.
After The Intercept reached out to the companies for comment on Monday, SpeakWithAnMD’s parent company, Encore Telemedicine, had an emergency meeting with lawyers from AFLDS, according to Espinal, who briefly attended the meeting via Zoom. “There were 16 different attorneys,” he told The Intercept, though Gold was not present. According to Espinal, he told the lawyers, “I’m ending my contract with you guys immediately,” and then left. Afterward, he took down Cadence Health’s service, preventing SpeakWithAnMD from operating.
The hacked data from Cadence Health gives insight into the patients themselves. Of those 72,000 patients in that two-month period, 58 percent were female, 38 percent were male, and 4 percent chose not to answer the question. While people of all ages sought consultations with AFLDS’s health care providers, people in their 50s and 60s were more likely to engage than other age groups. According to data provided by the CDC, Covid-19 patients aged 50 to 64 are four times more likely to be hospitalized and 30 times more likely to die than people aged 18 to 29. Covid-19 patients aged 65 to 74 are five times more likely to be hospitalized and 90 times more likely to die.
People in every state in the county, as well as Washington, D.C., sought the unproven Covid-19 treatments. 8,600 people in California paid $90 for telehealth consultations, as did another 8,000 in Florida and 7,400 in Texas. More than 1,000 people in each of an additional 21 states consulted health care providers through the service. The only states that contained less than 100 patients were Delaware and Vermont. Houston, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Jacksonville all had over 300 patients.
Ravkoo
Ravkoo filled its first prescription from AFLDS just 10 days after Gold’s “The Truth About the Covid-19 Vaccine” speech, on January 13, for hydroxychloroquine. In the data for the prescription, “AMERICAS FRONT LINE DOCTORS – ENCORE” is listed under the “remarks” field.
In the hacked data, each of the 340,000 prescriptions filled by Ravkoo between November 3, 2020, and September 11, 2021, lists a price. Adding up the prices of each type of medication shows that the online pharmacy apparently charged people a total of $4.7 million for ivermectin, $2.4 million for azithromycin, $1.2 million for hydroxychloroquine, $175,000 for zinc, and $52,000 for vitamin C. It appears that the vast majority of these medicines were paid for out-of-pocket rather than through insurance. Only $500 of these medicine sales were paid by insurance providers. Patel told The Intercept that Ravkoo doesn’t take a cut of prescription sales and that they run a platform that delivers prescriptions to local pharmacies — “Just like Uber,” he said — but didn’t answer follow-up questions about Ravkoo’s business model.
The Better Business Bureau warns that there are “current alerts” for Ravkoo, where the pharmacy has one out of five stars. Customers describe the pharmacy ignoring calls and emails about prescriptions for Covid-19 medicine from AFLDS.
On September 2, the pharmacy responded to complaints to the Better Business Bureau, saying, “We are no longer affiliated with AFLD [sic] or speakwithanmd.com. We are working diligently to resolve this issue.” Yet the hacked data includes 268 prescriptions that mention AFLDS between September 2 and September 11, the date Ravkoo was hacked.
When asked why the vast majority of prescriptions filled by Ravkoo appear to be for unproven Covid-19 treatments, Patel explained, “We don’t control who sends us business. Let’s put it that way. We don’t have formal contracts with particular companies. Patients can send us business.” Ravkoo could “find pharmacies for our patients who can pull ivermectin and get them at a lower cost. So patients are talking to each other, and that’s how that business might have — how America’s Frontline might have got to know us and started sending us business.”
Patel also claimed that he “got a threatening letter from one of the doctors saying, ‘Hey, if you don’t fill that prescription I’m gonna sue you.’ So pharmacists are put in a really tough position here.”
“Hilariously Easy” to Hack
“The whole online and telemedicine space is a bit of a Wild West because of the way the pandemic forced everyone to deal with telehealth right away,” Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Intercept.
The websites involved in this telemedicine operation were all built during the pandemic to take advantage of this Wild West. Certificate transparency records, which list which SSL certificates are created and when, show that the domain speakwithanmd.com was first set up in March last year, ravkoo.com was first set up in September last year, and cadencehealth.us was first set up in February of this year.
While the pandemic popularized telehealth, “patients still had to go to the pharmacy to pick up the prescription, and that’s where we came up with the idea to make a prescription delivery platform offering free nationwide same-day delivery,” Patel said while describing his motivation for starting the company.
The hacker told The Intercept that Cadence Health and Ravkoo were “hilariously easy” to hack. The websites of both companies had broken access controls, one of the most common mistakes in web application security.
The Cadence Health website only validated user input on the client side, not the server side, according to the hacker. This means that when a user accesses the telemedicine site the normal way, by loading the site in their browser, they can only access their own data, but if they write a program that tries to access other data on the server, the server will respond with that data. The hacker simply asked the server for all patient data.
