Reveal: Recent Episodes
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A growing number of states are considering legislation to set up protections for patients who might be drug tested when they give birth.
Three of the bills were introduced following an investigative series by The Marshall Project and Reveal that exposed the harms of drug testing at childbirth—including how many patients are often reported to child welfare authorities over false positive or misinterpreted test results and how women have faced child welfare investigations and removals over medications the hospitals themselves administered.
In New York, a bill that would require hospitals to obtain consent from patients before drug testing has been advancing. Two proposed bills in Arizona and Tennessee failed to make it out of their legislative sessions.
“We know when there’s secret drug testing, families are often torn apart,” said New York state Rep. Linda Rosenthal, a Democrat from Manhattan, who noted cases of women who were reported to child welfare over positive tests caused by poppy seeds and prescribed medications. “This is not some theoretical discussion we’re having here. This is really something that occurs.”
The New York bill, versions of which were first introduced by Rosenthal beginning in 2019, has faced years of resistance from lawmakers. Similar efforts in Minnesota, Maryland, and California also failed in prior legislative sessions. But in New York, The Marshall Project’s reporting on hospital drug testing helped convince more lawmakers to get on board, according to activists who lobbied for the legislation.
Poppy seeds, used in bagels, salads, and other foods, can yield positive results for opiates in urine tests. Credit: Andria Lo for The Marshall ProjectIf passed, the law would permit hospitals to drug test birthing patients and their newborns only if medically necessary. It would also require them to obtain informed consent from patients before drug testing them, which would include disclosing the potential legal consequences of a positive test result.
Similar bills were introduced this year in Tennessee by both a Democrat and Republican. Sen. Janice Bowling, a Republican from Tullahoma who frequently advocates for parental rights, was first approached about the issue by a progressive advocacy group and quickly saw the bipartisan appeal. She said she was shocked to learn that women had been tested and reported over false positive tests caused by poppy seeds, the heartburn drug Zantac, and other legal substances.
“Can you imagine if someone took the baby from you out of your arms or never even let you hold your child?” she said. “Taking children from families because a state entity says they have the authority to determine whether or not you’re a fit parent, that’s a slippery slope.”
After a particularly contentious legislative session, the bill failed to make it out of committee. Bowling said she plans to take up the bill again in 2026.
In Arizona, lobbyists and activists said they plan to pursue a similar informed consent bill in the next legislative session, in addition to continuing to pursue a more far-reaching bill that was introduced but failed to advance this year.
The Pro-Choice Arizona Action Fund and reproductive advocacy group Patient Forward began pursuing the legislation following a Reveal and New York Times Magazine investigation in 2023 that detailed the story of an Arizona woman whose baby was placed in foster care after she was reported to child welfare authorities for taking prescribed Suboxone during her pregnancy. Current state law requires health care providers to contact child welfare anytime a baby is born exposed to controlled substances, including legal medications such as Suboxone and methadone.
“We were like, how does this happen? What are the mechanisms in place that allow this to happen?” said Garin Marschall, co-founder of Patient Forward. “We wanted to understand what we could do to make sure that it didn’t happen again.”
The proposed legislation would have revised Arizona law to bar positive drug tests alone as a reason for a child welfare report or investigation. If health care providers have no concerns about abuse or neglect, the law would require hospitals to notify the health department instead of child welfare authorities. Other states, such as Massachusetts and New Mexico, have passed similar laws, while hospitals around the country have also made changes to their drug testing policies.
In New York, advocates said their bill has historically faced resistance from lawmakers who worry that asking patients for consent to test them for drugs will lead more women to decline such tests. But health care providers interviewed by The Marshall Project have said it’s rare for patients to decline a drug test, and even so, drug tests rarely provide useful medical information. Doctors don’t typically need drug tests to identify or treat babies exposed to substances in the womb, and a positive test does not prove that a parent has an addiction, the experts said.
Instead, studies have found that screening questionnaires, which collect certain information from patients, such as their partner’s history of drug use, are effective at identifying someone with an addiction without putting them at risk of needless child welfare intervention. Doctors have found that maintaining open communication with patients is also the best way to help them, whereas studies show more punitive policies lead women to avoid prenatal care altogether.
“If the trust between a doctor and patient is broken, that will lead to much more severe consequences for the child and the mother,” Rosenthal said. “Everyone does better if that doesn’t happen.”
From New York to Arizona, Efforts Emerge to Curb Drug Testing During Childbirth is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
This story was published in partnership with The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.
Shortly after dark one day in September 2022, police officers Yang Lee and Charles Laskey-Castle arrived on Milwaukee’s west side to investigate a car abandoned on the sidewalk. Lee knelt to examine the driver’s side floorboard as Laskey-Castle stood behind him. Then Lee rose—and his holstered gun fired a bullet into his partner’s leg.
The shooting was captured on body camera footage, and it was at least the third time in three years that a Milwaukee officer’s SIG Sauer P320 pistol had allegedly fired without a trigger pull, according to lawsuits and police records. The following month, the Milwaukee Police Department moved to replace its P320s with weapons from another manufacturer.
“There is no higher priority than the safety of the people who protect our city,” Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson said at an October 2022 news conference announcing the switch. “Unexplained discharges, they have injured people. That’s completely unacceptable to me.”
At the same event, Milwaukee’s police chief revealed that, to offset the cost of the new weapons, the department would be reselling its P320s to a gun dealer. Soon, the old P320s—deemed too dangerous for the city’s officers—would be available for purchase by civilians.
The decision in Milwaukee follows a pattern that has been repeated in cities across the nation as police departments reevaluate their use of the P320 amid mounting concerns about the weapon’s safety. A 2023 investigation by The Trace and the Washington Post revealed that the P320 has gruesomely injured scores of people who alleged in lawsuits that it has a potentially deadly defect. SIG Sauer denied these claims.
Over the past two months, The Trace surveyed more than 60 law enforcement agencies whose officers once used the P320. More than 20 of those agencies—including police departments in Oklahoma City, Denver, and Chicago—have moved to prohibit the gun because of fears about unintentional discharges. Twelve agencies said they resold their P320s to the public after determining the model was unsafe for officers to use.
Cumulatively, these departments sent at least 4,000 P320s back into the commercial market.
Used SIG Sauer P320s can be purchased by civilians after they are resold or traded in by law enforcement. Credit: SIG Sauer screenshot“If the primary function of law enforcement is to protect and serve, one would think that returning a problematic weapon to the public is not particularly consistent with that mission,” Jonathan Jacobs, director of the Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics at New York’s John Jay College, told The Trace. “The ethical issues here are very, very plain.”
A Milwaukee police spokesperson said, “The trade-in was a cost-savings for the department.”
SIG Sauer declined to comment on the specifics of this story and directed questions to p320truth.com, a website it created about the gun. The gunmaker previously has denied that the P320 is capable of firing without a trigger pull and cited accounts of unintentional discharges with other firearms as evidence that such issues are neither uncommon nor suggestive of a defect.
Concerns Grow After Multiple Shootings, LawsuitsConcerns about the P320 surfaced recently in Washington, where in February, the state’s Criminal Justice Training Commission banned the P320 from its facilities, citing an “abundance of allegations of un-commanded discharges occurring around the country.” Because the commission hosts mandatory training for police officers, its decision pressured law enforcement agencies across the state to reconsider their use of the P320.
The ban came after at least two shootings involving P320s among Washington law enforcement. Last year, a Kitsap County sheriff’s deputy’s holstered P320 discharged while she apprehended a suspect in a grocery store, according to body camera footage obtained by local media. Nobody was injured, but after the shooting, the Kitsap County Commission offered to fully fund the purchase of different guns plus the cost of destroying the old P320s to remove them from circulation.
The Sheriff’s Office declined the offer, and in March, it said it would be reselling more than 200 P320s to a dealer. “It seemed like the fiscally responsible thing to do,” Kitsap County Undersheriff Russ Clithero told The Trace. The office received roughly $300 per resold weapon—more than $60,000.
One of the most popular handguns in America, the P320 has been used by officers at more than a thousand law enforcement agencies across the country. But according to police records and lawsuits, as of April 23, at least 120 people have alleged that their P320 fired without the trigger being pulled. Those shootings resulted in more than 110 injuries and at least one death.
Dozens of people have sued SIG Sauer over P320 discharges. Several cases have been dismissed, and the company won a jury trial in 2022. More recently, however, two juries have ruled against SIG Sauer, awarding more than $13 million in damages. After the most recent verdict, in November, the national Fraternal Order of Police sent a letter to SIG Sauer requesting an accounting of measures taken by the company to address widespread concerns about the P320.
“The officers who rely on your products must have absolute confidence in the safety and performance of their weapon,” the letter read.
The Trace contacted 69 law enforcement agencies for this story and 41 responded. A total of 16 confirmed that after issuing the P320 to officers, they switched to a new pistol out of concern about the P320’s safety. Four others had acknowledged publicly that their departments switched pistols because of safety reasons but did not respond to The Trace.
The Pasco County Sheriff’s Office in Florida resold more than 800 P320s after three officers survived incidents in which they say their P320s discharged, though nobody pulled the guns’ triggers, records show.
“The trade-in value was necessary to facilitate the transition to the Glocks we currently use,” a spokesperson for the Sheriff’s Office said. “We cannot speak for what actions the vendor took with the weapons after we traded them back.”
The Police Department in Bridge City, Texas, resold its P320s after one of its officers claimed she was shot in the groin by a holstered gun zipped inside her purse, a police report shows. The bullet missed her spine by inches.
R.D. Bergeron, the assistant police chief of Bridge City, said the department kept the gun involved in the shooting. “The last thing we would want is anyone, officer or civilian, to get hurt due to it firing uncommanded,” Bergeron said.
A Common Police PracticeLaw enforcement agencies generally resell weapons for budget reasons. Used police guns are popular among gun buyers because they’re relatively inexpensive and often in good condition. Resales have drawn criticism from law enforcement experts and gun violence researchers, who have argued that introducing used police weapons to the civilian marketplace risks fueling crime.
At least 52,000 police guns had been involved in crimes—including homicides and other violent assaults—since 2006, according to an investigation by The Trace, CBS News, and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. While that tally includes guns lost by or stolen from police, many of the firearms were resold by law enforcement.
Ed Obayashi, a deputy sheriff in Modoc County, California, and a national police ethics expert, said reselling an allegedly defective gun poses an added threat to public safety, even if it never slips into criminal hands. For this reason alone, he said, departments should not resell P320s if they believe the guns to be defective. “There are situations in law enforcement where you’re going to have to do the right thing, even if it’s going to cost you financially,” Obayashi said.
In Laredo, Texas, the Police Department resold about 500 P320s after an officer experienced an unintentional discharge, officials said. The officer was not injured, but investigators concluded that his gun had fired “without the trigger being pulled,” according to a Bexar County Criminal Investigations Laboratory report obtained by The Trace.
When asked why the agency had resold its P320s after pulling them from service, a police spokesperson did not respond.
In addition to the 12 agencies that resold P320s to dealers, two—the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transit Authority (SEPTA) and the Honesdale Borough Police Department, also in Pennsylvania—returned their guns to SIG Sauer, The Trace found.
SEPTA returned its P320s after an officer’s gun discharged in a Philadelphia subway station, narrowly missing his leg. Andrew Busch, a SEPTA spokesperson, said the agency could not place conditions on what might happen with the returned guns. When asked whether it had considered holding onto the guns, Busch said, “We are not going to comment on internal deliberations or discussions with the manufacturer.”
Many of the largest police forces in the country allow officers to buy their own guns from an approved list, rather than issuing a single model to the whole department. Five such agencies contacted for this story—the Chicago, Denver, and Dallas police departments, as well as the Clark County and Pierce County sheriff’s offices in Washington—said they had pulled the P320 from their approved handgun lists or planned to bar officers from carrying the model because of safety concerns.
“The SIG Sauer P320 was found to no longer meet the internal safety standards of the Denver Police Department,” a spokesperson for the agency wrote in an emailed statement.
Sixteen other agencies either remained confident in the P320’s reliability or said they had transitioned away from the gun for reasons other than safety concerns, like it not being compatible with their preferred accessories.
The Goshen, Indiana, police chief, José Miller, said the P320 had proven reliable and “operationally sound” in over a decade of service. “Our evaluation—bolstered by both our internal experience and external research, including findings from the Department of the Army—leaves no doubt,” Miller said. “The SIG Sauer P320 is a safe, dependable firearm.”
Only one police department—in Orange, Connecticut—opted not to resell its P320s. Instead, the guns are locked away at headquarters. “If we believe a firearm might be defective, we don’t agree with putting that weapon back on the street,” said Max Martins, the department’s assistant chief. “What if we traded in the guns, then a civilian bought one of our old ones and there was an accidental discharge? You don’t want that on your conscience.”
A Gun Deemed Too Dangerous for Cops, But Fine for Civilians is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the US criminal justice system.
The request from child welfare authorities seemed harmless enough: Order a newborn drug test. Dr. Sharon Ostfeld-Johns and her hospital colleagues had done it countless times before.
This time, however, the request gave the doctor pause. A patient at Yale New Haven Health in Connecticut, the largest health system in the state, had said she’d used marijuana to help her eat and sleep during her pregnancy. The hospital had reported her to child welfare authorities. Now, an investigator wanted Ostfeld-Johns to drug test the newborn.
Ostfeld-Johns knew there was no medical reason to test the baby, who was healthy. A drug test would make no difference to the infant’s medical care. Nor did she have concerns that the mother, who had other children at home, was a neglectful parent. The doctor did worry, however, that the drug test could cause other problems for the family. For example, the mother was Black and on Medicaid—race and income bias could influence the investigator’s decision on whether to put the children into foster care.
“Why did I ever order these tests?” Ostfeld-Johns found herself wondering about past cases. She thought about her own son, then in kindergarten, and how she would feel if she faced an investigation over a positive test. Eventually, she would review her own prenatal records and learn that she had been tested for drugs without her knowledge or consent. “You try to imagine what it would be like if it was you,” she said. “The hurt that we do to people is overwhelming.”
Ostfeld-Johns had encountered this scenario many times before, but this time, she refused the drug test request. Then she began a research process that, in 2022, led to an overhaul of the Yale New Haven Health network’s approach to drug testing newborns. Now, doctors are directed to test only if doing so will inform medical care—a rare occurrence, it turns out. The hospital also created criteria for testing pregnant patients.
Many doctors and nurses across the country have long assumed that drug testing is both a medical and legal necessity in their care of pregnant patients and newborns—even though most state laws do not require it. Yet drug testing during labor is common in America, with a positive test often triggering a report to child welfare authorities. Ostfeld-Johns and Yale New Haven are among a small but increasing number of doctors and institutions across the country that have started questioning those drug testing policies. This cadre of doctors is pushing hospitals to become less reliant on tests and to focus instead on communicating directly with patients to assess any risks to babies.
No one seems to be tracking just how many hospitals have revised their testing policies, but over the past three years, changes have come to networks across the country, from California to Colorado and Massachusetts. The institutions vary, from large nonprofit networks and teaching facilities to private, for-profit hospitals.
While doctors pushing for reform argue that legislation is still needed to require hospitals to reduce testing, individual hospital efforts seem to be spreading. In Colorado, doctors worked with a child abuse prevention nonprofit to distribute a voluntary new policy as guidance, prompting several hospitals to change their practices. An educational effort, “Doing Right by Birth,” convened virtual groups of health care professionals across the country in 2023 to teach them their requirements under the law. Some participants were surprised to learn that most state laws do not actually require hospitals to drug test pregnant patients or newborns and are now questioning the policies of their institutions, suggesting more reforms may come.
At Yale, Ostfeld-Johns said she initially faced resistance to the policy change. Some of her colleagues feared that by ending near-automatic testing, “we were ultimately going to hurt babies,” she said. “We were hurting them by preventing identification of substance exposure that happened during pregnancy.” But Ostfeld-Johns said they found they didn’t need the drug tests to identify babies who might, for example, develop symptoms of opioid withdrawal that would require special care.
At the New Haven hospital, the policy change appears to have curbed unnecessary child welfare reports without harming babies. After the policy went into effect, child welfare referrals from the newborn nursery dropped almost 50 percent, according to preliminary data provided by Ostfeld-Johns. At the same time, the hospital did not see an uptick in babies coming back in need of new treatment for drug withdrawal, she said. “No babies came in with uncontrolled withdrawal symptoms,” she said. “No safety events were identified.”
The New Haven data is consistent with the anecdotal experiences of providers at other institutions. “I don’t think we’re missing babies” who have been exposed to substances, said Dr. Mark Vining, director of the newborn nursery at UMass Memorial Medical Center near Boston. The hospital did away with automatic testing of newborns in 2024. At the same time, Vining said, it has reported fewer families to child welfare authorities due to positive tests caused by hospital-administered medications like morphine. A newborn drug test “rarely adds any information that you didn’t already know,” he said.
The new policies are beginning to upend an approach that has existed in the United States for decades.
Hospitals first began routinely drug testing mothers in labor during the 1980s crack cocaine epidemic. The practice expanded during the opioid epidemic, following the passage of a federal law in 2003 and another in 2016, both of whichrequire hospitals to notify child welfare agencies anytime a baby is born “affected by” substances. Federal law and laws in most states do not require hospitals to drug test new parents or their babies, but hospitals frequently do so anyway—often out of concern that if they don’t, they’ll miss babies who are at risk.
Poppy seeds, used in bagels, salads, and other foods, can yield positive results for opiates in urine tests. Credit: Andria Lo for The Marshall ProjectWidespread drug testing has caused a variety of harms. A previous investigation by The Marshall Project found that urine tests, the type used by most hospitals, are easy to misinterpret and have false positive rates as high as 50 percent. Parents have been reported to child welfare authorities over false positives caused by things ranging from poppy seeds to blood pressure medication. Substances prescribed to patients during a hospital stay, such as the fentanyl in an epidural, can show up on maternal drug tests and also pass quickly from mother to baby, causing infants to test positive for drugs.
Race and class bias can also influence drug testing, with multiple studies finding that low-income, Black, Latina, and Indigenous women are most likely to be tested. Yale New Haven Hospital found that, before the drug testing policy change, Black babies in its care were twice as likely as White babies to be tested at birth. Studies elsewhere have found that racial disparities extend to child welfare cases and removals as well, with Black, Latino, and Indigenous babies being less likely to be reunited with their parents once removed.
In many hospitals, the tests are not typically used to make medical decisions. Instead, tests have become a cheap, fast way to assess whether a parent might be a danger to their child.
“We should be doing medical tests for medical reasons, not criminal, punitive, prosecutorial reasons,” said Dr. Christine Gold, a pediatrician who works at the University of Colorado Hospital system near Denver. Even for that purpose, Gold noted, drug tests fall short. “It is a really poor-quality test,” she said. It cannot tell doctors how often someone used a substance during pregnancy, if a patient has an addiction, or if the drug use affected their ability to parent. “Toxicology tests are not parenting tests,” Gold said.
In 2020, Colorado lawmakers removed positive drug tests at birth from the list of reasons for hospitals to automatically report a family to child welfare authorities. But many hospitals continued to test pregnant patients and newborns, prompting Gold to lead the effort to release guidance in 2023 that encourages hospitals in the state to test only when medically necessary. Now the entire University of Colorado Health system is reforming its policy on testing pregnant patients, and others in the state are reportedly considering changes.
Instead of automatic drug tests, the revised policies use screening questionnaires, which collect certain information from patients, such as their family’s history of drug use and the patient’s own history and frequency of use. Researchers and leading medical groups say these questionnaires are effective at identifying someone with an addiction or at risk of developing one, which can help doctors steer parents into treatment or determine whether a baby might need extra medical care. Some hospitals continue to drug test patients under certain circumstances. For example, at UMass Memorial, pregnant patients with diagnosed substance use disorders and new patients without any prenatal care are still drug tested.
The growing movement to limit drug testing is a source of optimism for many doctors. But its success hinges in part on doctors building more meaningful relationships with their patients, so the people they treat feel inclined to confide about substance use and ultimately agree to enter treatment. “That is really the goal here,” said Dr. Katherine Campbell, chief of obstetrics at Yale New Haven Hospital. “We’re trying to reduce substance use disorder in reproductive-age people.”
That may include asking a patient for informed consent to submit to a drug test and medical personnel being transparent about both the purpose of the test and its potential legal consequences.
But these types of conversations can be challenging. They also require longer appointments, something many medical institutions are unable or unwilling to provide. “The system is set up to make it difficult for us to really develop a knowing and trusted relationship with a family,” said Dr. Lauren Oshman, a family physician at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor.
Dr. Lauren Oshman, a family physician and associate professor in the University of Michigan Department of Family Medicine, in C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in February 2025. Credit: Sylvia Jarrus for The Marshall ProjectBy comparison, urine tests are fast and often involve little interaction with patients.
“It takes longer to talk to someone and really understand than it does to place an order and have the person give a urine sample,” Campbell said.
The new policies also don’t solve other problems. After Oshman and colleagues discovered that clinicians at Michigan Medicine ordered drug tests for Black newborns more often than for White newborns, the hospital network changed its policy in 2023 to require testing of babies only in certain circumstances. But early data indicates the new policy had no impact on the racial disparities in testing and reporting.
One reason, in Oshman’s view, is that Michigan law requires the reporting of a patient whom a provider “knows or suspects” has exposed their newborn to “any amount” of a controlled substance, whether legal or illegal. That includes marijuana, which is legal in Michigan. When the health network team dug into the data, it found that for almost half of all low-risk patients whose babies tested positive, the only drug detected was marijuana, and the patients were most likely to be Black. Most marijuana-only cases do not result in findings of abuse or neglect by child welfare authorities, according to the team’s research. But hospitals are still required to report these patients, Oshman said.
“And that won’t change until the state law changes,” she added.
Hospitals in most other states face similar challenges. A review by The Marshall Project found that at least 27 states explicitly require hospitals to alert child welfare agencies after a positive screen or potential exposure—though not a single state requires confirmation testing before a report.
Many hospitals that have changed their policies are in states that do not require reporting positive tests to child welfare authorities. In both Colorado and Connecticut, for example, hospitals are required to report a parent only if providers have identified other safety concerns. In Connecticut, providers fill out an anonymized form that allows the state to collect data on substance-exposed newborns without requiring a child welfare report.
But even in states that don’t require reporting positive tests, drug testing remains ubiquitous. For example, the New York Department of Health advised hospitals in 2021 to test labor-and-delivery patients only when “medically indicated” and only with their consent. But women continue to report nonconsensual drug testing at hospitals across the state, which has led to them being reported to child welfare authorities over false positive and erroneous results, The Marshall Project has found.
These challenges show that reducing the consequences of drug testing may require a multipronged approach, from legislative reforms to policy revisions and enforcement, experts say.
“We’re just at the beginning,” Oshman said. “This is the start of creating a system that provides that trustworthy care.”
Why Some Doctors Are Pushing to End Routine Drug Testing During Childbirth is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
This story was published in partnership with CBS News & Stations and The Trace.
More than a dozen law enforcement agencies have stopped reselling their used guns or pledged to reconsider the practice after an investigation by The Trace, CBS News, and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting.
The investigation, published last year, revealed that more than 52,000 former police guns had resurfaced in robberies, domestic violence incidents, homicides, and other crimes between 2006 and 2022. Many of those guns found their way into civilian hands after agencies traded them to retailers for discounts on new equipment or resold them to their own officers.
In a January report about gun trafficking, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives warned law enforcement against reselling guns because of the frequency with which former police weapons are used in violent crimes.
The Trace and CBS News subsequently contacted 60 law enforcement agencies with a history of reselling guns to ask whether they had changed their policies.
Twenty-one departments responded. Four — the Cincinnati, Columbus, and Sacramento police departments, as well as the Monmouth County Sheriff’s Office in New Jersey — confirmed they had stopped reselling weapons after last year’s investigation. (As The Trace and CBS News previously reported, the investigation prompted the Indianapolis and Minneapolis police departments to also discontinue gun resales.)
Seven more agencies said they’d review their policies in light of the ATF’s recommendation. Those agencies are the Wisconsin State Patrol, the New York State Police, the Newark Police Department, the sheriff’s offices in California’s San Diego and Orange counties, the Colorado State Patrol, and the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office.
“We will be considering a policy change regarding selling guns owned by the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office this year,” Boulder County Sheriff Curtis Johnson told The Trace. He said the agency would need to check with the county commissioners to ensure they had enough money to replace old equipment without the trade-in discount, but he believed they would support additional funding if needed.
A former police gun for sale at a gun store in Lithonia, Georgia, on May 8, 2024. Credit: Alyssa Pointer for The TracePolice forces generally resell weapons because gun stores offer trade-in value, allowing departments to offset the cost of equipment upgrades and, authorities have argued, save taxpayer money. Agencies that choose to dispose of the guns not only forfeit the trade-in value but must also pay a company to destroy them.
Several agencies cited budgetary concerns as their reason for continuing to resell guns.
Mark Kennedy, chief of the Quincy Police Department in Massachusetts, told CBS News that he feared his officers’ used guns could wind up in crimes, but that his department could not afford to change its policy. “If it wasn’t cost prohibitive, I would absolutely destroy them,” he said.
In Kentucky, law enforcement’s hands are tied. A state law requires agencies to sell guns they no longer need, including departmental weapons and those seized in connection with crimes.
In 2019, a Kentucky State Police pistol resold to a retiring detective ended up in Buffalo, New York, where federal agents confiscated it while serving a search warrant on a murder suspect. When CBS News asked whether the Kentucky State Police’s policy had changed, a spokesperson pointed to the state law, noting the agency “is required to comply.”
Researchers say that while trade-ins can cut an agency’s costs by tens of thousands of dollars, taxpayers ultimately bear the financial burden of the violence wrought with resold police guns — a price that can far outstrip savings on new equipment. A 2010 Iowa State University study estimated the cost of a single homicide at more than $17 million. That price tag includes spending on emergency response and crime scene cleanup, lost wages and tax revenue, salaries for investigators, and the cost of incarcerating suspects.
Scot Thomasson, a former ATF special agent, said law enforcement agencies frequently negotiate trade-ins without explicit approval from local elected officials, leaving taxpayers unaware that the police weapons their money purchased could end up in civilian hands.
“The taxpayer pays for these guns to be used by police for the protection of their community,” Thomasson said. “Now that gun could wind up in a criminal’s hands to be used against the same taxpayer that paid for it. It’s just plain wrong.”
In its January warning to law enforcement agencies, the ATF said it had identified more than 1,000 former police guns recovered in homicides and another 2,000 confiscated from convicted felons between 2019 and 2023.
The ATF also cited a 1998 resolution from the International Association of Chiefs of Police that instructed agencies not to resell guns. The resolution noted that “the recirculation of these firearms back into the general population increases the availability of firearms which could be used again to kill or injure additional police officers and citizens.”
But William Brooks, a former Norwood, Massachusetts, police chief who now heads the IACP’s firearms committee, said IACP resolutions expire after five years, and the 1998 guidance is unlikely to be revived when the organization meets to consider new resolutions this spring.
“I’d love to see city governments fully fund these weapons purchases so that departments can dispose of their old firearms,” Brooks said. “But if they don’t, it should be up to departments to decide whether they’re going to pass on an upgrade they can’t afford without a trade-in.”
Brooks argued that destroying used police guns wouldn’t prevent violence because firearms are already widely available and easy for the public to acquire.
Michael Sierra-Arévalo, an associate sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of “The Danger Imperative: Violence, Death, and the Soul of Policing,” said he wasn’t aware of any peer-reviewed research linking police trade-ins to increases in violence, but he also hadn’t seen evidence proving the practice was safe.
“The state has a responsibility to be conservative in these situations,” he said. “I would question the moral standing of someone who is willing to gamble with the life of a single member of the public on the grounds that they don’t have empirical proof that a change of policy would prevent their death.”
“We know that people are killed with these guns. That should be enough.”
Several Law Enforcement Agencies Have Stopped Reselling Guns is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
This story is published in partnership with the New York Times as part of The Times’s local investigations fellowship.
As religious groups across the country open more maternity homes for pregnant women and teenagers, the nonprofit that oversees some of those homes in Florida is facing renewed criticism from state lawmakers over its practices.
The nonprofit, the Florida Association of Christian Child Caring Agencies, has regulatory authority over about two dozen maternity homes, ranches for troubled youth, and group homes for children whose parents cannot take care of them.
Facilities it oversees have faced allegations of abuse, misconduct and restrictive practices for decades. In September, The New York Times and the investigative podcast Reveal reported that some of the maternity homes had imposed strict limits on residents’ communications and movements. One required residents to download a tracking app and lock their phones in a safe overnight.
Unlike homes that are licensed by the state, the association’s members are exempt from visits by state inspectors. Instead, the association performs its own inspections, holding its members to standards for hiring staff that government records show to be less rigorous than those used by the state.
The association also offers its own training. In one online course for new employees, an instructor described humiliating a teenager who had cheated on his homework by making him wear a sign that said, “I am a liar and a cheater.”
State Representative Anna Eskamani, a Democrat from Orlando. Credit: Phil Sears/Associated PressState Representative Vicki Lopez, a Republican from Miami. Credit: Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP ImagesIn recent interviews with The Times, four lawmakers expressed concern about some of the association’s lax standards. State Representative Vicki Lopez, a Republican from Miami, and State Representative Anna Eskamani, a Democrat from Orlando, called for the Legislature to examine them.
Children in group home care, Ms. Eskamani said, “require extra attention and support,” and should not be in facilities with a lower bar.
The association’s executive director, Matthew Higgins, declined requests for an interview, citing an open-records lawsuit The Times has filed against the group seeking to obtain its maternity-home inspection reports.
The state’s Department of Children and Families did not answer questions about the group or its standards.
In September, The Times and Reveal reported that amid new abortion restrictions and the rising cost of housing, pregnant women and teenagers are increasingly turning to charity-run maternity homes.
In Florida, homes for pregnant adults and their babies can operate without any government regulation. But homes that admit mothers who are minors must either obtain a state license or register with the Christian association.
Florida is unusual in that it allows faith-based children’s homes to register with a nonprofit in lieu of state licensing. Texas had a similar system, but lawmakers let the program expire more than 20 years ago after a series of abuse claims at unlicensed facilities.
Florida’s law dates to 1984, when lawmakers updated the state’s foster care standards to align with new federal guidelines. State archival records show that the Florida Association of Christian Child Caring Agencies took the opportunity to suggest that religious group homes be exempted from state oversight if they did not accept government funding.
The proposal met opposition from child welfare advocates, civil liberties groups and the state agency overseeing Florida’s foster care system, now named the Department of Children and Families. Christian organizations including Florida Baptist Children’s Homes, the National Lutheran Council and Catholic Community Services also opposed the measure, saying all children should receive the same level of care.
Still, the provision became law. It allowed Christian homes to register with a “qualified association” founded on or before Jan. 1, 1984. The only group to meet this requirement was the Florida Association of Christian Child Caring Agencies.
Today, the association counts nearly 25 faith-based homes and other nonprofits among its members, according to its website. While some facilities are free, others charge thousands of dollars a month in room and board. On occasion, they accept children in the state’s foster care system, according to data reviewed by The Times and Reveal.
Most of the people who sit on the association’s board founded or run its member facilities, federal tax records show. Mr. Higgins, the executive director, runs Hope Children’s Home in Tampa, according to its website.
Florida Association of Christian Child Caring Agencies executive director Matthew Higgins appeared before the Florida state legislature subcommittee in Tallahassee, Florida in 2023. Credit: The Florida ChannelThe association’s 2024 standards show that it allowed members more latitude than the state when it came to hiring and training.
For example, supervisors at homes registered with the association were not required to have college degrees or previous experience in residential care, as they were at state-licensed programs.
Additionally, the association required at least 20 hours of annual training — half as many as the state. And unlike the state, it did not mandate training in trauma-informed care, which involves recognizing and responding to trauma and is the widely accepted standard in residential-care settings.
In interviews, four people who had worked at homes registered with the association said the only training they were offered was an online course in behavior management and crisis prevention.
A Times reporter completed the six-hour self-directed program last year. Most of the course focused on how to defuse crises. Mr. Higgins said in the training that staff members could use “defensive physical measures” like holding a young person’s arms or legs in “extreme cases” if they became violent. He did not provide a demonstration.
Asked to review the course materials, Martha Holden, director of Cornell University’s Residential Child Care Project, said the program was “not sufficient” for new staff.
Physical restraints, she added, are best learned in person over several days of training. “That is very high risk,” she said. “Kids have been seriously injured or even die from that kind of intervention.”
At licensed homes in Florida, staff must receive annual training on passive restraint use.
At another point in the online training, Mr. Higgins explained how he had handled a student who repeatedly cheated on English assignments. Mr. Higgins said he initially let the student off with a warning, but later changed tactics and decided to “try humiliation” with the paper sign.
After the teenager refused to pin the sign to his shirt, Mr. Higgins ordered him to walk laps while carrying a cinder block. The boy walked one lap, then agreed to wear the sign, Mr. Higgins said in the video.
The Christian association’s standards prohibited employees from subjecting children to “cruel or humiliating treatment,” records show.
Facilities registered with the association have faced scrutiny since the late 1980s, when the director of a home near Port St. Lucie was charged with sexually abusing three 10-year-old girls. The girls’ mothers later said they did not want to pursue the case, and the charges were dropped, according to news reports.
In 2012, The Tampa Bay Times reported that young people had faced harsh physical punishments at religious boarding schools and homes for troubled teenagersacross the state. After the newspaper’s investigation was published, the association banned the use of restraints such as handcuffs. The Legislature also required the association to report emergency situations to state regulators within 24 hours.
More recently, a home in Lakeland made headlines after a 17-year-old resident was denied access to a doctor and died, apparently of a seizure. The facility, Lakeland Girls Academy, closed in 2022.
Experts say that state licensing does not necessarily prevent abuse. But licensing “provides a framework for knowing exactly what the expectations are,” said Jean Strout, a senior attorney with the National Center for Youth Law.
“Without that, it’s really just a Wild West,” she said.
Florida has the equivalent of a two-tiered system of group homes for children and pregnant teenagers, said Shamra Boel-Studt, an associate professor of social work at Florida State University who specializes in child welfare. “We have two sets of facilities: one set that is subjected to more rigorous licensing and monitoring, and another that seems to be going under the radar,” she said.
The Legislature at one point considered ending the Christian association’s monopoly and letting other nonprofits register religious group homes for children. During a hearing in 2023, some lawmakers criticized the association for overseeing facilities operated by its board members and grilled Mr. Higgins about abuse claims at the home he runs.
Mr. Higgins told lawmakers that the group worked with independent inspectors and said the abuse allegations were unfounded.
The proposal advanced in both the House and Senate with bipartisan support. But the Republican lawmaker who filed the Senate version, Clay Yarborough of Jacksonville, pulled it from consideration without public explanation.
Through a spokesperson, Mr. Yarborough declined to comment on the bill.
How Some Christian Group Homes Avoid Florida’s Standards is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
Arizona’s attorney general has sued a Saudi-owned farm operating a massive hay operation in the middle of the Arizona desert, alleging that the business is hastening the loss of the rural community’s rapidly depleting groundwater supply.
The farm owned by Fondomonte uses billions of gallons of groundwater in La Paz County each year to irrigate the desert to grow hay, which it then ships back to the Middle East to feed dairy cows.
The Saudi-owned operation first came to light in a 2015 investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting and quickly sparked outrage in the state, spurring national and even international media coverage.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes told CIR last year that she was considering suing to stop the damage. On Wednesday, she announced the public nuisance lawsuit. It asks a judge to stop Fondomonte from excessive pumping and require the company to establish an abatement fund, which would cover damages incurred by neighbors, such as their wells going dry or their water quality worsening as the groundwater is depleted.
“Arizona law is clear: No company has the right to endanger an entire community’s health and safety for its own gain,” Mayes said in a statement.
Arizona Department of Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke initially said CIR’s 2015 investigation was making “hay” and overblowing the issue, writing in the Arizona Republic that “there is a sufficient water supply available in this area of La Paz County for at least the next 100 years.”
But domestic wells of neighbors around Fondomonte soon began to go dry. The farm and its neighbors were profiled in the film The Grab, a feature-length documentary about global food and water conflicts, reported and produced by the Center for Investigative Reporting.
In 2017, the well at the Friendship Baptist Church next to the farm went dry, requiring the pastor to truck in bottled water for baptismals and other events. John Weisser, a rancher near the Saudi farm, told the filmmaking team that his well went dry, too, “because the water’s dropping. There’s not enough rain that could replenish it.”
Wayne Wade, who lived in a trailer park near the farm, reported the same problem.
“The water level went below my pump, and the pump burned up and melted the casing,” Wade said. “I think everybody knows the problem, but I don’t know how to correct it. I can’t pay for a high-powered lawyer. Neither can any of my friends.”
La Paz County Supervisor Holly Irwin has been asking for help since news of the Saudi-owned farm first broke nearly 10 years ago. Now that the state’s attorney general has stepped in, “I feel that La Paz County finally has someone fighting for us,” Irwin said. “My constituents are experiencing real damages from massive groundwater pumping.”
La Paz County Supervisor Holly Irwin, who is fighting to conserve groundwater in rural Arizona, talks about water issues with diners at Don’s Historic Cactus Bar & Restaurant in Salome, Ariz., in 2020. Credit: Jonathan IngallsMayes, who was elected in 2022, said allowing Fondomonte and other mega farms in rural Arizona to pump unlimited amounts of water at no cost beyond the electricity bills they pay to operate the wells has been a failure of the state government.
“Why are we allowing a Saudi-owned corporation to stick a straw in the ground and suck so much of our water out and send alfalfa back to Saudi Arabia and not charge them a dime for the water? It is bonkers,” Mayes told Reveal last year. “Water in Arizona is life. Our very survival as a state depends on our doing better when it comes to water.”
In the mid-1990s, Saudi Arabia was the world’s sixth-largest exporter of wheat. But as its groundwater was drained, the government told companies to go overseas in search of new water supplies.
“Fondomonte came to Arizona to extract water at an unreasonable and excessive rate because doing so was banned in its home country—another arid desert with limited water,” the lawsuit alleges. “Fondomonte is taking advantage of Arizona’s failure to protect its precious groundwater resource.”
Fondomonte said in a statement that the allegations are “totally unfounded.”
“We will defend any potential action against Fondomonte and our rights vigorously before the competent authorities,” the statement said.
Arizona Sues Saudi-Owned Farm Draining Groundwater in the Desert is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the US criminal justice system.
Amairani Salinas was 32 weeks pregnant with her fourth child in 2023 when doctors at a Texas hospital discovered that her baby no longer had a heartbeat. As they prepped her for an emergency cesarean section, they gave her midazolam, a benzodiazepine commonly prescribed to keep patients calm. A day later, the grieving mother was cradling her stillborn daughter when a social worker stopped by her room to deliver another devastating blow: Salinas was being reported to child welfare authorities. A drug test had turned up traces of benzodiazepine—the very medication that staff had administered before wheeling her into surgery.
For Victoria Villanueva, pregnant with her first child, the drug detected in her baby’s system was morphine. Villanueva had arrived at an Indiana hospital at 41 weeks to have her labor induced. To ease the pain of her contractions, doctors gave her narcotics. A day later, a social worker told the new mother, the baby’s meconium—or first bowel movement—had tested positive for opiates. Now, instead of bonding with her baby, Villanueva shook with fear that her newborn could be taken away. “I didn’t even know how to function,” she recalled.
What happened to Salinas and Villanueva are far from isolated incidents. Across the country, hospitals are dispensing medications to patients in labor, only to report them to child welfare authorities when they or their newborns test positive for those same substances on subsequent drug tests, an investigation by The Marshall Project and Reveal has found.
The positive tests are triggered by medications routinely prescribed to millions of birthing patients in the United States every year. The drugs include morphine or fentanyl for epidurals or other pain relief, anxiety medications, and two different blood pressure meds prescribed for C-sections.
In a time of increasing surveillance and criminalization of pregnant women since the end of Roe v. Wade, the hospital reports have prompted calls to police, child welfare investigations, and even the removal of children from their parents.
The reporting for this story included interviews with two dozen patients and medical professionals and a review of hundreds of pages of medical and court records. Some spoke about cases on condition of anonymity because the custody of children is at stake.
“The hospitals are at fault. The clinicians are at fault. Our policies are at fault.”
Dr. Davida Schiff
In New York, a mother with no history of drug use lost custody of her toddler and newborn for five months after she tested positive for fentanyl that the hospital had given her in her epidural. In Oklahoma, when a mother tested positive for meth, sheriff’s deputies removed her newborn and three other children. They were held in foster care for 11 days, until a confirmation test proved that the culprit was a heartburn medication the hospital had given the patient.
By the time of Villanueva’s hospital stay in 2017, researchers and doctors had known for years that medications can rapidly pass from mother to baby, causing positive drug test results. Two tests from Villanueva’s prenatal visits and another test done right before she went into labor all showed the mother had no drugs in her system. The morphine given to Villanueva for her contractions was documented in her medical records. But the staff reported her to the state child welfare agency anyway, hospital records show.
Marion General Hospital in Indiana did not respond to requests for comment. Brian Heinemann, a spokesperson for the Indiana Department of Child Services, declined to comment on Villanueva’s case but said policy has since changed to ensure that drug screen results alone are not used to substantiate an allegation of abuse or neglect.
Kimberly Walton, a spokesperson for the Texas Health Resources system, declined to answer questions about Salinas’ case but said that doctors order drug tests if there is a concern about patient health and that they are required “to report suspected illegal drug use that could endanger the health or safety of a child.”
Credit: Marci Suela/The Marshall Project and Getty ImagesHospital drug testing of pregnant women, which began in the 1980s and spread rapidly during the opioid epidemic, was intended in part to help identify babies who might experience withdrawal symptoms and need extra medical care. Federal law requires hospitals to alert child welfare agencies anytime such babies are born. But a previous investigation by The Marshall Project and Reveal found that the relatively inexpensive pee-in-a-cup tests favored by many hospitals are highly susceptible to false positives, errors, and misinterpretation—and many hospitals have failed to put in place safeguards that would protect patients from being reported over faulty test results.
In some cases examined by The Marshall Project, doctors and social workers did not review patient medications to find the cause of a positive test. In others, providers suspected a medication they prescribed could be the culprit but reported patients to authorities anyway.
“How much harm to birthing people are we willing to allow? Our patients are being harmed until we can get our act together,” said Dr. Davida Schiff, whose hospital network, Mass General Brigham in New England, instituted a new policy this year that directs providers to drug test patients, with their consent, only when medically necessary. The new policy also halted automatic reporting of positive test results. Hospitals have a responsibility to address the testing problems, she said. “The hospitals are at fault. The clinicians are at fault. Our policies are at fault.”
The risks from giving medications to birthing patients and then testing them for illicit substances have been well documented. A 2022 study by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital found that 91 percent of women given fentanyl in their epidurals tested positive for it afterward. Other studies have found that mothers can quickly pass these medications on to their babies. A baby’s positive drug test “cannot and should not be used to identify fentanyl drug abuse in mothers,” said Athena Petrides, the lead researcher of one of the studies at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Despite these warnings, hospitals often lack policies requiring providers to review a patient’s records to see what medications they received before reporting them to authorities. Mandatory reporting laws protect doctors from liability for reports made “in good faith,” even if they turn out to be wrong. And toxicologists and doctors say many doctors lack the time and expertise needed to adequately interpret drug test results.