Cadence Health’s website describes itself as the “most secure PCI & HIPAA-compliant VirtualCare Platform.” “Our website is still in development,” Espinal told The Intercept. “We don’t even have content. This was not supposed to be live.”
The Ravkoo website had a “hidden admin panel that every user can log in to and view all the data,” according to the hacker. Using this admin panel, the hacker was able to exfiltrate all of the online pharmacy’s prescription data. The vulnerability in Ravkoo’s website also appears to be fixed, according to the hacker, who reached back out to The Intercept after checking.
“It’s quite possible that [the companies] violated HIPAA by having such weak security,” Tien said. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act is a federal law that requires health care providers to protect sensitive “patient health information” from being disclosed without the patient’s consent or knowledge. The current security rule defined by HIPAA requires providers to “implement technical policies and procedures that allow only authorized persons to access electronic protected health information.”
HIPAA also defines a breach notification rule that requires health care providers to “notify affected individuals following the discovery of a breach” within two months of discovering the breach. Providers must individually notify affected patients by first-class mail or email, and if they have outdated contact information for enough patients, they’re required to post a public notice on their website or “in major print or broadcast media where the affected individuals likely reside.” If the breach affected more than 500 people, like the Cadence Health and Ravkoo breaches do, they are also required to “provide notice to prominent media outlets” serving the jurisdiction where the patients live.
While HIPAA rules have been loosened during the pandemic to accommodate telemedicine, health care providers are still required to protect sensitive patient health information that they collect.
The companies were left pointing fingers at each other. Espinal, Cadence Health’s CEO, told The Intercept that the patient database is hosted in Encore Telemedicine’s Amazon Web Services account and that his company does not have access to this data. Flinn, the public relations agent working for Encore, insists that the database is in Cadence’s AWS account, not in Encore’s.
“Following the money is a really important thing,” Koltai, of Center for an Informed Public, said.
"Antifa prisoner" Eric King. (photo: Eric King Support Committee)
In court filings, a legal nonprofit says guards in a federal prison tortured Eric King and then attempted to cover it up.
According to new motions to dismiss filed by the Civil Liberties Defense Center (CLDC), a legal nonprofit, BOP prison staff attacked King after leading him into a small, off-camera storage closet, then deleted video evidence, and may have misrepresented facts about the incident to the FBI. King’s attorneys also claim officers tied him to a four-point restraint device for approximately five hours, and then proceeded to interrogate him despite his asserting his constitutional right to counsel. King admitted to defending himself against Wilcox during the interrogation.
The case raises larger questions about the extent to which surveillance footage behind bars is manipulated, destroyed, or circumvented at the expense of incarcerated defendants. “All of these surveillance devices are controlled by those who it would also potentially expose,” Bianca Tylek of Worth Rises, an advocacy organization working to dismantle the prison industry, told Motherboard.
King was originally set to be released in 2023, but now faces additional charges accusing him of assaulting a federal officer, which could tack on 20 years to his initial 10-year sentence. Up until the incident, which documents say occurred on August 17, 2018, King was a yoga instructor at the prison and had managed to keep a relatively clean record.
“He was a week away from being sent to a low-security facility. He hadn't had a single shot. He had exemplary conduct. He had a good job,” Lauren Regan, King’s lead attorney, told Motherboard. “He was seeing his family every week. In terms of doing your time, he was in a really good place at the time that this occurred.” But now, Regan said, she has never had a client where she “feared so deeply just for their very survival.”
King has been held in solitary confinement for about three years, without access to snail mail or phone calls outside of communications with his immediate family and attorneys. And, according to a lawsuit filed by the CLDC on his behalf, the BOP has colluded with white supremacists by staging assaults and bunking him with members of white supremacist gangs.
The switch flipped after King sent an email to his wife wherein he made light of an unrelated assault on a prison guard. Afterwards, Lieutenant Donald Wilcox and Officer Jefferey Kammrad took him into a crowded, 8.5 by 11 foot room full of cleaning supplies—to “interview” him about the email, they claimed. After Wilcox asked Kammrad to leave the closet, according to the lawsuit, Wilcox cursed at King, threatened him, called him a terrorist, and punched him in the face twice. King claims he hit Wilcox back in self-defense, while Wilcox told the FBI King struck him first without any provocation.
Two days after the alleged assault, King’s attorney at the time submitted a request to preserve evidence of all video footage taken before and after the incident. However, an FBI memorandum recently uncovered by King’s attorneys revealed that the BOP destroyed footage of King shortly after the assault because “King was being complaint [sic] at the time.”