“It’s not something routinely taught in medical school or even residency,” said Dr. Tricia Wright, an OB-GYN and professor at University of California, San Francisco Medical Center who specializes in substance use disorders in pregnancy. “It’s all up to individuals, who make their own interpretations.” In 2021, Wright helped change the policy at her hospital, one of the country’s leading teaching facilities, to direct doctors not to drug test patients unless medically necessary.
While drug tests can help pediatricians determine how to treat an infant who may experience withdrawal symptoms, many OB-GYNs say that positive drug test results do not generally inform the mother’s medical care, so they have little reason to dwell on them.
Instead, at many hospitals, it is social workers—responsible for contacting child welfare agencies—who are more likely to pay attention to drug test results. Some hospitals require social workers to automatically file a report for any positive test, while other facilities first perform an assessment to determine whether a parent might be a risk to the baby.
But hospital social workers are often overworked, said Kylie Haines, who manages a program for pregnant women with opioid use disorder at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, one of the top maternity teaching hospitals in the nation. Social workers generally have even less training than doctors on drug testing and little authority to question test results, she said. Investigating the cause of a positive drug test is not considered part of their job.
“We’re not medical providers,” said Haines, a licensed social worker herself. “We can’t interpret drug screens.”
The timing of the tests can also make it tricky to interpret them. In theory, the best time to take a urine sample for drug testing is when a patient arrives at the hospital, before receiving medications. But it is common for hospitals to test urine samples taken from a birthing patient’s catheter bag or to request a urine sample after medications have already been administered, providers said.
Newborn drug tests can add another layer of complexity. While urine tests can detect potential drug use over a period of days, testing the baby’s meconium can uncover illicit substances going back months. Meconium tests are widely considered to be the gold standard for newborn drug testing because they can indicate potential drug use earlier in pregnancy, a possible sign of addiction.
But in some cases, there is no way to tell whether a baby’s positive test was caused by a medication the hospital dispensed or a substance the mother used earlier. Nor do such tests tell providers how much or how frequently a person may have used drugs—for example, if a patient used substances in the past but stopped when she realized she was pregnant. “You actually don’t know,” Schiff said, “which is kind of a mess.”
“It makes me sick to think of all the moms that have come through and said they don’t use fentanyl and we don’t believe them.”
Lisa Grisham
Medications such as morphine or fentanyl have led some patients to get flagged as opioid users. Ephedrine and phenylephrine, medications for low blood pressure that are commonly prescribed during C-sections, have caused false positives for meth. The Marshall Project also found that women were questioned over positive drug tests after hospitals gave them sedatives such as benzodiazepines or barbiturates.
Ephedrine and phenylephrine, medications for low blood pressure used during cesarean sections, can trigger positive results for meth in drug tests. Credit: Marci Suela/The Marshall Project and Getty ImagesWhen women are flagged by a positive drug test result, other aspects of their lives can quickly come under suspicion. Medical conditions or birth complications that can be associated with addiction—such as high blood pressure, a placenta that separates before birth, or a premature birth—may mistakenly be viewed as further evidence that a pregnant patient used drugs. Through the lens of a positive drug test, even something as innocuous as missing some prenatal appointments becomes potential evidence that a mother is a risk to her baby. And patients who had traumatic experiences giving birth may suddenly find themselves under threat.
In 2023, Salinas was still in a haze of grief after delivering her stillborn baby when she learned she would be reported to child welfare authorities. Salinas had no idea the hospital had given her the benzodiazepine for which she tested positive and denied using the medication. She had also tested positive for Delta-9, a legal hemp-derived product, which she said she had bought at the grocery store. But soon, Salinas found herself under a monthslong investigation, trying to fight off paralyzing depression while processing her grief and caring for her other children.
Amairani Salinas tested positive for midazolam, the same medication her hospital record shows she had received there hours earlier. Credit: Photo illustration by The Marshall Project; Courtesy of Amairani Salinas“I still have three live children. They still need to eat. They still need to get up for school. They still need their mom,” Salinas recalled thinking as she was being questioned.
Officials closed the case about four months later as “unsubstantiated.” But it wasn’t until a year later that Salinas read through her medical records with a Marshall Project reporter and discovered the cause of the positive test.
Marissa Gonzales, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, declined to discuss Salinas’ case, citing confidentiality laws.
Salinas said she wondered why child welfare workers weren’t spending their time investigating allegations of actual child abuse. “Why are you giving your attention to this person who’s a good mom, who hasn’t done anything, instead of a child who may actually be in danger?”
In recent years, studies have found that drug tests aren’t necessarily the best way to identify someone with a substance use problem—a simple screening questionnaire is also effective. Leading medical groups advise hospitals to use questionnaires instead of universal drug tests. But hospital drug testing—and reporting—of labor and delivery patients remains ubiquitous.
In at least 27 states, hospitals are required by law to alert child welfare agencies about a positive test or a potential exposure to the baby. But not a single state requires hospitals to confirm test results before reporting them. Hospitals routinely contact authorities without ordering confirmation tests or waiting to receive the results.
Not every state explicitly requires reporting a positive test, but many hospitals do so anyway. In 2022 alone, more than 35,000 babies were reported to child welfare authorities as substance-exposed, federal data shows, with no guarantee that the underlying test results were accurate.
“I couldn’t even really enjoy properly my child being born.”
Victoria Villanueva
“The system is primed for a report,” said Dr. Mishka Terplan, an OB-GYN in Maryland and a leading researcher on substance use disorders during pregnancy. “To slow it down, or to stop it, takes effort.”
The consequences of a faulty drug test can be especially severe for people with histories of addiction, who are less likely to be believed when they protest that the positive test was caused by a hospital medication. In this environment, a patient’s word is often pitted against a single drug test, and it’s up to an individual doctor, nurse, or social worker to decide whether to ferret out the truth.
Lisa Grisham, a nurse in Arizona, recalled the case of a patient in recovery for opioid use disorder who tested positive for fentanyl. The woman insisted that another nurse had given her the medication during labor, even though it was not listed in her hospital records. Grisham, the director of a hospital program for substance-exposed infants at Banner University Medical Center in Tucson, took it upon herself to investigate and eventually tracked down the nurse, who confirmed the patient’s explanation.
“It makes me sick to think of all the moms that have come through and said they don’t use fentanyl and we don’t believe them,” Grisham said.
Victoria and her children share strawberries outside their home in Indiana on a November afternoon in 2024.Villanueva was 18, newly married, and still working on her GED when she gave birth to her first baby. As a child, she had been taught to be honest with medical providers. So during hospital admission, she told a nurse that she had briefly experimented with drugs such as marijuana and acid when she was 15. She hadn’t used drugs since, she said.
When she was admitted, Villanueva took a drug test that came back negative for any illicit substances—the same result as the two drug tests from her prenatal appointments. Then she received medicine to induce labor, and her contractions began. They were so painful, Villanueva recalled, that she was relieved when a nurse told her she was giving her morphine.
The day after Villanueva gave birth, an investigator with the Indiana Department of Child Services arrived. The hospital had informed the agency about Villanueva’s “history of drug use,” according to medical records. Without her knowledge, Villanueva said, the hospital also sent her daughter’s meconium for testing, which found the morphine.
Villanueva was certain that her hospital records would prove she had received morphine, and she was right. The drug test results even stated, “Drugs administered during labor and delivery may be detected in meconium.”
But even after the investigator received the hospital records, Villanueva said, the agency required her to submit to more drug tests and allow inspections of her home. Finally, after several weeks, the agency closed the case, Villanueva recalled.
Only after the investigators were out of her life did Villanueva feel that she could finally revel in her baby’s birth and allow herself to be happy.
“I couldn’t even really enjoy properly my child being born,” she recalled. “Until after the fact, when they were gone.”
The Marshall Project reporters Weihua Li, Andrew Rodriguez Calderón, Nakylah Carter, and Catherine Odom contributed to this story.
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Hospitals Gave Women Medications During Childbirth—Then Reported Them for Using Illicit Drugs is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
Melissa Turnage approached the 12-year-old girl with the imposing affect of a cop: arms crossed, lips pursed, badge visible, tone skeptical.
“So, you don’t know how many times this has happened this week?”
Taylor Cadle slouched on a couch, staring at her lap and picking at her nails. That morning, in the summer of 2016, she had gotten into a fight with her adoptive parents when they took away her phone on the ride to church, on the outskirts of Tampa, Florida. A minister’s wife, noticing Taylor’s tear-stained face, pulled her into an office to ask what was going on. Taylor hadn’t been planning to tell her everything, but it all came spilling out. The minister called the police, and now Turnage, a detective with the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, was standing before her.
Taylor spoke tentatively, in barely more than a whisper, as she told Turnage in a recorded interview that her adoptive father, Henry Cadle, had been sexually assaulting her for years. The inappropriate touching had started when she was 9 years old, shortly after Henry and Lisa, Taylor’s great uncle and his wife, had adopted her. Over time, the abuse escalated. Now, he assaulted her “anytime he gets the chance,” she said. She didn’t like going with him on errands because it happened then, on the side of a quiet road that cut through a swamp. Standing outside the car, he would put his privates inside of her privates, she told Turnage. Taylor couldn’t say how many times he had raped her, but it had happened just the night before. He did it whenever they drove to get milk, too, which was three times a week.
“That’s a lot of driving,” Turnage said.
Taylor said nothing.
Turnage was embarking on the type of investigation that her boss, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd, had made a core mission of his agency. Judd is a beloved figure in Polk County, where he has served as sheriff for the past two decades and was just reelected to his sixth term. Known for his tough-on-crime rhetoric and social media presence, Judd gives a near-daily “morning briefing” to his 700,000 TikTok followers, holding up mugshots of suspects, telling the stories of crimes they allegedly committed—from stealing baby formula to driving drunk—and welcoming them to jail, which he calls “Grady Judd’s Bed & Breakfast.” Fans buy Grady Judd bobbleheads, Grady Judd mugs, and sweatshirts reading “God Guns and Grady Judd.”
An old joke that has been repeated by Judd himself is that the most dangerous place in Polk County is between Judd and a camera. He’s a regular guest on Fox News, where he shares his outspoken views about subjects ranging from the dangers of undocumented immigrants to the peril of looters after hurricanes, and where the stories in Judd’s TikTok posts often find a national audience.
A Grady Judd figurine in Polk County, Florida Credit: Melanie MetzBut he claims his top priority is protecting children from sexual predators. The county’s deputies have traveled to faraway places—from Colorado to Guatemala—to extradite men accused of victimizing children in Polk County. “If you think that you’re going to physically, sexually, or emotionally abuse a child and I’m not going to get in there and protect them, you’re making a big mistake,” he told MSNBC in 2015. In 2020, President Donald Trump appointed Judd to a federal council overseeing all programs related to juvenile delinquency, and missing and exploited children.
One might think that someone accused of the crimes Henry Cadle was accused of would be a prime target for the Polk County Sheriff’s Office. But when Turnage spoke with him, on a patio outside the church, she kept the interview brief and light. Henry, who was 57, spoke about his relationship with Taylor with a breezy confidence. She had anger issues and could be difficult—traits he attributed to her rocky upbringing—but he loved her to death. “Does she have dad wrapped around her finger? Yes. Everybody will tell you that,” Henry said.
Rather than asking him if he had sexually abused Taylor, Turnage floated a theory: “Basically, Taylor, I guess, has made up these allegations, okay? That you have been sexually abusing her.”
Henry brimmed with righteous indignation. “Why in the heck she would conjure up something like this about me, I don’t know. Only thing I’ve ever did with that kid is loved her.”
To hear a clip from Detective Melissa Turnage’s interview with Henry Cadle, listen below. A transcript for this audio can be found here.
Lisa Cadle was also dumbfounded by the allegations against her husband. Taylor adored Henry, Lisa told Turnage, and always begged to go with him on errands. She was quick to point out that Taylor was “mouthy” and “has been known to say things.” Turnage assured Lisa that kids had a way of making unfounded accusations “when things don’t go the way that they want it to.”
“Back when we were younger, it was, you know, ‘We’ll call [the Department of Children and Families] and say you abused me,’” Turnage said. “Now it’s, ‘We get sexually abused.’”
By the time Turnage spoke to Taylor again, later that afternoon, her skepticism sounded palpable. Turnage focused on one particular inconsistency: whether Taylor actually liked going for rides with Henry. “If you’re mad because you got your phone taken away, let’s say that now and be done with it,” she said in the recorded interview. “Because I have three stories that say you like to be with your dad, you’re daddy’s little girl, you love to go with him because you like to get out of the house.”
Taylor went silent. By necessity, she had developed a keen sense of the unsaid moods and whims of the adults around her. She had done the mental math when she joined Henry on the car ride the night before to visit his sister in the hospital. Taylor thought the somber occasion would keep her safe. But after the hospital and a quick stop at Taco Bell, Henry pulled into the Handy gas station and came out with a box of condoms stuffed into his front pocket, and she knew she had miscalculated.
Now, faced with an irritated deputy, Taylor realized she miscalculated again: She assumed the police would believe her.
“They’re going to pull you from your mom and your brother, and you’re going to have to go back into foster care.”
Melissa turnage
“What’s going on, Taylor?” Turnage asked. “Because you understand, if your dad goes to jail, he doesn’t come back.” There would be other consequences too, Turnage said. Her dad’s mower repair business would shut down. Her mom would lose the car while police checked it for DNA. She wouldn’t get the shoes she wanted, or the braces she needed. “They’re going to pull you from your mom and your brother, and you’re going to have to go back into foster care,” Turnage said.
A moment passed, and then another. Finally, in a small, strained voice, Taylor said, “Everything I told you earlier is not a lie.”
With that, Turnage told Taylor that she was going to the regional hospital “to have a sexual assault kit done.” Taylor didn’t know what that was.
To hear a clip from Detective Melissa Turnage’s interview with Taylor Cadle, listen below. A transcript for this audio can be found here.
Later that night, she slipped her arms through the sleeves of a too-big hospital gown and gingerly placed her feet into the stirrups. She shivered under the bright, fluorescent lights, nauseated from hunger and exhaustion. Although a doctor had walked her through what the examination would entail, Taylor was still shocked by the cold, hard metal thing that she later learned was called a speculum. As the doctor took one swab, and then another, and then another, Taylor clenched the side of the hospital bed, knuckles white, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Now 21 years old, Taylor has the same long hair and slight frame that she had when she was 12, but she no longer holds herself like she’s trying to make herself small. When we first met her in person, at an Airbnb for an interview in front of cameras and lights, she walked in as if she did this all the time, deftly setting her then-8-month-old daughter up for a nap in the bedroom before speaking, for nearly five hours straight, with the self-assurance and confidence of someone much older. She has a tattoo of the birthday of her son, who is 3 years old, in roman numerals on her left forearm, a nose ring, and dyed black hair—all decisions, she notes with a trace of pride, that she made despite Lisa’s disapproval soon after she turned 18.
Taylor Cadle at home with her two children. Credit: Melanie MetzBut perhaps the biggest act of defiance is that she has decided to speak publicly about what happened to her when she was 12. Asked if she wanted to use a pseudonym or just part of her name, she said no—she wants to use her full name, and she wants to share her whole story.
The way Taylor was treated—as a victim, but also as a suspect—flies in the face of best practices in handling sexual assault investigations. Her case isn’t an isolated one. In a multiyear investigation, the Center for Investigative Reporting identified hundreds of similar cases across the country in which police criminalized the very people reporting sexual assault.
“I think from the beginning—from our first interview—she had already had her mind made up about me. She made me feel like the monster.”
Taylor cadle
Armed with hours of recorded interviews, police reports and state records stemming from her report eight years ago, Taylor simmers with fury about how Turnage handled her allegation. “I think from the beginning—from our first interview—she had already had her mind made up about me,” she says. “She made me feel like the monster.”
But when she thinks about herself that night on the hospital bed, Taylor crumples. In court records from her case is a photo from the sexual assault exam, her 12-year-old self looking up at the camera from the hospital bed.
“Little me,” she said recently, her voice catching as she stared into her own eyes. “Broken inside. With a look of ‘Are you listening yet? Do you believe me yet?’”
Taylor’s earliest memories are of parenting her younger siblings. As a child, she gave them baths, made them food, and tucked them into bed. She was her mom’s “best friend,” she says. Taylor served as a lookout when her mom would steal drugs from her boyfriend, and she knew to pee in a cup and leave it under the bathroom sink when the probation officer came by.
“I worried about everything,” she says. “I stressed about everything that, quite honestly, a child should never have to worry about.”
When she was 7, amid drug use and violence at home, the Department of Children and Families placed Taylor into foster care, according to agency records. “I wasn’t relieved as much as I probably should’ve,” Taylor says. “It was still hard because being a child, and all you ever want is your mom.”
For the next year and a half, she bounced from foster home to foster home. It was a “scary, confusing” time, Taylor says. She desperately wanted to be reconnected with her parents and siblings, who had been placed in other homes. Her birth father had been a source of normalcy and stability before she was taken into state custody, but his drug use, too, precluded him from being cleared by DCF.
Cows graze in a field near the Cadles’ Polk County home. Credit: Melanie MetzTaylor’s tendency to assert control, key to her survival as a young child, became a liability that was pathologized in reports and case notes. Foster parents and case workers labeled her “defiant” and “bossy.” She had tantrums often and was accused of lying about little things, like stealing peanuts from the grocery store and taking another child’s phone. “Lying seems to have been a defense mechanism that has worked in the past to keep her safe,” noted one social worker in an assessment.
When Taylor was 8, Lisa and Henry “surfaced,” as it was described in a case manager’s notes. They were relatives of her birth father—Taylor didn’t really remember them—and were excited about adopting Taylor. They said their 6-year-old adoptive son wanted a big sister.
Taylor soon began making regular visits to the Cadles’ home in Polk City, partway between Tampa and Orlando. The family lived in a small mobile home surrounded by pastures and swamps, 45 minutes from the nearest Walmart. Taylor had reservations, telling staffers on her case that she was wary of moving again and scared of being rejected.
But she had little say in the matter: Two days before Taylor’s ninth birthday, her adoption was finalized. The Cadles had taken Taylor on shopping sprees and trips to SeaWorld during her weekend visits, but after the adoption, the family dynamic shifted. Discipline was harsh: Lisa was quick to smack Taylor across the mouth if she talked back, Taylor says, “but when Henry got ahold of us, it was a whole different story.” She still remembers having to wear jeans to school one sweltering day because his beating with a cooking spoon on her calves had left welts.
She felt claustrophobic in the cramped home, and begged Henry and Lisa to let her get out of the house. Lisa and her adoptive brother were homebodies, but Henry also liked to go for drives, so she went along.
It was on these long drives that he would assault Taylor, sometimes several times in a week, she says. A turnoff on an isolated backroad became his go-to spot. Across from a wilderness preserve, next to a cell tower access road, he would pull over.
Taylor tried to predict and avoid situations where he would see opportunity for abuse. “If I knew we were taking a back road or anything of the sort, I didn’t want to go because I knew what would happen,” she says. “I had to be on all 10 toes, 24-7.”
Fearful of going back to foster care, Taylor didn’t tell any authority figures—until that Sunday morning in July 2016, when she met Detective Melissa Turnage.
Statues outside the Polk County Sheriff’s Office. Credit: Melanie MetzTurnage was in her ninth year with the Polk County Sheriff’s Office and considered a model deputy, according to her performance reviews. Turnage’s “integrity is above reproach,” wrote her supervisor in the spring of 2015.
But mistakes quickly followed. In November 2015, during an interview with a man suspected of sexually assaulting a child, Turnage failed to read the suspect a key part of his Miranda rights—an omission that resulted in the suppression of the suspect’s confession. Turnage was suspended for eight hours, according to department records.
The following month, Turnage interviewed children who alleged their father was raping them, and then left for Christmas vacation without bringing the suspect in for questioning or updating her supervisors on the status of the case. While she was away, her colleagues found out about the seriousness of the accusations and immediately arrested the suspect. “Your decision to not complete this investigation or advise me of the interview results is inexcusable,” her supervisor wrote in a letter that year. “Disclosures made by children in this case must be acted upon immediately if the investigation allows for it.”
By August 2016, Turnage was in the middle of her investigation into Taylor’s case, and she wanted to do a “clarification interview” with Taylor—at a noisy truck stop parking lot. As cars whizzed by on the highway, Taylor thought it was an odd location to meet. Perhaps, she thought, it was out of convenience—the midpoint between the sheriff’s office and Tampa, where Taylor had been crashing with Henry’s adult daughter ever since that day in church.
Leaning against her car, Turnage said she’d gone through Taylor’s phone records, and saw that she was texting continuously at the time she said she was raped. Taylor explained that she used her phone as a barrier so Henry wouldn’t talk to her during the abuse. If that was the case, asked Turnage, why didn’t Taylor alert someone to the abuse while it was occurring? Taylor said she didn’t know.
Turnage looked for Henry on surveillance footage from the gas station where he supposedly bought condoms, she told Taylor, but he wasn’t there. Taylor had been quiet, if skeptical, in her interactions with Turnage up to this point, but now her temper flared. Henry was there, Taylor said, and it wasn’t her fault if Turnage couldn’t find evidence. “I am telling the truth,” she insisted. She stormed to her sister’s car and locked herself inside.
Polk County Courthouse in Bartow, Florida. Credit: Melanie MetzTurnage concluded that there wasn’t evidence to support a criminal charge against Henry. The surveillance footage turned up nothing. The car hadn’t shown any evidence of bodily fluids. The hospital exam hadn’t found evidence of trauma. Taylor had said the abuse happened near a pile of tires on a quiet road near the Cadles’ home, but Turnage only found a busy road with no tire pile in sight.
Sexual assault investigations involve sensitive gathering of information by trained professionals who understand the dynamics of abuse—ideally in neutral, safe, quiet settings with no distractions, said Jerri Sites, an expert in child abuse investigations who facilitates trainings on best practices. After listening to recordings of Turnage’s interviews, Sites concluded that they sounded like interrogations by a biased detective. “It seemed as though she was trying to pressure the child to recant,” she said. “It was really, really hard to listen to.”
Turnage didn’t bring the same skepticism to her interviews with Lisa and Henry. Her interview with Henry outside the church—the only time he was officially questioned—lasted just 20 minutes. During this time, he made a troubling admission. When asked if he would take a polygraph test, Henry declined. “I’ve had sex with a lot of people in the shower with my eyes closed, if you know what I mean,” he explained. “I’m a man.”
If Turnage was concerned about Henry acknowledging he had sexual thoughts about his adoptive daughter, she didn’t show it. “Daydreaming about it and answering questions in reference to the allegations are two totally different things,” she told him.
There were other missed opportunities during the investigation. There is no indication that Turnage asked for Henry to be forensically examined, even though the suspect’s body sometimes provides more evidence than the victim’s. When Turnage went looking for the remote road with the pile of tires, a location that Taylor described with the uncertainty of a 12-year-old who doesn’t drive, she never asked Taylor to join her to show her where it was.
Finally, Turnage erred in gathering a key piece of evidence: video of Henry buying condoms at a gas station. Surveillance footage from Henry and Taylor’s previous stop, Taco Bell, showed them leaving at 7:43 p.m. They should have arrived at the gas station about a half hour later, but confoundingly, Turnage requested footage starting 45 minutes later. In those missing 15 minutes, Henry likely would have already come and gone.
Turnage’s investigation came to a head after five months, in December 2016. She spoke with Taylor on the porch outside the Cadles’ home to deliver the news: The final results from the rape kit had come back, and there was no evidence of Henry’s DNA. “I’m not saying you’re lying,” Turnage told Taylor. “I just want to know why, if everything you said is true, why am I not finding anything?”
Taylor’s voice came out as a whimper. “I don’t know,” she said. “I swear on my life it happened.”
In fact, rape kits often don’t show evidence of abusers’ DNA, especially when more than 24 hours have passed since the abuse occurred, or when a condom was used—both of which applied in Taylor’s case.
“If it happened, there would be—there would be DNA found,” Turnage said. “And we didn’t find anything.”
If Taylor lived in another county, perhaps her case would have ended there: allegations made, no corroborating evidence found, no charge against the alleged abuser. But in Polk County, no wrongdoing is too small for a consequence. Sheriff Judd often quotes a phrase he learned from his late father: “Right is right, and wrong is never right.”
“Polk County has a very pro-arrest outlook,” said Joel Dempsey, a detective with the office until 2018. “If charges are deemed justifiable, then [suspects] are likely going to be charged.”
Inside the house, Turnage told Lisa that the sheriff’s office planned to move forward with a criminal charge against Taylor for lying to a law enforcement officer about a felony. Lisa was on board. “We know she’s mouthy, and she tries to act older than what she is,” she said.
Afterward, Turnage spoke with Taylor’s adoptive sister about what Taylor’s life would look like if she were sent to the juvenile detention center.
“You’re in your pretty little blue jumpsuit, with your little flip flops, and you’re housed with everybody else,” said Turnage. “She would come in and look like the pretty girl.”
Hearing bits and pieces of the conversation through the sliding porch door, Taylor had the distinct feeling that she was drowning.
Two days after meeting with Taylor at the Cadles’ home, Turnage filed an affidavit. The real crime wasn’t the alleged sexual abuse—it was that Taylor had given false information to a law enforcement officer, a first-degree misdemeanor. The victim of this crime, according to the affidavit, was the Polk County Sheriff’s Office.
Taylor Cadle, 21, wrote records requests to obtain documents and recordings from her 2016 and 2017 cases. Credit: Melanie MetzTaylor is one of hundreds of victims alleging sexual assault who have been charged with false reporting nationwide. No federal agency tracks the prevalence of false-reporting charges, but over a multiyear investigation, documented in the Emmy Award–winning film Victim/Suspect, the Center for Investigative Reporting (which produces Mother Jones and Reveal) identified more than 230 cases of reporting victims charged with crimes, originating from nearly every state.
Most criminal justice experts estimate that 2 to 8 percent of sexual assault allegations are actually false. But law enforcement officers tend to assume the rate of false reporting is much higher—in part because police officers don’t always receive training on how trauma can affect memory or behavior.
Through dozens of freedom of information requests, we amassed a first-of-its-kind trove of audio and video evidence documenting the police practice of criminalizing those who report sexual assault. We found examples of police officers lying, deploying interrogation techniques meant for criminal suspects that, when used on unsuspecting, traumatized people, can undercut their credibility and even cause them to recant. Of 52 cases analyzed closely, nearly two-thirds resulted in the alleged victim recanting. In nine cases, the recantation was the only evidence cited by police.
Most cases centered on adults accusing other adults, largely because juvenile arrests are not usually matters of public record. But a few examples emerged of children being charged.
In 2008, after an 11-year-old girl in Washington, DC, twice reported being sexually assaulted, she was charged with making a false report. But, as a Washington Post investigation detailed, detectives didn’t follow basic guidelines for how to treat victims of sexual assault. They lied to her, saying there was evidence contradicting her account, despite two medical reports confirming that she suffered genital injuries. Still, police and prosecutors wanted her punished for fabricating her report. After a plea deal, she was taken in as a ward of the District of Columbia, and spent more than two years in residential mental health facilities.
In 2014, a 12-year-old Indiana girl told police that a boy forced her to have sex with him. Phone records revealed that the boy apologized to her after the incident. Still, a detective challenged her use of the word “force”—she told the boy no, she said in a recorded police interview, but he didn’t hold her down. The detective sent the case to prosecutors, who charged her with lying.
We also learned of a 12-year-old girl in Polk County, Florida: Taylor. Last year, we sent Taylor a message on Facebook, explaining our investigation into police turning the tables on victims and asking if she’d like to talk about what happened to her. She immediately responded: “I’m sorry I’m shocked,” she wrote. “Is this real?” Within an hour, she called to talk.
There were few public records tied to the case due to confidentiality laws meant to protect children. So Taylor wrote records requests, signed release forms, and notarized documents to obtain case files and recordings from the sheriff’s office, the juvenile court, the circuit court, the Department of Children and Families, and the Department of Juvenile Justice. Then she shared them with us.
The culture of consequences that permeates the Polk County Sheriff’s Office applies to kids as well as adults. The same year as Taylor’s case, for example, the sheriff’s office accused an 11-year-old girl of lying about an attempted abduction. She, too, was charged with filing a false police report, which the sheriff’s office wrote on Facebook would “help re-enforce the lesson” after she wasted police resources.
Between 2019 and 2023, more children in Polk County were charged with misdemeanor obstruction of justice—an umbrella category that includes false reporting—than in any other Florida county. Children in Polk were twice as likely to face the charge than children in the state overall, according to an analysis of data from Florida’s Department of Juvenile Justice.
Such charges may be intended to make the community safer, but they can do the opposite, said Sites, the child abuse expert. “It’s hard enough to come forward in the first place,” she said, “and if the community feels that someone might be charged, people aren’t going to come forward.” Even in cases when a child isn’t telling the truth, she said, the response should be support services to help a child understand that it’s not okay to lie—but also efforts to understand why they did so in the first place. “Something is not right if somebody’s going to go to those lengths to falsely accuse somebody,” she said.
Turnage’s conclusion that Taylor was lying had bigger ramifications: DCF was supposed to conduct its own investigation, but it closed the case on the grounds that Turnage hadn’t found evidence of abuse.
The agency also appears to have used Taylor’s years of records against her. DCF records reference two allegations of sexual abuse before 2016. When Taylor was 5, her mother’s friend was arrested for sexually assaulting Taylor. And when Taylor was 11, DCF investigated a report made by her school that her gym teacher had touched her inappropriately. Taylor didn’t report the incident herself—rather, it was a rumor started by a group of girls. Taylor denied the rumor, and the case was closed with no indicators of abuse, according to the report.
“It’s hard enough to come forward in the first place, and if the community feels that someone might be charged, people aren’t going to come forward.”
JERRI SITES
But by 2016, the details didn’t seem to matter to DCF. In its report closing the investigation into Henry’s alleged abuse, the agency noted, “There is a pattern of...reports involving Taylor with allegations of sexual abuse and being touched by other males.”
Richard Wexler, who leads the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, said that child protective services agencies often give adoptive families the benefit of the doubt. “Whenever a child welfare agency investigates abuse in foster care or in an adoptive home it is, in effect, investigating itself—because they put the child there in the first place,” he said. “That creates an enormous incentive to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil and write no evil in the casefile.”
Remarkably, the same day Turnage filed the affidavit accusing Taylor of lying, she received a disciplinary letter from a lieutenant regarding another case. After investigating the sexual assault of a minor, Turnage had arrested the wrong person. A video of the assault showed the suspect had visible tattoos, but the man she detained had none. “It is imperative that as a detective you look at the totality of the circumstances and all evidence present in developing probable cause to make an arrest,” the letter read. It concluded, “You are a valued member of this agency and I am confident this will not recur.”
After four months with her adoptive sister, Taylor moved back in with the Cadles. Henry was friendly with her, full of smiles. “It was like a sticky sweet,” she says. He didn’t ask about the past four months or comment on the investigation—instead, he acted as if nothing had happened.
Taylor kept to herself, holing up in her room. She wrote about her dreams in her journal, like the one where she was trapped with an alligator in a locked room. Sometimes, she’d get so upset that she’d crouch on the floor, rocking back and forth, pulling out fistfuls of hair.
She vacillated between depression, fury, and exhaustion. She worried that if she stuck to her story in the face of her criminal charge, she would be sent to juvie. “I was basically like, I have no other choice,” she says. “I have to recant my story.”
In a meeting in February 2017 with Lisa, Henry, and her probation officer, Taylor said that she lied about being raped because she was mad about her cellphone being taken away. A report from the meeting reads, “Father extremely hurt by youth’s actions but forgives her.”
Three months later, on the way to the Polk County Courthouse for her arraignment, Lisa told her to “take it on the chin,” Taylor remembers. The state had offered Taylor a deal: If she pleaded guilty to her charge and completed the terms of her probation, the charge would be dismissed. Lisa and Taylor both signed a document agreeing for Taylor to “freely and voluntarily” waive her right to a lawyer and represent herself. She pleaded guilty to giving false information to a law enforcement officer.
Judge Mark Hofstad ordered probation, and signed an order for the terms: 15 hours of community service, a 7 p.m. curfew, and limits on leaving a tri-county area without permission from Taylor’s probation officer.
Taylor also had to write two apology letters: one to an unspecified officer, and the second to Henry. Without giving the words any thought, she scribbled in her journal and tore the pages out.
“Dear dad,
im sorry for what i did. I didn’t stop and think of my consequences of these actions. This will not happen again + im sorry.”
One evening in July 2017, a month after writing the apology letters, Taylor accompanied Henry to pick up a mower that needed repairs.
The sun was setting as they made their way home, and Henry pulled into a Dollar General to get something to drink. Taylor waited in the truck—now that she was 13, she could finally sit in front. As Henry walked out of the store, she saw that he was empty-handed, but his front pocket was bulging.
She realized several things simultaneously. The first was that he had bought condoms—which was confirmed when he got into the car and tossed a Lifestyles box in her lap. The second: She had thought that Henry would be too scared to abuse her again after all the scrutiny, but he had been emboldened. The third: She didn’t have anyone to call for help. The adults in her life—and the police—thought she was a liar.
Finally: She had to document what he did to her that night, so there would be no question about what had happened.
“I had to find the evidence for them,” she says. “Because if I didn’t find the evidence for them, I wasn’t too sure they would find it.”
As Henry drove, she made sure he could see that she was playing a game called Piano Tiles, tapping black piano keys as they floated across the screen. About 15 minutes into their drive, Taylor tilted the screen away from Henry for a moment and snapped a photo of the condom box.
Henry drove to the same spot as he had a year before, on the turnout of the quiet road that cut through the swamp. It was dusk outside, the road empty, the night quiet other than the chirping crickets and cows bellowing in a nearby pasture. As Henry walked around the back of the truck, Taylor recorded a six-second video panning to four crucial visuals: the radio clock reading 8:29 p.m., the back of Henry’s head, the condoms on the dashboard, and the view outside her window.
Then, she says, Henry unzipped his pants and ordered her to pull down hers. “You know what to do,” he said. Taylor’s Android allowed her to take photos by swiping up anywhere on the screen. When Henry told her to hurry up with her phone, she told him to wait a second—she was just closing applications. She swiped up again and again, silently snapping photos.
After it was all over, when he turned around to check for cars, she shoved the empty condom box under the seat. They began the drive home—AC pumping, pop music playing on the radio—and Taylor mentally collected more evidence: the white smear on the seat, the bushes where he threw a used tissue, the stretch of grass where he tossed unused condoms out the window as they drove.
Once home, Taylor told Lisa she was taking the dogs for a walk. Standing in the yard in the dark, she deliberated. She was terrified of calling the cops. If she wasn’t believed again, surely she’d face an even harsher punishment than the first time. But if she didn’t call the cops, nothing would change. The thought, on repeat: Am I going to do it?
She dialed 911.
Taylor describes the next few hours like scenes in a movie: the cars driving up, no lights or sirens, as Taylor had instructed, since Henry was sleeping. A cop’s flashlight through the backdoor. Taylor standing outside with an officer, showing the photos and video on her phone. The lights of cop cars bouncing off Henry’s vacant face as he was escorted through the yard in handcuffs. Taylor bawling after an officer asked her to go back to the godforsaken, freezing hospital in the middle of the night for another rape kit exam.
“I was fighting for my life, in a very quiet scream.”
Taylor Cadle
At first, Henry denied any wrongdoing. “I don’t know what the hell—why is she doing this again?” he told Polk County Detective Joel Dempsey in a recorded interview. It was only when Dempsey showed Henry the photos that Henry admitted that the photos were, in fact, of him.
Henry continued to deflect blame in recorded calls from jail, insisting that he had been set up. “I was dealing with a venomous snake,” he told his sister. In another call, he insisted, “It’s not all my fault neither. Yes, I’m the adult, but it’s not all my fault.”
Two days after the assault, Taylor sat through a videotaped forensic interview at a child advocacy center—the same child advocacy center and the same case worker she spoke to the year before. She spoke with urgency as she explained the evidence she had collected, still convinced that, somehow, Henry would work his way out of this.
“I mean, I really hope that they actually, like, take the time to, like, actually investigate and to listen to my side of the story before they just want to accuse me of giving false information,” Taylor told the case worker. “I tried everything. I did everything I could do.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBHPFQgLfSMToday, Taylor remembers this moment in vivid detail. “I was fighting for my life,” she says, “in a very quiet scream.”
The next day, Henry Cadle was charged with sexually assaulting Taylor.
“I don't remember any other case where the victim had the forethought or the intelligence to collect their own evidence and to be so thorough,” Dempsey said recently. “Just, unbelievable amount of presence of mind that she showed.”
Assistant State Attorney Joni Batie-McGrew, who approved the original false-reporting charge against Taylor, filed a motion to vacate Taylor’s probation and guilty plea. The information Taylor had provided to the police, the motion said, “has since been determined to be true.”
The Department of Juvenile Justice sent Taylor a letter terminating her supervision, adding that it was the department’s hope that the experience was beneficial to her.
In February 2019, Henry pleaded no contest to the sexual battery of a child. He was sentenced to 17 years in prison.
Taylor still lives in Polk County, just a half hour away from where she once lived with Lisa and Henry. She stays at home with her two kids—a 3-year-old boy and a 1-year-old girl—and the family’s massive pitbull mastiff while her fiancé works at an auto glass repair shop.
Motherhood comes naturally to Taylor. In the moments of chaos—when she’s trying to feed her baby and her toddler is climbing on her back and the dog is barking—she laughs. When her baby cries, she coos, “What’s wrong, girlie?” In her free time, Taylor vlogs about beauty and parenting in a way that’s refreshingly real, talking, for example, about how to wax your armpits or how dinner that night will be subs because the Walmart bread is getting stale.
In October, our interview with Taylor aired on PBS NewsHour. “Why punish me?” she said on camera, with an unflinching gaze. “What did I do for you to punish me?”
The video got millions of views on TikTok, and local and national publications picked up the story. Viewers flooded the comments sections of the Polk County Sheriff’s Office’s social media pages to demand justice for Taylor. But some of those comments mysteriously disappeared from view, prompting more outrage. Taylor decided to send Judd an email directly. She admired his work overall, she wrote, but she was outraged.
“I thought you guys were supposed to help? Not silence a victim.”
Judd has often said that the key to being a good sheriff is transparency with the public. One of his often-repeated phrases is: “If you mess up, then dress up, fess up, and fix it up.” But records show Henry Cadle’s arrest didn’t prompt any disciplinary action at the time. Judd has not responded to questions about the case publicly, or to Taylor.
Turnage didn’t respond to our attempts to reach her, and Judd’s office declined an interview. When we showed up at the sheriff’s office in August and asked to speak with Judd, we were told that a public information officer would come down to talk. Minutes later, we were told, she had been pulled into a meeting and didn’t know when she would be available. (A spokesperson told the Lakeland Ledger that the sheriff’s office wouldn’t speak to us because it “became clear they were not interested in accurately reporting an investigation that occurred in 2016.”)
Florida Senate Minority Leader Lauren Book, however, had more luck. A Democrat from Broward County, Book sponsored recent legislation requiring law enforcement to receive training in trauma-informed sexual assault investigations. After listening to audio of Turnage’s interviews that we shared with her, an incensed Book asked Judd for information about Taylor’s 2016 case.
Credit: Melanie MetzIn a letter to Book last month, Polk County Captain Dina Russell defended Turnage’s “thorough investigation” and doubled down on the same concerns with Taylor that Turnage had back in 2016: Taylor had said she didn’t like going on rides with Henry, but family members said otherwise. Henry wasn’t on the surveillance video buying condoms. Taylor was texting during the abuse, but, Russell wrote, “made no mention in her texts she was being abused.”
But after listening to a recording of an interview from the case, Russell acknowledged that Turnage’s approach didn’t meet the department’s standards. She sent Turnage a “letter of retraining” last month.
“Several of your questions and comments were inappropriate,” Russell wrote. “While your intent may have been to elicit the truth and gather essential information, referencing personal circumstances such as foster care or financial hardships can create an environment of discomfort, fear, mistrust is simply unacceptable.” The letter made no mention of the ramifications of these failures for Taylor, or the fact that Taylor was later deemed to be telling the truth.
The captain’s demands of Turnage were minimal: Within a week, she was required to complete an online course on interview and interrogation techniques. The captain’s conclusion echoed the disciplinary letter Turnage received in 2016, when she arrested the wrong suspect: “I am confident you will take the appropriate steps to prevent any similar events in the future.”
Turnage is still a detective, though she’s no longer in the special victims unit. Her latest performance review noted that she’s on track to become a sergeant.
Batie-McGrew, who prosecuted Taylor’s first case, also didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. But the state attorney’s office said in an email that after Taylor was proven to be telling the truth, they made a policy change: They now require that the office be consulted before charging a juvenile who claims to be a victim of sexual abuse, according to Jacob Orr, the chief assistant state attorney for the 10th Judicial Circuit.
Since Taylor’s case, Orr said, the office has charged three other juveniles with falsely reporting sexual abuse. He said those cases included “irrefutable evidence proving the falsehood” of their claims, but he didn’t elaborate on how police were able to irrefutably prove that the children were not sexually abused.
For Taylor, three more children is far too many. “It should have stopped with me,” she says. “It shouldn’t have even gotten to me, but it should have stopped with me.”
Once in a while, Taylor drives on the quiet road through the swamp, past the spot where Henry abused her. It’s still hard, but having her kids in the backseat makes clear how much things have changed over the past seven years. She’s no longer a child being driven there against her will, bracing herself for the worst, preparing to crouch on the floorboard if anyone drives by.
Now, she is in the driver’s seat. “It’s a sense of relief, in a way,” she says. “I’m going past this spot because this is the route I chose to take.”
Reveal data reporter Melissa Lewis contributed data analysis.
The Unflinching Courage of Taylor Cadle is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
Content warning: The story discusses childhood sexual abuse.
In Polk County, Florida, where its sheriff has said his department will “go to the ends of the earth” to arrest child predators, one child victim was left wondering how she ended up on the other side of the law.
Taylor Cadle was 12 years old when she disclosed to a trusted adult that her adoptive father had been sexually abusing her since she was 9. Law enforcement was quick to respond, and almost just as quick to suspect that Taylor had made up the allegations. The lead detective, Melissa Turnage, began to question Taylor aggressively, even threatening her with returning to foster care if she continued with her allegations.
“I told her time and time and time and time again that I am not the liar here,” Taylor said of the detective.
Despite Taylor’s pleas, Turnage eventually sought criminal charges against her for lying to police.
For the Emmy Award-winning Center for Investigative Reporting and Netflix documentary Victim/Suspect, I found hundreds of others nationwide who, like Taylor, began as alleged victims reporting sexual assaults to police and ended up criminal suspects. My reporting uncovered shocking police missteps in several of those investigations. All of those alleged victims remain adamant that their reports were truthful.
In a surprising development in her case, Taylor vindicated herself. With our partner PBS NewsHour, I went to Polk County to meet Taylor—and hear how she finally put her abuser in prison.
Related: The Unflinching Courage of Taylor Cadle
A Florida Teen’s Remarkable Fight to Put Her Rapist Behind Bars is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
Laura C. Morel is examining maternity homes as a part of The New York Times’ Local Investigations Fellowship. For this article, she interviewed, among others, 48 current or former residents, employees, and volunteers from homes across Florida.
In Naples, Florida, Sunlight Home offered refuge and a fresh start for pregnant women on the brink of homelessness. It also required them to get permission before leaving the property and to download a tracking app on their phones, former residents said and its policies show.
At Hannah’s Home of South Florida, near West Palm Beach, women needed a pastor’s approval to have romantic relationships and were compelled to attend morning prayer, according to former residents, employees, and volunteers. They also had to hand over their food stamps to pay for communal groceries, a practice that two government assistance experts said most likely violates the law.
In many parts of Florida, where housing costs are soaring and lawmakers have sharply curtailed abortion access, pregnant women and teens who need a safe, stable place to live are increasingly turning to one of their few options: charity-run maternity homes.
The homes, most of which are affiliated with churches or Christian nonprofits, often help women and teens as they flee abuse, age out of foster care, or leave drug rehabilitation.
But Florida allows most homes to operate without state standards or state oversight. An examination by The New York Times and Reveal found that many homes require residents to agree to strict conditions that limit their communications, their financial decisions, and even their movements.
After Kristina Atwood lit incense in her bedroom at Genesis House in Melbourne, Florida, she was told to wake her two children and leave immediately, she said. Credit: Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesHomes often disclose the rules to women before they move in and sometimes post them online. Codes of conduct are common in residential programs. Still, in interviews, women who lived in some maternity homes said they had not anticipated how burdensome the rules would be.
“I felt like Sunlight Home was dehumanizing, almost like we were criminals, not single mothers,” said Kara Vanderhelm, 33, who lived at the home for about eight months until July.
At several homes, residents faced serious consequences for violating rules. In some instances, employees called police when women questioned their authority or left the property without permission. In others, women said they were expelled with little notice.
After Kristina Atwood lit incense in her bedroom at Genesis House in Melbourne one night in June 2021, she was told to wake her two children and leave immediately, she said. The home’s director, Kristen Snyder, said employees had warned Atwood that fire of any kind was not allowed. Atwood, 35, said she did not recall any warnings.
“I had nowhere else to go,” she said.
For decades, maternity homes were institutions where unmarried pregnant women could give birth in secret and put their babies up for adoption. Most shut down by the 1970s, when access to birth control had widened.
More recently, however, the homes have experienced a nationwide renaissance. The number of homes has grown by nearly 40 percent in the past two years and now surpasses 450, according to Heartbeat International, a national anti-abortion group that supports maternity housing.
Mike Carroll, a former secretary of the Florida Department of Children and Families, oversees a network of social services programs, including a licensed, faith-based maternity home. Credit: Zack Wittman for The New York TimesHomes today typically focus on keeping mothers and babies together. Many let expectant mothers, and occasionally women with children, stay for free so they can save money and find a permanent place to live. Women often learn about them through social services providers or anti-abortion pregnancy centers and move in voluntarily.
In Florida, maternity homes that house pregnant teenagers are subject to oversight. Those that admit minors in the foster care system must obtain state licenses, which entails meeting qualification and training requirements for employees, among other standards, and allowing state inspections.
Other homes with teenagers can instead register with the nonprofit Florida Association of Christian Child Caring Agencies, an alternative for voluntary, faith-based programs that forgo government funding. The association conducts its own inspections and requires less training and formal education for employees, a review of its standards shows.
But about half of the maternity homes in Florida do not accept pregnant teenagers and can therefore develop their own standards and rules. Several of those homes are staffed by employees who lack relevant professional experience, people who worked in them said.
The Times and Reveal identified 27 total homes in Florida. The news organizations examined 17 of them by touring some facilities, reviewing published policies, examining hundreds of pages of police reports, and interviewing 48 current or former residents, employees, and volunteers.
The news organizations found that homes with mandatory religious programs and restrictions on outings and communications tended to be unregulated or registered with the religious nonprofit. Many licensed homes did not have such rules, even though state standards do not explicitly prohibit them.
Hannah’s Home of South Florida, near West Palm Beach. Credit: Zack Wittman for The New York TimesSome directors of homes with strict rules said that they were necessary to maintain order and that they had limited residents’ movement to keep them away from drug users and abusive people. The Florida Association of Christian Child Caring Agencies said the restrictions in its homes were meant to “help each client break the cycles of poverty and addiction to find hope and healing in Christ.”
In a statement, Sunlight Home said residents regularly leave the property for job interviews, work, and appointments, but employees “provide some accountability to ensure their safety.”
In a separate statement, the chief executive of Hannah’s Home, Karen Hilo, said that her home’s food-stamp practices did not violate any laws and that its other rules were in place to “curtail behaviors and attitudes which can undermine individuals’ and the entire group’s success.”
Other home leaders said their programs were improving the lives of mothers and children. Some had helped residents get benefits like day care vouchers and food stamps. “We have women who go to work every day,” said Snyder, of Genesis House. “It’s not enough.”
Valerie Harkins, who oversees maternity housing for Heartbeat International, said more programs nationwide were embracing a more clinical approach by hiring social workers. “We want women to have services,” she said. “We want women to have access to help.”
Social services experts agreed that maternity homes offer vital aid. But the inconsistencies in care and oversight are troubling, said Mike Carroll, a former secretary of the Florida Department of Children and Families who now oversees a network of social services programs, including a licensed, faith-based maternity home.
“It can lead to some pretty abusive situations,” Carroll said.
Living Under a MicroscopeRachel Hunt, 29, was six weeks pregnant, fresh out of detox, and homeless at the start of 2022. Employees at the treatment program she had just completed helped her find Hannah’s Home, which is registered with the Christian nonprofit.
At first, Hunt found Hannah’s Home charming: pale yellow with green front doors and located in a leafy, residential neighborhood in Tequesta. It could house up to eight women and their babies.
But Hunt said she felt as if she were living under a microscope. There were security cameras in the living room and entryway, a common feature at both regulated and unregulated homes.
In interviews, 10 former residents, volunteers, and employees described strict rules at Hannah’s Home. For the first month, cellphones were prohibited and visitors were not allowed. Morning prayer, art therapy, and nutrition classes were mandatory.
Jadyn Merrill, who moved in during the summer of 2022, said she quit her job at a retail store and canceled medical appointments to avoid missing the required programs. With no income, she fell behind financially, she said.
Several women also said the air-conditioning system struggled to cool the women’s bedrooms on hot summer days. The babies napped wearing only diapers, with fans trained on their cribs.
After Rachel Hunt left Hannah’s Home, she and her daughter moved in with her parents in North Carolina. Credit: Kate Medley for The New York TimesHilo, the chief executive, said in her statement that Hannah’s Home is a voluntary program that requires a “significant commitment” from residents.
“We do not merely meet a housing need,” Hilo wrote. “We offer a comprehensive program which is available from the time a pregnant woman commits until her baby is 2 years old. Ultimately, their motivation needs to be intrinsic for the program to be successful.”
Hilo characterized the religious programming as optional. She said an air-conditioning unit was replaced four months ago.
In a statement, the Christian nonprofit said it does not oversee the care of adults who live in its registered homes. The group has denied requests for copies of its inspection reports, asserting that they are not subject to Florida open records laws. Last month, The Times filed a lawsuit against the group seeking access to the reports.
Rachel Hunt’s room in Hannah’s Home. Credit: Courtesy of Rachel HuntIn some ways, Hunt said, Hannah’s Home changed her life for the better: She found a sense of community and stayed for months after her daughter was born in 2022. But many rules felt overly restrictive, she said. Last year, she missed several morning prayer sessions and let her mother into the home’s “private residential area,” which was not allowed. Soon after, she was advised that any further violations would lead to her removal from the program, a warning letter shows.
After returning late from an out-of-state trip this past January, Hunt and her daughter were kicked out, she said and text messages between her and multiple employees show.
Hilo said Hunt was expelled because she “consistently violated rules that are in place to ensure the safety of all residents.”
Hunt had wanted to build a life with her daughter in Florida, she said, but without Hannah’s Home, she could not afford a place to live. She and her daughter moved in with her parents in North Carolina. “I felt like a failure,” she said.
‘It Isn’t a Correctional Institute’Many, though not all, unlicensed homes imposed similar restrictions as a condition of residency, policies and interviews show.
Two required sexual abstinence. Three conducted random searches of rooms and belongings. At least six mandated attendance at morning prayer, church services, Bible study, or a Christian 12-step program, activities that some former residents said felt like religious indoctrination.
One of those homes, Divine Mercy House in Jacksonville, let residents choose a church and allowed for absences. “I’m very flexible,” said the executive director, Amy Woodward. “I’m not going to force anyone to go to church when their baby is sick.”
At Divine Mercy, outings longer than 30 minutes required written notice at least 24 hours in advance and were subject to approval. Woodward said the rule was intended to ensure the safety of residents who had fled abusive relationships.
“I have really tried my absolute hardest to create an environment that is just peaceful and uplifting,” she said.
Restrictions on cellphone use were also common. Residents of the Inn Ministry in Jacksonville had to leave their phones downstairs overnight—a rule instituted to prevent disruptive conversations, the director, Judith Newberg, said. The house had a landline telephone upstairs for emergency use, she said.
Women at Sunlight Home had to download a tracking app and lock their phones in a safe overnight, they said. Credit: Felicity FordMelissa Radey, a professor of social work at Florida State University who has published research on licensed maternity homes in Florida, said employees sometimes believe that such rules protect residents from traffickers and other potential threats.
“There could be some very good intentions from providers,” Radey said.
Some home leaders said they were scaling back rules. Visitation House, an unregulated home in DeLand, stopped requiring residents to turn in cellphones at night because it deterred women from staying there, said the board president, Erin Kappiris.
“We don’t want these women to come and feel like they’re going into a penal system,” she said. “It isn’t a correctional institute.”
Sunlight Home, which is registered with the Christian nonprofit and housed up to eight residents and their babies, had some of the strictest rules among the homes reviewed by The Times and Reveal. Beyond the tracking app requirement and needing permission to leave, women had to lock their phones in a safe overnight, former residents said.
“Not being able to just step outside and go for a walk was hard,” said Emily Colts-Tegg, 24, who lived at the home this year from February to July. “It did take a toll on me.”
Former residents and employees also said home leaders withheld access to donated clothing and accessories by requiring women to first earn “Sunlight coins.” The coins were awarded for meeting personal goals.
An excerpt from the Sunlight Home code of conduct.Calls and messages to the chief executive, E.B. Yarnell, were not returned. In Sunlight Home’s statement, a lawyer representing the facility, David C. Gibbs III, called it a “voluntary rehabilitative program.” He said the home requires residents to agree to its rules before they move in. The coins were required only for luxury items like purses and jewelry, he added.
“Our program provides a safe, residential space for each client to begin getting quality rest and proper nutrition and feel safe and secure to start building their lives,” Gibbs wrote. “This atmosphere assists each client in creating new nondestructive habits that can help them towards a lifestyle that will allow them to survive and thrive.”
But Jessica Behringer, 38, who moved out in April after three months there, said the rules made life unbearable. “Everyone is being controlled there,” she said.
Three other residents departed for similar reasons in the last year, they told The Times and Reveal.
Recently, a complaint about the house led to litigation. This past summer, a former director of operations, Jenna Randazzo, posted an online review urging women to avoid Sunlight Home. In the review, she wrote that the home had stopped providing mental health therapy and transportation and that Yarnell had turned the “once nurturing environment into one resembling a strict boot camp.”
This month, Yarnell sued Randazzo over that review, asserting that it was false and defamatory. In the lawsuit, Yarnell denied that she had canceled mental health and transportation services or withheld residents’ access to donated items.
Randazzo declined to comment on the suit.
‘We Weren’t Prepared’In interviews, some women recalled positive experiences at unlicensed homes. One said she had been raised in a religious family and did not mind the church requirements.
Another, Alice Payne, who stayed with Brehon Family Services in Tallahassee, appreciated the help employees gave during her infant daughter’s bouts of colic in 2014. “I don’t know where I would have been without Brehon House,” she said, adding that the home did not monitor residents or enforce rigid rules.
But other women faced police visits or expulsion.
Eight homes routinely called police when residents defied rules or employees, a review of more than 500 pages of police records from the past six years found.
Calls to law enforcement are common in group homes, said Shamra Boel-Studt, an associate professor of social work at Florida State University and co-author of the maternity housing research with Radey. But she said staff with proper training and resources should be able to manage some situations, and best practice is to call police only when there is a safety risk.
Genesis House in Melbourne, Florida. Credit: Scott McIntyre for The New York TimesEmployees at Mater Filius Miami, which was licensed until 2023 but then opted for the religious registration, frequently called police, records show.
On August 26, 2021, an employee called to report that a 29-year-old resident had stopped eating, according to a police report. The employee wanted her detained under a state law that lets police temporarily commit people in a mental health crisis.
When officers arrived, employees said the woman had been “disobedient and noncompliant,” records show. Earlier that day, she had walked to a nearby Starbucks, which was not allowed at that time.
In the end, the woman was not detained. Officers advised home employees not to call police “when they had a mom that did not want to follow house rules,” records show.
Mater Filius Miami closed this year. Blanca Salas, who ran the home with her husband, Juan C. Salas, said in a phone interview that the reason was a lack of funding.
“We worked on this pro bono,” Blanca Salas said. “We did it for the love of God.”
She said the home needed the support of mental health professionals. “We weren’t prepared,” she said.
For women at other homes, failing to follow house rules had different consequences. Several homes gave women 24 hours or less to pack up and leave, according to their policies, police records, and interviews.
When Genesis House expelled Atwood after she lit incense, she initially refused to leave. After both she and staff members called police, Genesis House agreed to cover a hotel room for Atwood and her children that night, she said.
The next afternoon, she was homeless again.
Cheryl Phillips contributed reporting.
This article was reported in partnership with Big Local News at Stanford University.
These Maternity Homes Offer Sanctuary, But It Can Feel Oppressive is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the US criminal justice system; Mother Jones; and USA Today. Sign up for The Marshall Project’s newsletters and follow them on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, and Facebook.
Susan Horton had been a stay-at-home mom for almost 20 years, and now—pregnant with her fifth child—she felt a hard-won confidence in herself as a mother.
Then she ate a salad from Costco.
It was her final meal before going to Kaiser Permanente hospital in Santa Rosa, in Northern California, to give birth in August 2022. It had been an exhausting pregnancy. Her family had just moved houses, and Horton was still breastfeeding her toddler. Because of her teenage son’s heart condition, she remained wary of Covid-19 and avoided crowded places, even doctor’s offices. Now, already experiencing the clawing pangs of contractions, she pulled out a frozen pizza and a salad with creamy everything dressing, savoring the hush that fell over the house, the satisfying crunch of the poppy seeds as she ate.
Horton didn’t realize that she would be drug tested before her child’s birth. Or that the poppy seeds in her salad could trigger a positive result on a urine drug screen, the quick test that hospitals often use to check pregnant patients for illicit drugs. Many common foods and medications—from antacids to blood pressure and cold medicines—can prompt erroneous results.
Poppy seeds, used in salads and other foods, can yield positive results for opiates in urine tests. Credit: Andria Lo for The Marshall ProjectThe morning after Horton delivered her daughter, a nurse told her she had tested positive for opiates. Horton was shocked. She hadn’t requested an epidural or any narcotic pain medication during labor—she didn’t even like taking Advil. “You’re sure it was mine?” she asked the nurse.
If Horton had been tested under different circumstances—for example, if she was a government employee and required to be tested as part of her job—she would have been entitled to a more advanced test and to a review from a specially trained doctor to confirm the initial result.
But as a mother giving birth, Horton had no such protections. The hospital quickly reported her to child welfare, and the next day, a social worker arrived to take baby Halle into protective custody.
Kaiser Permanente declined to comment on Horton’s care. In a statement, it said the Santa Rosa hospital typically gets consent to drug-test patients for medical reasons, and as a mandated reporter under state law, it refers potential exposures of newborns to illicit drugs to child welfare authorities.
The Sonoma County Human Services Department said, in a statement, that it evaluates all referrals using “evidence- and research-based” methods, and if a report is deemed valid, it has a duty under state law to investigate.
Horton said the experience made her feel powerless and terrified.
“They had a singular piece of evidence that I had taken something,” she said, “and it was wrong.”
Susan Horton walks with her youngest daughter, Halle, in Cotati, California, in July 2024. Credit: Marissa Leshnov for The Marshall ProjectFor decades, state and federal laws have required hospitals across the country to identify newborns affected by drugs in the womb and to refer such cases to child protective services for possible investigation. To comply, hospitals often use urine drug screens that are inexpensive (as little as $10 per test), simple to administer (the patient pees in a cup), and provide results within minutes.
But urine drug screens are easily misinterpreted and often wrong, with false positive rates as high as 50 percent, according to some studies. Without confirmation testing and additional review, false positive results can lead hospitals to wrongly accuse parents of illicit drug use and report babies to child welfare agencies—which may separate newborns from their families, an investigation by The Marshall Project and Reveal has found.
It’s unclear how many of the nation’s 3.6 million births every year involve drug testing, but health care experts said urine screening is ubiquitous. Tens of thousands of infants are reported annually to authorities for in utero drug exposure, with no guarantee that the underlying tests are accurate, our analysis of federal data shows.
To report this story, The Marshall Project interviewed dozens of patients, medical providers, toxicologists and other experts, and collected information on more than 50 mothers in 22 states who faced reports and investigations over positive drug tests that were likely wrong. We also pored over thousands of pages of policy documents from every state child welfare agency in the country.
Problems with drug screens are well known, especially in workplace testing. But there’s been little investigation of how easily false positives can occur inside labor and delivery units, and how quickly families can get trapped inside a system of surveillance and punishment.
Hospitals reported women for positive drug tests after they ate everything bagels and lemon poppy seed muffins, or used medications including the acid reducer Zantac, the antidepressant Zoloft, and labetalol, one of the most commonly prescribed blood pressure treatments for pregnant women.
After a California mother had a false positive for meth and PCP, authorities took her newborn, then dispatched two sheriff’s deputies to also remove her toddler from her custody, court records show. In New York, hospital administrators refused to retract a child welfare report based on a false positive result, and instead offered the mother counseling for her trauma, according to a recording of the conversation. And when a Pennsylvania woman tested positive for opioids after eating pasta salad, the hearing officer in her case yelled at her to “buck up, get a backbone, and stop crying,” court records show. It took three months to get her newborn back from foster care.
Federal officials have known for decades that urine screens are not reliable. Poppy seeds—which come from the same plant used to make heroin—are so notorious for causing positives for opiates that last year the Department of Defense directed service members to stop eating them. At hospitals, test results often come with warnings about false positives and direct clinicians to confirm the findings with more definitive tests.
Yet state policies and many hospitals tend to treat drug screens as unassailable evidence of illicit use, The Marshall Project found. Hospitals across the country routinely report cases to authorities without ordering confirmation tests or waiting to receive the results.
At least 27 states explicitly require hospitals to alert child welfare agencies after a positive screen or potential exposure, according to a review of state laws and policies by The Marshall Project. But not a single state requires hospitals to confirm test results before reporting them. At least 25 states do not require child welfare workers to confirm positive test results, either.
While parents often lack protections, most of the caseworkers who investigate them are entitled to confirmation testing and a review if they test positive for drugs on the job, our analysis found.
Health care providers say there are medical reasons to test labor and delivery patients for drugs, including alerting doctors to watch a newborn for withdrawal symptoms. They also cite concerns about criminal and legal liability if they fail to report positive test results.
Even when a doctor refutes a positive result and vouches for their patient, hospitals may report the incorrect data anyway to child welfare agencies.
Dr. Yashica Robinson, an OB-GYN in Alabama. Credit: Lynsey Weatherspoon for The Marshall Project“It’s almost like a gut punch. You come to the hospital and you see a social work note on your patient’s chart,” said Dr. Yashica Robinson, an OB/GYN in Huntsville, Alabama, who has tried and failed several times to halt child welfare reports and investigations of patients with false positive results. “Once that ball is rolling, it’s hard to stop it,” Robinson said.
No government agency collects comprehensive data on false positive results or on how many pregnant patients are tested. And confidentiality laws that shield medical and child welfare records make it difficult for the public to understand how many families are affected.
In 2016, Congress mandated states to submit the number of “substance-affected” infants to the US Department of Health and Human Services. Not all states track every case, but from fiscal years 2018 through 2022, medical professionals reported at least 170,000 infants to child welfare agencies for exposure to substances, according to an analysis by The Marshall Project. In 2022 alone, more than 35,000 such cases were reported, and authorities removed more than 6,000 infants from their families, our analysis found.
The harms of drug testing fall disproportionately on low-income, Black, Hispanic, and Native American women, who studies have found are more likely to be tested when they give birth, more likely to be investigated, and less likely to reunite with their children after they’ve been removed.
But the false positive cases The Marshall Project identified include parents of all socioeconomic classes and occupations—from a lawyer to a school librarian to a nurse who drug tests other people for a living.
“People should be concerned,” said Dr. Stephen Patrick, a leading neonatal researcher who chairs the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta. “This could happen to any one of us.”
Drug screens are more guesswork than exact science. Chemicals in the tests quickly cross-react with urine, flagging anything that looks like it could be an illicit substance. The tests are like fishing nets that are cast wide and pick up anything and everything that fits, said Dr. Gwen McMillin, a professor at the University of Utah School of Medicine and medical director of a drug-testing lab. The problem is that nets also ensnare fish that aren’t being targeted: compounds that are closely related to illicit substances or merely look similar.
“Drug testing results need to be confirmed before they go to CPS,” McMillin said. “Actions should not be taken based on a single drug testing result. Period.”
But sometimes, even confirmation tests can be misinterpreted, as Susan Horton found.
At first, Horton was puzzled by her positive test result. She wondered if her urine might have been mixed up with another patient’s. Then—“ding ding ding!”—her last meal popped into her head. She told a nurse about the poppy seeds in her salad, sure that this would resolve her doctors’ concerns.
Horton’s records show Kaiser ran her urine sample through a second test, and this time it came back positive for one opiate in particular: codeine. That shouldn’t have been surprising—poppy seeds, like the ones in Horton’s salad, are derived from the opium poppy plant and contain codeine.
To differentiate between salad dressing or bagels and illicit drugs, toxicologists have long recommended testing urine for the presence of a compound called thebaine, which is found in poppy seeds, but not in heroin. There’s no indication that the hospital performed or even knew about the thebaine test, leaving providers with no way to prove or disprove Horton’s claims.
“Mom and dad insistent that a Costco salad with poppyseed dressing is responsible,” a doctor wrote in her notes. Another doctor wrote: “We are unable to verify whether this could result in a positive test.”
Soon, multiple doctors and nurses filed into Horton’s room. They said hospital policy dictated that Halle remain there for five days to be monitored for possible drug withdrawal symptoms—“for baby’s safety,” a doctor told Horton.
Unlike most other states that require hospitals to report positive drug tests, California law says a positive test alone “is not in and of itself a sufficient basis for reporting child abuse or neglect.” But because of Covid-19 and her son’s heart condition, Horton had also missed some prenatal appointments, which many providers see as a red flag for drug use. A hospital social worker noted the missed appointments and decided to file a report.
In a statement about its practices in general, Kaiser said it always conducts a “multi-faceted assessment” prior to filing a report to CPS, which is responsible for reviewing the information and investigating.
Horton insisted that keeping her baby at the hospital was unnecessary. “I’m not a drug addict,” she said she pleaded. Desperate for help, her husband called the police, who declined to oppose hospital directives, records show.
When the caseworker arrived, the couple refused to sign a safety plan or allow the person to interview their children and inspect their home. So the caseworker immediately obtained a judge’s order and placed baby Halle into temporary custody in the hospital, before discharging her to her grandparents, who were ordered to supervise Horton with her child.
A few days later, Horton stood silently in court, dressed in pants that clung uncomfortably to her still-healing body, feeling as if her motherhood was on trial. A caseworker told the judge it would be dangerous to release Halle to her parents, and Horton agreed to another drug test. A worker followed her to the bathroom and watched her urinate in a cup.
By then, caseworkers and doctors had privately acknowledged that poppy seeds could have caused Horton’s positive test result. But in court the caseworker didn’t mention that. Instead, she argued that Horton’s purported drug use had “caused serious physical harm” to her child.
The agency said under state law it can’t comment on individual cases. Speaking generally, it said a single positive drug test, false or otherwise, doesn’t warrant an investigation, and that there needs to be “a reported observation of impact to the child.”
When workplace drug testing was introduced in the 1980s, unions and civil rights groups decried the error rates of drug screens and how companies were firing workers over false positive results. In response, federal authorities mandated safeguards for employees, including requiring confirmation tests and a review from a specially trained doctor to determine whether a food or medication could have caused a positive result.
A federal medical advisory committee in 1993 urged health care providers who drug test pregnant patients to adopt the same rigorous standards. But amid the “crack baby” panic, the idea of protecting mothers did not catch on.
Hospital drug testing policies vary widely. Many facilities, such as Kaiser in Santa Rosa, test every single labor-and-delivery patient. Other hospitals flag only certain people, such as those with limited prenatal care, high blood pressure, even bad teeth, experts say. At many hospitals, the decision is up to doctors and nurses, who may view a mother’s tattoos, disheveled clothing, or stressed demeanor with suspicion. Studies have found that the decision to test is rife with class and race bias.
“Those who look like they have less resources, people might say, ‘Well, they look more likely to use drugs,’” said Dr. Cresta Jones, an associate professor and maternal-fetal medicine specialist at the University of Minnesota Medical School.
Hospitals often have full discretion over whether or not to screen for drugs, but once a positive result is in hand, the decision to report becomes more complicated. Laws and policies in at least 12 states explicitly require hospitals to send screen results to child welfare agencies, even if they are not confirmed, according to The Marshall Project’s review.
For hospitals, cost is also an issue. While urine screens are cheap, the equipment needed to run a confirmation test costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, in addition to the cost of expert personnel and lab certification. Some hospitals contract out confirmation testing—a lower-cost alternative—but getting results can take days, long after many families are ready to go home.
Doctors, nurses and hospital social workers face an uncomfortable predicament: Do they send the baby home to what they believe could be an unsafe environment, or do they call authorities?
“God forbid the baby goes home, withdraws and dies, we’re going to be held liable for that,” said Dr. Adi Davidov, an obstetrician at Staten Island University Hospital, which drug tests every birthing patient.
State mandatory reporting laws add to the pressure on doctors and nurses. These laws impose criminal liability on providers who fail to report, while also protecting physicians who report “in good faith”—insulating hospitals from lawsuits if test results are wrong.
Even when doctors have the ability to order a confirmation test, they don’t always do so. Many misinterpret positive screens as definitive evidence of drug use.
When Grace Smith had her fourth child in 2021 at St. Luke’s University Hospital, an hour north of Philadelphia, she was taking prescribed marijuana and Vyvanse, a medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The medicine contains amphetamine, but the hospital’s drug screen results did not differentiate between meth and amphetamine, according to medical records. The day after Smith delivered her son, a doctor told her that she and her baby had tested positive for meth and that the hospital had notified child protective services.
Smith’s husband Michael asked the doctor to review his wife’s medical records to confirm her prescription, according to the doctor’s notes. The doctor argued that wasn’t her role. “I explained that our responsibility as healthcare workers was to report the case” to child welfare authorities, she wrote, adding that the agency “would conduct any investigation that was necessary.”
Grace and Michael Smith at their home in Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania, in July 2024. Credit: Parikha Mehta for The Marshall ProjectWhen Michael Smith told the doctor they were leaving with their baby, the hospital called the police. An officer escorted the parents out, without their newborn, a police report shows. The Smiths said the police told them they would be arrested if they returned.
St. Luke’s University Health Network declined to answer questions from The Marshall Project, saying in an email that the hospital “complies with all rules and regulations regarding drug testing and reporting” and that the newborn’s welfare “is always our primary concern.”
Four days after the Smiths’ son was born, Monroe County Children and Youth Services told the hospital it was OK to release the baby to his parents. But the investigation remained open. It wasn’t until the Smiths paid more than $3,500 for a lawyer—and nearly $300 for a confirmation drug test that came back negative—that the agency closed their case. The agency declined to comment.
The Smiths filed a lawsuit in 2022 against St. Luke’s. In its response, the hospital acknowledged that it had not given Grace a confirmation test, but denied violating the Smiths’ privacy or civil rights. A judge dismissed the suit in 2023, saying in part that the Smiths did not sufficiently argue their claims.
Many providers erroneously assume that child welfare agencies verify a parent’s drug use. But government caseworkers typically lack the expertise to accurately interpret drug test results. State policy manuals seldom mention the possibility of false positives. It often falls on parents to prove their own innocence.
As a nurse in South Carolina, Ashley Riley said she regularly drug-tested patients in an addiction treatment program, flagged faulty tests, and sent out positive screens for confirmation. But when she herself screened positive for opiates after delivering her son in 2023, Riley said the hospital declined to order a confirmation test, then reported her to authorities.
Riley and her husband, Jeffrey, insisted the positive result was from lemon poppy seed muffins that she had eaten throughout her pregnancy. As proof, Jeffrey Riley texted the investigator a receipt for the muffins, studies on false positives caused by poppy seeds, and the 2023 memo from the Department of Defense urging service members to avoid poppy seeds.
“At no point in time was there anybody in there that was even trying to advocate for my wife, except for me,” he recalled.
At first, he thought his efforts were working. The caseworker acknowledged in his notes having seen the poppy seeds and noted that the report “could be falsified.”
But the caseworker still insisted the couple sign a safety plan, advising them that their two children would be placed in foster care unless they assigned a “protector”—a responsible adult who would supervise them with their children at all times. This continued for 45 days before the case was closed as unfounded.
“We were guilty until proven innocent,” Ashley Riley said.
The hospital even charged $424 for the problematic urine test. Hospital officials did not respond to multiple interview requests.
Will Batchelor, a spokesperson for the South Carolina Department of Social Services, wrote in a statement that the agency has a duty to investigate once a hospital has filed a report, and that it “exercised appropriate restraint” by not removing the child from the home.
“Because the safety of a child is at stake, DSS has to continue its investigation beyond seeing a receipt for poppy seed muffins,” Batchelor wrote.
Even when a parent has a confirmation test and her own doctor’s word attesting to a false positive result, authorities may keep investigating.
When Melissa Robinson, an elementary school librarian in Huntsville, Alabama, screened positive for cocaine in early 2024, the news shocked her and her doctors. Robinson had avoided anything during her pregnancy that could be risky, even cold cuts—which may carry bacteria—and had no history of drug use. Because of the positive test, staff told Robinson she was not allowed to breastfeed her daughter, hospital records show, and they reported her to Alabama’s child welfare agency, the Department of Human Resources. Robinson said a caseworker told her that she probably wouldn’t be allowed to be alone with her baby—her husband would have to supervise.
A few days later, a confirmation test came back negative for any substances. With proof that she had not used cocaine, Robinson assumed the case would be closed. Instead, the agency continued to investigate, inspecting her home and even requiring her husband to take a drug test, she said.
Alabama’s child welfare agency said they are required to respond immediately to a hospital report and “make safety decisions relying on current and most accessible information.”
When the baby was two weeks old, the agency closed the case, citing insufficient evidence. But the allegations will remain on Robinson’s record for at least five years.
“To have such a beautiful experience tainted by something like that, it’s difficult,” Robinson recalled. “Truthfully, it’s turned me into somebody different.”
Melissa Robinson of Huntsville, Alabama, with her daughter, Lyriq. Credit: Lynsey Weatherspoon for The Marshall Project
Some medical groups and providers have taken steps to reduce unnecessary child welfare reports. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists advises hospitals to use a screening questionnaire rather than drug tests to identify people who may have substance abuse problems. The organization also recommends that hospitals obtain consent from patients, explaining the potential consequences of a positive result—including if the hospital is required to report it to authorities. A number of large hospitals have adopted some version of those recommendations.
After a study at Staten Island University Hospital in New York found a high rate of false positives, administrators brought the confirmation testing in-house. They said results come back within a day or two, rather than the week that is typical for outside tests, which allows providers to wait before contacting child welfare.
“Any time you act on a test that’s not 100 percent, you run the risk of causing more harm than good,” said the hospital’s Dr. Davidov. “If you are going to get CPS involved with a mother who did nothing wrong, is a good citizen, that’s harming her. It’s harming her experience, it’s harming her ability to take care of her newborn.”
In recent years, advocacy groups have filed lawsuits against hospitals for testing without explicit consent, which has led some state officials and lawmakers to speak out against the testing. But in most of the US, it remains common practice to report families based on unconfirmed positive screens. Most of the women interviewed by The Marshall Project signed general consent forms at the hospital, but said they were never informed explicitly they would be drug tested, nor that a positive result could be reported to authorities.
For Susan Horton, her family’s ordeal has created an undercurrent of fear that courses through her daily life.
After the court hearing in August 2022, child welfare workers took the baby to Horton’s elderly in-laws and barred Horton and her husband from being alone with their newborn while the agency investigated. Finally, almost two weeks after their daughter was born, the agency withdrew its petition and a judge dismissed the case, allowing the Hortons to bring baby Halle home.
One afternoon last spring, Horton took her daughter, now a toddler, outside. Halle giggled as her mother chased her around the front yard, her little feet splashing in a small mud hole. This was the life Horton had envisioned years ago—a quiet place in the California countryside where her children could delight in the world around them. And yet, Horton couldn’t help but remember the investigation that destroyed her family’s peace of mind—and her self-esteem.
“I had a lot of confidence in how I mother and how I parent,” she said, adding later: “Now in my head, I’m always questioning my choices.” She wondered aloud what neighbors would say if they saw her daughter playing in the mud, if someone might accuse her of being a bad parent.
“I just always have that looming feeling that at any moment CPS could come knocking and take my children away.”
The Marshall Project reporters Weihua Li, Andrew Rodriguez Calderón, Nakylah Carter, and Catherine Odom contributed to this story.
She Ate a Poppy Seed Salad Just Before Giving Birth. Then They Took Her Baby Away. is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
A landmark bill aimed at standardizing and improving the way police treat victims in the aftermath of a sexual assault has become law in Connecticut.
The new law establishes a council that will create a model policy for police responding to sexual assault, and it received unanimous, bipartisan support. The law also requires that officers refer victims to a victim advocate, distribute information about services available, and help the victim and any children present obtain medical care. Every law enforcement agency in the state will have to meet or exceed the model policy by September 2025, and the council will collect data about police and the overall criminal justice response to sexual assault statewide.
Democratic state Rep. Eleni Kavros DeGraw, a co-sponsor of the bill, cited an investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting in her testimony about the need for sexual assault victims to be treated better by law enforcement. The investigation, featured in Victim/Suspect, a documentary film by Center for Investigative Reporting Studios, found dozens of cases, including several in Connecticut, in which women reporting sexual assaults were ultimately charged with crimes after law enforcement doubted their stories or zeroed in on behavior common for victims of trauma.
“This isn’t just a bill that victims and survivors want, it’s a bill that law enforcement also wants and needs in order to serve the public to the very best of their ability,” Kavros DeGraw said.
Kavros DeGraw attended a screening of Victim/Suspect sponsored by the Bipartisan Women’s Caucus last fall. There, she met Nicole Chase, who was featured in the film and an episode of Reveal and a constituent of Kavros DeGraw’s.
Chase told an officer in the Canton Police Department in 2017 that her boss had sexually harassed her and ordered her to perform oral sex. When she acknowledged weeks later in a formal interview that the sex act had occurred, the detective concluded she’d lied by omission and charged her with making a false statement.
“I was unaware that (this phenomenon) was happening, not just all over Connecticut, but also all over the country,” Kavros DeGraw said.
Prosecutors later dropped the case against Chase, and the city of Canton eventually settled a civil lawsuit. Her boss was never charged with any crime. Kavros DeGraw vowed she would do something about Chase’s treatment.
During a public hearing on the bill, Kavros DeGraw used Chase’s case as an example of why the new bill is needed. “While the case was eventually settled in court in favor of the survivor, it does not erase the trauma the survivor experienced,” she said.
Gov. Ned Lamont signed the bill into law this month.
Our investigation into sexual assault cases found that police routinely deploy interrogation techniques meant for criminal suspects on alleged victims, including lying about evidence. When reporting victims recant or backtrack, it can lead to false reporting charges: Of 52 cases involving false reporting charges that we analyzed closely, nearly two-thirds involved a recantation. In nine cases, the recantation was the only evidence cited by police.
About half of the 52 cases we analyzed came from Connecticut, where a statewide court system allowed us to more easily locate false reporting cases tied to sexual assault. Our analysis found four Connecticut cases in which the reporting victim was arrested or charged with a crime within 24 hours; in two cases, a recantation was the only evidence police cited. In one prominent Bridgeport case, an 18-year-old reported she was raped by two men at an off-campus college party. Detectives concluded that the sex was consensual and charged her with false reporting and felony tampering with evidence.
But the detectives’ conclusion was based largely on her recantation during a 45-minute recorded interview-turned-interrogation. The audio recording showed that a detective lied to her about nonexistent evidence, told her that she wasn’t telling the truth, interrupted her frequently, and repeated questions again and again until she agreed with him that the sex was consensual. She was not aware that she had become the suspect of a crime and was interviewed alone. She pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree falsely reporting an incident and one count of interfering with police and was sentenced to a year in prison.
While the new law doesn’t specifically mention the use of false reporting charges against alleged sexual assault victims, it aims to address the circumstances under which victims often fall under suspicion. Chase endured a long police interview alone, and she thinks an offer for support from a victim advocate could have changed the entire trajectory of her case, had the police specifically mentioned it, as they’ll now be required to do.
“You’re sitting with somebody that’s not judging you, that knows what trauma does,” she said. “It is just somebody there to be there for you.”
Chase said having an advocate might have made her feel safe enough to disclose more details earlier in the process – and maybe prevent the arrest that followed.
She hopes the model policy will more clearly define what a false report is, since she was charged based on not being forthcoming enough.
“That’s not lying,” Chase said. “That’s not falsely reporting something. That is just not being willing to open up to you yet because I don’t feel comfortable with you.”
Kavros DeGraw said she intends for the newly created council to specifically address the use of false reporting charges against victims in its model policy and to mandate trauma-informed training for police to combat misconceptions about missing details or inconsistent statements.
“There are so many pieces to the trauma of these incidents,” she said. “You may not have all of the details in that first meeting, and not because of omission or purposeful lying, but because you have just experienced a trauma, and often it comes back over time.”
New Connecticut Law Aims to Support Victims of Sexual Assault – and Prevent Them From Being Treated Like Suspects is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
40 Acresand aLieIt’s often thought of as a promise that was never kept. But “40 acres and a mule” was more than that.
It was real.
In “40 Acres and a Lie, ” a three-part podcast series from Reveal and the Center for Public Integrity, we tell the history of an often-misunderstood government program that gave formerly enslaved people land titles, only to take the land back. We explore a reparation that wasn’t – and the wealth gap that remains.
Listen to the trailer now:Coming June 15, from Reveal and the Center for Public Integrity.
SUBSCRIBE TO REVEAL ON YOUR FAVORITE PODCAST APPApple PodcastsStitcherIHeartRadioPandora
40 Acres and a Lie is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
This story was produced in partnership with The Trace and CBS News and Stations.
Candace Leslie was leaving church when she got the call she will never forget.
“All I heard was his girlfriend yelling in the phone, and she was like, ‘Cameron! Cameron! … He won’t get up. He won’t get up!’ ”
Someone shot Leslie’s son four times that Sunday evening in September 2021 outside his new apartment on Indianapolis’ northeast side.
Cameron Brown was 19. He was working at FedEx. He loved fishing with his grandfather and was trying to follow his footsteps into the U.S. Army.
Brown died at the scene.
“I just felt numb. I felt kind of disoriented,” Leslie said, remembering the chaos, the yellow police tape and officers scouring the scene.
Police recovered at least one gun. It was a Glock pistol. Unbeknownst to investigators at the time, the gun once served as a law enforcement duty weapon, carried by a sheriff’s deputy more than 2,000 miles away in California.
According to data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Glock was one of at least 52,529 police guns that have turned up at crime scenes since 2006, the earliest year provided. While that tally includes guns lost by or stolen from police, many of the firearms were released back into the market by the very law enforcement agencies sworn to protect the public.
Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, in partnership with The Trace and CBS News, reviewed records from hundreds of law enforcement agencies across the United States and found that many had routinely resold or traded in their used duty weapons – a practice that has sent thousands of guns into the hands of criminals.
Law enforcement resold guns to firearms dealers for discounts on new equipment and, in some cases, directly to their own officers, records show. Some of the guns were later involved in shootings, domestic violence incidents and other violent crimes.
A Kentucky State Police pistol sold to a retiring detective ended up in Buffalo, New York, where federal agents executing a search warrant on a suspect in a murder investigation in 2019 found the gun in a backpack alongside heroin and a bulletproof vest. In another case in Indianapolis in 2021, police seized a former Iowa State Patrol pistol from a man while arresting him for allegedly choking a woman. The gun was fully loaded with a round in the chamber.
Reporters surveyed state and local law enforcement agencies and found that at least 145 of them had resold guns on at least one occasion between 2006 and 2024. That’s about 90% of the more than 160 agencies that responded.
A box holds seized pistols from a 2013 case at the Vanderburgh County Sheriff’s Office in Evansville, Indiana. The sheriff was exploring legal ways to sell the weapons to help fund officer training. Police departments across the country often sell their old service weapons as well. Credit: Darrin Phegley/Evansville Courier & Press via Associated PressRecords from 67 agencies showed they had collectively resold more than 87,000 firearms over the past two decades. That figure is likely a significant undercount, however, because many agencies’ records were incomplete or heavily redacted.
Scot Thomasson, a former ATF division chief who is now a consultant for SafeGunLock, a Washington, D.C.-based company, believes police departments that resell weapons are violating their obligation to protect the public. “Taxpayers are buying firearms that are then resold for pennies on the dollar and ultimately ending up in criminals’ hands,” Thomasson said. “It is absolutely ridiculous.”
Many police departments resold their weapons while holding buyback events, which they say are important to pull guns off the street.
The Philadelphia City Council boasts on its website of having collected 825 guns in buybacks since 2021. But records show that Philadelphia police resold at least 886 guns over the past two decades, including 85 firearms between 2021 and 2022.
In some cases, departments added more guns to the marketplace than they removed.
The Newark Police Department in New Jersey staged a buyback in 2021, offering the public up to $250 for each firearm turned over. The event netted 146 guns. “Without question, 146 fewer firearms on our streets means less gun violence, fewer gun violence victims, and less risk of suicide or death,” the city’s public safety director said in a YouTube post celebrating the haul.
But five years earlier, Newark police resold more than five times that number of guns – nearly 1,000. One of those weapons surfaced in Pittsburgh, where police seized it from a convicted felon after he allegedly squeezed off more than a dozen shots in a neighborhood and then led officers on a foot chase.