The discovery process also revealed one lieutenant and one nurse appear to have misrepresented facts to the FBI by claiming they did not interact with King while he was in four-point restraints. Their own paperwork contradicts their statements, according to evidence presented in the new filings.
While reviewing footage of King in four-point restraints, King’s attorneys noticed that the video was edited. “When we started forcing the U.S. Attorney's Office to turn over [the] video, we were able to ascertain that there were cuts where the video clearly stopped and then started up,” Regan said. “For instance, at one point, he has a certain type of clothing on and the next frame, they've cut that clothing off of him, and now he's in nothing but boxers. And there was no acknowledgement that the cameras were started and stopped.” At least two hours of footage of King in four-point restraints is missing.
One guard suffocated King while he was in the four-point restraint by putting his hands over King’s mouth, according to King’s civil suit. Then multiple guards allegedly taunted, insulted him, and threatened to have him raped by other incarcerated people, calling it “street justice” and “what he deserved.” None of this was documented on camera.
The Bureau of Prisons acknowledged Motherboard's request for comment, but stated the agency does not comment on pending litigation. The Offices of the United States Attorneys and the government’s attorney, Aaron Teitelbaum, did not respond to Motherboard’s request by the time of publication. In court filings, the U.S. government admitted that it destroyed footage but said it did so within the bounds of its existing video retention policy and asked a judge to not move forward with an evidentiary hearing. “The unpreserved video of defendant behaving in a compliant manner between the entrance to the SHU and his holding cell was not relevant to this case, let alone exculpatory,” a U.S. attorney wrote.
On Tuesday, Judge William J. Martinez ordered an evidentiary hearing in response to factual disputes surrounding King’s interrogation and possible Fifth Amendment violations, delaying a trial which was originally scheduled for October 12. If King’s motions to dismiss are denied, a trial is likely to be scheduled for late October or November, where a jury will be asked to weigh the evidence. But people who are already convicted of crimes face a steep disadvantage in court, Regan said. “It's so hard to convince jurors that people with felony convictions deserve to be believed," she told Motherboard, "especially when you've got a shiny badge and this Lieutenant saying that he's worked for the Bureau of Prisons for 20 years, you know, and this is just a terrorist...I mean, it's just such an uphill battle.”
Since King’s character is at the heart of the case, any evidence showing King to be compliant or non-combative before, during, or shortly after the incident inside of the storage closet could be considered “exculpatory evidence”—legalese for evidence that may prove a defendant’s innocence.
“If Mr. King is fighting, resisting or otherwise out of control on the video, a jury might infer he was aggressive and may have instigated violence against Wilcox in the closet,” Regan argued in a motion to dismiss. “[B]ut on the other hand if King is compliant and not resisting in the immediate aftermath, a jury may infer that he merely defended himself in response to an assault by staff. The video is key to establishing this question before the jury.” The video could have also been used to impeach a government witness, Regan argued, since some guards claimed King was acting aggressively and resisting.
Teitelbaum argued that King’s attorneys overstated the seriousness of the alleged government misconduct and contended that the conditions of confinement should be excluded during trial. The off-camera alleged assault, Teitelbaum argued, is the only relevant part of the case. “Even assuming that such video is indeed missing, defendant fails to explain how additional video of him lying on a cot in restraints without causing a disturbance (beyond the hours of video already provided) is relevant at all, let alone exculpatory,” U.S. Attorneys wrote in response to defendant’s motion to dismiss. “This case is not about the defendant’s behavior hours after the charged assault occurred.”
U.S. prisons are some of the most heavily surveilled places on Earth. But guards can often find a discreet place where no one is watching. And the public and defense attorneys often can’t access existing footage that may be incriminating for a department.
For this reason, misconduct captured on surveillance cameras isn’t necessarily going to benefit an incarcerated survivor of abuse, Tylek explained. “The issue is very similar to body cameras for police officers. Body cameras aren't saving people,” she said. “In prisons, it's just even worse, because there's so little oversight. It's almost as if people who are incarcerated don’t deserve to have their civil rights protected. COs and correctional administrators can get away with even more.”
In 2020, the Massachusetts Department of Corrections immediately released footage showing several incarcerated people punching prison guards at Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center. In the weeks that followed, more than 40 people reported being assaulted by guards while locked in their cells. Some were allegedly punched, kicked, slammed into walls, starved, tased, shot with mace guns, or bitten by dogs. Meanwhile, according to an investigation by the Boston Globe’s Spotlight Team, the DOC’s lawyers have sought gag orders to prevent defense attorneys from sharing evidence of abuse with the public.
“That level of citizen accountability, especially when it comes to police misconduct, does not exist in the prison system. There are no cell phones that incarcerated people have, there are no cameras that they get to control,” said Regan. “The BOP employees know where the cameras are and are not. So when they are committing acts of misconduct they know better than many how to get away with it.”