A Newark police spokesperson said that the guns had been traded in as a cost-saving measure under a previous administration and that the department currently “has no plans to upgrade its service weapons.”
The Glock pistol involved in the killing of Cameron Brown in Indianapolis was one of more than 600 guns resold by the Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Office in Modesto, California, between March 2019 and August 2023, records show. Another weapon from the same agency found its way to Texas, where San Antonio police recovered it in connection with the shooting of a 15-year-old in 2020.
In an interview with CBS News, Stanislaus County Sheriff Jeff Dirkse defended the practice of reselling weapons as necessary to reduce the cost of new equipment. “You’re talking several hundred thousand dollars every few years, and that’s all taxpayer money,” he said. “It’s just a cost benefit to the department.”
Dirkse expressed sympathy to Brown’s family but said his agency was not responsible for the teenager’s killing. “Whoever did this, if he didn’t acquire that gun, he’s probably going to go acquire another one,” Dirkse said. “My organization had nothing to do with it.”
A family album holds photos of Cameron Brown, who was shot and killed in Indianapolis in 2021. Credit: Lee Klafczynski for The TraceWhen a reporter told Brown’s family members that the gun involved in his death once belonged to a sheriff’s office, they were at first in disbelief and then angry.
“One more gun on the street actually changed our lives forever,” said Brown’s grandmother, Maria Leslie, a pastor. “We’re missing a piece of our puzzle.”
Now the family wants police to stop selling their weapons.
“I’m losing trust in the people who’re supposed to protect and serve us,” said Leslie, Brown’s mother. “There’s no reason for police firearms to be in the hands of young teenagers.”
Indianapolis Police Chief Christopher Bailey told CBS News that his agency has historically traded in its weapons, but he would consider changing that policy in light of Brown’s death. “I don’t want any weapon that we owned to end up being used violently against another person,” he said.
Brown’s killing remains unsolved.
A Rift in Law EnforcementFor decades, the ATF has worked on behalf of state and local law enforcement to trace recovered crime guns to their original owners, providing fresh leads to investigators and insights into firearms trafficking.
ATF data obtained by Reveal shows that between 2006 and 2021, the number of crime guns traced to law enforcement agencies each year more than doubled, from about 2,200 to more than 4,500. On average, more than 3,200 duty weapons were recovered at crime scenes annually over that 16-year period.
Records detailing some of the traces conducted between 2013 and 2017 indicate that the guns previously belonged to more than 800 different agencies, ranging from rural sheriff’s offices to police departments in the country’s largest cities.
Even more granular trace information used to be publicly available, making it easier for reporters to hold police accountable for their resale practices. The Washington Post in 1999 analyzed ATF data and identified 107 crimes linked to former District of Columbia police guns. That same year, a similar investigation by CBS News revealed more than 3,000 police guns had been connected to crimes – including nearly 300 homicides – since 1990.
The Tiahrt Amendment, passed by Congress in 2003 and named after the lawmaker who introduced it, now bars the ATF from disclosing most trace information to the public. In 2017, Reveal sued the ATF for refusing to respond to a public records request for statistical data on recovered police guns. The agency pushed back, citing Tiahrt. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided in favor of Reveal in 2020, ruling that the request fit within an exception to Tiahrt that allows the ATF to release statistical information.
Federal law enforcement agencies are legally required to destroy their used guns, but there’s no similar mandate for state and local agencies. As a result, decisions about what to do with old guns are left up to state and local leaders and police chiefs, who’ve taken a variety of stances.
Public safety concerns prompted Seattle police to stop trading in handguns around 2016. “If we’re selling them out, we just don’t know where those guns could end up,” said Seattle Police Chief Adrian Diaz. “We don’t want to contribute to the problem.”
When CBS News Minnesota showed our findings to Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara, he said his agency would stop reselling its guns.
“I don’t want us to be in a position where a weapon that was once in service for the police department here is then winding up used in a crime, or in an act of violence against a person, or even to shoot a police officer,” O’Hara said. “So going forward, we’re not going to be selling any weapons at all.”
Law enforcement agencies often trade their used weapons to a gun dealer for credit toward their next purchase, similar to how cellphone companies offer discounts on new phones in exchange for previous models.
William Brooks, a board member for the International Association of Chiefs of Police, said resales are essential for many departments to afford weapons upgrades. “Decisions about trading in old police service weapons should be left to individual communities and their police chiefs,” he said. “We believe that, should a community decide to destroy old weapons when new ones are purchased, they should commit just as fervently to fully funding new firearm purchases when their police chiefs call for them.”
Once sold by a department, weapons enter a secondary market where they can be resold to members of the public or other dealers. By the time they turn up at crime scenes, the guns may have been stolen, traded or resold multiple times with little documentation. They sometimes still have the department’s name stamped on the side.
Michael Sierra-Arévalo, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin and author of “The Danger Imperative: Violence, Death, and the Soul of Policing,” said trade-ins allow police to avoid public scrutiny, as they can purchase new guns without having to obtain budgetary approval from city leaders.
“There are certainly other mechanisms to acquire weapons. You can get a line item in the budget with the city, but that could come with all kinds of political hurdles to jump through,” Sierra-Arévalo said. “So I’m not surprised that when someone shows up and says they can help the police skip all of that, the police go with that.”
The Baltimore Police Department weathered public criticism in 2008 after one of its traded-in service weapons was used to kill two children as they walked home from a slumber party in Oklahoma.
At a news conference in April, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said officers are given the opportunity to purchase their duty weapons for personal use before the guns are traded in for credit. If an officer buys a gun and wants to resell it later on, they must first offer it back to the department.
“We know that there are some issues around the country,” Scott said. “For BPD, we’re extremely diligent about what happens when we have weapons retire.”
The police department for Baltimore County – which is separate from the Baltimore city police department – takes a different approach. In 2013, it traded in its old guns to a firearms dealer, but under the terms of the agreement, key parts of the guns were destroyed, a spokesperson said.
“I felt throughout my entire career that police departments should not be in the business of putting more guns back out into our society,” said James Johnson, who served as Baltimore County police chief from 2007 to 2017.
In 2023, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved a requirement that the Sheriff’s Department destroy firearms it no longer needed. Board Supervisor Janice Hahn said she hopes the decision can serve as a model for the rest of the country. “Those of us at the local level should do what we can to keep guns out of the hands of criminals,” she said. “We all can wait all day long for Congress to pass common-sense gun violence prevention laws.”
Police departments should not be in the business of putting more guns back out into our society.
James Johnson, Baltimore county police chief, 2007-2017
Some police departments argued that because they were reselling to gun stores and other federally licensed gun dealers, they were not technically purveying firearms directly to members of the public.
In an email, a spokesperson for the Fort Worth Police Department, Buddy Calzada, said it would be “inaccurate” to report that the agency resells guns to the public.
He then went on to explain how the department resells guns: “In rare cases, the department has traded small quantities of firearms back to the dealer the department purchased them from and received credit for newer weapons,” Calazada wrote. “It is important to note, any guns sold by a dealer are sold only to qualified buyers who have passed the Federal background checks.”
Internal records show that the department resold more than 1,000 guns to two dealers in the past 10 years. The department declined an interview request.
Appealing to Gun BuyersUsing sales records obtained by CBS News from dozens of police departments, reporters identified nearly 50 gun dealers whose business includes buying and reselling retired police weapons. Many are self-styled police-supply companies that also sell flashlights, handcuffs and other tools of the law enforcement trade.
Police-supply companies that buy and sell firearms have to hold a federal gun dealer’s license, which allows them to sell guns to members of the public. The license opens them up to inspections by the ATF, but internal records show that the agency has long been toothless and conciliatory, mostly issuing warnings instead of serious punishment when its inspectors find dealers breaking the law.
To encourage better practices among suppliers competing for lucrative public contracts, some California cities have passed measures to prevent local law enforcement from doing business with gun dealers that have been cited for serious violations during inspections. But in most of the country, there is no requirement for law enforcement to consider a dealer’s compliance history when awarding contracts.
Lindsay Nichols, policy director at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said police have a moral and ethical responsibility to do business only with gun dealers that follow best practices. “There are plenty of conditions that an agency could put on a gun store as a condition of receiving their weapons,” she said. “There are lots of gun stores out there. You don’t have to sell to any one particular business.”
ATF inspection records show that one of the most prolific buyers of used police guns has a long history of violating federal regulations.
LC Action Police Supply, based in San Jose, California, bought more than 3,000 guns from 11 different law enforcement agencies between 2005 and 2023, including the gun involved in Cameron Brown’s homicide, according to records obtained by CBS News.
Over that same period, the ATF cited LC Action for 30 violations of federal firearms laws, including failing to conduct background checks and report suspicious gun sales, records show. One ATF inspector pushed for revoking LC Action’s license to sell guns after the company was cited for six violations in 2005, but the recommendation was overruled by agency higher-ups.
The ATF inspected LC Action four more times between 2009 and 2019, uncovering many of the same violations. The agency allowed the company to keep its license to sell firearms.
LC Action did not respond to multiple requests for comment via phone and email. When a reporter and a photographer from CBS News Los Angeles visited the company’s retail store and asked to speak with a representative, they were told to leave.
An ATF spokesperson said the agency does not comment on specific cases, but as a general matter, the outcome of any licensing action involving a gun dealer is dependent on the underlying facts and circumstances. The spokesperson added that the ATF’s policies and procedures were designed to maximize public safety by ensuring federal law is fairly and consistently administered.
In 2021, the Biden administration ordered the ATF to implement a zero-tolerance policy on lawbreaking gun dealers, a step that has led to an increase in license revocations.
Used police guns are popular among gun buyers because they’re relatively inexpensive and often in good condition. They also typically have high ammunition capacities and are designed to hold large- to medium-caliber rounds.
Larry Brown Jr., a firearms instructor and president of the Bass Reeves Gun Club in Atlanta, said he bought a used police gun because it was already equipped with glow-in-the-dark sights and a special trigger that made it easier to shoot, saving him money on upgrades.
“The price is on point,” Brown said. “Police trade-ins are typically better equipped and better souped-up than what I would buy new. That’s what made me buy the one I have.”
The demand for decommissioned police weapons has created a thriving market, with gun dealers snapping them up en masse.
Mark Major owns 2-Swords Tactical & Defense, a gun store in Lithonia, Ga. Credit: Alyssa Pointer for The Trace“Every now and then, I’ll get a call from my reps saying, ‘Hey, we got a bunch of police Glock 22 trade-ins for a great price. They’re all in good shape if you’re interested,’ ” said Mark Major, the owner of 2-Swords Tactical & Defense, a gun dealer in Lithonia, Georgia. “Usually, police trade-ins are kept up by the armorer in the department. They do have some scratches and rubs on them from being in a holster, but they work.”
Online forums and blogs promoting the benefits of used police guns are common, and there are dozens of YouTube videos featuring gun dealers and enthusiasts showing off large shipments of the weapons to entice potential buyers.
In a video posted last month by AimSurplus, a gun dealer in Monroe, Ohio, one of the store’s employees shows off a rolling cart piled high with assault weapons, as well as several boxes of pistols and shotguns – all former police guns to be resold on its website.
“You guys love our police trade-ins,” the employee says. “And why shouldn’t you? They’re awesome. We just got a whole truckload in.”
The team behind the story:
Reporting and Research: Champe Barton, Alain Stephens, Will Van Sant, and Olga Pierce of The Trace; Pamela Kirkland for Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting; and Chris Hacker, Amy Corral, Nicole Vap, Jose Sanchez, John Kelly, Brian Maass, Chelsea Jones, Julie Watts, Kelsi Thorud, Brian New, Megan Hickey, Erika Stanish, Mike Hellgren, Tim McNicholas, Walter Smith Randolph, Christina Hager, Joe Holden, Ross Polambo, Jennifer Mayerle, Scott Pham, Dilcia Mercedes, Nick Devlin, and Rachel Gold of CBS News
Digital Production and Photo Editing: Selin Thomas of The Trace
Visual Design and Development: Chip Brownlee of The Trace and Grace Manthey, Aaron Munoz, Josh Pena, and Doug Holly of CBS News
Photography & Video Editing: Lee Klafczynski and Alyssa Pointer for The Trace; and Jose Sanchez, Josh Pena, and Aaron Munoz of CBS News
Social media, engagement, and promotion: Gracie McKenzie of The Trace
Editing and Project Leadership: Brian Freskos, Craig Hunter, Miles Kohrman, Samantha Storey, and David Geary of The Trace; Chad Cross, John Kelly, and Nicole Vap of CBS News; and Taki Telonidis and Kate Howard of Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting
Shot by a Civilian Wielding a Police Gun is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
Famine is already happening in parts of Gaza, a top U.S. humanitarian official publicly acknowledged last week for the first time. After six months of Israeli war and blockades, an estimated 2.2 million people are facing acute or catastrophic food shortages. One in three children in northern Gaza are malnourished, and deaths due to hunger are expected to accelerate quickly, U.S. officials have warned.
According to the groundbreaking work of Dutch researcher Tessa Roseboom, the impacts of near-starvation are also likely being experienced by generations not yet born. Roseboom, a biologist and professor of early development and health at the Amsterdam UMC/University of Amsterdam, has been studying the long-term consequences of prenatal malnutrition for almost 30 years.
Much of her work focuses on people like her parents, who were born around the time of the Dutch “Hunger Winter” at the end of World War II. In dozens of studies, Roseboom and her colleagues have provided some of the first direct evidence in humans of the intergenerational impact of in-utero exposure to stresses such as famine. Their work suggests that malnutrition during pregnancy can have lasting consequences not only for the future health of the child, but also for subsequent generations. “It’s one of the things that makes me very passionate to talk about how the decisions we make today will have an effect for many, many decades,” Roseboom says. “I really feel the generations before me urging me to speak out.”
Audio journalists Neroli Price, Salman Ahad Khan and Gabrielle Berbey talked with Roseboom as part of their investigation into how Israel’s blocking of aid trucks carrying food and medical supplies is leading to a maternal and infant health disaster. Excerpts of their conversation can be heard on the latest Reveal episode, “In Gaza, Every Pregnancy is Complicated.” Given the timeliness and urgency of the subject, we are presenting a longer digital version here.
Let’s start with the Hunger Winter. What was the confluence of events that made the winter of 1944-1945 so devastating for people in the Netherlands?
Tessa Roseboom: The Hunger Winter was a period of famine that occurred at the end of the Second World War, in the part of the Netherlands that had not been liberated by the Allied forces. (After the D-Day invasion in June 1944), the Allies liberated France and Belgium and retook the southern part of the Netherlands. The Dutch government-in-exile called for a railway strike to support the Allies, but the operation failed before they could retake the north and west of the country, which included the capital, Amsterdam. The German occupying forces retaliated for the railway strike by banning all food transports from rural parts of the country to urban areas. Suddenly, rations that had been around 2,000 calories a day during the entire war dropped to around 400 to 600 calories a day. Two slices of bread, two potatoes and half a sugar beet was the typical ration for adults during that period.
The blockade coincided with a very early and extreme winter, which froze all the waterways in the Netherlands – and canals are an important way of transporting food. So it was really a combination of this harsh winter and the blockade that suddenly led to a very acute period of famine, which lasted until the Netherlands was liberated and the war ended, in May 1945.
How did that extreme level of famine affect mortality?
Roseboom: During the first six months of 1944, when there was sufficient food, mortality rates were half what they were in the first six months of 1945, during the famine period. It is estimated that a total of 25,000 people died during the Dutch Hunger Winter.
What do you know about what happened to yourfamily during this period?
Roseboom: My father was born in the first weeks of the famine, and my mother was born in the month after liberation, so they don’t remember anything, of course. But my grandmothers remember what it was like to be pregnant during a war and during a period in which there was very little food available.
Luckily, both my parents were born in the rural part of the country, where the famine was much less extreme. My father’s mother told me how she delivered my father at home when there was no light and bombings were going on. She told me how families from Amsterdam came fleeing to the part of the country where she lived, looking for food. Even though my father was only 10 weeks old, he was already heavier than the 10-month-old boy from Amsterdam.
When you began to study the broader effects of this famine, what did other people tell you?
Roseboom: Even though I spoke to them decades later, they still remember it as such a traumatic period. I remember one woman who was so undernourished after the birth of her first baby, she couldn’t breastfeed. She told me that her baby looked like a skinned rabbit – that’s how skinny he had become after a few days. So she went to church to try to find someone willing to take him, because she realized, “He’s going to die if I keep him with me.” Luckily, someone helped her get milk and food, so she could feed herself and her baby. But she felt so guilty all her life that she had considered giving him away. It took her almost 50 years before she told her son this story.
You’ve written or co-authored numerous papers about how the Hunger Winter affected the long-term health of people conceived or born during that period. What are some of the impacts you’ve found?
Roseboom: In almost three decades of studying men and women who were being shaped inside their mother’s womb during the Dutch famine, we know that the lack of nutrients left lasting marks on the organs and tissues that were forming at the time.
The babies who were conceived during the famine and whose mothers were undernourished while their brains were being built – those brains were smaller. When those people were adults, their brains were wired in a different way. They were more susceptible to stress and addiction; their cognitive function was affected. They were less likely to participate in the labor market.
We found that babies who were conceived during the famine had a higher risk of depression in particular. They also had a higher risk of schizophrenia and antisocial personality disorders.
Their metabolism was altered as well. It makes a lot of sense that if you are taking in very few nutrients in utero, your body will develop a very, very efficient way of metabolizing the calories you do get. But then, because of your efficient metabolism, when food becomes more plentiful later in life, you have a higher risk of becoming obese. Our research found more obesity and Type 2 diabetes, higher cholesterol levels, and people developing cardiovascular disease at a younger age.
Were these effects immediately apparent when the Hunger Winter babies were born?
Roseboom: No. It’s fascinating, but based on the size of babies who were born just after the Dutch famine ended, one wouldn’t have thought that they were that much impacted. At birth, babies were not particularly small, particularly thin or particularly any different from most babies. So for a long time, we thought maybe they’re not going to be affected by famine. They’re safe inside their mother’s womb. We shouldn’t be too worried.
But based on our research now, we know that the structure and function of their organs are different. And it’s only as we age that problems with our organs tend to arise as damage accumulates across the life course.
Separate from the effects of famine, did you find any impacts of maternal stress on babies during that period?
Roseboom: In general, (the fetus is) protected from the stress hormones that the mother has in her own bloodstream. But when women are undernourished, the enzyme in the placenta that protects the fetus from getting exposed to this stress hormone is not functioning properly anymore. So with high stress levels and low nutrition, the baby will get exposed to the stress levels that the mother is experiencing.
Your research didn’t stop with people born around the time of the Hunger Winter. You also studied their children. What did you find?
Roseboom: We saw that both through the mother and the father, these effects can be transmitted to future generations.
As a biologist, I often talk about the fact that each and every one of us, every human being, started as a single fertilized egg. But the egg that made you and me didn’t arise just before it was fertilized. It was actually formed when our mothers were in our grandmothers’ wombs. So the egg that made me was formed during the Hunger Winter.
Human beings are very sensitive to their environment, particularly in early life during development. And we know that the environment, whether it is nutrition or whether it’s a traumatic experience, has an impact on the expression of the genetic code – what we call epigenetic effects. The environment has a big impact on the extent to which your genetic potential is being expressed. The Dutch Famine Study, as well as other studies looking at other crises and catastrophic events – 9/11, climate disasters such as flooding and fires – they’ve all consistently shown that there are epigenetic effects. Not so much of the DNA structure is changed, but the extent to which our genes are expressed is altered by the environment in which we grow and develop, and even these effects are transmitted from one generation to the next.
The blockade of food transports by the German occupying forces seems like a parallel to what’s happening in Gaza right now.
Roseboom: I think there is a strong parallel with what’s going on in Gaza. And because of the research I’ve done, I’m not worried only about the people currently experiencing the situation there. I’m very worried about the long-term consequences this will have for the generation that isn’t even born yet.
We’ve spoken with OB-GYNs from Gaza who ran out of basic medical supplies to take care of women and babies back in October. How might that kind of collapse in the medical infrastructure affect fetal development?
Roseboom: I can only guess what the impact might be. Based on the studies that we’ve been doing on the Dutch famine, I have no proper comparison of the medical system collapsing because, quite surprisingly, during the war and the famine, the medical system continued to operate. Doctors and nurses continued to provide care and record details of the pregnancies that we’ve been able to see because these records were kept.
But based on other studies of disruptive situations like flooding that didn’t allow pregnant women to go to their doctors or midwives, we know that increases stress levels and has a negative impact on the development of the (fetus). You can actually still see (this) in the way that their genes are expressed, in the way that these children develop and in their risks of chronic diseases later in life.
I’m imagining a mother who is living through what has been happening in Gaza, who may be wondering if there was any way to protect her infant from those negative long-term effects.
Roseboom: It’s a very difficult question, because during your time in the womb, your organs are formed and you cannot do that again. You cannot rebuild your brain. But the scientific evidence is quite clear that in terms of stress, the effects can be greatly reduced if people get social support. Even if you cannot get out of that stressful situation, getting social support can be very important in helping reduce the negative impact.
Another thing that people could do if they have been unnourished or have a child who is unnourished during pregnancy is to make sure they eat healthy diets and exercise as they grow up, which will help reduce the risk of developing cardiovascular disease or Type 2 diabetes.
If you could grab all the world’s leaders and get on your soapbox, what is the one message you would tell them about mothers and babies and war and famine?
Roseboom: I’d say that we as human beings have all been shaped by the environment that our ancestors created. The world that we live in, the knowledge that we have access to, our societies, our cities, our families are shaped by those who came before us. What we do today is literally shaping the environment in which future generations will be allowed to develop to their full potential.
And these future generations are not some imaginary future creatures that are not around already. As I said before, the egg that made you and me was already there when our mothers were in our grandmothers’ wombs. The future generations are already here, in the present, and we are affecting them with our actions right now.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length. It was edited by Nina Martin.
How Famine and Starvation Could Affect Gazans for Generations to Come is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
Last year, 25-year-old Carlee Russell called 911 in Hoover, Alabama, reporting that there was a child on the interstate. Then Russell vanished, and no child was found. A massive search effort followed, along with a national media frenzy. Two days later, she returned home, seemingly unharmed but claiming that she had escaped a kidnapping.
After about a week, sympathy for Russell turned to anger as investigators concluded that she had faked her disappearance and charged her with two misdemeanors for false reporting. She pleaded guilty, and a judge ordered Russell to pay nearly $18,000 in restitution and to serve probation and community service – a sentence deemed far too lenient by those outraged by Russell’s actions. Nothing less than jail time would satisfy them.
“The biggest thing was just the impact it had,” said Alabama state Rep. Mike Shaw, a Republican from Hoover. “I mean, hundreds of people showed up to search, and it was a pretty damaging thing for the community.”
Emboldened by the community outrage, Shaw and other state lawmakers proposed legislation that was designed to deter, or at least more severely punish, the next Carlee Russell. The bill, which has cleared the House of Representatives and is poised for a vote in the Senate, would create a new class C felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison for a false report that “alleges imminent danger to a person or the public.”
“One of the real problems with that false report is that it hurts the next person who actually experiences something,” Shaw said. “If you have a false report, it kind of makes everybody skeptical on the next one.”
As anyone who has been told the fable of the child who cried wolf knows, Shaw is right that false reports lead to more skepticism. But the outsized attention they receive obscures the fact that they’re relatively rare. And this legislation doesn’t consider a prevalent problem: the troubling track record of police in Alabama and across the country when it comes to framing reports of violence as having been made up.
Kijana Mitchell is an Alabama-based advocate for survivors of domestic violence who’s also worked as a 911 dispatcher. She said she’s encountered law enforcement officers who suspect a victim is lying simply because they make the common and complicated decision to return to an abusive relationship.
And she fears this bill could work in the favor of abusers – “master manipulators” who will use it to convince victims not to report an assault to skeptical officers. “A law like this can scoop up a lot of innocent victims” if people aren’t able to prove their case to the police’s satisfaction, Mitchell said. “This added factor that our lawmakers are trying to bring into the equation will really bolster a lot of (abusers’) ability to keep victims from speaking up.”
For the last six years, I’ve been collecting and researching cases in which people – mostly young women and sometimes children – were charged with falsely reporting a rape or sexual assault. I’ve amassed more than 230 cases that span the country, an investigation we first shared in the documentary “Victim/Suspect,” streaming on Netflix. In our first-of-its-kind qualitative analysis, we found a pattern of police turning their suspicions to the reporting victim before thoroughly investigating the alleged crime.
Academic studies consistently estimate that 2% to 8% of reports of sexual assault and rape are false. But police officers presume reporting victims are lying much more frequently: In one 2010 study, a majority of sex crimes detectives with less than seven years of experience believed that anywhere from 40% to 80% of rape reports were false. And a 2018 study found that officers’ estimates of false rape reports go up the more they believe in popular myths about rape, like the idea that women lie about rape after regrettable sex or they bear responsibility if they were drunk.
In case after case I reviewed, detectives didn’t interview suspects or send rape kits to the lab. Instead, they interrogated the reporting victim, seizing on the moment when they backtracked or buckled under the pressure, framing it as either a recantation or a confession.
In one-quarter of the 52 cases we analyzed, it took investigators less than 24 hours after the report was made to conclude the victims were lying.
Tangled up in these reports are complicating factors: gaps in memory due to trauma, delays in reporting and a lack of physical evidence. I’ve watched or listened to more than a dozen recorded interrogations and interviewed women who were charged with false reporting.
What I heard again and again were police officers clumsily or aggressively questioning alleged victims, who were typically interviewed alone, in the same manner in which they interrogated suspects. One detective lied to a teenager, saying videos proved her account of being raped at a party wasn’t true. She was left confused and desperate to end the interaction. Another detective told a 12-year-old who insisted she was raped by a family member that she would have to return to foster care. A college student facing harsh questioning about an allegation of sexual assault eventually agreed when police said it wasn’t true, wanting to drop the case.
All of them saw the police conclude their reports were intentionally fabricated and were charged with crimes.
“Knowing what I know now, I would absolutely not report.”
EMMA MANNION
Emma Mannion is all too familiar with this dynamic. In 2016, when she was an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Alabama, she told police that a man she’d met earlier that night had raped her in the back of a car while his friend stood guard.
“Knowing what I know now, I would absolutely not report,” said Mannion, now living in her home state of New Hampshire.
Tuscaloosa investigators concluded within a few days that she lied because she was ashamed that she had sex with a stranger. Under questioning for two and a half hours, Mannion never backed away from her allegation that she was raped – and still hasn’t. But there was a moment in her interrogation when everything seemed to change. A detective chided her for wasting police resources. She had distracted him from working with “true victims,” he said.
“I’m so sorry,” she responded.
“Well, if you’re sorry, then that makes me feel better,” the detective said, softening his tone.
Police records summarized that Mannion confessed to lying about the assault and she was charged with making a false report to law enforcement.
Shortly before Mannion had to decide whether to fight the charge, she heard about what happened to University of Alabama student Megan Rondini, who was also interrogated by Tuscaloosa police after reporting a rape. Similarly, detectives quickly turned the focus of their investigation against Rondini. While a grand jury considered criminal charges against her in February 2016, Rondini took her own life.
Mannion said she wasn’t mentally stable enough to go through a trial and relive the incident again and again. She pleaded guilty to a youthful offender charge, a generic label used for nonviolent crimes. Mannion faced only a misdemeanor. But other young women seeking justice after being sexually assaulted could face felony charges.
“I already have a hard time comprehending and understanding how they did what they did,” Mannion said. “I cannot fathom (Tuscaloosa police) looking at 18-year-old Emma and going, ‘Yes, this is a felony charge, and she should go to prison.’ ”
There is no evidence that false reports in Alabama – or nationwide – are increasing or creating a measurable strain on police resources. Nonetheless, this isn’t the first time Alabama has tried to make false reporting penalties more severe. In 2019, then-Rep. Dickie Drake, a Republican, introduced a similar bill, aiming to make a false report of sexual assault or rape a class C felony. At the time, advocates and survivors testified against the measure, saying it would only deter legitimate reports of assault. It didn’t make it out of the Judiciary Committee.
Sen. Merika Coleman, a Democrat based in the greater Birmingham area, spoke out against the bill back then and intends to do the same when the new proposal goes to a vote in the Senate. “I think that it can make our communities less safe,” she said. “If someone is afraid to report because they may face up to 10 years in prison if they are not believed, and then you would have a monster still on the streets.”
She also said the racial dynamics of Carlee Russell’s case can’t be ignored. Russell is a young Black woman who received the type of sympathetic media treatment usually reserved for blond-haired, blue-eyed women. “I think people got pissed off,” Coleman said. “White folks got pissed off.”
The proposed bill includes a qualifier that the false report must allege “imminent danger” to a person or the public, a provision a sponsor said is intended to account for only the most egregious false reports: someone falsely reporting a bomb threat, for instance, or a report similar to Russell’s that launches a big police response. But could a report of a stranger rape or an abusive spouse with a gun also be considered an imminent threat? After Mannion reported rape, her university issued a public safety notice to warn other students.
Best estimates suggest that only about a third of sexual assaults are reported to police, and advocates worry this bill could further exacerbate already existing police and victim mistrust.
“My greatest fear is that this bill will cause victims of sexual violence to read this as another reason NOT to report,” Brenda Maddox, executive director of the Tuscaloosa SAFE Center, a sexual assault crisis center, wrote in an email. “These types of crimes are significantly underreported because by nature they are shrouded in secrecy, not to be talked about in the light of day, and often turned back on the victim as being culpable in their own crime.”
Shaw, the state representative who proposed the House version of the bill, said he spoke to constituents, law enforcement officers and his fellow legislators while drafting this legislation. But he said he didn’t reach out to anyone who works with victims, the community that is most likely to ask police for help and at risk of being accused of false reporting.
He acknowledged the bill is in response to the Russell case – a “sample size of one,” he said. “I think it’s somewhat reactive. But we’re really trying not to be.”
If this bill passes and law enforcement officers in Alabama pursues felony charges for a rape or domestic violence case and there are questions about the quality of the investigation, Shaw promised that he would look into it.
Alabama Lawmakers Want Prison for False Reporting Charges. That Could Have Serious Consequences. is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
In 1999, John Goodrich, an Idaho dentist who was also a bishop with the Mormon church, accompanied his teenage daughter Chelsea on a school field trip to the East Coast. During a stay in Williamsburg, Virginia, he allegedly abused her sexually, as she later claimed he had done since she was at least 9.
Nearly a quarter-century later, John Goodrich – whose story was at the center of an Associated Press/Reveal radio collaboration about how The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints protects itself from sexual abuse allegations – has been arrested in Virginia following a grand jury indictment on multiple felony charges, including forcible rape, forcible sodomy and aggravated sexual battery by a parent of a child.
The indictment came in January, weeks after AP investigative reporters Jason Dearen and Michael Rezendes exposed how the Mormon church used a legal playbook to keep accusations against John Goodrich secret, despite numerous recordings and witnesses supporting the allegations. John Goodrich also has been accused of similar abuse in Idaho.
Dearen and Rezendes write:
Chelsea and her mother, Lorraine, went to Idaho police in 2016 to report wide-ranging allegations of abuse during her childhood.
Those charges were eventually dropped after a key witness in the case, another Mormon bishop to whom John had made a spiritual confession about him and his daughter, refused to testify. While the details of that confession have not been made public, the church excommunicated Goodrich.
John Goodrich’s defense lawyer declined to comment.
The Reveal/AP radio episode, which first aired in December, drew on hours of audio recordings of Chelsea Goodrich’s meetings with Paul Rytting, a Utah attorney who directs the church’s risk management division. The recordings show how Rytting, despite expressing concern for what he called John Goodrich’s “significant sexual transgression,” discouraged the local bishop to whom John Goodrich confessed from testifying. Rytting cited Idaho’s clergy-penitent privilege that exempts clergy from having to divulge information to authorities that is gleaned in a spiritual confession.
Dearen and Rezendes write:
Invoking the clergy privilege was just one facet of the risk management playbook that Rytting employed in the Goodrich matter. Rytting offered Chelsea and her mother $300,000 in exchange for a confidentiality agreement and a pledge to destroy their recordings of their meetings, which they had made at the recommendation of an attorney and with Rytting’s knowledge. The AP obtained similar recordings that were made by a church member at the time who attended the meetings as Chelsea’s advocate.
In a statement in December, a church spokesperson told The AP and Reveal that “the abuse of a child or any other individual is inexcusable.” The church said it dedicates “tremendous resources” to preventing and reporting abuse and noted that John Goodrich, following his excommunication, “has not been readmitted to church membership.”
Lawmakers in Utah, where the Mormon church is headquartered, recently passed a bill that provides legal protections to clergy if they notify authorities of ongoing child abuse based on information obtained from a perpetrator during a confession.
The measure extends to clergy the same legal protections that exist for mandatory reporters of child abuse and neglect, such as doctors, teachers or therapists. However, religious leaders who report abuse still will not be required to testify.
“I hope this case will finally bring justice for my childhood sexual abuse,” Chelsea Goodrich, now in her 30s, said in a statement to The AP. “I’m grateful it appears that the Commonwealth of Virginia is taking one event of child sexual assault more seriously than years of repeated assaults were treated in Idaho.”
Michael Montgomery can be reached at mmontgomery@revealnews.org. Follow him on X, formerly known as Twitter: @mdmontgomery.
Ex-Mormon Bishop Arrested on Charges of Sexually Abusing His Daughter is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
UPDATE, Dec. 18, 2023: This story has been updated to include details from and links to stories from the Florida Trident.
This article was published in partnership with the Miami Herald.
To understand the problems with Florida’s oversight of anti-abortion pregnancy centers, you don’t have to look much further than Mary’s Pregnancy Resource Center, north of Miami.
The crisis pregnancy center in Broward County steered women away from abortion while providing free pregnancy tests, ultrasounds and parenting classes. Founded by Yohanka Reyes and her husband, its mission was rooted in Reyes’ own horrific history: The first time she became pregnant after she was sexually assaulted as a young girl, she had an abortion. The second time, she decided to carry her baby to term – as it turned out, the only child she would give birth to.
Mary’s “has been the greatest blessing in the world,” Reyes declared in an interview with a Spanish-language Catholic TV channel. “To be able to tell my story and to be able to save so many lives and be able to reach their souls with the word of Jesus.”
For years, Mary’s was one of the crown jewels of the Florida Pregnancy Care Network, the little-known nonprofit that administers the state-funded “alternatives to abortion” program. In April, the network’s profile grew tremendously after the Legislature approved a fivefold funding increase to $25 million a year. In October, state support grew once again after the state Department of Health quietly increased the contract to up to $29.4 million.
This year’s funding nearly matches that of the entire last decade, when the state handed out $32.5 million in taxpayer money to the anti-abortion initiative. Mary’s has been one of its biggest beneficiaries, taking in more than $2.2 million in that period.
Mary’s Pregnancy Resource Center, a crisis pregnancy center in Broward County, Fla., had received more than $2.2 million in taxpayer funds over the last decade from the state’s alternatives-to-abortion program. Credit: Lauren Witte/Miami HeraldYet Mary’s was floundering financially for much of that time, sending up numerous red flags that the network didn’t seem to notice. For at least three years, the pregnancy center failed to file its federal Form 990s, the tax forms required for nonprofits, and other required paperwork, leading the Internal Revenue Service and the state to temporarily revoke its tax-exempt status.That should have disqualified it from receiving any public money, according to the state program’s compliance manual. But during this period, the network gave Mary’s $622,000. Mary’s also named a prominent anti-abortion activist as a board member on state records, even though she denied ever serving on the board, the Florida Trident reported in June.
The Florida Pregnancy Care Network was planning to award another $275,000 to Mary’s this year, according to documents obtained through a public records request – until journalists began asking questions.
Now Mary’s has dropped out of the network and faces nearly $170,000 in federal tax liens. In November, an eviction notice was posted on the front door of its two-story building alongside a sign that said, “We are moving.”
Reyes declined requests for an interview, complaining that journalists were treating her unfairly. “Why don’t you accept Jesus as Lord and Savior and that way you stop hurting people that are really trying to help others?” she wrote in an email.
A Reveal/Miami Herald review of Florida Pregnancy Care Network records from the last three years shows that the oversight deficiencies that allowed Mary’s to collect state funds are endemic in the alternatives-to-abortion program. The network hasn’t been conducting regular reviews of nonprofit tax filings or checking for federal tax debt. Centers didn’t need to apply for funding every year because their contracts had been automatically renewed. The network isn’t required by the state to conduct frequent site visits of the crisis pregnancy centers it’s funding; it visited fewer than half of the centers it funded last year. Network employees met with Mary’s staff just twice over 18 months, once in person and once online.
And because the Florida Pregnancy Care Network is a nonprofit, it isn’t subject to the same kind of transparency required of public agencies, shielding the program from the scrutiny lawmakers and public officials would otherwise give when millions in taxpayer dollars are spent. Funneling millions in taxpayer money through a nonprofit “creates a cloud over freedom of information,” said Democratic state Rep. Anna Eskamani of Orlando. “We should have the ability to know exactly what these public dollars are doing in our state.”
Fixing the network’s oversight gaps is more urgent than ever, given its rapid state-funded growth. Republican state Rep. Jennifer Canady from Polk County, who co-sponsored the funding bill, said she contacted the Florida Pregnancy Care Network’s executive director to “ensure taxpayer dollars are used effectively” after our reporters told her about problems at Mary’s.
“There are pregnancy care centers around the state doing incredible work and doing things for women,” Canady said. “But any that are not following the rules should not be receiving state funds.”
In a written statement, Rita Gagliano, the network’s executive director, called the Mary’s situation “an isolated incident,” adding: “We do not believe the allegations made involving this one center are representative of the program, how it runs or how it will continue to run.”
The network has put in place new requirements that centers share federal tax returns, end-of-year financial reports or any information about tax debt, and annual audits will be required of any nonprofit that receives $750,000 or more in public funding. Next fiscal year, they’ll have a new contract renewal process.
But those monitoring measures are still “the very minimum,” Eskamani said.
If the state doesn’t significantly strengthen how it monitors the program and mandate that the Florida Pregnancy Care Network be more transparent about its processes, serious financial problems are bound to continue, lawmakers and experts said.
“Transparency reduces corruption,” said David Cuillier, director of the Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida. Problems like the ones at Mary’s “happen all the time when you have a system shrouded in secrecy.”
Florida’s alternatives-to-abortion program dates back to Gov. Jeb Bush’s administration in 2005. The goal, said then-Lt. Gov. Toni Jennings, was to support women through pregnancies they might otherwise be tempted to terminate: “We want them to know that they do have a choice.” Last year, about 50 nonprofits received state money, including pregnancy centers, adoption agencies and maternity homes.
The Florida Department of Health sets the basic rules for the program. But since the beginning, responsibility for running it has been outsourced to the Florida Pregnancy Care Network, whose ties to anti-abortion conservatives and religious groups run deep. One of its founders, Tampa OB-GYN Dr. Rufus S. Armstrong, led a failed 2012 ballot campaign that sought to remove state constitutional protections for abortion.
The alternatives-to-abortion program had its first major growth spurt in 2016, when lawmakers increased funding from $2 million to $4 million a year. In 2018, they codified the network’s role as the sole conduit for distributing the taxpayer money.
The biggest chunk of that funding has gone toward parenting classes and counseling “with the goal of childbirth.” Other covered services include pregnancy tests, pregnancy loss counseling, parenting classes, testing for sexually transmitted infections and medical exams for the uninsured.
This year’s expansion was far more sweeping, and it came as Florida’s Republican lawmakers reacted to the demise of Roe v. Wade by restricting abortions. The state law banning abortion after six weeks is on hold pending a ruling from the Florida Supreme Court.
The rising profile of pregnancy centers reflects a trend that can be seen in other conservative states in the post-Roe era. For decades, the crisis pregnancy center movement concentrated on persuading “abortion vulnerable” women to choose parenting or adoption instead. Now, in conservative states with restrictive abortion laws, crisis pregnancy centers are revamping their mission – trying to fill growing gaps in access to reproductive health care by providing women’s wellness exams, sexually transmitted infection testing and even some prenatal care.
With so much new money flowing into the Florida program, many anti-abortion pregnancy centers are receiving double – and even triple – the amount of funds they received in previous years. The state is also reimbursing more for specific services – for example, reimbursement for counseling doubled to $2.50 per minute. Much of that money will go toward rent and salaries, records show.
Some of this year’s largest contracts went to Catholic dioceses that run crisis pregnancy centers.
The Catholic Charities arm of the Diocese of St. Petersburg will receive up to $800,000 this fiscal year, including for its four Foundations of Life crisis pregnancy centers in the Tampa Bay area. That’s more than triple its contract last year, and according to the operating budget it submitted to the state, the funds could nearly cover the entire budget. Foundations of Life director Laura Ramos said the new money will go toward promoting two part-time employees to full time and adding one more ultrasound technician.
“We live in a world where women are told constantly what to do, right? They tell us we cannot have children and go to school. They tell us we cannot hold jobs and have children,” Ramos said. “We are here to tell them that whatever decision they make, we will walk with them.”
The Archdiocese of Miami has seen its latest contract more than double to $350,000, enough to cover 75% of its submitted budget this year. In an interview with the Herald last spring, Angela Curatalo, director of the archdiocese’s three pregnancy centers, said volunteers, many from local churches, encourage women in state-funded counseling sessions to keep their pregnancies.
“It’s not professional counseling,” she told a Herald reporter in April. “We don’t pretend that it is.”
Angela Curatalo, director of the Archdiocese of Miami’s three pregnancy centers, explains the role of a sonogram in counseling pregnant people in April 2023. Credit: Carl Juste/Miami HeraldThey tell women about services like Medicaid and food stamps, free ultrasounds and adoption. They use plastic models of first-trimester fetuses and warn about alleged long-term effects of abortion, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, suicidal ideation, and alcohol or drug abuse – information that is not supported by sound medical research.
“We let them know you don’t have to go down that route,” Curatalo said.
The Florida Pregnancy Care Network also saw a big bump in its own state funding for operational expenses, including $1 million for marketing. This type of spending is a sore point with program opponents, including Eskamani, the state representative from the Orlando area.
“Part of this $29.4 million is literally going to go towards (advertising), boosting anti-abortion rhetoric and anti-abortion stigma,” she said. “I think there should be a complete prohibition on that.”
An additional $100,000 will fund an Option Line call center run by Heartbeat International, one of the largest anti-abortion organizations in the country, to give referrals to pregnancy centers.
Florida health authorities have been given virtually no power to regulate pregnancy centers. That means the Florida Pregnancy Care Network is the only agency with a true window into the operations of pregnancy centers in the state. But that doesn’t mean it’s offering oversight.
Gagliano said the network monitors only services “that are billable to the program.” “We expect members to independently and properly maintain and keep current all other business aspects of their organizations,” she wrote, as they are “completely independent of (the network).”
The state requires pregnancy centers to have policies for addressing client complaints, file monthly invoices detailing the number of clients served and the total number of minutes spent providing services, and do background checks on employees and volunteers, according to the program’s compliance manual. The network is also required to conduct an “on-site review” of centers “in person or by Zoom every other year.” And centers must also complete training, though the manual doesn’t specify what training is required.
Once a year, pregnancy centers are also required to go through “monitoring,” a process that includes a financial audit. But the Florida Pregnancy Care Network audits information for only one month and a single financial quarter – and gives program participants 30 days’ notice about which time periods it plans to review.
Then, if a group is in compliance with these rules, the network has more or less rubber-stamped its continued participation in the program, Reveal and the Herald found.
“We need to have people visiting these centers,” said state Senate Minority Leader Lauren Book, who represents parts of Broward County, including where Mary’s was located. “People should be looking at, ‘What is our return on investment?’ ”
Pamphlets about adoption, family planning, breast feeding and abortion are displayed at one of the Archdiocese of Miami’s pregnancy centers. Credit: Carl Juste/Miami HeraldThe state also requires that the network ensure that centers are providing “accurate and current” medical information to clients. Yet Reveal found that about a third of state-funded centers in Florida last year have posted misleading or inaccurate medical information on their websites, such as inaccurate claims about abortion causing infertility, anxiety attacks and suicidal ideation.
In October, Book filed legislation for the upcoming session that would require the Health Department to conduct annual inspections at state-funded centers and fine those distributing medical misinformation to clients.
“Your files should be up to date,” Book said. “You should be paying taxes. You should be doing all of the things that everybody else is having to do. You shouldn’t just get a free pass because you’re providing, quote, crisis pregnancy services.”
With a system that allows a nonprofit the power to distribute state money to private centers, much about the Florida Pregnancy Care Network and its operations remains hidden from the public.
Cuillier, the freedom of information expert, said outsourcing the alternatives-to-abortion program’s operations creates barriers around the public’s ability to scrutinize how taxpayer funds are spent – a practice he equated to “laundering public information through a nonprofit.” “This is kind of a gimmick used around the country to hide information,” he said. “It’s really just a blatant workaround (to promote) secrecy.”
If the Florida Department of Health directly contracted with the centers receiving state funds, individual contracts with centers and any audits would be publicly available. Currently, the only network document that’s posted online is the state’s contract with the Florida Pregnancy Care Network.
At least 17 other states award taxpayer funds to pregnancy centers and other organizations that work to deter people from having abortions. Last year, states handed out $89 million to crisis pregnancy centers and other anti-abortion organizations across the country – and that amount has been growing since Roe v. Wade was overturned.
Other states that have used the same nonprofit model have discovered problems, from a Texas pregnancy center using taxpayer money to pay for vacations to a state audit that found Oklahoma’s program spent more on administrative costs and salaries than on aid to pregnant women.
Book was among a small contingent of Democratic lawmakers who publicly opposed the Legislature’s proposal for $25 million in funding to the network this year. The lawmakers proposed reallocating the money toward other services, such as resources for domestic violence and sexual assault victims and telehealth services for a minority maternal care pilot program. Those amendments ultimately failed.
“You know how much $25 million could do for the child welfare system right now? It blows my mind,” Book said. “We talked a lot about that during the time when this bill was coming up on the floor. OK, you’re gonna give (families) bottles and cribs and car seats? Great. But that’s not child care. People can’t afford child care.”
This story was edited by Nina Martin, Kate Howard and Casey Frank and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
Laura C. Morel can be reached at lmorel@revealnews.org, and Clara-Sophia Daly can be reached at csdaly@miamiherald.com. Follow them on X, formerly known as Twitter: @lauracmorel and @clarasophiadaly.
ABOUT THE REPORTING
This story is part of Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting’s 18-month project on lack of oversight of anti-abortion pregnancy centers around the U.S. For this piece, Reveal and the Miami Herald spent almost a year examining Florida Pregnancy Care Network contracts, compliance manuals, center agreements and other documents obtained through public records requests with the Florida Department of Health. Reporters also reviewed publicly available IRS Form 990 filings filed by the Florida Pregnancy Care Network and dozens of crisis pregnancy centers since 2014.
How Anti-Abortion Pregnancy Centers in Florida Get Taxpayer Funds With Almost No Oversight is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
The Americans pulling into the luxury Caribbean resort town of Juan Dolio could have easily passed as tourists. Dressed in jeans and tennis shoes, they set up at a hotel overlooking the Dominican Republic’s southern coast. But the group, which included law enforcement officers from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, wasn’t traveling to enjoy the area’s world-class golf courses and palm-studded white sand beaches.
Trained to target and dismantle terrorist groups and transnational drug cartels, the special agents from Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, were probing something very different: working conditions at the Central Romana Corp., a major exporter of sugar to the U.S., whose top executive is Alfonso Fanjul, a billionaire Florida businessman.
The agents spent days in March secretly interviewing Haitian cane cutters, who were shuttled to the hotel from Central Romana’s sprawling nearby 240,000-acre plantation, where many workers, along with their families, live in ramshackle camps known as bateyes.
In November, months before the HSI agents’ arrival, U.S. Customs and Border Protection blocked imports of Central Romana sugar – which averaged about a quarter-billion pounds a year – after finding evidence of forced labor among its Haitian cane cutters.
But the HSI agents’ inquiry and deployment in the Dominican Republic, disclosed here for the first time, indicates significant new federal scrutiny of the country’s sugar industry. It could also represent a breakthrough in the application of U.S. laws allowing corporations and their executives to be held criminally accountable for labor exploitation in their supply chains.
A series of lawsuits and reports by government agencies, civil society groups and academics– along with extensive media investigations – have exposed grim conditions that Central Romana cane cutters and their families face, including substandard company housing, often without electricity or running water. In dozens of interviews with Reveal and Mother Jones over the last four years, workers and their advocates have described inadequate protective gear, poor medical care, low pay, chronic debt and intimidation by the company’s armed security force.
Alfonso Fanjul and his brother Jose “Pepe” Fanjul hold top positions at Central Romana. Their business empire includes the Dominican luxury resort Casa de Campo; major sugar brands such as Domino, C&H and Florida Crystals; nearly 190,000 acres of Everglades-area cane fields; and the world’s largest network of sugar refineries.
An investigation by HSI that leads to criminal charges against Central Romana or the company’s leadership would be “unprecedented,” according to Kenneth Kennedy, a retired special agent with the division who directed efforts to expand its work targeting forced labor in goods imported into the U.S. “This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains.”
Central Romana spokesperson Jorge Sturla declined to confirm the existence of or comment on any investigation by HSI. Sturla said Elevate, a labor auditor Central Romana has arranged to consult for the company, had “found no evidence of forced labor.” He declined to provide a copy of its report.
A Central Romana batey. Credit: Pedro Farias-NardiA department spokesperson said HSI does not confirm the existence of or comment on ongoing investigations. However, four Central Romana cane field workers confirmed they met with HSI agents earlier this year. The workers, who requested anonymity fearing reprisal by their employer, told Reveal and Mother Jones that agents queried them in Spanish and Haitian Creole about their grueling work, living conditions, pay, debt, medical care and precarious immigration status. (The vast majority of the company’s cane workers are of Haitian descent, and many are undocumented.) The agents also asked about elderly workers who, lacking access to government pensions, routinely cut cane into their 70s.
“The people from the United States government were interested in improving the situation for the Central Romana workers,” said one man who was interviewed by HSI, who reported having spent 30 years working in the cane fields.
The Homeland Security Investigations inquiry is taking place as Central Romana flexes its muscle in Washington over the export ban. Congressional disclosure reports show Central Romana has paid Akin Gump, which Sturla confirmed was hired for its “experience in international trade law,” to lobby members of the House about the ban. Another payment of $25,000 for lobbying the State Department and U.S. Customs and Border Protection went to the firm of James “Wally” Brewster, a U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic under the Obama administration.
In August, Alfonso Fanjul, the Palm Beach-based president and CEO of Central Romana, sent a letter to former U.S. Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., a longtime ally of President Joe Biden who now serves as a State Department special presidential adviser for the Americas. In the letter, obtained by Reveal and Mother Jones, Fanjul said he was “terribly upset” by the forced labor allegations and asked for Dodd’s help in “requesting (Customs and Border Protection) to lift its sanctions on our company.”
“Chris, we have been friends for a long time,” wrote Fanjul, who has contributed millions of dollars to Democratic campaigns, including Dodd’s. “I am a man of honor. … I would never allow my company to treat our workers in ways that would deserve the treatment we have received from CBP.”
Fanjul’s letter, which refers to Dodd’s previous “help and advice” on the Customs and Border Protection ban, comes from a powerful executive whose millions of dollars in campaign donations and lobbying has helped preserve lucrative price supports for U.S. sugar producers.
Sturla, the Central Romana spokesperson, said Fanjul had sent the letter to combat “disinformation” about the company. Dodd’s office and a State Department spokesperson both declined to comment on the letter, as did a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson.
The letter “gives a rare glimpse into the smoky backroom,” said Andrew Sullivan, a political strategist for No Big Sugar, a coalition of labor, human rights and environmental groups lobbying Congress to end the price supports. “He says the quiet part out loud, asking his ‘friend’ Senator Chris Dodd to trust him, not Customs and Border Protection. Fanjul is a man used to getting what he wants, and his frustration is palpable.” In light of the longstanding friendship Fanjul cites in his letter, Sullivan called on Dodd to recuse himself from any efforts to lift the ban.
Fanjul’s letter strongly denied that Central Romana uses forced labor and also cited Elevate’s report, claiming it came to the same conclusion. However, he wrote that the labor auditor recommended steps to improve its handling of “employee complaints,” their “interactions with supervisors” and “the quality of our worker housing.” Sturla said Central Romana has invested millions of dollars to improve worker housing, but experts on forced labor say those parts of the letter are unintended acknowledgements of some of the issues at the heart of the import ban.
“This letter confirms what other people have been saying,” said Duncan Jepson, managing director of Liberty Shared, an anti-trafficking group. “There are problems in how they handle complaints by workers, governance over supervisors’ conduct, housing and infrastructure.”
Jepson’s organization has partnered with U.S. agencies, including HSI, to combat forced labor throughout global supply chains – and has provided the government with relevant evidence on Ireland’s fishing industry, an Asian palm oil company, Goodyear’s factory in Malaysia and Central Romana’s operations. Most recently, the group filed a petition with U.S. Customs and Border Protection regarding Firestone Tire and Rubber Co.’s rubber plantation in Liberia. “These are very old industries,” Jepson said, “so their production methods still are very much entwined with the long history of abusive and exploitative labor practices.”
“This seems an opportunity for Mr. Fanjul to lead a program of transformative change at Central Romana,” he added.
But according to Charity Ryerson, executive director of the Corporate Accountability Lab, a labor watchdog group, instead of making the changes necessary to lift the ban, the company has so far focused on fighting it: “Central Romana has wasted the 10 months since the Customs ban was issued pursuing a political escape route rather than doing the right thing: remediating the abusive labor conditions identified by CBP and others.”
Federal laws authorize HSI to conduct and coordinate criminal investigations into U.S.-bound supply chains that could involve forced labor. Businesses or individuals who knowingly benefit financially from forced labor can face criminal penalties, including up to 20 years in prison.
As part of his work at HSI, Kennedy helped initiate the agency’s criminal investigation into Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. over alleged labor abuses at its factory in Malaysia. The investigation, which included interviews with overseas workers, was the first of its kind, said Kennedy, who retired from government in 2020. The inquiry was closed without criminal charges after Goodyear reached a settlement with workers last year.
Kennedy said investigators would easily be able to trace Central Romana’s supply chain of raw sugar from its Dominican plantation to U.S. ports. But prosecutors could face significant obstacles to bringing any potential or possible criminal charges, he said, including a lack of legal precedents or political will by agency officials and lawmakers and difficulties in getting victims to agree to testify. “These are some uncharted waters,” he said.
Central Romana has long denied the use of forced labor on its Dominican plantations. In a statement issued in the wake of the 2022 U.S. customs ban, the company insisted it ensured “safe and productive employment” with “appropriate wages, housing and other benefits.” Yet the same statement also pledged to “engage in a dialogue” with Customs and Border Protection. Since then, the company tasked Elevate, which specializes in global supply chain issues, with examining concerns raised by the agency. Central Romana has announced salary increases, applied fresh paint to some bateyes and, as part of what Sturla described as a “multi-year” improvement plan, installed solar panels in some bateyes and demolished others, relocating occupants to “upgraded housing.” But ex-residents of one dismantled community, now living in isolated bateyes with no power, have bitterly denounced the company’s actions. Their former community had been located on a highway and was one of the estimated 10% of the company’s work camps with electricity. According to complaints by residents of two other bateyes, the solar installations are adequate only for charging a cellphone or lighting a single bulb.
While Sturla also cited investments in health care and education for workers and their families, former U.S. officials and sources from nongovernmental organizations said Central Romana has appeared resistant to implementing more expansive reforms that could lead to a lifting of the trade ban.
“Labor rights advocates offered to collaborate with the company to develop an innovative, long-term solution for these workers,” Ryerson said. “Central Romana squandered that opportunity by not engaging in good faith,” declining to “do the right thing and remediate the harmful labor conditions” identified by Customs and Border Protection.
This story was developed in partnership with Mother Jones and with support from the Pulitzer Center. It was edited by Clint Hendler and Kate Howard and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
Sandy Tolan can be reached at atolan@usc.edu, and Michael Montgomery can be reached at mmontgomery@revealnews.org. Follow them on X, formerly known as Twitter: @Sandy_Tolan and @mdmontgomery.
Federal Agents Investigating Sugar Exporter Over Allegations of Forced Labor in Its Supply Chain is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
Written and reported by Julia Lurie
This story was produced by Mother Jones. Get their investigations emailed to you directly here.
The first time Katrina Edwards was locked in a psychiatric hospital for children, she was sure a foster parent would pick her up the next day.
It was a spring night in 2012 when Edwards, then 12 years old, was admitted to North Star Behavioral Health in Anchorage, Alaska. In a photo taken upon her arrival, Edwards wears an Abercrombie hoodie and has dark circles under her eyes, her expression skeptical. During her initial evaluation, a psychiatrist asked a battery of questions, including what Edwards wanted to be when she grew up (a police officer), what she did for fun (sports) and how she slept (poorly, with nightmares).
Alaska’s Office of Children’s Services had put Edwards in foster care earlier that year after she reported being sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend. Asked why she’d ended up at North Star, Edwards explained that she had threatened to run away from her foster home and commit suicide. Medical records from her admission noted that she had a history of fleeting suicidal ideation but that Edwards said she didn’t have a plan or intention of killing herself.
Then the psychiatrist asked, if Edwards had three wishes, what would they be? Instead of talking about her dreams for the future, Edwards focused on the past: She said she wished that she hadn’t been abused, that she hadn’t been sexually abused and, pointedly, that she hadn’t threatened suicide.
Edwards sobbed and yelled in protest as she handed over her cellphone and jewelry and changed into blue scrubs and hospital socks. She refused to sign the admissions paperwork; an OCS caseworker did so instead, according to court documents. Her outburst continued as a staffer ushered her into the unit for adolescent girls.
“If you keep acting like this,” one girl warned her, “you’re gonna get booty juiced.”
In the days to follow, Edwards learned the facility’s peculiar vernacular. “Booty juice” was the intramuscular sedative that staffers gave to kids they thought were acting out. According to court documents, they would restrain children and pull their pants down to administer the injection, then seclude them in the small, unfurnished space known as the “quiet room.” If someone in your unit got into a fight or if you refused to take your medications, you could be put on “unit restriction,” unable to leave the dormitory area to go to the cafeteria, classes or the fenced-in basketball court outside.
How was it possible, Edwards wondered, that passing thoughts of suicide had landed her in a “mini prison for children”? She says that when she mentioned suicide to her foster mom, she hadn’t meant it literally; she’d meant that she felt miserable and wanted someone to sit down and listen to her. The chaos of the facility felt like the opposite of what Edwards needed. A few weeks into her stay, she filled out a “personal de-escalation plan.” It asked, “What are some things that do not help you calm down or stay safe?” She checked all the boxes on the sheet: things like “loud tone of voice” and “being ignored.” She also wrote in her own answer: “Being in North Star.”
A “personal de-escalation plan” Edwards filled out a few weeks into her first stay at North Star.Now 23, Edwards has a round face, a quick laugh and an unfiltered way of speaking that’s disarmingly charming, even if she’s telling you that you’re an overcautious driver and that you’ve had something in your teeth all day – which she did, the first time we met. She giggles while telling traumatic stories. In those first days at North Star, she banged on the windows, hoping to be rescued. “When people would walk up, I’d be in the window, thinking they could see me cry for help,” she explained with a laugh. “They couldn’t see me at all.”
Edwards was released after 24 days. But just two weeks later, she was back – this time in a police car, after reportedly making suicidal comments. Noting Edwards was “agitated and prone to threaten others,” a psychiatrist prescribed Seroquel, a potent antipsychotic. Twenty-eight days later, she was released, and by February 2013, she had run away, again had been picked up by the police and again was deposited at North Star.
This time, she repeatedly attempted to escape. Over the course of two weeks, she was put in the quiet room three times, restrained twice and forcibly injected once – for pulling a fire alarm in an escape attempt, according to medical records. She vividly recalls being held down, a male staff member’s knee on her back as she was injected, the panic and confusion she felt when waking up in the quiet room.
The psychiatrist increased Edwards’ Seroquel prescription; she was also taking Concerta for ADHD, Benadryl for “agitation,” melatonin for sleep and the antidepressant Lexapro. At times, Edwards pleaded to stop the meds. “They are messing up with my body,” she told her psychiatrist, according to medical records. “They are messing up with my mind and sometimes I don’t even know what I’m doing.”
A month into her stay, Edwards was moved from North Star’s hospital to its psychiatric residential facility, a locked unit for longer stays. From the unit’s window, she stared out at a bank on the other side of a parking lot, imagining the lives of the customers – their baby mamas, their paydays. For a time, Edwards shared a room with a girl who talked to “Sally,” her hallucinated friend who visited their dorm.
OCS turnover was so common that Edwards often didn’t know who her caseworker was, but on the rare occasions they spoke, Edwards begged to go anywhere else. According to Edwards, North Star staffers told her she’d have to wait for a foster family to become available. “They would tell me, ‘Oh, you’re only gonna be here for a month,’ ” she said. “And then a month would go by, and they’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, we got to extend it for like another month.’ ” Medical records show that Edwards’ discharge was pushed back on at least two occasions because OCS couldn’t find a home for her.
Edwards celebrated her 13th birthday at North Star in March and her 14th a year later. She remained in the facility for 18 months.
North Star is owned by Universal Health Services, a publicly traded Fortune 500 company that is the nation’s largest psychiatric hospital chain, with 185 inpatient behavioral health facilities and dozens of acute care hospitals across the country, in addition to centers in Puerto Rico and the United Kingdom. More than 21,000 inpatient psychiatric beds – or 1 in 6 across the country – are operated by UHS, which brought in $13.4 billion last year.
In recent years, the company has been the subject of several high-profile lawsuits and investigations, including a blistering BuzzFeed News series in 2016 and a Department of Justice probe that resulted in $122 million in settlements in 2020. The claims of these investigations bear a striking resemblance to Edwards’ experience: UHS facilities admitted patients who didn’t need to be there to begin with, failed to provide adequate treatment and staffing, billed insurance for unnecessary services over excessive lengths of time, and improperly used physical and chemical restraints and isolation. BuzzFeed reported that some of the company’s psychiatric hospitals used suicidal ideation to “justify almost any admission”; in 2013, UHS hospitals submitted Medicare claims for suicidal ideation at more than four times the rate of non-UHS psychiatric hospitals.
In a statement, UHS denied BuzzFeed’s conclusions and disputed the Justice Department’s allegations, noting that the settlement agreement “is not an admission of liability.” The company said it complies with regulations related to “restrictive practices” and is committed to reducing the use of restraints and seclusion. (Read the statement here.)
Politicians on both sides of the aisle have decried the company, and Democratic Sens. Patty Murray of Washington and Ron Wyden of Oregon launched an ongoing probe into UHS and other operators of residential facilities for kids in July 2022. Celebrity heiress Paris Hilton – who experienced physical and sexual abuse as a teenager in the 1990s at Provo Canyon School, a Utah facility since bought by UHS – took aim at the company as part of her advocacy work against the so-called troubled teen industry.
Despite all this scrutiny, a large, highly profitable and easily exploitable group of UHS patients has been overlooked: foster children. A yearlong Mother Jones investigation shows that thousands of foster kids have been admitted in recent years to UHS’ psychiatric facilities, where they typically stay for weeks or months, sometimes leaving far worse off than when they arrived. Foster children provide a lucrative patient base for the same reasons they’re so vulnerable: There’s rarely an adult on the outside clamoring to get them out, and often, they don’t have anywhere else to go. Plus, Medicaid typically foots the bill, which at North Star costs $938 per night. As Edwards notes, “They got a lot of money from me.” (UHS disputed the allegation that many children get worse in its care, pointing to its positive clinical outcomes and patient satisfaction scores.)
Over time, a symbiotic relationship has developed between overburdened child welfare agencies, which have too many kids in custody and not enough places to put them, and large for-profit companies like UHS, with beds to fill and profits to make, says Ronald Davidson, a psychologist and the former director of the Mental Health Policy Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Over the course of two decades, until 2014, Davidson and his team reviewed hundreds of psychiatric facilities across the country as part of a consent decree intended to reform Illinois’ child welfare system. He also conducted similar reviews as a Justice Department consultant. “The sales pitch – ‘We can offer solutions to your overwhelming caseloads of high-needs children’ – appeared irresistible to frantic agencies in need of more beds,” he explains, “and many of them desperately took the bait.” Kids often come back to facilities again and again, acting out more with each admission. “Unfortunately, in many hospitals, the door only swings one way,” Davidson says. “You become a patient, and you stay a patient.” To UHS and its competitors, he concludes, foster kids are “a gold mine.”
For some foster children, the results have been devastating. As Edwards endured her stay at North Star, a 12-year-old West Virginia foster child was placed at UHS’ Cedar Grove Residential Treatment Center, a program in Tennessee for sexually abusive and reactive boys, even though he wasn’t a sex offender. He begged his caseworker to let him leave but was held at the facility for 18 months, according to a subsequent lawsuit against the state’s Child Protective Services agency. In 2018, Oregon Child Protective Services sent a 14-year-old girl to Provo Canyon School, where she experienced 42 instances of peer assault, seclusion or restraint – including being forcibly injected with the antipsychotic Haldol 17 times – over the course of three months, according to records obtained by state officials. The same year, Virginia’s Child Protective Services sent 17-year-old Raven Nichole Keffer to UHS’ Newport News Behavioral Health Center, where she collapsed after days of complaining of feeling sick. According to a lawsuit, a 15-year-old patient was the first to call 911; Keffer died of an allegedly preventable adrenal insufficiency. In 2021, Alabama Child Protective Services placed a 10-year-old at UHS’ Alabama Clinical Schools, where he was repeatedly assaulted by staffers over six months, resulting in a broken collarbone and black eye, in addition to being bitten by scorpions in his bed “many times,” according to a recent lawsuit. When he reported the injuries, staffers allegedly threatened to kill him.
In its statement, UHS noted it couldn’t comment on ongoing investigations, pending lawsuits, or specific patients, though it did say the incident at Newport News “was the only death of a patient while in the care of the facility.” The statement added, “Our facilities are highly regarded, trusted providers of behavioral health services in the communities we serve.”
Anchorage, Alaska. Credit: Ash AdamsLast year, when a lawyer in Alaska offhandedly mentioned that OCS uses North Star as a “dumping ground,” I started talking to foster kids about their experiences at the facility. I was struck by the similarities in their stories: the frequency of restraints and booty juicing, the panic of being sent to the quiet room, the claims that a caseworker or staffer said they were only there because they were waiting for a foster home, even the banging on the double-paned windows. The problem transcends Alaska or UHS. As many lawsuits have documented, child welfare agencies across the country rely on locked psychiatric facilities, many of which use punitive disciplinary tactics, to house difficult-to-place kids. These placements disproportionately affect children of color. Black and Indigenous kids – including Edwards, who is part Yupik – are more likely to enter the foster system and more likely to be sent to residential treatment facilities.
To understand just how big an impact UHS has on the lives of foster kids, I combed through thousands of pages of court filings and medical records and interviewed more than 50 former UHS employees, patients, child welfare experts, lawyers and policymakers. I also filed public records requests to the Child Protective Services and Medicaid agencies in all 50 states, asking for the number of foster children sent to the company’s inpatient behavioral health facilities and the amount of money spent on their care. (No national database exists.) The 38 states that provided data sent foster children to UHS facilities more than 36,000 times between 2017 and 2022. Meanwhile, the 31 states that responded to my Medicaid query spent more than $600 million on the treatment of foster children at UHS facilities over the same period.
The data shows that child welfare agencies routinely send foster children to UHS programs already implicated by damning inspections and media reports. Hundreds went to Provo Canyon, whose license was threatened twice after children escaped or were injured during physical restraints. (UHS noted Provo Canyon School resolved concerns with state inspectors in a timely manner.) Hundreds more went to Hill Crest Behavioral Health Services, where internal videos revealed by BuzzFeed in 2017 showed staffers repeatedly beating and dragging young patients, to the condemnation of members of Congress, and to North Star, where federal investigators last year reported escapes, assaults and a patient not receiving a single therapy appointment for 40 days.
“It does kind of make your head spin,” said Davidson, when presented with the data. “It is a huge, huge market, dollarwise. And the thing that irritates advocates and people like me is that so much of this marketplace is either unnecessary or patients could far more easily be treated at far lower cost in outpatient care.”
By February 2015, Edwards had spent a total of 722 nights at North Star – a stay that cost the state an estimated $330,000. For Edwards, the years collapsed into one long, medicated blur. Recalling her experience there, she says, is “like explaining what happens when you get into a fight, and you don’t know how you got the bruises on your body.”
Back in 2020, North Star’s Haley Morrissey had a clear sales goal: “Get numbers up and make sure census was at capacity.” That meant spreading the word about the treatment center to 120 people each month. As part of a five-person team of “clinical community liaisons,” Morrissey contacted police officers, first responders and emergency departments, alerting them when North Star had open beds and reminding them that prospective patients could always get a free assessment. She met with school counselors across southeastern Alaska. Her team sent care packages to OCS offices with North Star-branded mugs, stress balls and lip balms, thanking them for their work. Organizations with particularly high referral rates to North Star received bath bombs and cards reminding the recipients to practice self-care.
Morrissey spent nearly a decade working at North Star, including time as a recreational therapist. She took pride in helping provide much-needed mental health services. Her enthusiasm dimmed, though, as she became increasingly alarmed by the understaffing and unsafe conditions. Foster kids, sometimes called “frequent flyers” by the staff, tended to come back. A bright-eyed 8-year-old on the children’s unit would turn into a slightly more aggressive kid on the preteen unit and then become an apathetic, angry teenager on the adolescent unit. Eventually, Morrissey decided to resign, leaving North Star last fall. Her message for families today is a far cry from when she was on the road marketing North Star: “Absolutely do not send them there.”
Alaska perfectly exemplifies the way UHS profits from failing foster care systems. More than three times as many kids are in foster care as there are licensed foster homes, a problem some critics attribute to too many children being removed from their families to begin with – particularly Alaska Native kids, who make up two-thirds of the state’s foster children. A quarter of OCS caseworker positions are empty; more than half of caseworkers leave each year. Meanwhile, behavioral health resources for kids are so lacking that the Justice Department recently concluded the state is violating the Americans With Disabilities Act.
It’s no wonder, then, that foster children have been admitted to North Star, the state’s only private psychiatric facility for kids, more than 500 times over the past six years or that foster kids are routinely sent to similar programs out of state. Two of every three admissions of Alaska foster children to psychiatric facilities occurred at those owned by UHS, including half of out-of-state placements. From 2017 to 2022, the state’s Medicaid program for children paid North Star $119 million.
But the spending doesn’t stop there: OCS data shows that the agency pays for kids to stay at North Star even when Medicaid reviewers have determined it’s not medically necessary. Between 2017 and 2020, the agency paid North Star more than $1 million for the care of foster children whose stays weren’t covered by Medicaid.
Of the many lawsuits involving OCS and North Star over the years, the case of a “frequent flyer” named Nathon Pressley stands out for laying bare their mutually beneficial relationship. Pressley entered the foster system in 1998, when he was a year old, and bounced from foster home to residential facility to foster home for 17 years – his entire childhood. He cycled in and out of North Star starting when he was 5, ultimately spending a cumulative 429 days there.
Sometime after his last North Star stay, Pressley went to a retreat organized by Facing Foster Care in Alaska, an advocacy group for foster youth. At a church on the outskirts of Anchorage, he met Jim Davis, the co-founding attorney of the Northern Justice Project, a civil rights law firm. Davis had recently had his own awakening at one of the retreats, hanging out with foster youth, mostly teenagers, eating pizza at the church. The kids seemed “basically normal,” Davis remembers – they reminded him of his own kids. “And then a lot of them started talking about North Star, and how they were institutionalized at North Star, and how they were forced to take drugs at North Star.”
Nathon Pressley. Credit: Ash AdamsThis was news to Davis. “To be honest with you, I just remember leaving and thinking, maybe these foster youth are exaggerating everything,” Davis says. “It just seemed too far-fetched.”
But once Davis dug into foster care records, he was convinced. In 2017, Davis represented Pressley in a lawsuit accusing OCS of negligence; OCS, in turn, sued North Star in a third-party complaint, arguing that if Pressley had been harmed, North Star was partially at fault. In her deposition, then-OCS Director Christy Lawton said that foster children stay at North Star – even after Medicaid stops paying – when the agency can’t find a “safe, appropriate discharge placement.” In the foster system, she admitted, “there often can be cases that end up languishing.”
Lindsay Bothe, an OCS manager who was an expert witness in Pressley’s case, acknowledged in her deposition that Pressley “did have some longer stays while they were looking for a placement for him to discharge to.” Davis then pressed Bothe:
Davis: Nathon didn’t really belong at North Star anymore because he didn’t meet that level of care, and he was already stabilized, at least as far as North Star goes, but there wasn’t anyplace else with the right level of care to put him?
Bothe: Correct.
Davis: So he just stayed locked up in a psychiatric facility?
Bothe: Yes.
Davis: For months.
Bothe: Yes.
OCS and North Star settled with Pressley last year for an undisclosed sum. In a statement, OCS said that finding suitable placements is a “nationwide challenge” and that it strives to do so promptly.
Former North Star staffers told me that the problem wasn’t just that kids stayed too long, but that they were admitted at all. Jason Fedeli, who worked as an intake coordinator and counselor until 2020, repeatedly saw cases in which children would end up at North Star after having an argument with their foster parents. Fedeli interviewed kids who he didn’t think needed a locked psychiatric hospital. But again and again, they were admitted. He often saw them get worse rather than better, in part because the facility was so understaffed. When Fedeli became a therapist, he says he was spread so thin that “therapy” often amounted to five-minute check-ins during which he would ask, “How’re you doing? You feeling good? Are you suicidal?” Staffers would call such encounters “flybys.” (UHS denied that its facilities operate with inadequate staffing levels, adding that admissions are based “only on the patient’s clinical presentation.”)
Alexies Ezell stands for a portrait near her neighborhood in Anchorage, Alaska. Credit: Ash AdamsEventually, North Star dismantled the discharge planning team, and this, too, became Fedeli’s responsibility. He learned that there were plenty of places out of state – particularly in Utah – that would take struggling children. Medicaid covered a child’s out-of-state stay only if they first had been denied by three Alaska facilities; when staffers wanted to send a child to the Lower 48, they would “go to three places that you knew would deny the child,” Fedeli said, “and just mark them off your list. Or you’d even call them up and be like, ‘Hey, we just want a denial.’ ”
This may help explain why so many foster children who stayed at North Star said that staffers proposed out-of-state transfers. “They kept trying to bring me to Utah,” said Alexies Ezell, who attended North Star three times. “Every single time I was brought there, it was fucking Utah. I was like, What is in Utah?”
Katrina Edwards would find out. In 2015, shortly before her 15th birthday, Edwards received news: She was being moved from North Star, where she’d lived for two years, to Copper Hills in West Jordan, Utah. Plane tickets had already been bought. She had never been out of state before. Everything about Copper Hills – the climate, the terrain, the people – was unfamiliar. But Copper Hills did have something in common with North Star: It, too, was owned by UHS.
Founded in 1979, UHS traces its origins back a decade earlier, when Alan Miller – a Brooklynite, veteran and Wharton School graduate – was working at an ad agency. One day, an old Wharton roommate approached him with a business idea: “He said, ‘You know, we can own private hospitals,’ ” Miller later told The New York Times. “To which I responded, ‘You’re kidding.’ He said they had them in California, and it sounded like a good idea.” The roommate started the hospital company American Medicorp, and by 1972, Miller was the CEO.
A few years later, the company faced a hostile takeover by the health care company Humana. “When you’re faced with a takeover bid, your true nature comes out. It’s war,” Miller, a lover of military history who says his leadership style was inspired by George Washington, told the Times. Humana kept raising the price, and Miller eventually lost the company. But the very next day, he started UHS. His timing was perfect: As deinstitutionalization emptied out state psychiatric hospitals, private facilities stepped into the breach. Between 1983 and 1986, the number of patients in private psychiatric hospitals nearly doubled.
By the ’90s, this freewheeling growth came back to haunt the industry as mounting lawsuits accused psychiatric institutions of defrauding insurers. Medicaid tightened its policies, lowering reimbursements. UHS began buying up floundering facilities. In 2003, the company made the Fortune 500 list for the first time.
A pivotal moment came seven years later, when UHS more than doubled its number of behavioral health beds by buying its direct competitor, Psychiatric Solutions Inc. – even though journalists and government regulators repeatedly had revealed abuse at a number of PSI facilities. In 2008, a Chicago Tribune investigation found that PSI’s Riveredge Hospital in suburban Chicago “left sexual predators unguarded,” leading to “savage violence.” The Los Angeles Times and ProPublica found a pattern of abuse and neglect throughout the company’s California establishments. During an earnings call that year, PSI’s co-founder, Joey Jacobs, acknowledged that most of the company’s business came from children and adolescents, “and the vast majority of those are Medicaid or state agency” kids. In a 2009 review, Davidson’s team reported that PSI facilities in five states showed a pattern of violence, sexual assault, poor medical care, inadequate staffing and “a general failure of professional clinical leadership and accountability.” Nonetheless, in a jubilant call with investors after the acquisition, Miller said, “We know these facilities well, and these are very attractive assets. The fit with our business is outstanding.” (Miller did not respond to a request for comment.)
UHS grew in tandem with a burgeoning population of foster kids. For decades, “troubled” kids had been sent away to military schools and “tough love” programs, but what we think of as the child welfare system emerged in the 1960s and ’70s, as state mandatory reporting laws went into effect and the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act provided federal funding to Child Protective Services agencies. Reported cases of child abuse and neglect skyrocketed, from some 60,000 in 1974 to about 3 million in 2000.
Faced with too many foster kids and not enough places to put them, some agencies sent them far away. At its peak in the mid-’90s, Illinois had 800 children placed out of state. After the ACLU sued the state, Davidson was hired in 1994 to ensure the child welfare system was complying with requirements of the resulting consent decree. Over the next 20 years, he and his team crisscrossed the country, visiting and revisiting the facilities, eventually compiling reports on more than 400 of them. Several patterns emerged: Very few kids needed inpatient psychiatric treatment to begin with; the out-of-state treatment centers were substandard; and more often than not, they presented imminent risk of sexual or physical abuse. The researchers found that foster children in the facilities – particularly those out of state – were essentially stranded.
There were a few reasons for this. Behavioral health programs attracted little scrutiny from insurers. “It tends to get, I don’t want to say no attention, but a fairly minimal amount of attention from payers, which I think is generally a good thing,” UHS’ chief financial officer, Steve Filton, said at a health care conference in 2013. “So, it is a space that tends to operate … under a lot of people’s radar.” Making matters worse, Davidson notes, “these are kids by and large who’ve been taken away from their parents, so they have no family to watch out for them.” Caseworkers didn’t keep a close eye on them either. “In Chicago, they couldn’t even monitor the kids that were five miles away on the South Side,” he adds. “How were they going to monitor a kid in Arizona or Texas? The short answer is they couldn’t and they didn’t.”
Thanks in part to Davidson’s work, UHS attracted the attention of federal regulators, who by 2013 were investigating 10 of UHS’ psychiatric facilities – including Florida’s River Point Behavioral Health, where they were looking into allegations that staffers had doctored records and diagnosed patients with psychiatric disorders to extend their stays. The Justice Department initiated concurrent civil and criminal investigations into false-claims allegations, expanding its criminal probe to include UHS as a corporate entity in 2015.
BuzzFeed then reported that many UHS facilities kept beds filled at the expense of patient safety. Employees in 14 treatment centers were allegedly pressured to hold patients until their insurance coverage ran out – a strategy summed up in the instruction: “Don’t leave days on the table.” UHS’ stock dipped; one Oklahoma facility lost state funding and later was forced to close. But the investigations had little effect on the company’s bottom line, and when the Justice Department’s criminal investigation closed in 2019 with no charges filed, share prices soared. The following year, UHS agreed to pay $122 million to resolve allegations brought by the Justice Department and state attorneys general. It amounted to roughly one-hundredth of the company’s net revenues that year.
In 2021, after more than four decades at the helm of UHS, Alan Miller passed the reins to his son, Marc – sort of. The 86-year-old executive remains chair of the board, holds the vast majority of shareholders’ general voting power and controls most board appointments. Forbes estimates his family’s net worth at $1.3 billion – wealth Miller has long used to support conservative politicians, including in his longtime role as a board member of the Republican Jewish Coalition. He and his wife, Jill, live in the Philadelphia area, home of Miller Theater, which hosts touring Broadway shows; the Ronald McDonald House’s Jill and Alan B. Miller Tower; and, in an homage to the benefactor’s military hero, the Alan B. Miller Theater at the Museum of the American Revolution, which houses George Washington’s Revolutionary War tent.
On the flight to Utah, Edwards wore scrubs and handcuffs, accompanied by two security escorts. “I looked like a fucking criminal,” she remembers.
The sprawling Copper Hills campus sits on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, surrounded by a tall fence. Edwards considered her options: She could try to escape again, but she had no money for a return plane ticket. Perhaps she could be homeless in Utah, she thought. “I didn’t care about anything,” she says. “I was thousands of miles away from home. What the hell are they going to do to me?”
When Edwards was admitted in 2015, Copper Hills was spiraling out of control. The previous year, patients “acted out sexually” on a child after staff left them unsupervised, according to court records. State officials put the facility on conditional status, which was lifted in 2016. Physical restraints and sedative injections were used more than a dozen times per day, say two former executives. (I spoke with eight recent employees, including four people in leadership.)
Edwards arrived just before a new CFO named Brian Blohm was hired to help turn things around. Looking back on his tenure, which stretched until 2019, Blohm sees red flags from the beginning. His bonus was based partly on the ratio of employees per occupied bed – with the goal of maximizing the number of beds filled and minimizing the cost of staff. But when crunching numbers, Blohm realized it was impossible for him to be paid his full bonus without running under the state’s staffing requirement. He mentioned it to higher-ups, who eventually changed the bonus plan, though the pressure to cut costs remained. Each week, he was required to send a report on employees per occupied bed to regional and corporate leadership; if there was an increase, there had to be a justification, Blohm explains.
Though state law mandates one staff member for every five patients, a single employee routinely watched more than a dozen kids, former staffers said. A staffing spreadsheet I reviewed from January 2022 shows that, across nine units of patients, only one was within the legal staffing ratio. Six units had just one employee – with as many as 15 children – for hours. Employees lay the blame partly on meager wages: Entry-level “mental health technicians” today begin at $16 an hour – the same starting wage as the McDonald’s down the street.
The understaffing extended to medical personnel: Copper Hills and Benchmark Behavioral Health, another UHS site a half-hour away, house some 200 kids at a time, many with acute psychiatric needs. Yet, for years – until the pandemic hit – they were served by just two psychiatrists, who split their time between the facilities. (UHS said it complies with staffing regulations and doesn’t incentivize unsafe staffing levels.)
Though a clinical team reviewed intake referrals to make sure they could safely meet new patients’ needs, Blohm would often receive calls from UHS executives in other states asking him to free up bed space for a patient at a sister facility who needed to be admitted immediately. “We’d even get calls from our CEO’s boss saying, ‘Take this kid, because they’re in my facility, and we’re not getting paid by insurance anymore,’ ” said a former Copper Hills clinical director, who asked that Mother Jones not use her name. “The goal was to fill the beds.”
Multiple former Copper Hills employees said that around 2016, they were informed of a new goal: Increase patients’ length of stay from about seven months to a full year. That way, they could introduce fewer potentially disruptive children while still generating revenue. Rather than leaving a patient’s discharge up to a therapist, the facility implemented a lengthy review process involving its leadership. “There was pressure on me to push back too and say, ‘Oh, you think they’re ready?’ ” said the former clinical director. “ ‘What makes you say that they’re ready? Have you addressed trauma?’ ”
Blohm was directed to have his staff report monthly on “unused days,” or times when the facility could have gotten insurance money but didn’t. Minimizing unused days helped determine discharge, he said. A soon-to-be-released patient may be “ready to go home today – and maybe it’s their birthday tomorrow,” he said. “But, you know, we have two weeks approved. We’ll just plan the travel for two weeks.” (After four years as CFO, Blohm was fired following a dispute with an employee. He later filed a complaint with Utah’s labor division for retaliatory discrimination.)
Long stays were rationalized as better for kids, many of whom had chaotic home lives. Plus, it made life easier for everyone else. “If there is a stable kid on the unit, that is fantastic for the staff and the other patients, who all benefit from having less disruptive behaviors happening around them,” the former clinical director said.
The length of patient stays had come up in UHS investor calls and conferences for years. At the 2013 Credit Suisse Healthcare Conference, Filton, the CFO, noted that nearly all of the reimbursement for behavioral treatment was on a per diem basis, “and obviously, if they spend less days in a facility, then we’re going to be paid less for a single admission.” A few years later, when behavioral facilities started to see a slight downturn in length of stay, Filton assured investors they’d reach out to facilities “to make sure we’re doing all the appropriate … blocking and tackling that we do vis-à-vis length of stay.”
Once more, foster kids offered a convenient patient base. They tended to linger, especially if they had “an uninvested caseworker or a caseworker who doesn’t trust this kid,” said the former Copper Hills clinical director. Chalese Meyer, a former recreational therapist, adds: “They were the kids who stayed there for extended amounts of time and usually were institutionalized and placed over and over and over again. So they know how to work the system – and they felt comfortable in those places.”
This, in effect, is what happened to Edwards: Her resistance to Copper Hills morphed into something like acceptance. A few months into her stay, it dawned on her that she wasn’t leaving anytime soon. “So I was like, ‘Might as well start doing what I’m told,’ ” she remembers. A staffer took her on a walk to the campus store, where kids who had earned enough points based on behavior could buy snacks, and asked for her opinion on what the store should stock. This type of conversation – an adult treating her like an adult – was new to Edwards. “From then on, I was like, I want to be a teacher’s pet,” she said.