Health workers move a patient to a hospital after he was cleared of having Ebola in 2018 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. (photo: Getty)
The probe was prompted by an investigation last year by the Thomson Reuters Foundation and The New Humanitarian in which more than 50 women accused aid workers from the WHO and other charities of demanding sex in exchange for jobs between 2018-2020.
In its long-awaited report, the commission found that at least 21 of 83 suspected perpetrators were employed by the WHO, and that the abuses, which included nine allegations of rape, were committed by both national and international staff.
"The review team has established that the presumed victims were promised jobs in exchange for sexual relations or in order to keep their jobs," commission member Malick Coulibaly told a press briefing.
Many of the male perpetrators refused to use a condom and 29 of the women became pregnant and some were forced to later abort by their abusers, he added.
WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who has pledged zero tolerance on sexual abuse and is said to be seeking a second term at the United Nations health body, said the report made "harrowing reading" and apologised to the victims.
"What happened to you should never happen to anyone. It is inexcusable. It is my top priority to ensure that the perpetrators are not excused but are held to account," he said, promising further steps including "wholesale reform of our structures and culture".
Regional director Matshidiso Moeti said the health body was "humbled, horrified and heartbroken" by the findings. U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres' spokesperson also apologised and thanked victims for their courage in testifying.
PROSECUTIONS UNCLEAR
The known perpetrators have been banned from future WHO employment while the contracts of four people employed by the body have been terminated, officials said.
It is not clear if the perpetrators will face prosecution. Tedros said he planned to refer the rape allegations to Congo and to the countries of the suspected perpetrators. Some of them have yet to be identified.
Victims' representatives in the one-time Ebola hotspot of Beni in eastern Congo welcomed the WHO's response, but urged it to do more.
"We encourage the WHO to continue and show the community that its personnel who abused women and their daughters in our community have been genuinely, severely punished," said Esperence Kazi, coordinator of women's rights group 'One Girl One Leader' in Beni.
One girl, a 14-year-old named as "Jolianne" in the report, told the commission she was selling phone recharge cards on the side of the road in April 2019 in Mangina when a WHO driver offered her a ride home. Instead he took her to a hotel where she says he raped her and she later gave birth to his child.
Some women who were already employed told the review team that they continued to be sexually harassed by men in supervisory positions who forced them to have sex to keep their jobs, get paid or get a better paid position.
Some said they had been dismissed for refusing sex while others did not get the jobs they wanted even after consenting.
Alleged victims "were not provided with the necessary support and assistance required for such degrading experiences", the report said.
Co-chair of the investigation Aïchatou Mindaoudou said that there was "no overlap" between the victims who testified in last year's media reports and those it interviewed, acknowledging that this could point to a larger problem.
Some people at higher levels of the WHO "were aware of what was going on and did not act", she added.
In June last year, Congo's government announced the end of the two-year outbreak of Ebola that killed more than 2,200 people - the second-largest outbreak since the virus was identified in 1976.
Congo and other aid agencies have also pledged investigations into the sex abuse. Congo's minister of human rights was not immediately available for comment.
The ivory-billed woodpecker was once the US's largest woodpecker (photo: Getty)
The ivory-billed woodpecker is among 23 species declared extinct by the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS).
In all, 11 birds, one bat, two fish, one plant and eight types of mussel have been declared extinct.
The FWS said it had made the determination based on "rigorous reviews of the best available science for each of these species".
"Each of these 23 species represents a permanent loss to our nation's natural heritage and to global biodiversity," Bridget Fahey, who oversees species classification for the Fish and Wildlife Service, was quoted as saying in the New York Times.
"And it's a sobering reminder that extinction is a consequence of human-caused environmental change."
The ivory-billed woodpecker was once the US's largest woodpecker species but the last commonly agreed sighting was in 1944 in Louisiana. The species was officially listed as endangered in 1967.
Another bird declared extinct is the Bachman's warbler, which was one of the rarest songbirds in North America. It too has been listed as endangered since 1967.
Eight species of birds from Hawaii and the Little Mariana fruit bat from the Pacific island of Guam are also on the list.
The FWS, in its statement, said the protections afforded by the ESA, which came into effect in 1973, had come too late for these species.
But it stressed the act has been successful at preventing the extinction of more than 99% of species listed, and its protections are needed now more than ever.
"The Service is actively engaged with diverse partners across the country to prevent further extinctions, recover listed species and prevent the need for federal protections in the first place," said Martha Williams, FWS Principal Deputy Director.
"The Endangered Species Act has been incredibly successful at both preventing extinctions and at inspiring the diverse partnerships needed to meet our growing 21st century conservation challenges."
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