She stopped trying to escape and getting into fights. She started doing well in school. She participated in activities reserved for kids who were behaving, like cheerleading and cooking in the campus kitchen. When Edwards talks about Copper Hills, it’s hard to tell if it was genuinely helpful or simply better than before. At one point, she told me, “It was like a high school. It really was. The facility was locked, and that’s it.”
After more thana year in Utah, Edwards was discharged. She returned to Anchorage, where she lived in a group home. But the following months were challenging. Edwards testified in the trial of the man whose abuse sent her to foster care to begin with; he was convicted and sentenced to 39 years in prison. Soon after, she attempted suicide. Edwards says that she did need mental health services during this period, but when she learned that she was being sent to North Star, she was filled with dread. “If I could paint a picture of what North Star is,” she says, “it is literally hell on earth.”
At first, it looked like this North Star stay was going to go like the others. She was unhappy and resistant to treatment. Her psychiatrist expected her to be there a full year. Her three wishes on admission: to get out, to go to school and to find a foster family.
Then, on the eve of her 17th birthday, it finally happened. A foster family came through. As it turned out, it was someone Edwards already knew – a former North Star staffer. Edwards, thrilled, was discharged early.
By the time she was released in March 2017, she had been in treatment for the better part of five years, including 891 nights at North Star. All told, Alaska’s Medicaid program had paid more than half a million dollars for her care at UHS facilities.
When she got out, she felt like she’d emerged from an alternate universe – one devoid of fashion trends, everyday interactions with strangers and new technology. “Every time I went in and came out, there was like three new iPhones,” she says. Without the structure of an institutional environment, she had no idea when she should shower or go to bed. Would her foster mom think it was weird if she ate a snack and was hungry again five minutes later? Old reflexes from her treatment life lingered. She found herself asking her foster mom for permission to use the bathroom. Sometimes, Edwards would stand outside her bedroom door, waiting for someone to let her in – only to remember that she didn’t need to wait for a staffer with a key card.
Edwards, like Nathon Pressley, met Jim Davis at a Facing Foster Care in Alaska retreat. Edwards was skeptical of this middle-aged White lawyer giving a presentation with pizza sauce on his chin, but when he talked about suing North Star, she remembers, “I was like, oh, no way, this man knows about North Star!”
By 2018, Davis was representing Edwards in a lawsuit alleging battery and false imprisonment against North Star and UHS. When Pressley sued OCS, the agency subsequently sued North Star, but in Edwards’ case, the blame-shifting reversed course: North Star turned around and sued OCS. Neither organization, it seems, is prepared to take full responsibility for the children in their care. (The defendants in Edwards’ case have denied the allegations.)
Davis remains just as incredulous about warehousing foster kids at North Star as he was when he first learned about it years ago. “There aren’t any foster homes available, so we’ll just lock them up?” he says. “I mean, we just can’t do that. You can’t take someone’s freedom away because you’re doing a shitty job at recruiting foster families.”
Paris Hilton returned to Utah’s Provo Canyon School on a sunny day in 2020 for the first time since her teenage years. She had the platinum blond hair and big sunglasses of her reality TV days – but wore a T-shirt reading “Survivor” on the back and “Breaking Code Silence” on the front, the name of a campaign to put an end to the troubled teen industry.
“When I was a teenager,” she said to the camera, “I promised myself that one day, I was gonna shut down Provo Canyon School and save all the children.”
Actress and model Paris Hilton speaks outside the U.S. Capitol on Oct. 20, 2021. Congressional Democrats held a news conference with Hilton to discuss child abuse and legislation to establish a “bill of rights” to protect children placed in congregate care facilities. Credit: Alex Wong/Getty ImagesThe documentary “This Is Paris,” in which Hilton revealed the abuse she endured over her 11-month stay at the facility, had come out just a few weeks before. Since then, she has proved to be a powerful lobbying force. In 2021, after hearing testimony from Hilton and others, Utah lawmakers passed legislation aimed at increasing oversight, requiring facilities to document instances of physical restraint and seclusion and to allow contact with family members. Hilton testified to state legislatures in Missouri, Montana and Oregon, all of which have since toughened regulations. Earlier this year, Hilton’s team helped push the Stop Institutional Child Abuse Act, a bipartisan House bill that would increase oversight and data collection of residential programs for kids.
But the progress is halting. Multiple staffers told me that Copper Hills has become more violent since 2020, when Ron Tuinei, the former executive director of Provo Canyon School, took over. Improper restraints from overaggressive employees, some of whom came from Provo Canyon, left children with black eyes and bruises, they said.
Four days after Utah’s governor signed the oversight measure Hilton championed, Idaho’s Child Protective Services sent a 12-year-old named Logan to Provo Canyon School – even though Logan’s aunt, Trisha Leon, who was close with Logan and had no criminal record, wanted to take him in. Despite the new law, Logan’s mother and aunt say they were prohibited from talking to Logan during his first two weeks there. UHS acknowledged in a statement that for “therapeutic reasons, family contact may be limited in the initial admission period to allow patients to adjust and focus on their treatment.” When Logan finally did speak with his aunt, he told her about being slammed against a wall by a staffer. He still had the high-pitched voice of a boy who hadn’t hit puberty. “He pushed me in it really tight, which sort of hurt,” he said. (UHS noted such an incident would’ve been reported to state regulators and law enforcement. In the event of allegations of mistreatment, it said, facilities investigate and take remedial actions.)
Leon contacted everyone she could to get her nephew out: Child Protective Services, the governor’s office, local news and Breaking Code Silence. Hilton made a video for Leon to show Logan. “I just want to let you know that myself and so many others are out here fighting for you and all the other children in that horrible place,” she said in the video. (Hilton told me over email, “He is so young and it was sobering that his stories mirrored my own.” She added, “Provo hasn’t changed and never will.”)
Logan stayed there for more than three months. He now lives with his mom.
Experts note that long-term fixes come down to reducing the need for inpatient psychiatric facilities to begin with. “The rate of institutionalization in what we used to call orphanages has gone down,” says Marcia Lowry, who founded the legal advocacy groups Children’s Rights and A Better Childhood. “But the need to stow kids someplace – to get them basically out of sight and pretend that we’re dealing with their problems – continues to exist.” The statistics are staggering: West Virginia Child Protective Services, for example, institutionalizes 71% of kids age 12 to 17 in foster care; in New Hampshire, more than 90% of older foster youth with a mental health diagnosis are placed in group homes or institutions. Lowry notes that solutions will require more community-based mental health services and support to families to prevent kids from entering the foster system in the first place. To that end, advocates have filed class-action lawsuits on behalf of foster children against state Child Protective Services systems.
In some places they’ve succeeded – though it takes time. After Lowry’s team sued New Jersey in 1999, the state’s child welfare system transformed, thanks to two decades of court oversight, pressure from A Better Childhood and an unflagging court-ordered monitor. Today, the state has among the lowest rates of children in foster care in the country. Only 5% of those foster children are in group homes or residential treatment centers – roughly half the national average.
North Star Medical Treatment Center in Anchorage, Alaska. Credit: Ash AdamsOn a windy spring day, Katrina Edwards and I drove to North Star. She had passed by the facility many times since her return to Anchorage, where she lives in an apartment on the outskirts of town and works at a JCPenney, but this was her first time resting her full attention on its gleaming facade. Edwards’ daughters, both toddlers, sat in the back seat watching “The Lorax,” oblivious to the tears in her eyes.
“This is … intense,” said Edwards. “This is my childhood in one building. It’s a lot. It’s a lot to take in.”
She later told me she felt awkward on that visit. It was our first in-person meeting. I was a stranger to her, she said, just like the foster parents who’d driven her to North Star. She still struggles to trust people, from grocery clerks offering their help to reporters and lawyers asking about her experiences. “I’m a very friendly person,” she said, “but I hate humans.”
“This is my childhood in one building.”
Katrina edwards
She’s not the only one grappling with the lingering effects of being, as one former foster youth put it, a “treatment kid.” For years, Nathon Pressley, now 26, brought a gun everywhere he went – not because he intended to use it, but because he’d noticed people left him alone when he was carrying. Alexies Ezell, 20, seemed so anxious when I met her at a coffee shop – her voice quivering, her legs crossing and recrossing – that I stopped the interview to make sure she was OK. She explained that social anxiety was a product of treatment facilities. “I used to be really social. I’d come up to people and – just, like, strangers – and make friends super easy,” Ezell said. Now, she constantly second- and third-guesses herself and worries that if she says the wrong thing or expresses any strong emotion, she’ll face consequences.
“The system – we adults – put them in a place like North Star, and literally almost throw away the key,” Davis says. “If you don’t, as a youth, lose faith in the world and all the adults running the world if that kind of thing happens to you, you’d have to be a saint.”
As we visited North Star, Edwards pointed out the familiar spots: the bank across the street, the cement area surrounded by a fence where the kids used to play, the door that she once tried to escape from, the grassy median where a moose gave birth as Edwards and the girls on her unit gaped from inside the facility.
But it was North Star’s wall of mirrored windows her gaze kept returning to, as if she were searching for something. These were the windows she spent countless hours staring out of and banging on in a futile attempt to catch the attention of anyone who might be passing by. “There’s probably a child in there looking at this particular parking lot,” she wondered aloud, “and wishing that she wasn’t in there.”
This article has been updated with additional reporting from medical and public records received since the story published in Mother Jones’ September/October 2023 issue.
Inside the Psychiatric Hospitals Where Foster Kids Are a ‘Gold Mine’ is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
Sequestered in a small interrogation room, sipping an iced coffee, Nicole Chase was trying to explain just how dysfunctional things had become at Nodine’s Smokehouse Deli and Restaurant, a family-owned place in Canton, Connecticut, that specialized in smokehouse meats and toxic masculinity.
There was the time one of her colleagues came to work high on acid, she said. On a day the restaurant made only $100, a manager closed early and got fired. Her boss, Calvin Nodine, was constantly telling sexist jokes and drinking on the job – even the customers saw it.
Chase thought she’d learned how to handle Nodine’s roving eyes and rude remarks. Until one night in May 2017, after his wife had gone home, when Chase said he pulled her into the men’s room, exposed himself and ordered her to perform oral sex.
Chase reported the incident to police the next day, an awkward, abbreviated interview with a rookie officer in the main lobby of the station as her mother sat next to her. Chase decided to quit that day, and six weeks later, she’d almost given up hope that anything would happen when she was asked to meet with Detective John Colangelo, who was now taking over the case as the lead investigator. She’d never spoken to him before, but he was friendly in a professional way as he ushered her into the interrogation room, listening to her stream-of-consciousness recollections and jotting down contact info for people who might corroborate her story. Chase felt a glimmer of optimism: Maybe her now-ex-boss would face some accountability after all, she thought.
An hour into their videotaped interview, though, Colangelo’s tone and posture subtly shifted. Soon, he was chiding her for interrupting him and getting off-topic. “You know, no one comes and tells us the entire truth,” he told her. “No one.”
But there was one person in this conversation who was allowed to lie. Colangelo, as a police officer, had no obligation to tell the truth at all. He leaned into a common interrogation tactic known among law enforcement as a ruse or a bluff. Most would call it a lie.
He asked Chase what she’d say if he told her Nodine had already taken two polygraph tests. She was skeptical.
“I know he’s taken two polygraphs, and I know that there are issues in some of these stories,” he said.
In fact, police records showed Nodine had refused to take a police-administered polygraph. He told Colangelo that he paid for a privately administered test, but Colangelo never saw the results. Besides, Nodine admitted to Colangelo that he’d failed it.
Chase fell for the ruse, though, and just like that, her frenetic energy shifted to despair. It was true: There was something she hadn’t told police or her lawyer or her mother; she hadn’t told anyone.
She began frantically drumming her hands on her thighs, then burst into tears.
“As soon as he told me to do it, I just did it,” she blurted. “I just didn’t know what to do.”
Nicole Chase cries during her June 2017 interview with Detective John Colangelo at the Canton Police Department in Connecticut. Credit: Canton Police Department“So you did give him oral sex,” Colangelo stated matter-of-factly. “Yes,” Chase sobbed. “Everything else is completely true.”
Now it all came flooding out: the humiliating details of what had happened between her and her boss in the bathroom, Chase’s history of abusive relationships, her embarrassment when people wondered why someone as smart and strong as she is would tolerate such abuse, her self-loathing that the pattern continued with Nodine and she’d given in to him without a fight. The 26-year-old mother had been afraid of losing her job, then worried that no one would understand, and now she was terrified that by not telling the complete story from the beginning, she’d wrecked her case.
But Colangelodidseem to understand. In his 25 years as an officer, he’d seen it all, he assured her. He offered to work with her to revise her written statement and asked if she was going to be OK when she left.
“I kind of want to thank you for making me do this,” Chase told the detective as she wiped her eyes.
“That’s what I’m here for,” Colangelo replied. “I’m here to serve everyone.”
In the weeks following the interview, Chase emailed Colangelo and went down to the station to revise her statement. But the detective had already done the last thing anyone in her situation would expect. He’d sent a warrant to the state’s attorney charging her with making a false statement and requesting her arrest.
By some estimates, more than half of women and nearly a third of men in the U.S. will experience some form of sexual violence in their lifetimes. Most of those crimes go unreported. Of the cases that make it to law enforcement, the least likely outcome is an arrest of a perpetrator. The vast majority of complaints to law enforcement end with no trial, no conviction and, for victims, no closure – instead, they leave with a deep mistrust of the legal system, while some predators go free and attack again.
But sometimes there’s another outcome: The victim becomes the suspect, charged with false reporting – even when the attack actually occurred. “Between the way that the police treated me and the assault itself, the police treatment has definitely hit me harder,” said Emma Mannion, who was charged with false reporting in Alabama in 2016. “Half of my nightmares are of the assault. And the other half is court.”
No one knows how often victims have been charged with falsely reporting a sexual assault. There’s been little effort by law enforcement authorities to document how many assault victims are wrongfully arrested or to understand the circumstances that lead victims to be accused of false reporting.
Between the way that the police treated me and the assault itself, the police treatment has definitely hit me harder.
Emma Mannion
To understand the scope of the problem, I’ve spent the past five years digging into cases like Nicole Chase’s. I’ve found at least 230 cases in which alleged sexual assault victims were charged with a lying offense, and these cases represent only the proverbial tip of the iceberg: A 12-year-old was charged with making up a rape by a family member, only to prove her innocence later when the same man raped her again – and she recorded the assault. I found college students interviewed without advocates or their parents, buckling under psychological manipulation from detectives and backtracking their statements. Megan Rondini, a 20-year-old University of Alabama student, accused a wealthy and connected businessman of rape in 2015 and quickly found herself under police suspicion. Tuscaloosa police turned the tables, investigating her for theft because she went through his car and took items she said she needed to get home. Seven months later, she killed herself. A grand jury had been tasked with deciding whether to indict Rondini on two theft charges, but she died before it voted. The jury ruled only on charges against the man she accused of rape – and did not indict him.
I’ve also amassed a first-of-its-kind trove of audio and video evidence showing the main factors that can lead victims to be wrongfully accused, featured in “Victim/Suspect,” a documentary film by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and Netflix. Police routinely unleash a slew of interrogation techniques meant for criminal suspects on unsuspecting young and vulnerable people. They told a young woman that surveillance footage (marked from the wrong day and time) disproved her entire account, confusing her and causing her to question her sanity. When an 18-year-old recounted to a detective how a man she accused of sexual assault grabbed her arm and tugged her away from a party, he used a flattery technique and commented that she was a “pretty young lady” and wondered who wouldn’t want to pull on her arm.
Both would go on to recant or backtrack on their claims, leading to false reporting charges.
My most startling discovery: Over and over again, it’s police who lie. And those lies can be used to gaslight and confuse reporting victims until they make inconsistent statements that undercut their credibility – and sometimes even make them recant. Of the 52 cases I analyzed closely, nearly two-thirds involved a recantation. In nine cases, the recantation was the only evidence cited by police in the records Reveal obtained.
People do sometimes lie about rape, just like any other crime: Criminal justice experts estimate that 2% to 8% of sex crime accusations are false. American history is replete with horrific examples. In the Jim Crow South, White people’s fabricated allegations of sexual assault were often the pretext for lynching Black men and terrorizing entire communities. In recent years, a few hyper-publicized incidents, like the 2014 Rolling Stone piece in which an anonymous source seemed to have made up her account about being repeatedly raped at a University of Virginia frat party, have stoked the belief – embraced by the men’s rights movement – that rape accusations are often made up.
Victim/SuspectWatch Reveal’s documentary now on Netflix.
Rape denialism runs alarmingly deep in the law enforcement community, too, for male and female officers. It’s common for police officers to overestimate the rate of false reporting of rape, even if they are assigned to work with victims of sex crimes. A 2010 study for the National Institute of Justice analyzed interviews with 49 detectives in different sex crime units and found that a majority of officers with limited or moderate experience (fewer than seven years) estimated that between 40% and 80% of all reports of rape were false. And a 2018 study published in Violence and Victims found that the more an officer believed in rape myths – the idea that women report rape after regrettable sex, for example, or that they bear responsibility if they were drunk – the higher they estimated the rate of false rape reports.
“If you think large numbers of people are lying,” says Lisa Avalos, an associate law professor at Louisiana State University who has spent a decade studying wrongful prosecutions of assault victims in the U.S. and abroad, “your No. 1 approach to rape investigation is going to be, ‘Let me see if I can prove that she’s lying.’ ”
Sexual assault cases are inherently difficult to investigate, often plagued by a lack of corroborating evidence. “If you haven’t received really solid training and you don’t have a good professional support system to investigate the cases properly, what you’re thinking about is, ‘This is a case that’s taking my time. … I need to clear it and get it off my plate as quickly as I can,’ ” Avalos says. “One of the ways that an officer can clear a sexual assault case is to decide the case is unfounded because the victim was actually lying.”
Police officers can be especially critical of acquaintance-rape cases, which make up an estimated 80% of sexual assaults. “The reality is that most victims actually know their assailants,” Avalos says, but among law enforcement, “there is sort of a blanket assumption … that if you know the guy, he can’t have raped you.” Often in such cases, she says the default police reaction is “to just assume the victim must be lying – ‘the victim must have some kind of vendetta against this individual.’ ”
That impulse is further fueled by a lack of trauma-informed training in how to interview victims of sex crimes. In recent decades, a large body of research has emerged showing the debilitating effects of sexual trauma on memory and behavior. Assault victims often can’t recall details of their attack, even in the immediate aftermath. They frequently omit important information – like the fact that they performed a sexual act because they were too afraid to fight back – out of embarrassment or shame or fear that they won’t be believed.
“It’s called avoidance behavior. We train on this all the time: ‘I’m gonna avoid talking about this part of the assault because it’s just too painful,’ ” says Tom Tremblay, a former police chief and former state public safety commissioner in Vermont who consults with police departments across the country on trauma-informed investigating. Avoidance is most common in settings “when the victim doesn’t feel physically, psychologically and emotionally safe,” Tremblay says.
Even something as basic as the way officers typically ask questions can be problematic, he says. “Police are trained to ask, ‘What happened? What happened next? What happened after that?’ ” That can force victims to relive a trauma before they’re ready, which can make them more confused – and seemingly unreliable. “We should not be demanding or expecting a chronological narrative for someone who’s experienced trauma.”
But many police officers don’t understand – or don’t take seriously – how trauma and stress can warp a victim’s memory and cognitive functioning. They view inconsistencies and omissions as evidence that a victim is dishonest. This is an error law enforcement makes again and again, Tremblay says. “We’ve misinterpreted trauma repeatedly and looked at it like it was deception.”
And because police officers don’t get much specialized training in talking to sex crime victims, they resort to techniques they do know how to use, including ruses and bluffs – methods designed specifically to interrogate suspects and obtain confessions, not to elicit a victim’s painful and truthful story. “It’s OK for police to present hypotheticals in an interrogation of a suspect of a crime,” Tremblay says. “That is not good police procedure to do that to a victim of a crime who’s experienced trauma.” A big part of a victim interview is to build trust, he says. “And you can’t build trust when you lie.”
The betrayal goes deeper, Avalos argues. “You are confusing a person who is already traumatized and already has memory difficulties. This is not how you get information.” In the context of a sexual assault, bluffing is “a really toxic thing to do to a victim,” Avalos says. “She’s wondering, ‘Am I crazy? Did I make this whole thing up?’ ”
Tremblay acknowledged that sexual assault cases are one of the most complex crimes to investigate. They can be hard to prove, and prosecutors tend to hold cases up to a standard of whether a jury would convict – even though the vast majority of criminal cases end in a plea agreement. But Tremblay says he is absolutely sure of one thing: Chase’s omission does not amount to a lie.
I first met Nicole Chase last year at her house in a small town in Connecticut, close to Hartford. It had been her grandmother’s house, where Chase and her mother both grew up. Now Chase owns it, sharing the cozy, spotless space with her fiancé, two kids, a cat and a bloodhound puppy. She’s down to earth, quick to admit when there’s legal jargon she can’t pronounce, but she tries anyway. She is surprisingly open and willing to talk about past traumas.
It had been five years since the ordeal with her former boss Calvin Nodine, and she felt like it was finally behind her. “I’m hoping that this is the end of the cycle of all the bad,” she says.
For Chase, the cycle of bad started early. Her father was addicted to crack cocaine, she has reported, and she was using it too by the time she was 11 or 12. Before long, she was addicted, eventually spending a year in rehab. In her 20s, she was involved with a man who she says abused her physically and emotionally. By the time she found the Nodine’s job, “I had no savings. I didn’t even have a bank account. … I had not a pot to piss in.” Eager to impress her new employer, Chase threw herself into her job, doing a little bit of everything – ringing up orders, cleaning, preparing food. Her mother sometimes worked at the restaurant, too.
Nodine was 30 years older and far more affluent, though in blue jeans and suspenders, he gave off a casual country vibe, much like the decor of his restaurant. Nodine’s Smokehouse, founded by his late father in the 1960s, produced high-quality Connecticut-made hams, bacon and sausages for sale in grocery stores around the country. The restaurant opened in 2016. He liked to tell dirty jokes, and his female employees were often the target. Chase’s younger colleague Allie Archer told me Chase was singled out. One of Nodine’s favorite jokes was about blondes being like butter, “easy to spread.” Chase, who was the only blonde working there, says she brushed him off and just kept working.
Nodine’s Smokehouse Deli and Restaurant in Canton, Conn., in 2016. Credit: Google Street ViewAfter a promising opening, the restaurant began to struggle, and Nodine started attracting the wrong kind of attention. “Very inconsistent,” a Yelp review from April 2017 reads. “Owner can be seen randomly wandering in his socks with beer in hand.” In May 2017, Nodine’s stepson – the head chef and general manager – quit abruptly, and the staff turmoil deepened.
The bathroom incident occurred a few days later, during this chaotic period. Earlier that day, a visibly inebriated Nodine told one of his trademark dirty jokes, this time going so far as to grope Chase’s butt as Archer watched. “I wish I had actually said something to him,” Archer said. “I wish I’d slapped him, honestly.”
At some point that same day, Nodine informed Chase she was getting a promotion – she would be the new manager. Later that night, her ride home already waiting for her in the parking lot, she encountered Nodine standing alone in the hallway. Chase said he hugged her and told her that they were going to get through this hard time. Then, according to Chase, he pulled her into the men’s room, shut the door behind them and demanded oral sex.
That was as much as Chase felt safe telling a young officer named Adam Gompper in a recorded interview the next day in the lobby of the Canton Police Department. She’d brought along her mother for support. She left out the worst parts of it all – how Nodine had pushed her head down toward his exposed genitals and that out of fear, she gave him oral sex.
Gompper never asked whether she complied, and he said he didn’t think the incident sounded like a sexual assault. But he agreed that Nodine’s actions were inappropriate and said Chase could make a formal report when and if she was ready.
Nicole Chase’s first interview with Canton Police Officer Adam Gompper occurs in the Police Department’s front lobby in May 2017. Credit: Canton Police DepartmentIn the meantime, he suggested that she confront Nodine and tell him to leave her alone. Gompper added that he hoped things worked out for her. “But it sounds like he’s never going to change,” he told her.
Chase returned to the restaurant later that day. She hoped Nodine had been so drunk that he wouldn’t remember what happened. Maybe he’d even apologize. Instead, he summoned her to help clean his small, closet-like office. She declined.
“Can you think of something else better to do than fuck me?” he asked, according to Chase.
Chase worked the rest of her shift, enlisting two male co-workers to stay near her so she wouldn’t be alone with her boss. At the end of the day, she grabbed a photo of her daughter that she kept at work, walked out the door and never went back.
A few days later, she and Archer went to the police station to give written statements. But once again, Chase couldn’t bring herself to disclose everything that had happened in the bathroom. She thought she didn’t need to.
“I just figured that I was going to say as much as I was comfortable saying and that he’d be held accountable for something or just even get a restraining order,” Chase told me. “And I’d go on my merry way.”
Calvin Nodine declined to be interviewed. Detective John Colangelo’s attorney said in an emailed statement that Colangelo “acted appropriately at all times,” and that she advised Colangelo not to speak with me. But I obtained a police interview between Nodine and Colangelo that occurred a few weeks after the incident, and what’s most striking about it is how differently the police detective handled major changes in Nodine’s story. Colangelo didn’t just ignore the inconsistencies; he gave Nodine and his lawyer a strategy for how to explain them away and even turn Chase from the accuser into the suspect.
The recorded meeting took place in the same claustrophobic room as Chase’s interview, but with four people in attendance – Officer Adam Gompper and Nodine’s lawyer were also there. Colangelo, now the lead detective, does most of the talking. In classic TV cop-show fashion, he started off chummy and casual, chit-chatting about golf before introducing the issue at hand.
“You got employees in uproar or something. … What’s this girl’s name? Nicole?” Colangelo asks, sounding disgruntled. “What’s Nicole’s deal?”
The detective notes that Chase’s complaint alleged inappropriate talk and “sexual stuff.” He hadn’t questioned Chase yet, but he makes it clear that he already has his doubts.
“Let me put it this way: I’m not so sure I believe everything she’s telling me,” Colangelo says.
In the video, Nodine appears uncomfortable, his legs crossed and twisting away from his slumped shoulders. He acknowledges that he uses crude language sometimes – “I’m a meat guy, I grew up in meat plants,” Nodine says – but he insists nothing happened that night, or ever, with Chase.
Let me put it this way: I’m not so sure I believe everything she’s telling me.
detective john colangelo to calvin nodine, who was accused of sexual assault
Colangelo tells him he’s got conflicting accounts – from Chase and another employee. He offers Nodine another scenario. “If you were fooling around with (Chase) consensually, that’s a whole different story.”
Before Nodine can respond, his attorney cuts him off. He asks to speak with his client alone.
A few minutes later, Nodine comes back with a new story: In this telling, something did happen, but it was Chase who was the aggressor. Now, Nodine claims she grabbed him in the dark hallway and told him that she needed to show him something in the men’s room. Then she pulled down his pants and performed oral sex.
“So you think she’s a liar?” Colangelo asks.
“As far as it not being consensual? Absolutely,” Nodine replies.
Nodine’s old and new stories clearly conflicted. At least one of them had to be a lie.
At this point, according to sexual assault experts who’ve seen the video, Colangelo had the advantage. If his goal was to prove or disprove the case against Nodine, he should have started asking detail-oriented questions to confirm Chase’s statement or expose inconsistencies in Nodine’s story: How long were you in the bathroom? How much did you have to drink? Did you lock the door or did she? Where were your hands while this was taking place?
Instead, Colangelo suggests that Nodine take a polygraph. If he passes, the detective says he’ll have the leverage to ask Chase to take a polygraph, too. He tells Nodine he’s done this before with another woman he suspected of lying.
“So you switch the case,” Colangelo explains. “That’s all.”
As for Nodine’s initial lie that nothing had happened, Colangelo shrugs it off with a sports analogy, telling Nodine he’ll give him “a bit of a base on balls on the first false statement.”
Even Nodine’s claim later that he failed a private lie detector test – he blamed medication he forgot to take – didn’t prompt Colangelo to interview any of the people Chase named or to take any other steps to corroborate her story.
Despite the inconsistencies in Nodine’s story, Colangelo chose to lie to Chase about the polygraph and use the omissions in her own story to charge her with giving a false statement to a law enforcement officer, a misdemeanor. In early September 2017, four months after making her initial report, Chase found herself back at the police station, where she was fingerprinted and her mugshot taken. If convicted, she faced a fine of $2,000 and up to a year in jail.
In numerous ways, Nicole Chase is typical of the victims-turned-suspects in my analysis. Nearly all were women; most were under 30 when arrested. More than two-thirds knew their alleged assailant; few put up any physical resistance to their assailant or suffered visible injuries.
The victims charged with false reporting in my analysis were usually White. Even though Black and Brown people experience sexual violence at higher rates, they are less likely to report their assaults due to historical mistreatment by police, law professor Lisa Avalos says. “There are many women of color today who don’t believe that the police are going to help them, and so they don’t even go to begin with.”
Lisa Avalos is an associate law professor at Louisiana State University who has spent a decade studying wrongful prosecutions of assault victims in the U.S. and abroad. Credit: Still from “Victim/Suspect,” courtesy of NetflixAnd as in Chase’s case, I found others in which the central evidence supporting a false reporting arrest was derived from police bluffs or ruses. Sometimes police told a lie to manipulate a reluctant victim into coming to the station for arrest. In a 2018 case, a law student in Kansas was asked to come to the station to help police decipher an anonymous letter connected to her report that a colleague had raped her. But when she arrived, the detective admitted there was no letter. “I got you here under, basically, a ruse,” he said in their recorded interview.
Instead, he had a warrant for her arrest. A short while later, she left in handcuffs on her way to jail. She was charged with three counts of false reporting – one for each time she said she was raped. The prosecutor’s office later dismissed the charges, saying it believed in the “merits” of the case but didn’t want to discourage other survivors from reporting their attacks.
In three instances, investigators lied about supposedly damning video evidence that they claimed contradicted the victims’ stories. After 18-year-old freshman Nikki Yovino reported being raped by two men at a college party in Connecticut in 2016, a detective told her there was cellphone video of the entire sexual act, proving that she wasn’t assaulted. Faced with such “proof,” she recounted to me, “I told him what he wanted to hear just so he can leave me alone.” He asked repetitive questions, and when he didn’t like her first, second or third answers to the same question, she backed down, edited her statements and eventually agreed when police insisted the encounter was consensual. But the police claim about the video was a lie; investigators had only an eight-second video that offered no insight about whether Yovino consented. After a year of fighting the charges and on the verge of trial, Yovino pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree falsely reporting an incident and one count of interfering with police. She was sentenced to a year behind bars and three more on probation.
Emma Mannion was also 18 and sleep-deprived when a detective in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, asked her to come in for a second interview, five days after she reported she was raped by a man she’d met that night in 2016. The detective told her that surveillance evidence contradicted her story, that she was caught making out with the man she accused and went willingly into his car. She was lying, he said, and taking time away from his “true” victims. She apologized and was arrested that day. But she never saw the footage. Her mental health was rapidly declining and she was fearful that she might not survive a trial, so she pleaded guilty to a youthful offender charge – a catchall used for young people so they can keep records sealed. She never saw any surveillance footage until Reveal sued in 2020 to obtain it. There were no cameras recording the parking lot where she said she was raped. The only footage of Mannion showed a brief kiss while walking with the suspect, which she’d already told police about.
Dyanie Bermeo (second from right) and her parents, Gabe Bermeo and Karla Cardenas, speak with reporter Rachel de Leon (right) in Abingdon, Va., in August 2021. Credit: Still from “Victim/Suspect,” courtesy of NetflixDyanie Bermeo was 21 in 2020 when she told deputies in Washington County, Virginia, that a police officer or someone impersonating one had pulled her over and groped her. Officers doubted her account and told her they found surveillance footage proving that no one pulled her over. She never saw the footage – which was dark, grainy and labeled with the wrong date and time – before they interrogated her. So when they asked if the stop really happened, she said it didn’t; Bermeo told me it was because she was tired of trying to prove herself and wanted the interrogation to end. A judge later vindicated her by finding her not guilty of the false reporting charge on appeal.
In nearly all the cases in my data sample, the alleged victims-turned-suspects were charged with misdemeanors, which carry lower sentences than felonies. Still, law enforcement’s zeal to punish their alleged lies was sometimes evident in the creativity of the charges. In Yovino’s false reporting case in Connecticut, prosecutors used her rape kit to tack on an extra felony charge, arguing that she “used her own vaginal secretions, which were indicative of recent intercourse, to mislead the nurse and law enforcement,” according to court records.
More routinely, law enforcement agencies promote the arrests, creating the conditions for public shaming. “It’s as though police are proud,” Avalos says. “They’re telling the community, ‘We have identified a false reporter of sexual assault, and her name is Jane Doe.’ ” In many of the cases I examined, alleged victims saw their full names, mugshots and horrific details of their alleged assaults published in newspapers or on police social media accounts – often without their knowledge, much less their consent – triggering a cascade of online harassment and vicious slurs. Some cases became national news, stoked by media reports and men’s rights groups. Women were told by online commenters that they should get longer prison sentences or that they weren’t attractive enough to have been assaulted.
Emma Mannion (foreground) and Dyanie Bermeo (background) present to a group of police officers during a sexual assault investigation training session in San Diego in November 2021. Credit: Still from “Victim/Suspect,” courtesy of NetflixPublic shaming doesn’t just compound the trauma of being sexually assaulted and then not being believed. In the internet era, the injuries – social, legal, mental, moral – are life-altering and almost impossible to overcome. Many of the women in my investigation cut short their schooling, left jobs and moved to places where their cases weren’t known, but their efforts were often futile. Mannion tried to rebuild her life after her arrest, leaving the University of Alabama and moving back home to New Hampshire. She applied for several open positions to teach dance and got a call back for one. Mannion arrived expecting an interview. Instead, the hiring manager said she had Googled her and called her foolish for thinking the studio would ever hire a “criminal.”
“The whole thing felt unnecessarily malicious,” Mannion recalls.
The consequences for false reporting prosecutions are devastating not just for wrongly accused victims, but also for the criminal justice system and the safety of entire communities. “They are chilling the reporting of sexual assault because other victims are going to be afraid to come forward,” Lisa Avalos says. “The message that they send to all the sexual assault survivors in their community is that if the police don’t believe you, they might prosecute you.”
I’ve seen how this plays out firsthand. During my investigation, a former roommate of one of the prosecuted women in my database confided that she, too, had been sexually assaulted, not long after her roommate’s attack. She was worried she might get the same treatment from police if she came forward. So she never did.
Yet instead of taking steps to protect sex crime victims from being wrongfully accused, at least four state legislatures – Alabama, Kentucky, New Jersey and Missouri – have introduced bills in recent years aimed at making false reporting a more serious crime. Montana passed such a law in 2021. A few other bills would open the door to bring civil lawsuits against a person who makes an alleged false report. West Virginia and Illinois introduced bills in 2021 that were so broad that a person who was simply questioned by police could sue for being falsely accused. The Illinois proposal specified that the claim could go forward even if the other person was acquitted of filing a false report. Neither bill passed.
Bills in at least eight states have targeted false reports motivated by bias, which is intended to deter people from calling law enforcement on people of color or other vulnerable groups of people. But the increased penalties could inadvertently affect sexual assault victims. Another spate of bills designed to stop “swatting,” or reporting a fake emergency, could ensnare some sexual assault reports. But at least one proposal was squarely aimed at people reporting rape: One lawmaker in Alabama – where Emma Mannion and Megan Rondini were both charged – tried in 2019 to upgrade the penalty for false reports of rape and sexual assault from a misdemeanor to a class C felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. The bill died in committee.
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A far better approach, Avalos says, would be to ban the use of bluffs and ruses against people who’ve reported a sexual assault.
Additionally, if police want to press charges against a reporting victim, prosecutors should use their discretion to determine whether criminal charges are the best course of action to promote public safety, according to the organization End Violence Against Women International, a nonprofit that teaches trauma-informed law enforcement responses.
One of the organization’s training bulletins points out that prosecutors have an ethical obligation to balance their duty to enforce the law with the public’s interest. “They are not required to file charges just because they have the evidence to do so,” it says.
In a case like Nicole Chase’s, it was the state attorney who signed the warrant, leading to her arrest.
Police must also change their attitudes about sexual assault allegations, says police consultant Tom Tremblay – instead of automatic skepticism, they should begin every investigation by assuming the attack happened. Tremblay didn’t come up with this idea; End Violence Against Women International has built an entire training campaign around the idea that police should “Start by Believing.” But he’s a big fan, in part because he thinks it helps police do a better job of getting to the truth of what happened and solving a case. Skepticism or doubt signals to a victim that reporting the crime was the wrong course of action and is likely to make her shut down, he says – or in a worst-case scenario, falsely recant just to get away from police. If a victim feels they’re being helped, they’re more likely to participate in the investigation, providing better details, evidence and leads to follow, Tremblay says.
Trauma-informed training for police is also critically important, he says. This involves everything from understanding how trauma affects memory to knowing how to question victims and understanding that just because victims leave out major details from their initial accounts doesn’t mean they’re lying.
When Chase revealed that she had complied with Calvin Nodine’s demands, Tremblay said he would have asked what he summarizes as “thinking, feeling and experiencing” questions: “We’re gonna support you in this process, but help us understand your thought process when you said this. Help us understand what you were experiencing when you said this. Help us understand what you might have been feeling when you left this information out.” Chase would have had the chance to explain what she told me: that she was scared, worried what Nodine would do if she denied him and feeling like she had left her own body. A trauma-informed detective would recognize that this sounded like disassociation – a common psychological response for victims of sexual violence.
But police departments have to improve many other aspects of sex crime investigations, too. Avalos wants to see new requirements that would place the burden on police to prove elements of the case before resorting to false reporting charges. First, Avalos argues, a thorough investigation of the sexual assault is a necessity. Officers should interview key witnesses, review lab results and give the victim time to rest and recover memories, for example. After that investigation, if charges are pursued, there should be evidence that no sexual assault occurred or was attempted – and not be based solely on a recantation. Avalos says it’s also necessary that police not rely on rape myths or trauma responses to conclude that the victim lied.
There is one important way that Nicole Chase’s case stands out from many others in my five-year investigation. She used the legal system to fight back. Her criminal case was dropped a month after her initial court appearance, and she decided to sue everyone. Her lawyer filed a civil suit against the city of Canton, the police department, Detective John Colangelo, Officer Adam Gompper and Calvin Nodine, which in turn triggered an internal affairs investigation of Colangelo’s conduct in the case.
Nicole Chase, shown on a beach vacation. Credit: Courtesy of Nicole ChaseColangelo was suspended for three days without pay for his actions. He then sued the police chief and the city in 2021 for a “sham” investigation to “appease the #metoo movement,” according to court records, but a judge dismissed his claim. He retired that same year and is now the head of security at a local nonprofit. After a series of disciplinary incidents unrelated to Chase’s case, Gompper also resigned and now works as a police dispatcher for a nearby department. He did not respond to requests for comment.
Nodine denied ever having sexually assaulted or harassed Chase and was never criminally charged, but he agreed to settle for an undisclosed amount. His restaurant closed in 2019. The city fought the lawsuit for years, including an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, but finally settled with Chase for $800,000 last year.
For Chase and her lawyers, the victory wasn’t just about money. The lawsuit also set an important legal precedent, as federal District Judge Vanessa L. Bryant ruled that victims have no obligation to report their assaults or to include every painful detail.
And it prompted a change to Canton police policy: If an officer decides to go after a reporting victim, a supervisor now must review the case first.
These days, Chase is no longer working on anyone’s schedule but her own. She’s not on her feet all day. She decorates epoxy tumblers and sells them on Facebook, when time allows. She’s home for her kids after school, makes dinner for them and her fiancé, and takes care of the dog and cat, in the childhood home they were able to buy due to the settlement money.
“When I think about my life in full, it really is like a little fairy tale, besides all the trauma and insaneness in between,” she says.
She still deals with vivid nightmares about Nodine and the police and anxiety that prevents her from driving. But life is peaceful, stable, comfortable and maybe even predictable most days – a far cry from the chaos of before. The string of trauma from her father, her ex, Nodine and the police – she says she is ready to put it all behind her.
“I pray that there’s no more,” Chase says. “I’m hoping that is the last thing that comes to me in this life in the form of men.”
Katharine Mieszkowski and Melissa Lewis contributed reporting. Betty Márquez Rosales, Skyler Glover, Vanessa Ochavillo and Elena Neale-Sacks and Sinduja Rangarajan contributed research. Sarah Cohen and Soo Oh contributed data analysis. This story was edited by Kate Howard, Nina Martin and Amanda Pike and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
Rachel de Leon can be reached at rdeleon@revealnews.org. Follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter: @raeoflion. Watch “Victim/Suspect,” a documentary based on this reporting, on Netflix.
HOW WE REPORTED THIS STORY
Reveal collected media reports, mostly from the last 10 years, about people reporting sexual assault and later being charged with false reporting, lying to police or other similar offenses. To find cases that weren’t cherrypicked by the media, we requested arrest records for all false reporting cases from jurisdictions across the country where we knew about at least one case.
Ultimately, we found more than 230 examples and analyzed 52 criminal cases across five states related specifically to false reporting of sexual assault or rape to determine how the cases were investigated and identify any commonalities. This is the first known attempt at an analysis like this, and due to the small sample size, we cannot make any conclusions about nationwide rates. But we found patterns and themes throughout the 52 cases.
For example, nearly two-thirds of the cases involved a recantation. In nine cases, the recantation was the only evidence cited by police. And in 15 cases, investigators made an arrest or sought charges related to false reporting within 24 hours of the original assault report.
‘If the Police Don’t Believe You, They Might Prosecute You’: How Officers Turn Victims of Sexual Assault Into Suspects is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
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‘The Opportunities Are Gatekept’: Coffee Shops Continue to Fall Short on Diversity is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
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State Pension Fund is Helping a Middle Eastern Firm Export Arizona’s Precious Groundwater is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
Federal agencies have been padding their environmental stats with a strategy that’s too cheap, too carbon-heavy and too easy to make a difference.
As Climate Clock Ticks, US Government Has Been Using Burning Trash to Look Green is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
Federal law has put thousands of women on anti-addiction medications into an impossible bind: Give up your treatment or risk losing your child.
A Mother’s Worst Nightmare is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
As the only woman on a 10-person sales team at Dell Inc., Marsha Cipollone said she was pushed down and pushed out while less-experienced men were handed the plum accounts.
Cipollone said she was denied the training and support her male colleagues received and was set up to fail. She was fired in 2017 and sued, alleging discrimination, according to court records. She said she settled with the company in 2018.
That same year, the U.S. Labor Department’s anti-discrimination office also documented systemic inequality at the company, finding that women and Black employees earned less than men and White workers in similar positions.
“Dell has very much typically been a White guy company,” Cipollone said.
But exactly how diverse Dell is – how many women and people of color it employs at all levels of the organization and how that stacks up against other companies – remains obscured.
When the federal government released a historic data set last month detailing employee diversity at more than 19,000 of its contractors, Dell was one of more than 4,000 companies missing because they objected to the release. And the Labor Department’s anti-discrimination office – the same one that found inequality at Dell – has so far allowed the objectors to keep their diversity data secret.
USA TODAY and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting compared the new diversity data with federal contractors receiving at least a billion dollars in contracts in 2020, according to federal spending records. A majority of those companies were left out of the data release, indicating they objected, despite accounting for more than $180 billion in federal spending in 2020. That includes at least a dozen companies – collectively reaping more than $100 billion – that paid to settle Labor Department findings of job discrimination over the last decade.
Companies that receive taxpayer-funded contracts are supposed to be held to a higher standard, and they’re subject to audits by the Labor Department office charged with making sure contractors provide equal employment opportunities.
Dell agreed to pay nearly $10 million in back wages after repeated government findings of discrimination. The company called itself a “leader in pay equity and inclusion” and retained its status as a major federal contractor, with at least $2 billion in federal contracts to Dell or its subsidiaries in 2020 alone.
Dell didn’t respond directly to questions about why it objected to releasing its diversity numbers. The company pointed instead to its own curated diversity report, which says its “people leaders” are 72% male and 71% White and doesn’t include the standardized data that would allow it to be compared to similar companies, such as Apple, HP, IBM or Intel, which didn’t object. “We believe in fair treatment in the workplace, regardless of race, gender identity, sexual orientation or religion,” the company said in an emailed statement.
Secret Reports Stymie Comparison Across IndustriesUnlike subjective reports that can be manipulated to present a rosier picture of diversity, the data that federal contractors are required to submit to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission shows the actual numbers of employees broken down by race and gender, for broad job categories like executives, professionals and service workers. The numbers allow for standardized comparison. They also show, for example, how many women of color are employed at different levels of a company, which many companies leave out of their customized reports.
Until recently, most companies didn’t share standardized numbers with the public. Some companies say the job categories on the reports are too broad or misleading, and their annual diversity reports better reflect their workforce. Others are reluctant to be cast in a negative light or invite litigation.
In 2019, when Reveal sued the government for diversity data submitted by a group of tech companies, some argued they’d be vulnerable to rivals learning sensitive information or luring away their diverse talent. A federal judge disagreed, ruling that the diversity reports known as EEO-1s are not confidential business information. The Labor Department released those tech company records but has chosen not to apply that ruling to requests for more data. Several of those companies, including fitness company Fitbit and software company DocuSign, no longer object to the data’s release. Others, such as PayPal, initially fought the data release but now share the annual reports publicly.
Last month, in response to more requests and a lawsuit from Reveal, the department released five years of diversity data from companies that didn’t object. An analysis of the data by USA TODAY found that federal contractors are failing to live up to the promise of equal opportunity, with White men dominating their executive ranks. Companies that did not fight public disclosure include defense contractors Raytheon and Boeing, which ranked among the highest recipients of federal contract dollars in 2020, as well as familiar names like Moderna, Pfizer, A&E Television Network and Sherwin-Williams.
Equal Employment Opportunity: Who Rises to the Top?
Type a company name, city or state in the search box above.
Source: U.S. Department of Labor
Labor Department spokesperson Edwin Nieves said the agency hasn’t allowed any companies to opt out of providing their EEO-1 numbers. Instead, Nieves said the department is required to give all contractors a chance to object and is withholding their data while evaluating those objections. Reveal is still pushing in court for the release of all contractors’ data.
While the government gave contractors repeated opportunities to object over several months, lawyers warned companies to object or face the potentially brand-damaging consequences of transparency.
Lawyers advising contractors on meeting government anti-discrimination requirements are often focused on minimum compliance, not transforming company culture, said Mary-Frances Winters, CEO of The Winters Group, which provides diversity consulting to companies.
And company lawyers often don’t want to reveal anything that could put the company at risk. That can pit the diversity team against the legal team, Winters said.
“We fight with lawyers all the time,” Winters said. “The DEI office is saying, ‘Let’s be transparent,’ because for them, it’s about, where are the opportunities to be better? The legal people, while they’re not necessarily against that, they’re saying, ‘Let’s not share our weaknesses.’ ”
After Discrimination, Promises About Equity and Inclusion, But No DataAs they gobble government money, big federal contractors are at different points on their diversity and transparency journey. Some, such as engineering and construction company Bechtel and health care company McKesson, didn’t respond to any questions. Government services contractor Amentum said it would disclose EEO-1 data at some point: “Target date is unknown,” a spokesperson said. And the pharmaceutical company Merck objected because the company considers those numbers confidential and not representative of the firm’s diversity efforts, said spokesperson Bob Josephson. But when asked about its objection, the company provided Reveal all five years of data anyway.
Lockheed Martin’s data would have shown how many people of color the company employed at different levels back in 2017 and 2018, when the Labor Department’s anti-discrimination office found the defense contractor had discriminated against Asian, Black and Latino or Hispanic job seekers. But Lockheed objected to the Labor Department’s release.
In 2020, Lockheed denied wrongdoing and expressed its commitment to diversity, but agreed to pay $700,000 and hire 34 of the rejected applicants.
In an emailed statement, the company noted that it posted its 2021 EEO-1 report online and that “our commitment to diversity and inclusion is a business imperative, helping to drive our innovation and global leadership.” Lockheed was awarded more than $51 billion in federal contracts in 2020, the biggest dollar figure to any single company.
A Lockheed spokesperson didn’t explain why the company objected.
Washington D.C.- based consulting firm called Chemonics International blocked releasing its own diversity data because it considers that confidential commercial information, said Chemonics spokesperson Martha James.
“Furthermore, we don’t frame our diversity, equity and inclusion strategy or measure our progress through the lens of EEO-1 data, which lacks the additional variables and context that allow us to fully analyze our workforce data,” James said in an email.
The company launched a diversity effort in 2017 after a Labor Department audit flagged a time when the firm rejected every single one of 124 Black applicants for entry-level professional jobs. Chemonics agreed to pay $482,000 to the rejected job seekers and to hire eight of them. James said the company has been in compliance with anti-discrimination regulations ever since.
Chemonics claims some progress: Its first diversity report says its ranks of people of color increased from 36% in 2017 to 40% in 2021, without a detailed breakdown. How many Black people does Chemonics employ and at what level in the company? The proof would be in EEO-1 numbers Chemonics wouldn’t disclose.
Cipollone, the former Dell employee who sued for discrimination, said she didn’t see a lot of diversity there, so she’s not surprised Dell objected to releasing its numbers. But she thinks all companies should come clean and face the consequences.
“It’s not 2000 anymore. It’s 2023,” she said. “You’re just going to have to take the hit for it and you’re going to have to get on board with everybody else.”
This article was produced in collaboration with USA TODAY. Jessica Guynn contributed reporting.
This story was edited by Kate Howard and Doug Caruso and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
Will Evans can be reached at wevans@revealnews.org, Jayme Fraser can be reached at jfraser@gannett.com, and Jessica Guynn at jguynn@usatoday.com. Follow Evans and Fraser on Twitter: @willCIR and @JaymeKFraser.
After History of Discrimination, These Federal Contractors Fought to Hide Diversity Data is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
Each year, thousands of companies land lucrative federal contracts, producing COVID-19 vaccines, manufacturing missile defense systems or serving hot meals.
But taking a slice of the hundreds of billions the U.S. government spends each year on goods and services comes with strings.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed an executive order holding federal contractors to a higher standard than other employers in ensuring that Black Americans and people of color have equal opportunities in hiring, training and promotions.
Nearly six decades later, an analysis by USA TODAY of new data on federal contractors obtained by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting shows those firms are not living up to that commitment. Records were available for 19,000 companies, including 10,000 with data as recent as 2020.
U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, right, listens to Rep. Emanuel Celler, D-N.Y., during a meeting with a group of civil rights leaders in Washington, D.C., April 28, 1966. Others at the meeting are Floyd McKissick, left, national director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., president of the Southern Christian Leadership, seated third from left. (AP Photo)Employees of color cut out of top jobs
Deep racial divides cut through the workforces of federal contractors, which employ 1 in 5 American workers.
While the employee ranks in these companies have diversified, the top jobs that command the best pay and benefits have not, mirroring the private sector at large.
White men dominate the executive ranks, holding 59% of those positions in 2020. They are the only demographic group that holds a higher proportion of top positions than of all other jobs, where 34% are White men.
People of color are largely missing from the top assignments. A small fraction of executives are Black or Hispanic, and an even smaller number are women of color. Instead, they are concentrated at the lower levels of organizations in roles such as administrative assistants, technicians and laborers.
Even at companies where women and people of color hold management jobs at rates near their workforce participation, it does not translate into advancement into the C-Suite.
Equal employment opportunity: Who rises to the top?
Type a company name, city or state in the search box above.
Source: US DEPARTMENT OF LABOR
While White male executives could almost fill Houston’s football stadium twice, Black female executives would fit into a few sideline sections. They hold roughly 1.7% of the top jobs at these companies.
The second-widest representation gap is among Latinas or Hispanic women, with about 1.5% of executive positions. Asian women hold around 2% of executive roles.
The fallout can be measured in stagnating income levels and widening wealth gaps as women of color face powerful headwinds when they try to rise above middle management.
The USA TODAY and Reveal findings suggest federal contractors are not meeting their contractual obligation to combat historic patterns of discrimination and the federal government is doing too little to ensure they abide by the letter and spirit of the law, said J. Edward Kellough, professor of public administration and policy at the University of Georgia.
“Federal contractors are doing work for our government and it’s being funded by our government,” he said. “The government is supported by all the people, so their workforce ought to reflect all the people.”
Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., whose office has conducted a corporate diversity survey of America’s largest companies since 2010, says the findings reveal “an abysmal record among federal contractors who have largely failed to improve and promote diversity at the highest levels of their organizations.”
“This clearly demonstrates why Congress must do more to ensure all federal contractors that receive federal dollars can show data-backed progress in training, hiring, and promoting diverse candidates at all levels, especially executive leadership positions,” he said in an emailed statement.
Corporations tout their commitment to a diverse workforce in glossy reports filled with photographs of smiling employees of all races. But for years they resisted disclosing their actual numbers of people of color and women they employ.
That began to change after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. Under pressure from investors and employees, more companies opened themselves up to public scrutiny by voluntarily sharing the forms they are required to submit each year with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Lawsuit reveals years of demographic data on employees and executives
Federal contractors are not only charged with opening up opportunities, but they also must submit proof through the EEO-1 forms that include the race, ethnicity and gender of employees broken down by job category.
Until now, the government shielded that information from public view. It took a yearslong legal battle by Reveal to pry the information loose.
Last week, the Labor Department released data on more than 19,000 federal contractors employing as many as 19 million people. Thousands more have objected and their information remains in limbo pending further litigation.
About 4,000 companies had contracts in both 2016 and 2020. Two-thirds did not show improved diversity at the top in those five years; overall, the percentage of White executives dropped only about 2 percentage points.
There was some progress: The ranks of women of color as executives at those companies grew 30%, from about 4,800 to about 6,200.
At that rate, however, it will take more than 50 years for women of color to occupy as many spots in the C-Suite as they do behind cash registers and in cubicles.
Nearly all white leadership in companies with big federal contracts
Take ABM Industries, a facility services company employing more than 100,000 people, which scored $15 million in federal contracts in 2020. Of 460 executives, 78% were White, while White people held just over a fifth – 21% – of other jobs.
Ninety-one percent of executives at debt collector GC Services were White in 2020, but White people accounted for about a third of its 7,000 workers. The company was awarded more than $478 million in federal contracts.
Like any other employer, federal contractors can’t discriminate based on race or gender. But as recipients of federal money, they have to go further than that under the standard set by Johnson: They are required to actively open doors for women, people of color, people with disabilities and veterans.
They must develop affirmative action plans to show how they will accomplish that. Federal contractors also can be audited by the Labor Department. Sometimes the department uses the type of demographic data released last week to support its investigations.
‘I wanted to move up in the company’
The NAACP and Communication Workers of America recently used EEO-1 data to highlight racial disparities at Maximus, a call center provider whose annual federal contracts exploded from $371 million in 2016 to $1.9 billion last year, in part because of the pandemic. The company had posted its 2021 EEO-1 report in response to shareholder pressure, according to the groups’ report.
The groups found that Black women and Latinas make up almost half of the lowest-ranking workers at the company, but only 5% of executives.
Daija Arrington, a 27-year-old mother of two, works for Maximus from her home in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, answering emails that people write to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention asking about COVID-19 and vaccines. After nine years in customer service, three of them at Maximus, she’s trying to climb the ladder to management.
Daija Arrington, who works for Maximus from her home in Hattiesburg, Mississippi Credit: Courtesy of Daija Arrington“I have the experience and I have the heart and I have the knowledge,” she said, “and loving the place I was working, I wanted to move up in the company.”
When she applied for Maximus supervisor positions several times, Arrington said she either heard nothing or was rejected without an explanation. She’s working on an online degree in business administration, hoping that will improve her chances.
Statistically, she faces an uphill battle: Most of her own supervisors have been White.
Arrington, who is Black, said she can’t help but think, “Nothing’s changed.” Calling out the company on disparities between leadership and other employees is important, she said: “It’s important to me because I deserve a seat at the table.”
Maximus’ vice president of public relations, Eileen Cassidy Rivera, said the company is routinely audited by the government for its hiring practices and has passed every time.
“Maximus is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and we continue to make significant progress with our long-term commitment to build a strong and diverse workforce,” Rivera said in an emailed statement. “Maximus has an established career path for all contact center employees that we regularly promote with our program and teams.”
Maximus does not appear in the data released by the federal government, and Rivera did not directly respond to questions about why the company objected to disclosure.
‘A disservice to the organization’
Diversity researchers say racial inequality can derail careers.
In 2017, Althea Woodson, a 27-year veteran Black engineer, sued Boeing because she said younger White male co-workers were given more opportunities to advance within the organization.
The case settled out of court in 2019 for undisclosed terms.
The company receives more than $20 billion a year in federal contracts. In 2020, 79% of its executives were White, a dramatic improvement from 89% five years earlier.
Representatives from Boeing declined to comment on the company’s employment records.
Homogeneity at the top also puts corporations at a disadvantage. As the nation grows more diverse, studies show greater diversity on leadership teams improves financial performance and increases innovation.
Ron Williams, the former Aetna CEO whose first job was washing cars on Chicago’s south side in the dead of winter, says corporations must cast a wider net and apply a broader lens to the executive skill set.
“People have lots of capabilities to learn and to do great things if given the opportunity,” said Williams, who is among a small number of Black leaders to have run a Fortune 500 company. “To judge people by where they came from and to judge people by what they are currently doing is a disservice to them and a disservice to the organization.”
Inequities can persist even after promotions. In 2017, a young female consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton sued her former employer, accusing it of gender discrimination.
After moving up to a management role, Raena Dhuy says she discovered all of her female subordinates were paid substantially less than their male counterparts. And she herself was vastly underpaid, she said.
Booz Allen Hamilton denied the accusation and settled the case out of court.
Booz Allen Hamilton and its related consulting companies were paid more than $5 billion by federal agencies in 2020. That year, more than a quarter of executives were women, all of them White.
“Our business requires a diverse workforce that respects and champions inclusive thought, experiences, and backgrounds,” spokesperson Jessica Klenk wrote, noting the company has set specific goals for increasing diversity among senior leaders. “We remain committed to building and empowering diverse talent within our workforce and in our communities.”
Dhuy said she cannot discuss details of her case because she signed a nondisclosure agreement as part of the settlement. But she said Americans should expect top federal contractors like the firm to pay their employees equitably.
“People give up their lives because they work so many hours and dedicate so much of their time to these companies,” Dhuy said. “I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t be treated equally both in pay and in general respect.”
Savannah Kuchar contributed reporting.
This article was produced in collaboration with USA TODAY.
People of Color Were Promised Equal Opportunity. Federal Contractors Are Failing. is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
Executives at companies that receive billions of dollars in federal contracts were less likely to reflect America’s diversity than their employees, according to a first-ever analysis by USA TODAY and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. Some have been sued for workplace discrimination.
In 2020, 21 companies each were paid more than $3 billion by the federal government, including defense contracting giants like Lockheed Martin and pharmaceutical companies like Moderna, one of the pioneers of the COVID-19 vaccine.
People of color were underrepresented among executives at these corporations compared with the rest of their workforce, the analysis showed. And women were less likely than men to break into top ranks, particularly those of color. Such disparities have long been documented by researchers and in the historically limited public information about demographics at American companies, including a USA TODAY database of S&P 100 corporations.
Why does the diversity of companies receiving public dollars matter?The disparities highlight how tax dollars can reinforce gaps in wealth and opportunity for women and people of color.
Dr. Joseph Bryant Jr., who leads the Rainbow PUSH Silicon Valley Diversity Project founded by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, said public money should advance equity in the country.
“Either the government should be giving more money to minority businesses or the government should be giving money to businesses that make diversity and inclusion a priority,” he said.
Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, who runs the Center for Employment Equity, said making the data public allows people to compare companies and hold them accountable for their hiring practices. He said diversity, equity and inclusion officers also could use the data to benchmark their companies’ performance against competitors.
“I hope that in the long run this empowers the DEI staff in these firms to push their firms to do better,” said the sociology professor from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Why is this the first time this information has been available about federal contractors?The data is the largest trove of corporate diversity information ever made public after a yearslong legal battle by Reveal seeking the reports filed by government contractors each year to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It includes more than 19,000 federal contractors. More than 4,000 others have objected, and their information remains in limbo pending further litigation.
The Department of Labor has argued it can’t release contractor diversity reports without notifying each company. It has so far sided with companies that argue the reports should be considered confidential business information – even though a federal judge has ruled those records should be made public.
Could this lead to more public information about company demographics?Researchers say Monday’s release could be a crucial step toward the public being able to see all summary diversity data collected on this federal form, not just the demographics of government contractors.
“This could be what breaks the logjam,” Tomaskovic-Devey said. “If the vast majority of firms were willing to release these data, what does that say about the defense that this is a trade secret? ”
What does the new data show about the diversity of federal contractors?Many of the companies receiving the most money from federal contracts do work for the Department of Defense.
Topping that list in 2020 at more than $51 billion in public money is Lockheed Martin, the Washington, D.C.-based aerospace and security giant. That figure does not include its subsidiaries. For instance, Sikorsky Aircraft received $4.6 billion in federal contracts that year, ranking 11th.
Neither company appeared in the five years of data released Monday by federal officials. But Lockheed Martin has published a copy of its demographic report online since its 2020 filing. That document shows White, non-Latinx men held 68% of executive jobs despite being 34% of the U.S. workforce. They had no executives who were Pacific Islander or American Indian. And Latinx women held just two of the 356 executive jobs despite accounting for 7% of the U.S. workforce.
Our analysis found similar trends – White men holding a disproportionate number of top jobs and women of color having the least representation – at other companies receiving billions of dollars, such as Boeing, Raytheon, Humana, General Electric and Honeywell.
A Texas father-daughter attorney team of Elizabeth “BB” and Brian Sanford represent employees suing major defense contractors.
Brian Sanford says the Pentagon should do more to audit employment relations from its largest contracts.
“Just hold them to the basic standard. It’s our tax dollars – they should be following the law,” Sanford said. “There is a lot of power in saying ‘You don’t get this $1 billion contract if you do this.’ They’ll listen to that.”
What do companies have to say about this release?Few of the 21 companies that received the most federal contract money in 2020 returned a request for comment about their diversity track record.
Companies often argue that the reports must be kept secret because they could give competitors valuable information about their workforce, even allowing other firms to lure away diverse talent.
For example, Oracle has objected to the release of its data in the past by saying it could lead to a “raiding of minority or female employees,” though the company posted a more recent copy of its federal report online.
This article was produced in collaboration with USA TODAY.
Jessica Guynn contributed to this report.
Have a tip? Reach Will Evans at wevans@revealnews.org or on Signal at (510) 255-0865, Jayme Fraser at jfraser@gannett.com or on Twitter @jaymekfraser, Nick Penzenstadler at npenz@usatoday.com or @npenzenstadler, or on Signal at (720) 507-5273, and Jessica Guynn at jguynn@usatoday.com.
No Longer a Trade Secret: Diversity Data from the Country’s Mega Contractors is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
The COVID Tracking ProjectThis three-part series exposes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s bungled response to COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic and takes listeners inside the massive volunteer effort to collect data about tests, cases, hospitalizations and deaths in the U.S.
The United States has 4% of the world’s population, but 16% of COVID-19 deaths. This series investigates the failures that led to over 1 million Americans dying from COVID-19 and what that tells us about the nation’s ability to respond to the next pandemic. This three-part series was reported by Artis Curiskis and Kara Oehler and hosted by infectious disease expert Jessicca Malaty Rivera.
Credit: Illustration by Amanda NorthrupThe COVID Tracking Project Part 1In February 2020, reporters Rob Meyer and Alexis Madrigal from The Atlantic were trying to find solid data about the rising pandemic. They published a story that revealed a scary truth: The U.S. didn’t know where COVID-19 was spreading because few tests were available. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also didn’t have public data to tell citizens or federal agencies how many people were infected or where the outbreaks were happening.
Explore the episodeCredit: Illustration by Amanda NorthrupThe COVID Tracking Project Part 2Episode two debuts April 22.
Credit: Illustration by Amanda NorthrupThe COVID Tracking Project Part 3Episode three debuts April 29.
SUBSCRIBEApple PodcastsStitcherGoogle PodcastsSpotifySubscribe by emailSUBSCRIBEProcessing…Success! You're on the list.Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. Please reload the page and try again.CreditsSpecial thanks to The Covid Tracking Project at The Atlantic. This series is presented by Tableau.
Host: Jessica Malaty Rivera
Executive Producer and reporter: Kara Oehler
Executive Producer and reporter: Artis Curiskis
Lead editor: Michael Schiller
Production assistants: Max Maldonado, Kori Suzuki and Aarushi Sahejpal | Fact checker: Nikki Frick | Production manager: Steven Rascón | Digital producer: Sarah Mirk | Episode art: Amanda Northrup | Original score and sound design: Jim Briggs and Fernando Arruda | Post-production team: Kathryn Styer Martinez and Michael Montgomery | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis
Support for Reveal is provided by the Reva and David Logan Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hellman Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Park Foundation.
COVID Tracking Project is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
A state lawmaker is calling for Kentucky to regulate anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers after a Reveal investigation found that most centers aren’t subject to the same kind of oversight as other medical clinics, even though they perform procedures that can dramatically affect the lives of pregnant people.
The Kentucky bill is among a wave of efforts by reproductive rights advocates in more than a dozen states to regulate crisis pregnancy centers through medical licensing requirements or consumer protection laws.
Many of the bills were filed following an investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting that found that most centers operate in a kind of regulatory dead zone, free of significant state and federal oversight. Most states don’t require pregnancy centers that provide medical services to be licensed or inspected. They’re also not required to comply with the federal patient privacy law known as HIPAA. In many states, tanning salons, massage parlors and even pet stores face significantly stricter oversight.
Kentucky state Rep. Sarah Stalker, a Democrat from Louisville, filed House Bill 489 after Reveal published a story about a Kentucky nurse who reported infection control issues at a pregnancy center where she volunteered. The center was using an expired disinfectant to sanitize equipment used in transvaginal ultrasounds. And that disinfectant had no efficacy against HPV, a widespread sexually transmitted infection responsible for most cervical cancers. In Kentucky, as in most of the country, pregnancy centers don’t have to be directly licensed and inspected by state authorities.
Pregnancy centers, which discourage women from obtaining abortion care, have proliferated in recent decades, with many aiming to expand their capacity now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned. An increasing number look and operate much like traditional OB-GYN providers, offering ultrasounds, tests for sexually transmitted infections and in some instances even prenatal care. More than 2,500 are open across the country, with more than 40 in Kentucky.
After reading Reveal’s reporting on the Kentucky nurse whistleblower, Stalker said she grew concerned about the effect that unlicensed and unregulated centers could have on public health. In Kentucky, most counties do not have an OB-GYN, and the state’s maternal mortality rate is more than twice the national average.
These centers’ existence or their overall mission are not up for debate with this proposal, Stalker said. “What I want people to have a conversation about is keeping people healthy and safe and their privacy protected. And that’s what this bill would do.”
The legislation would establish facility requirements, such as sanitation standards, staffing qualifications, maintenance of medical records and infection control protocols – regulations that are standard practice at most medical facilities in the state. Centers would be regulated by state health authorities. The bill also would create procedures for facility inspections, corrective action plans and a process for disciplinary action against centers.
The Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services regulated pregnancy centers until 2018, when state legislators passed a law that erased the licensing requirements as part of a broader push to make it easier for hospitals to expand. Stalker said her bill aims to “close that loop.” Given the Republican supermajority in the Kentucky General Assembly, the bill did not advance through any committees during this year’s session. Stalker said she will file the proposal again next year.
She modeled her legislation after a similar proposal in Indiana filed in January by state Sen. Shelli Yoder, a Democrat from Bloomington, which aims to create licensing standards for that state’s nearly 90 centers. Indiana is among 14 states that funnel taxpayer money to pregnancy centers through “alternatives to abortion” programs. But like in most states, “we have zero oversight and accountability” over centers, Yoder said.
“This is an industry seeking to be perceived as providing health care,” Yoder said. “We need to be talking about how we’re going to ensure that these facilities, these centers, are held to evidence-based standards of care for women.”
The lack of regulation stems from a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning the Reproductive FACT Act, a California law that required any clinic “providing family planning or pregnancy-related services” to let clients know that the state also offered free or low-cost reproductive services, including abortion, and to notify clients if it wasn’t licensed to provide medical care. Pregnancy centers argued that it infringed on their free speech rights.
The ruling created hurdles to new laws meant to protect clients from centers engaging in deceptive practices. But the overturning of Roe is reviving interest in legislation, with lawmakers attempting different approaches to regulate the pregnancy center industry.
In Texas, which funneled $100 million to pregnancy centers for 2022 and 2023, a Dallas representative filed a bill requiring that the state’s nearly 200 centers have at least one obstetrician or gynecologist on staff. More than 80% of centers in Texas don’t list a medical director or OB-GYN on their publicly available materials, Reveal’s analysis found.
Legislation in Arizona, Minnesota and New Jersey would require that pregnancy centers use licensed health care providers to provide ultrasound services. Four states – Minnesota, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Washington – are considering laws that would protect the data privacy of people visiting pregnancy centers. Because most centers aren’t subject to HIPAA, reproductive rights advocates worry that clients’ information could be shared and used to harass or, in anti-abortion states, to even prosecute patients who later seek abortions, their family members and their abortion providers.
Some legislators are pursuing consumer protection laws. In recent years, a few states and cities have enacted such laws, which levy penalties against centers engaging in deceptive marketing practices.
In Colorado, Democratic lawmakers filed a package of bills to protect reproductive health care access. One bill would prohibit deceptive advertising by pregnancy centers and penalize licensed health care providers who provide the controversial treatment known as abortion pill reversal. The bill passed the state Senate last week.
“With the danger of (reproductive health) access being curtailed and rights in other states being taken away, it has just turned up the volume on how dangerous these practices are,” said state Rep. Karen McCormick, one of bill’s co-sponsors. “We should have addressed this a long time ago.”
This story was edited by Nina Martin and Kate Howard and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
Laura C. Morel can be reached at lmorel@revealnews.org. Follow her on Twitter: @lauracmorel.
Kentucky Lawmaker Pushes to Regulate Anti-Abortion Pregnancy Centers After Reveal Investigation is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
This article was published in partnership with the Miami Herald.
The glass outside the Pregnancy Help Medical Clinics location in North Miami reads: “FREE pregnancy Testing, Walk-Ins Welcome, Ultrasound Verification, Confidential.”
Inside, it looks like a medical office: fake plants, a generic painting of an ocean and a TV tuned to a cooking show channel. There is a reception desk with a closed-off window and a sign that reads: “Your donation is greatly appreciated! We are only funded by the community.” But that isn’t entirely true: Heartbeat of Miami, the nonprofit that runs this center, was awarded more than $1.4 million in state funding between 2017 and 2021.
Although the Pregnancy Help Medical Clinics claim to be medical facilities, their mission is to dissuade pregnant people from considering abortion.
Now, Republican lawmakers in Florida are proposing a more than fivefold increase in taxpayer funding for anti-abortion centers like the Pregnancy Help Medical Clinics, to $25 million from $4.45 million in 2022.
The proposal is tucked at the bottom of a new bill that would ban abortions past six weeks of pregnancy, dramatically reducing access from the 15-week limit signed into law last year.
For decades, reproductive rights groups have warily eyed so-called crisis pregnancy centers that often have the appearance of abortion clinics but in reality push women toward parenting or adoption. These centers also typically discourage the use of contraceptives.
Most offer free ultrasounds, a strategy that centers use to change women’s minds by offering a “window to the womb,” according to industry leaders. Many also open near abortion clinics in an attempt tointercept patients.Their online ads come up during searches for abortion care, an issue that Google has aimed to address. More than 2,500 centers are open across the country, with nearly 160 in Florida. About a dozen are in South Florida, many located in Spanish-speaking and lower-income communities. In Miami, all the Pregnancy Help Medical Clinics have staff who speak Spanish.
The proposed funding increase is part of a national anti-abortion campaign spearheaded by Republican-dominated state legislatures. The goal is to expand the reach of pregnancy centers following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last summer to overturn Roe v. Wade, a landmark decision that protected abortion rights for half a century.
Florida is among 14 states that fund pregnancy centers through “alternatives to abortion” programs, funneling millions in taxpayer money to the anti-abortion movement. This year, at least three additional states – Kansas, Tennessee and West Virginia – are considering new plans to fund pregnancy centers.
The multimillion-dollar proposal, which would be funded by the state’s general revenue, is a provision within the Senate version of the six-week abortion ban bill, filed by Sen. Erin Grall, R-Fort Pierce, and co-introduced by Republican Sens. Joe Gruters of Sarasota and Clay Yarborough of Jacksonville. It includes exceptions for rape and incest until 15 weeks of pregnancy, but only if a victim provides documentation of the crime, such as a medical record or police report.
“The $25 million appropriation is really to go to all families, all mothers who are looking for support at this time in their life,” Grall said at a Senate Health Policy Committee hearing Monday. Committee members voted 7-4 to advance the bill.
While the bill would inject millions into the centers’ cause, it does nothing to increase oversight of the pregnancy center industry in Florida. An investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting found that most centers operate in a kind of regulatorydead zone, free of significant state and federal oversight. Most states, including Florida, don’t require pregnancy centers that provide medical services to be licensed or inspected. They’re also not required to comply with the federal patient privacy law known as HIPAA. In many states, tanning salons, massage parlors and even pet stores face significantly stricter oversight.
The House version of the six-week abortion ban bill does not include the $25 million proposal. A Florida House committee voted to advance the bill last week.
If the bill is signed into law, it would run up against a legal challenge to Florida’s 15-week abortion restriction based on grounds that it violates the state constitution’s privacy clause. The case is pending before the Florida Supreme Court. The six-week ban would not go into effect until the court issues its decision. The funding for pregnancy centers, however, would go into effect immediately if it is included in the appropriations bill approved by lawmakers and signed by the governor.
The law would effectively end Florida’s status as one of the last remaining abortion-access states in the South. Over the past six years, more than 440,000 abortions were performed in Florida, with nearly 23,000 patients traveling from other states. With a Republican supermajority in the Legislature, the bill is likely to pass.
Grall and Yarborough did not respond to reporters’ requests for an interview, instead providing prepared statements. “SB300 will make Florida a beacon of hope for those who understand that life is sacred and must be protected,” Grall said in her statement.
“I am honored that I will have the opportunity as a state senator to support the strongest pro-life legislation in more than 50 years,” Yarborough echoed in his statement. Gruters did not return reporters’ messages for comment.
The Senate bill also would expand the state’s alternatives-to-abortion program to include parenting support services and require an annual report to the governor and Legislature. Additionally, it would set aside $5 million toward the family planning program run by the state Health Department, which covers contraceptives.
During a Senate Health Policy Committee hearing Monday, Democratic lawmakers attempted to make the case for diverting the $25 million to other services. Sen. Lauren Book, D-Plantation, proposed the money go to resources for domestic violence and sexual assault victims. “Let’s put these taxpayer dollars that are already in the bill where they will make a real difference,” she said.
Sen. Tracie Davis, D-Jacksonville, proposed allocating the funds toward family planning services and telehealth services for a minority maternal care pilot program. “By passing this amendment, we can truly better guarantee that our constituents will have transparent, accountable, professional, licensed, tailored resources in their communities to make well-informed decisions,” she said. The amendments were ultimately rejected.
The program providing state funding for pregnancy centers in Florida began in 2004 under then-Gov. Jeb Bush. Since the program’s creation, the Florida Department of Health has contracted out oversight of the program to the Florida Pregnancy Care Network, an anti-abortion nonprofit in Tallahassee.
According to the care network’s state contract, centers are reimbursed for providing free pregnancy tests, tests for sexually transmitted infections and “counseling with a goal of childbirth.”
The program has come under scrutiny in recent years. A 2021 report by Floridians for Reproductive Freedom, a coalition advocating for access to reproductive health care like abortion and contraceptives, found that centers were providing clients with misleading materials about abortion. Some centers, for example, tell clients that abortion causes breast cancer – a claim widely disputed by medical research.
The state contract also requires the Florida Pregnancy Care Network to provide wellness services, such as medical screenings for cholesterol, blood pressure or diabetes. But the report notes that out of 56 subcontractors, only two were equipped to provide this type of medical care. The pregnancy centers run by Heartbeat of Miami specifically say they do not offer this type of medical care. Aside from offering ultrasounds, they refer women to outside clinics if they need additional care. Heartbeat President Martha Avila did not respond to the Miami Herald’s interview requests, instead sending a text message with a summary of center services.
“Four million a year was already way too much,” said Amy Weintraub, reproductive rights program director for the progressive nonprofit Progress Florida. “And then the idea that they’re adding $25 million on top of a nearly all-out abortion ban is beyond the pale. It is like they are looking to punish Floridians who want to have full bodily autonomy and want to have control over their own pregnancy decisions in every way possible.”
Florida Pregnancy Care Network Executive Director Rita Gagliano declined to comment and referred a reporter to the state Health Department. A spokesperson there said the agency does not comment on pending legislation. The network’s board members did not return reporters’ messages or declined to comment.
Among the care network’s subcontractors is the Archdiocese of Miami, which received nearly $650,000 between 2017 and 2021. It operates three centers, with the Fort Lauderdale center next door to an abortion clinic.
“By funding these pregnancy centers, we can provide women in crisis with alternatives that would ultimately be better for them and certainly much better for their unborn baby,” Archbishop Thomas Wenski said in an interview last week.
Angela Curatalo, director of the archdiocese’s Respect Life Ministry, which runs the pregnancy centers, said “the increased funding we would receive through the state would help us immensely support our programs.” She said her program would use the money for online parenting courses, supplies for pregnant people and new mothers, as well as administrative costs.
Women sometimes call the centers seeking to terminate a pregnancy, but staff there are clear that they do not offer or refer for abortions, Curatalo said. The centers offer counseling and free pregnancy tests, as well as ultrasounds that “show the mom that there is a baby,” she said. The centers then refer clients to medical providers for further care.
Not all centers are as forthcoming about their services. In 2018, the state Health Department investigated a volunteer at a Jacksonville pregnancy center. The volunteer allegedly told patients heading to the abortion clinic across the road that their appointments were in her building. She performed ultrasounds on several women, providing them with inaccurate information about their pregnancies. The state issued a cease-and-desist notice against her for practicing medicine without a license, Reveal reported in December.
Book, the Democratic state senator, called the multimillion-dollar proposal “insulting to women on top of a six-week ban with a ridiculous rape and incest exemption.”
Nearly six years ago, Book and a friend visited a pregnancy center near the Florida State University campus in Tallahassee to better understand how they operate. They sat in a room staring at a glass diorama that showed the stages of fetal development. They also recalled a counselor who told them abortion was more traumatic than rape, a claim that infuriated Book, who is a survivor of child sexual abuse.
“This is an irresponsible way to utilize state funds,” Book said. “It is despicable that we have been funding these all along.”
This story was edited by Nina Martin, Casey Frank and Kate Howard and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
Laura C. Morel can be reached at lmorel@revealnews.org, and Clara-Sophia Daly can be reached at csdaly@miamiherald.com. Follow them on Twitter: @lauracmorel and @clarasophiadaly.
Florida Legislators Want to Vastly Expand State Funds for Anti-Abortion Pregnancy Centers is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
A new Florida law gives Gov. Ron DeSantis’ prosecutors power to pursue more election-related cases – a move explicitly designed to circumvent recent judicial scrutiny of the state’s highly politicized voter prosecutions.
The law comes after DeSantis’ new election prosecution team’s first round of cases largely flopped, resulting in dropped charges, a number of dismissals, one plea agreement that resulted in no punishment and only one partial conviction. It is just one in a wave of renewed efforts by Republican legislators nationwide to amp up prosecutions of voters and election officials. The push shows that fearmongering around the myth of widespread voting fraud remains a legislative priority for many Republicans, even though it was largely a losing issue during the 2022 midterm elections.
An investigation from Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting found that following the 2020 elections, legislators across the country filed and passed a raft of bills that injected police and prosecutors into elections to an unprecedented degree. A new analysis by Reveal shows that push has only intensified in the four months since the midterms: Lawmakers in 20 states already have introduced at least 57 bills targeting election activity.
In Ohio, for example, a Republican lawmaker has introduced a bill that would establish an election integrity division within the Ohio secretary of state’s office. This unit would have the ability to investigate allegations of election fraud and voter suppression and refer these to a prosecutor or law enforcement agency. And in Texas, legislators introduced proposals this session that would enable the state’s Republican attorney general to appoint prosecutors from neighboring counties to investigate alleged cases of voter fraud in Texas’ large Democratic counties.
The law enforcement buildup efforts come in response to a made-up problem, as endless studies, court rulings and bipartisan reports have found no evidence of widespread voter fraud. Instead, they signal an aggressive new front in voter suppression that risks intimidating voters of color in particular.
While former President Donald Trump took the voter fraud myth and made it a central platform of the Republican Party, DeSantis, a likely primary challenger in the 2024 presidential race, has taken the idea and turned it into law enforcement policy in the state with the third-most electoral votes in the nation.
Matletha Bennette, a senior staff attorney for voting rights at the Southern Poverty Law Center who is based in Tallahassee, Florida, said DeSantis is exerting his control over all facets of state government and is now focusing on the judicial system. “Florida has been a petri dish for these laws,” she said. “It’s the testing ground.”
Republican politicians try to change voting laws “when results don’t match their expectations,” she said. “The Legislature is now changing the rules of the game.”
Since the 2020 election, Florida Republicans have passed successively more punitive election-related legislation. For example, in 2021, the Legislature restricted and criminalized ballot collection – a once-common practice of delivering ballots on behalf of friends or neighbors that is central to conspiracy theories about how the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. When lawmakers reconvened last year, they amended that law to upgrade ballot collection to a felony offense, punishable by up to five years in prison. And while lawmakers first created the election crimes division last year, they came back this year to give the statewide prosecutor more teeth to support the office’s work.
DeSantis’ first attempt at a voter crackdown hit a major jurisdictional snag.
Typically, elected state attorneys have jurisdiction over crimes that happen in their judicial circuit. The state constitution allows the attorney general’s Office of Statewide Prosecution to take over alleged crimes that take place in at least two judicial circuits as part of a related transaction, like stealing a car in one circuit and using it to commit a crime in another circuit. The constitution also allows state prosecutors to step in if an alleged crime affects multiple circuits, though state statute specifies that, in those cases, prosecutors also have to show that the crimes were part of a criminal conspiracy.
Last year, three separate judges threw out illegal voting cases from DeSantis’ team on procedural grounds. Each judge rejected the state’s argument that the statewide prosecutor could handle the cases because they took place in multiple jurisdictions: the county where the voter lived and the county where the secretary of state’s office processes voter registration applications and tabulates votes.
Lawmakers in Florida took note of those dismissals. The new law removes the conspiracy requirement for cases involving voting, voter registration, or getting a candidate or petition on the ballot. The change “may increase prosecutions for such crimes,” the legislative analysis states.
Rep. Anna V. Eskamani, an Orlando Democrat who voted against the law, said Florida Republicans’ new legislative supermajority has given DeSantis free rein to consolidate power. “It’s just so sick that with this type of supermajority and this type of thirst for power that you can just bend the law however you see fit to fit your political agenda,” Eskamani said. “It’s incredibly unsettling. It’s undemocratic and it muddies the division between the branches of government.”
Even under the new law, state prosecutors still will have to show that an alleged crime occurred in or affected multiple jurisdictions. That’s a key point, said Rep. Michael Gottlieb, a Florida criminal defense attorney and Broward County Democrat who voted against the new law. He said it doesn’t actually give state prosecutors more powers, but it will have a chilling effect on voters.
“All they did was delineate some more quote-unquote voting matters, and they didn’t change the jurisdiction of the statewide prosecutor because they can’t, because it’s in the Florida Constitution,” Gottlieb said of his peers in the Legislature. “The bill was really cover for the governor to try to make it look like the governor’s doing something, and it’s really just, in my opinion, intended to disenfranchise more people from being able to vote.”
Gottlieb represented Terry Hubbard, a man charged with illegally registering to vote and illegally voting in Florida last year. The charges against Hubbard, in Broward County, were dismissed in December.
Bryan Griffin, a spokesperson for DeSantis, wrote in an email that “the bill just passed by the Legislature and signed into law by the governor helps ensure that those who set out to undermine our democracy by illegally voting in Florida face legal consequences.”
Republican Rep. Juan Fernandez-Barquin, one of the authors of the bill, wrote in a statement that the law “seeks to reinforce Florida as a national model for election confidence and integrity, and it ensures fraud will be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
Fernandez-Barquin did not respond to Reveal’s requests for comment, nor did Republican Sen. Jonathan Martin, the bill’s lead sponsor in the upper chamber.
Last year, the state appealed the three court decisions dismissing charges for lack of jurisdiction. The state has not yet filed its briefs in those cases, and Whitney Ray, a spokesperson for the attorney general, did not specifically respond to a question about how the new law could affect them. In an email, Ray said only that the statewide prosecutor will move forward with the appeals, as well as cases that are pending in trial courts. “The Office of Statewide Prosecution previously had jurisdiction and still does today. However, because there was confusion in some courts, this law was passed to clarify the matter,” Ray wrote.
The cases are among 20 illegal voting prosecutions DeSantis announced in an August press conference. The cases involved people who were ineligible to vote because they had previously been convicted of murder or a sex-related felony, though most of them had received voter registration cards from the secretary of state’s office and also said they did not know they were not eligible to vote.
Robert Barrar, one of the attorneys who successfully argued that the statewide prosecutor can’t bring illegal voting cases, said the burden should be on the state, rather than the voter, to determine voting eligibility. He described the prosecutions as a “colossal waste” of taxpayer resources.
“What they really should be looking at is the people who apply for a voter registration card before it’s issued,” Barrar said. “They shouldn’t just be bureaucrats that rubber-stamp everything that comes in. And if that’s what they’re doing, that’s the problem. We’re paying people a lot of money to do this review and these review processes, and obviously they’re not looking closely enough.”
In its first annual report, issued in January, the Office of Election Crimes and Security said it had received complaints about or started investigations into more than 3,000 cases in 2022. Reveal analyzed the records in the report and found that:
- Nearly 50% of the cases were closed by the election crimes office outright, suggesting they didn’t make it past initial vetting, while another 5% were closed by a law enforcement agency to which the case was referred.
- Another 42% of cases are still pending, meaning the election crimes office has not yet finished vetting them.
- While the vast majority of cases stem from 2020, the office has handled 116 cases related to last year’s general election. Of those, 72 have been forwarded to statewide law enforcement and were considered active investigations at the end of the year. Almost all of them involve allegations of voting more than once in the same election or voting without being eligible to do so.
Meanwhile, DeSantis has asked the Legislature to increase the budget and size of the election crimes office, according to a recent proposal. The governor asked for $3.1 million and 27 staff positions, significantly higher than the $1.2 million and 15 staff positions approved last summer. That’s despite the fact that the unit has filled only three of those 15 positions, an organizational chart obtained by a Tampa news station in January showed. One of those three employees is a political operative, the news outlet found.
The governor also requested another $1.2 million for the statewide voter fraud hotline (which is overseen by the election crimes office), cybersecurity training for elections supervisors and a training program for verifying elections signatures. The Legislature is slated to consider and vote on the state budget during the current session, which started this week.
The Florida Department of State, which oversees the election crimes office, did not respond to questions about the office’s work and the budget increase request.
None of the cases brought by the state so far point to a widespread voter fraud scheme like the kind the Office of Election Crimes and Security was established to find. In many cases, the people prosecuted said they believed they were eligible to vote. Indeed, the state issued them voter registration cards.
The voters, in essence, were trapped: The state granted them the permission to vote, and then prosecuted them for it.
Abdelilah Skhir, a voting rights policy strategist at the ACLU of Florida, said the state should be providing resources to help people easily determine whether they’re eligible to vote.
“They’re instead using resources to criminalize what could ultimately just be a mistake,” he said.
Data reporter Melissa Lewis contributed to this story. It was edited by Andrew Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
Maryam Saleh can be reached at msaleh@revealnews.org, and Ese Olumhense can be reached at eolumhense@revealnews.org. Follow them on Twitter:@MaryamSaleh and@essayolumhense.
DeSantis’ Election Police Have Largely Flopped in Florida Voter Prosecutions. A New Law Aims to Change That. is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
At 52, Susan Rames was looking for a way to give back. She worked part time at a Kentucky hospital as a postpartum nurse and, with her three children nearly grown, she had some extra time during the week.
Motivated by her Christian faith, Rames decided to volunteer at ALC Pregnancy Resource Center, a crisis pregnancy center whose mission is to discourage people from seeking abortions.
The center offers free ultrasounds and needed volunteer nurses to complete a sonography training program. Rames said she liked the idea of helping women see “the truth and the life” inside their pregnant bodies so they might make “a better choice for themselves and their babies.”
After taking an online training course, Rames began in-person instruction in August 2020 at one of ALC’s two Louisville-area locations, doing practice ultrasounds under the supervision of a nurse manager.
That’s when she spotted the red flags.
The center was using an expired disinfectant to sanitize an essential piece of equipment for early-pregnancy ultrasounds: the transvaginal probe. And that disinfectant, medical researchers have warned in recent years, doesn’t kill the human papillomavirus, a widespread and potentially deadly sexually transmitted infection responsible for more than 90% of cervical cancers, as well as cancers of the genitals and throat.
Stopping HPV’s spread has been a major public health goal for decades.
“You’re saying you want to help these women,” Rames recalls thinking as she researched different types of high-level germ-killers on the internet. “Yet you’re potentially going to transmit an infection to them?”
Rames said she immediately went about trying to fix the problems she saw, first with her manager and then the clinic’s leadership. After four months and little response, she filed a flurry of whistleblower complaints with the state of Kentucky.
But far from resulting in any action against ALC, the complaints illustrate just how difficult it is to get any accountability for crisis pregnancy centers that offer medical services such as ultrasounds.
A key part of the anti-abortion movement’s long-term strategy, pregnancy centers have proliferated across the country in recent years, many mimicking the look and feel of medical clinics. Yet an ongoing investigation by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has shown most centers operate in a kind of regulatory dead zone, free of the significant state and federal oversight – such as regular inspections and rules to protect ultra-sensitive personal information – that most medical clinics face.
Until five years ago, Kentucky was one of the few states that did regulate pregnancy centers, but that changed in 2018 when legislators passed a law that erased the licensing requirements as part of a broader push to make it easier for hospitals to expand. Now in Kentucky, as in most of the country, pregnancy centers don’t have to be directly licensed, instead providing medical services under the professional licenses of their staff and volunteers.
Rames’ account of the problems at ALC, documented in hundreds of pages of emails, cellphone photos, research papers and other materials, highlights how the lack of regulation of pregnancy centers can put women – and, in the case of HPV, potentially even their partners and babies – at risk.
Without meaningful oversight, it’s difficult to know whether centers are complying with the latest medical protocols or cutting corners in ways that compromise clients’ safety. Even when a whistleblower such as Rames is willing to come forward, without outside watchdogs, there’s no way to ensure that changes made by centers to correct problems will stick.
“The fact that you are allowed to put yourself out there as somebody that is helping pregnant women and (are) doing pseudo-medical procedures, but have no accountability as a medical facility, is a problem that endangers people,” said Seema Mohapatra, a health law professor at Southern Methodist University.
Graphics posted on ALC’s Facebook page promote the center’s free ultrasound services and cast doubt on the safety of abortion pills. Credit: ALC Facebook postsAs a registered nurse with nearly 20 years’ experience in hospital settings, Rames was highly attuned to the importance of keeping up with the latest research and complying with even the most insignificant-seeming protocols to prevent infections. “We know it is what we can’t see with the naked eye that can continue to live on surfaces & then our instruments become vectors of these pathogens,” she wrote in one complaint.
Rames first got an inkling that ALC wasn’t being as careful as it should be when she said she noticed that staff weren’t using the right type of lubricant gel on the probe that was inserted into a client’s vagina. Instead, they were using gel meant for external abdominal ultrasounds and squirting it from refillable containers that, according to ultrasound industry guidelines, might not be sterile enough for transvaginal procedures.
When Rames voiced her concerns, ALC’s nurse manager, Sara Reece, said she’d have to get permission to order the correct product because, as a nonprofit, the center’s staff “have to use their donations responsibly,” Rames later alleged to the Kentucky Board of Nursing.
Rames ended up purchasing the proper lubricant on Amazon and donating it to the center, receipts show. Reece declined requests to comment.
In early December 2020, Rames said she noticed something more troubling. Hanging on the wall next to the ultrasound machine was a plastic canister of disinfectant that staff used to soak the probe after each examination. But the expiration date, scrawled in marker, read 11/11/20 – three weeks earlier. Rames said she didn’t raise concerns at the time because she assumed someone would replace it. But the canister was still there in January 2021, now nine weeks past when it should have been tossed.
For disinfectants, the expiration date typically marks the point at which the solution becomes less potent and reliable. Rames said that after she and another volunteer-in-training asked about the solution, Reece pulled out a big jug of the disinfectant, MetriCide OPA Plus, that was used to refill the smaller container. According to its label, it too had expired, on Dec. 1, 2020, Rames said. And no one had recorded when the jug was first opened – a critical part of infection prevention protocols, the manufacturer’s packaging warned. This particular disinfectant has a shelf life of only 75 days after the container is opened. Rames photographed the expired products with her phone.
Susan Rames took photos in January 2021 showing expired disinfectants at ALC Pregnancy Resource Center. Credit: Courtesy of Susan RamesThen, at home, Rames said she made yet another disturbing discovery. MetriCide OPA Plus wasn’t the right disinfectant for the pregnancy center’s purposes. A special report from the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine warned that orthophthalaldehyde, MetriCide’s active ingredient, has “virtually no efficacy against” HPV.
Rames said she considered reaching out to the center’s volunteer medical director, Dr. Anita Kotheimer, but the doctor never seemed to be there when she was. So, armed with her research, Rames requested a meeting in January 2021 with ALC’s executive director at the time, Diana Cahill. “Ms. Cahill appeared to understand the importance of this issue” and said she’d talk to Reece and replace the disinfectant, Rames recounted in her whistleblower complaints. “We want to use best practices,” Cahill told her. Cahill no longer works at the center and didn’t return Reveal’s calls. ALC’s current executive director, Erica Price, also didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Still, Rames quit the training program soon after that meeting, worried that her nursing license could be in jeopardy if she continued to volunteer there. “I did not want to be associated with an organization that was betraying people’s trust,” she wrote to one state medical board. “This way of operating presented a moral, ethical, legal & professional conflict for me.”
A few weeks later, Cahill checked in with Rames, telling her that ALC had indeed changed out the expired supplies. The center also upgraded a host of its infection control protocols. Yet Rames said she worried that without any external oversight, ALC could revert to its previous practices.
“To me, it’s about accountability,” she said in an interview. “This is something that needed to be brought to light and have some other people be aware of it.”
So starting in May 2021, Rames began filing her whistleblower complaints.
First, she went to the state, but the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services no longer had the authority to investigate her allegations because of the 2018 law that eliminated licensing requirements for several types of clinics, including pregnancy centers.
If ALC had been overseen by state authorities, “there would be a way to insist that corrections be made to deficiencies that are found,” said Lois Uttley, a national health care policy consultant who teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. “Clearly, that process is not happening with crisis pregnancy centers because they are under-regulated.”
Rames also turned to Care Net and Heartbeat International, two of the largest pregnancy center networks in the country, which issue best-practice recommendations to their members, including ALC. Both responded that they would follow up with the center, but neither had any regulatory authority. “We aren’t able to provide regulatory oversight for ultrasound practices outside of our affiliation requirements,” Care Net told Rames in an email. Neither organization responded to Reveal’s questions.
The only other avenue for accountability was to appeal to state medical boards, which can discipline doctors and nurses if they violate their professional codes of conduct but have no power to oversee the facilities where they work. Rames filed a complaint with the Kentucky Board of Nursing that accused Reece of a “repeated and willful” failure to follow current infection control guidelines, contributing to a “culture of non-compliance & poor nursing practice.”
Reece said the allegations were “inaccurate.” “I take my role as nurse manager very seriously and am always open to opportunities for improvement,” she wrote to the nursing board. “I take pride, as a nurse and as a leader at ALC, in fostering a culture of safety and transparency.” Ultimately, the board concluded that there was insufficient evidence for disciplinary action.
“To me, it’s about accountability,” registered nurse Susan Rames said of ALC’s infection control practices. “This is something that needed to be brought to light.” Credit: Jon Cherry for RevealRames filed a second complaint with the Kentucky Board of Medical Licensure accusing Kotheimer, the medical director, of failing to adequately supervise ALC’s services.
Under the pregnancy help industry’s own guidelines, centers that offer ultrasounds must have a medical director who is a licensed physician. But Rames said she met Kotheimer, a semi-retired OB/GYN with 40 years of experience, only once for about 10 minutes at the beginning of her training and never saw her during her once-a-week shifts over about five months at the center. In Reveal’s analysis of pregnancy centers in 27 states, including Kentucky, we found that most medical directors maintain their own practices or work as volunteers, raising questions about how much time they spend on their center duties.
In her response to the board, Kotheimer insisted she played an active role at ALC and said that after Rames raised her concerns, “changes were promptly put in place.” The medical board closed the case without disciplinary action. Neither the board nor Kotheimer returned Reveal’s messages for comment.
But the boards’ failure to take action against ALC’s medical director and nurse manager doesn’t mean Rames’ concerns weren’t valid, health policy experts said. Teneille Brown, a law professor and bioethicist at the University of Utah, noted that institutionwide problems, such as sloppy infection control or poor maintenance of medical equipment, can’t be addressed by only regulating staff and volunteers.
“Imagine that a popular restaurant had an outbreak of food poisoning. The state wouldn’t hold an individual server accountable. It would hold the entire restaurant accountable,” Brown said. “It’s the same in medicine. But if the clinic is not regulated or required to have a license, good luck deterring risky practice by putting pressure on individuals.”
After months of trying to get authorities to act, Rames said she felt deflated by the fact that ALC would continue to operate without external oversight.
“It’s a public health risk. It is not known by the public that this is how these centers are operating,” Rames said. “They are doing medical procedures, but not doing it to the standard of care that you would have if you were going to your doctor or any hospital or clinic.”
Less than a year after leaving ALC, one of Rames’ daughters got pregnant. It was an unplanned pregnancy, and she gave birth in July. Rames warned her to stay away from any pregnancy centers. “Whatever you do,” she told her, “don’t go.”
This story was edited by Nina Martin and Andrew Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
Laura C. Morel can be reached at lmorel@revealnews.org. Follow her on Twitter: @lauracmorel.
This Nurse Wanted to Help Women Avoid Abortions. Then She Saw Infection Control Problems at a Crisis Pregnancy Center. is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
Under new legislation proposed in Texas, the state’s Republican attorney general could send prosecutors from neighboring counties to investigate suspected cases of voter fraud in the state’s large Democratic counties.
The bill is one of at least nine filed in Texas since the November midterm elections that would increase criminal penalties for voting-related infractions or extend law enforcement’s ability to investigate voters, signaling an intensification of what is already one of the most threatening waves of voter suppression in decades.
Another proposal would allow the attorney general to remove from office a district attorney who chooses not to prosecute election crimes, effectively stripping local prosecutors of discretion over how they use their office’s resources.
The two bills targeting district attorneys, introduced by Reps. Keith Bell and Bryan Slaton, respectively, would set the stage for Republican interference in the state’s Democratic urban centers, as top GOP officials continue to push the myth that widespread voter fraud is undermining elections.
The bills were proposed about a week after Harris County, home of Houston and one of the state’s main Democratic strongholds, experienced ballot shortages and late polling site openings. Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg, a Democrat, has launched an investigation, but the state’s top Republicans – including Gov. Greg Abbott – immediately seized on the confusion and used the problems as pretext to contest a number of elections, even ones Democrats won by wide margins.
“The allegations of election improprieties in our state’s largest county may result from anything ranging from malfeasance to blatant criminal conduct,” Abbott said.
Bell and Slaton are both Republicans who represent districts adjacent to Dallas County, another center of Democratic power.
Slaton’s bill, which would allow the attorney general to remove elected prosecutors whose policies he disagrees with, would give legislative cover to executive branch efforts to interfere with prosecutorial discretion on a local level – something that has happened elsewhere in the country. In August, for example, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, suspended an elected state prosecutor who said he would decline to prosecute those seeking and providing abortions in the state. The Texas bill outlines a process for the attorney general to initiate civil court proceedings against a local prosecutor, whose fate would ultimately be decided by a jury.
Neither Slaton, Bell nor Attorney General Ken Paxton’s offices responded to requests for comment.
Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting’s review of legislative records found at least seven more bills in Texas that would increase law enforcement involvement in the election process. Several bills would increase the penalty for illegal voting. Another would make it a crime for a voter to cast a ballot in a party’s primary election if the voter is not a member of that party.
Republicans were the authors of each of these bills.
The bills are part of a wave of legislation that has followed former President Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen by fraud. An ongoing Reveal investigation found that lawmakers across the country have introduced and passed bills that would dramatically increase law enforcement involvement in elections. In the two years since the 2020 election, legislators in 42 states introduced bills that would establish new election investigation agencies, create new election-related crimes or give law enforcement officials more power to investigate these crimes. Such laws passed in 20 states.
Dozens of lawsuits and audits have disproven the claim that the 2020 election was tainted by fraud, while multiple studies have shown widespread voter fraud does not exist.
In 2021, for example, Texas lawmakers passed Senate Bill 1, which created new election crimes, including making it a felony for any election official to provide a mail-in ballot to someone who didn’t request it. Paxton also created an election integrity team, which has been unsuccessfully targeting election workers, according to ProPublica.
The proposed bills in Texas target phantom problems.
“District attorneys are appropriately investigating fraud, as far as we know,” said Matt Simpson, interim policy director at the ACLU of Texas. “There’s not cases where election fraud is happening and district attorneys just refuse to move forward. There’s just not evidence of these things being problems.”
Moves by the Legislature and statewide officials to undermine local elected officials’ power can also chill the vote.
“When you de-legitimize local or elected officials, you also undermine confidence in democracy,” said civil rights attorney Tom Saenz, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “People lose faith that their votes matter.”
Saenz said the true intent of these efforts is to suppress the vote, particularly in marginalized communities.
Threatening people with criminal prosecution is “the most extreme deterrent you can imagine,” he said. “Even if someone has every right to vote, they may hesitate. Or if someone has every right to facilitate participation by their own family members, by their own neighbors, that causes a hesitation.”
“That’s the whole purpose of it,” Saenz said. It’s no coincidence that, in Texas, these efforts come alongside demographic changes that could weaken Republicans’ grip on power, he added.
Another Texas bill would require the secretary of state to designate select state law enforcement as “election marshals” with the power to investigate voting crimes. It was first introduced in 2021 and passed out of the state Senate but floundered in the House.
When the bill’s sponsor, Houston-area Republican Sen. Paul Bettencourt, reintroduced it in November, he said he wants to introduce more “voter integrity legislation” in the coming session. He’s also described the 2022 midterm election in Harris County as a “3rd world” contest.
Meanwhile, Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, the Senate’s president, has signaled that adopting stricter penalties for election crimes will be a legislative priority in this year’s session.
“We need to restore voter fraud to a felony,” Patrick said at a press conference in late November. “Unfortunately, it was dropped to a misdemeanor last time. It’s a serious crime – you steal someone’s vote.”
SB 1 downgraded illegal voting from a felony to a misdemeanor. Under that law, illegal voting is punishable with a maximum $4,000 fine, a one-year jail term or both.
Ahead of the new legislative session, lawmakers in both legislative chambers filed four separate bills that would make illegal voting punishable by a felony charge.
One of those bills came from Slaton, a former pastor and co-author of SB 1. His bill would make illegal voting a second-degree felony, punishable by prison sentences of two to 20 years, plus a possible $10,000 fine.
Another bill would increase the criminal penalty for election fraud, or tampering with someone else’s vote.
State lawmakers are seeking to make changes to elections in other ways, too. For example, one bill would allow select poll workers, known as election judges, to carry guns at polling places during early voting and at polling places on Election Day.
The ACLU’s Simpson said Texas has a host of pressing issues that its Legislature could be addressing now in its once-every-two-years session.
“Texas, famously, has an electric grid that is different from the rest of the country, that is not that reliable,” he said. “There’s some real issues in Texas, and I think that when we get into these conversations and these policy discussions about district attorney authority and how we’re gonna, in great detail, push different agendas with different local officials – these conversations waste time that should be spent on real issues.”
This story was edited by Maryam Saleh and Andrew Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
Ese Olumhense can be reached at eolumhense@revealnews.org. Follow her on Twitter: @essayolumhense.
Texas Republicans Look to Usurp Power of Local Prosecutors Who Don’t Pursue Their Voter Fraud Agenda is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
New York has become the second state to regulate warehouse work quotas in an effort to improve working conditions at Amazon facilities.
Gov. Kathy Hochul last month signed the Warehouse Worker Protection Act, which says warehouse workers can’t be forced to hit work quotas that would prevent them from taking meal and rest breaks and using the bathroom. As Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting reported in 2019, Amazon workers felt such pressure to achieve productivity targets and escape discipline that some delayed bathroom trips and even developed urinary tract infections. The new law also says employers must provide written notice of quotas and provide productivity data to workers who request it. It’s the latest example of government officials taking action after years of mounting injuries from Amazon’s relentless drive for speed.
Reveal’s investigation into Amazon’s injury crisis helped prompt a wave of state legislation around the country, beginning with a California law passed in 2021. A similar bill in Minnesota failed last year and was reintroduced this month.
The New York law was modeled on California’s, but it has some big differences: The California law bans any quotas that conflict with safety standards and gives workers the right to sue to enforce it. Similar provisions were taken out of the New York bill in the scramble to pass it with limited time, said New York Senate Labor Committee Chair Jessica Ramos, who sponsored the bill. But Ramos said there will be more bills to come.
“We’re just getting started, baby,” she said. “I can’t let my state become one where we condone high-tech sweatshops.”
Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel said the law is based on a misunderstanding of the company’s practices. Amazon doesn’t have “fixed quotas,” she said: “Instead, we assess performance based on safe and achievable expectations.”
Reveal has documented how Amazon used tracking software to hold workers to specific productivity rates under threat of discipline. Workers, former Amazon safety managers and Washington state safety officials have said it’s that constant pressure to work fast that leads to injuries.
Last month, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited Amazon for failing to record injuries properly at six warehouses around the country and proposed nearly $30,000 in fines. At a New York warehouse, for example, workers were hurt lifting a heavy box of kitty litter and an inflatable canoe, and another was struck by falling boxes, but Amazon didn’t record the injuries, according to OSHA.
Nantel, the Amazon spokesperson, said in a statement that the citations involved “minor infractions.”
“The safety of our employees is our top priority, and we invest hundreds of millions of dollars every year into ensuring we have a robust safety program to protect them,” she said. “Accurate recordkeeping is a critical element of that program and while we acknowledge there might have been a small number of administrative errors over the years, we are confident in the numbers we’ve reported to the government.”
OSHA noted that its investigation, which has stretched to five states, is ongoing. The agency’s inspections were prompted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, which is investigating safety hazards related to Amazon’s pace of work and “possible fraudulent conduct designed to hide injuries,” according to a statement. Both issues have been subjects of Reveal’s reporting.
After Reveal documented that Amazon had much higher injury rates than the warehousing industry average, company officials argued the high rates were due to extra-diligent recordkeeping. But Amazon has a history of undercounting injuries and has misled the public about the extent of its safety problems. As we reported in 2020, medical providers at an Amazon-contracted clinic said they were pressured to send injured Amazon workers back to their jobs without appropriate treatment so the company wouldn’t have to count their injuries.
This story was edited by Kate Howard and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
Will Evans can be reached at wevans@revealnews.org. Follow him on Twitter: @willCIR.
New York Passes Law to Protect Amazon Warehouse Workers is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
Patricia Henderson stood in the parking lot next to the Florida Women’s Center in Jacksonville, wearing a white lab coat and greeting patients as they emerged from their cars. Their abortion appointments, she told them, were in the flat-roofed building across the road.
Once inside, Henderson handed them three pages of paperwork to fill out – questions about everything from their highest level of education to the date of their last period. State investigative documents lay out what clients say happened next: She led them to a pink-walled ultrasound room, where she would reveal their pregnancies in grainy images that, according to leading medical groups, only a licensed physician or a specially trained advanced practice nurse should interpret.
Henderson told one woman that abortion causes breast cancer – a claim widely disputed by medical research.
She informed another that she was not pregnant and just had a stomach virus. According to the state report, that wasn’t true.
Henderson allegedly told a third woman not to bother getting an abortion because her 9-week-old embryo wasn’t “forming properly” and she would probably lose the baby anyway. “She told me my body would do the right thing and in 1 week I would have a miscarriage. Which would save me $555.00!” the woman wrote in her complaint to the state. A doctor later determined that the pregnancy was normal.
In the most serious accusation against her, Henderson told yet another woman that “the baby was stuck” in her fallopian tube, a potentially catastrophic complication known as an ectopic pregnancy. If not treated immediately, the condition can lead to massive hemorrhaging and, sometimes, the mother’s death. But Henderson allegedly advised the woman to “relax at the beach” and come back in a few days. Fortunately for the woman, Henderson was wrong. The 5-week-old embryo was where it should be, in the uterus.
The women later discovered they weren’t at the abortion clinic they’d intended to visit, but at the similarly named Women’s Help Center, one of more than 2,500 crisis pregnancy centers across the country that aim to discourage people from getting abortions. Henderson, then in her early 70s, wasn’t a “cancer doctor,” as she allegedly informed one client, or indeed any type of licensed medical professional. Her only medical experience was as a radiation therapy technologist, and her license had expired 10 years earlier.
Nor was there a doctor on hand to review the ultrasound images Henderson took, as is considered best practice by mainstream medical organizations and the pregnancy center industry itself. The Women’s Help Center – which has four locations in the Jacksonville area – did have a volunteer medical director, according to its tax filings, a family practitioner then in his mid-80s. But he wasn’t involved in daily operations – “never saw clients and did not provide medical advice,” the clinic’s executive director, Nancy Basham, told Florida Department of Health investigators in 2018, according to a never-before-published report obtained by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. Basham declined to comment.
In a video targeting donors, Women’s Help Center’s Nancy Basham explains the strategy of placing pregnancy centers close to abortion providers. Basham also alleges – without providing details or other evidence – that patients at the abortion clinics near her centers regularly end up injured or worse: “Too many times, a woman is wheeled out, covered head to toe in a sheet,” she says. Credit: Screenshot from Women’s Help Center videoAnti-abortion pregnancy centers like the Women’s Help Center have proliferated in recent decades, with many aiming to expand their capacity now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned. By design, an increasing number look and operate much like traditional OB-GYN providers, offering ultrasounds, tests for sexually transmitted infections and in some instances even prenatal care. Many boast of having medical directors and other licensed staff. Dozens include the word “medical” in their names.
But as the newly unearthed Jacksonville case highlights, beneath the veneer of medical professionalism is an industry that state and federal authorities have done almost nothing to regulate.
Only a few states require pregnancy centers that provide medical services to be formally licensed as clinics, a Reveal investigation has found. And, because their views are grounded in a particular ideological viewpoint, the centers aren’t subject to many other rules designed to protect patients – rules that would require them to be transparent about their operations and medical credentials.
The lack of significant regulation means that in most of the country, for the hundreds of thousands of clients whom pregnancy centers serve every year, there is no one playing an oversight role to make sure that centers are offering high-quality care and accurate information or that staff are licensed and adequately trained. No one protecting clients’ ultra-sensitive personal information or inspecting facilities and equipment to verify that they’re clean and up to date. No one taking substantive action if clients are mistreated or deceived.
Yet for decades, misleading consumers has often been a key part of pregnancy centers’ business model, numerous researchers and advocacy groups have found. One well-known tactic is to open shop near abortion clinics – sometimes even mimicking their names and logos – in an attempt to intercept their patients. Basham acknowledged this strategy in a seven-minute video targeted to Women’s Help Center donors. Women who already have an abortion scheduled, she says, “come to us thinking we are the abortionist.”
Logos for the recently shuttered Florida Women’s Center, an abortion clinic in Jacksonville, and the Women’s Help Center, a crisis pregnancy center located directly across the street, were remarkably similar. The abortion provider closed in November after its medical director retired. Credit: Google Street View screenshotsAnti-abortion groups have fought hard against attempts to rein them in, arguing that the First Amendment shields them from increased scrutiny under consumer protection laws. In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed, throwing out a California law that required pregnancy centers to disclose if they weren’t a licensed medical provider and ruling that the law violated their right of free speech.
The result is what Teneille Brown, a law professor and bioethicist at the University of Utah, calls “a regulatory dead zone” that allows pregnancy centers “to dodge all of the legal safeguards that attach to actual health care without being held to even basic consumer protection standards.”
The consequences extend far beyond the reproductive health front, Brown added. “It muddles medical trust,” she said. “They trade on the goodwill of legitimate medicine to defraud patients.”
The Women’s Help Center case is an egregious, and unusually well-documented, example of just how little authorities are doing to hold pregnancy centers accountable, even when the evidence – and the risks to women – are significant.
The center came to the attention of state investigators after an abortion patient filed a complaint in early 2018. The Florida Department of Health ultimately documented seven incidents involving Henderson from February 2016 to March 2018, issuing a cease-and-desist notice in April 2018 that prohibited her from providing health care without a medical license. The department said its action against Henderson was the most it could do in an “unlicensed activity investigation.” There was one other avenue for accountability: Practicing medicine without a license is a felony in Florida. The department referred the case to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, but investigators there decided the behavior wasn’t “criminal in nature.”
An excerpt from a client’s 2018 complaint about the Women’s Help Center details how she was tricked into believing that the woman who greeted her in the parking lot and performed her ultrasound scan was a doctor. Credit: Florida Department of Health unlicensed activity investigative reportIt’s unclear whether Henderson is still involved at the center; she is not listed on its websites or in its tax filings. She didn’t return calls seeking comment.
Meanwhile, the center didn’t face any apparent repercussions for permitting Henderson to perform diagnostic medical procedures without a valid license.
Even as the state investigation was underway, Henderson was meeting with – and deceiving – abortion seekers. In one incident that isn’t in the state report, an abortion patient accused Henderson of collecting her private medical information under false pretenses, then refusing to hand over the paperwork after she realized she had been lied to.
By the time the young woman found her way to the abortion clinic next door, she had missed her appointment. She was able to reschedule, but four years later, the trauma lingers. “I was sobbing,” she recalled in a recent interview. “I was so upset.”
How Pregnancy Centers Moved Into Medical ServicesThe first pregnancy centers were founded in the late 1960s as grassroots charities that opposed abortion on religious grounds. They offered spiritual counseling and free items such as maternity clothing and diapers.
The move into medical services began more than a decade later, as centers started offering free pregnancy testing. After a client sued, a California judge ruled that organizations administering or interpreting such tests needed to be medically licensed. But centers quickly found a workaround: giving out tests for women to take and interpret on their own.
The medicalization of pregnancy centers became a core strategy of anti-abortion activists in the 1990s following the advent of the ultrasound machine. They saw its potential to change women’s minds by offering a so-called “window to the womb.” “Mothers contemplating abortion will have the opportunity to see the wonderful handiwork of the Creator move, kick and dance in celebration of life,” the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates, which provides legal and education support to the pregnancy help movement, enthused on its website.
Since then, centers have ramped up their medical services as a way to expand their reach and build credibility with clients, communities and donors. These days, 79% of centers provide free ultrasounds and 30% offer testing for sexually transmitted infections, according to the Charlotte Lozier Institute, an anti-abortion think tank.
A table in one pregnancy center’s lobby holds brochures and a basket of plastic fetuses. Credit: Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty ImagesEven as pregnancy centers have become more medicalized, complaints about their deceptive tactics have intensified. But there’s been very little scrutiny of how these centers operate under the regulatory radar.
So Reveal set out to understand how pregnancy centers have managed to get away with practices that would get other types of health care providers into trouble with regulators and consumers.
We examined the publicly available materials for about two-thirds of pregnancy centers in the U.S. – nearly 1,700 centers in 27 states. Our analysis included reviews of state laws, federal tax filings, center websites, professional licenses and how-to information for pregnancy centers seeking to add medical services.
We found that there’s shockingly little oversight of the pregnancy help industry. The vast majority of states don’t require centers that provide medical services to be licensed or inspected. In many states, tanning salons, massage parlors and even pet stores face significantly stricter oversight.
A sign in the parking lot of the Women’s Health Center of West Virginia, the state’s only abortion clinic before the procedure was largely banned in September, cautions patients about a crisis pregnancy center next door. Credit: Leah M. Willingham/Associated PressInstead, pregnancy centers typically recruit licensed doctors, nurses and sonographers as part of their teams of staff and volunteers, then piggyback on their professional licenses to legally provide medical services. It’s a system that works for other types of medical clinics because they face many additional levels of oversight. These include the federal patient privacy law known as HIPAA, regulations that govern Medicaid and Medicare, and accreditation rules for the larger hospital systems to which many traditional clinics belong.
But because the vast majority of pregnancy centers don’t charge for their services and aren’t part of hospital systems, they escape those layers of scrutiny, too.
Help Reveal report on reproductive health issues
Have you received services at a pregnancy center? Have you volunteered or worked at one? We’d like to hear your stories. Email reporter Laura C. Morel: lmorel@revealnews.org.
Contrast that with the level of regulation faced by the very abortion clinic the Women’s Help Center went to such lengths to mimic. For years, Florida abortion providers have been subject to annual inspections and visits from investigators at the whiff of potential problems; those inspection records are easily accessible to the public online. Under state law, there are rules about dressing rooms, ventilation, “adequate lighting” and “appropriate lavatory areas.” Abortion clinics even have to post their current state licenses “in a place that is conspicuous to all patients.”
Yet Florida investigators ended up at the Women’s Help Center only after one patient finally came forward, triggering a broader review. Even when the state Department of Health did substantiate those complaints, it did not make the report public. The case came to light only after Reveal filed a series of public records requests with Florida agencies.
Other notable findings from Reveal’s analysis:
- Most pregnancy centers don’t list a medical director in their publicly available documents. According to the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates, pregnancy centers that provide ultrasound services should have a medical director who is a licensed physician. But in Reveal’s examination of websites and tax filings for centers that advertised ultrasound services, only a third explicitly noted having a medical director – and many of those directors maintain their own practices or work as volunteers, raising questions about how much time they spend supervising centers’ services. Some centers said they had a licensed physician on staff or working as a volunteer, though not in the medical director role.
- Medical directors at many centers specialize in fields outside of reproductive health. While most of the directors identified by Reveal are OB-GYNs or family medicine doctors, others have careers in internal or emergency medicine. We also found six pediatricians, a urologist and a rheumatologist.
- Centers often make it difficult to find out who works there and to check their credentials. The vast majority of center websites provide no information about medical staff. Many other centers disclose staffing information only on tax filings or donor-focused websites that use sophisticated search optimization tools to make themselves less visible to consumers.
The reports from the Women’s Help Center echo stories told by OB-GYNs from around the country, underscoring how reproductive health providers are often held to higher medical standards than abortion foes.
“In any other field of medicine, this would not be tolerated,” said Dr. Jasmine Patel, an OB-GYN in California associated with Physicians for Reproductive Health. “How can you just set up shop and claim to be medical but have no medical training?”
Why Ultrasounds Should Be Performed by ProfessionalsUltrasounds have become so ubiquitous – and such a feel-good pop culture symbol – that it’s easy to forget they are a sophisticated medical technology. In the early prenatal period, they’re used to confirm and date the pregnancy and detect early signs of a heartbeat; later, they show whether bones and organs are growing normally and reveal the baby’s sex. Early-pregnancy ultrasounds are invasive, involving a probe inserted into the patient’s vagina and strict protocols to avoid spreading germs and STIs.
Only four states have laws requiring sonographers to be licensed. But because the technology is so complex and the stakes are so high, mainstream medical groups like the American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine state that only technicians or nurses with training in obstetric sonography should perform prenatal ultrasounds, while a physician or an advanced clinical provider should interpret those results.
The pregnancy help industry echoes those standards in its written materials going back at least two decades. The three leading national groups subscribe to a “Commitment of Care and Competence” that they encourage members to post prominently in their centers. It pledges that medical services will be provided “under the supervision and direction of a licensed physician,” in accordance with “pertinent medical standards” and “all applicable laws.”
“Ultrasound is a diagnostic procedure that must be supervised and directed by a licensed physician experienced in ultrasound,” the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates says on its website.
The groups wouldn’t say how they hold their affiliates accountable for failing to follow that pledge. NIFLA did not respond to written questions and declined requests for an interview. In a written statement, Heartbeat International, the largest pregnancy center network in the world, acknowledged that “it is important that medical professionals operate with licenses to help protect clients and patients from being harmed,” but it didn’t explain what it does to uphold its standards.
Meanwhile, mainstream women’s health providers say, ultrasound technology has proven to be especially susceptible to misuse and manipulation by pregnancy center staff. It’s common for patients to receive incorrect gestational ages, several doctors told Reveal.
“They’re trying to just run out the clock,” said Dr. Nisha Verma, a Georgia OB-GYN who testified before Congress this past summer on the impact of overturning Roe. “They tell people that they’re earlier so that they think that they have more time (to obtain an abortion). And then people come to us. They’re like: ‘Oh my goodness. That is not what I was told. I was not told I was 15, 16, 17 weeks. I was told I was seven weeks.’ ”
The Failed Attempt to Force TransparencyAbortion rights supporters join a 2018 rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court, where justices were holding oral arguments over the constitutionality of California’s attempt to regulate the speech of crisis pregnancy centers. The court eventually ruled 5-4 in favor of the centers. Credit: Andrew Harnik/Associated PressThe issue of regulation is more urgent than ever in the post-Roe era. As abortion providers have shuttered in conservative states, pregnancy centers are trying to fill the gap in some core reproductive services. In areas that continue to allow abortion, centers are doubling down on efforts to deter women – many from out of state – from following through with plans to end their pregnancies.
Women’s health advocates have been especially concerned that sensitive health information collected by pregnancy centers could be weaponized against abortion seekers. That’s because women are sometimes tricked into providing their personal information, as happened at the Women’s Help Center in Jacksonville. And because most centers aren’t subject to the same privacy rules as medical clinics, advocates warn, that information could be shared and used to harass or, in anti-abortion states, even prosecute patients, their family members and their abortion providers.
“In the current political environment,” said Lois Uttley, a senior adviser at Community Catalyst, a national health care advocacy group, “pregnant people need to be able to get care in a confidential manner and with assurance that it is the highest standard of care.”
But the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in the California case presents monumental roadblocks for states and local jurisdictions seeking to protect women and hold centers accountable.
In 2015, California passed a law to protect low-income people who relied on the freebies pregnancy centers provide. The Reproductive FACT Act didn’t apply just to the state’s nearly 200 centers; it required any clinic “providing family planning or pregnancy-related services” to let clients know that the state also offered free or low-cost reproductive services, including abortion, and to notify clients if it wasn’t licensed to provide medical care. Pregnancy centers challenged the law, arguing that it infringed on their free speech rights.
California claimed it was seeking to regulate only “professional speech,” not religious or political speech. And reproductive rights advocates pointed out that many conservative states have laws that regulate what abortion providers can say. But the court’s conservative majority, led by Justice Clarence Thomas, rejected those arguments, ruling that the law violated the First Amendment. The decision essentially freed crisis pregnancy centers and their employees from restrictions that apply in other medical contexts.
The ruling created huge new hurdles to passing laws protecting center clients, said Stephanie Toti, a constitutional lawyer who has argued reproductive rights cases before the Supreme Court. It “caused a lot of jurisdictions that would like to regulate pregnancy centers … to pause those efforts or move more slowly.”
Still, Connecticut lawmakers tried a different approach last year, passing a law that authorized the state’s attorney general to levy civil penalties against centers engaging in deceptive marketing. Three months after the statute took effect, a pregnancy center associated with Care Net, a faith-based network with 1,200 affiliates, sued in federal court to block enforcement, arguing that this legislation, too, infringes on religious liberty and free speech. The case is pending.
But the overturning of Roe is reviving interest in regulation, Toti said. This past summer, a group of U.S. senators co-sponsored the Stop Anti-Abortion Disinformation Act, which would authorize the Federal Trade Commission to crack down on deceptive or misleading marketing practices at pregnancy centers. In November, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously adopted an ordinance that allows the city to fine centers that falsely advertise their services and clients to sue if they have been misled. The law applies to any business offering pregnancy-related care.
Teneille Brown, the Utah law professor and bioethicist, said the 2018 Supreme Court ruling is far more consequential than many people realize. “The Supreme Court has said that because they’re not only fake clinics, but religious and ideological ones, they can mislead consumers – something basic, nonideological businesses cannot do,” she said. “They are not even required to correct the very confusion that they helped to create.”
Brown draws an analogy to the pandemic. Imagine going to a clinic that says it offers vaccines, she said: “They make it look like it’s a COVID clinic and they have signs outside saying ‘COVID vaccines here.’ You fill out a little clipboard, and someone who looks like a nurse comes out and they give you a shot.” But it turns out the clinic is run by anti-vaxxers who object to vaccines on religious and moral grounds. The staff isn’t licensed; the injection was nothing but sugar water.
Now, imagine if California passed a law forcing those clinics to let people know there are places where they could actually get a free vaccine. “And the Supreme Court says, ‘No, you can’t even do that. You’re not allowed to correct the misinformation where they think that they’re getting the COVID vaccine.’ ”
“That is just bananas,” Brown said. “In any other context, we would say you don’t get to do that … because you are defrauding people and that is putting their health at risk.”
Farah Eltohamy, Soraya Ferdman, Grace Oldham and Anya Syed contributed to this story. It was edited by Nina Martin and Andrew Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
Laura C. Morel can be reached at lmorel@revealnews.org. Follow her on Twitter: @lauracmorel.
Have you received services at a pregnancy center? Have you volunteered or worked at one? We’d like to hear your stories. Email reporter Laura C. Morel: lmorel@revealnews.org.
Feature image photo collage by Reveal, photos from Getty Images.
ABOUT THE REPORTING
To conduct this analysis, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting obtained lists of pregnancy center websites compiled by two groups, Abortion Access Front and Reproaction. The analysis focused on 27 states, including the 10 with the largest numbers of pregnancy centers. We reviewed the information on each website, as well as publicly available IRS Form 990 filings, materials published by the pregnancy center industry and professional credentials for center staff and volunteers.
How Anti-Abortion Pregnancy Centers Can Claim to Be Medical Clinics and Get Away With It is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
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How a group of rogue sheriffs decided to make themselves the new election police.
These Sheriffs Say They’re More Powerful Than the President. Now, They’re Targeting Elections. is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
Election attorneys and voting rights experts worry these laws will scare people away from voting. So we’ve created this guide to make sure you know the rules in your state.
Ballot Collection Rules Have Changed in Many Places. Here’s How to Make Sure Your Vote Counts. is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
The proliferation of election crime legislation is the most threatening front in voter suppression efforts in generations.
State Legislatures Are Dramatically Increasing Law Enforcement Involvement in Elections is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
Help us understand whether new election rules and threats are keeping people from voting.
How Are Voter Suppression Tactics Affecting You and Your Community?  is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
Reveal created a first-of-its-kind database to track bills that target election crimes in state legislatures across the country.
Search for the Crime Bills That Target Voting and Elections in Your State is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
Expanded self-defense laws are being used to justify killings of roommates, people who are unhoused, and in road rage incidents and child custody disputes.
Stand Your Ground Laws Are Proliferating. And More People Are Dying. is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
Instead of releasing diversity reports for thousands of government contractors, the U.S. Department of Labor invited them to fight their public release – and specifically named Reveal’s reporter as the instigator.
We Forced the Government to Share Corporate Diversity Data. It’s Giving Companies an Out Instead. is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
Since last August, the U.S. government has collected nearly $20 million in fees from 66,000 Afghan applicants. Less than 8,000 applications have been processed.
The US Has Approved Only 123 Afghan Humanitarian Parole Applications in the Last Year is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
In scores of intimate partner gun homicides from 2017 through 2020, Reveal found that law enforcement repeatedly ignored even the most glaring signs that a victim was at high risk of being killed.
Police Often Miss Red Flags in Domestic Abuse Cases, and the Consequences Are Deadly is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
The Texas attorney general would be the one to hold True the Vote accountable on allegations that it swindled a $2.5 million donor. But the nonprofit’s founder has been a friend and ally.
Group Behind ‘2000 Mules’ Has Deep Ties to Ken Paxton is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
As a wave of bans on the procedure takes effect across the U.S., providers and patients will face mounting risks in places where clinics remain open.
Abortion Providers Ask for Protection as They Prepare for Post-Roe Harassment and Violence is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
As unhoused people increasingly live in residential neighborhoods, their new neighbors have turned to one place for help in particular: the police.
Police Know Arrests Won’t Fix Homelessness. They Keep Making Them Anyway. is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
Data obtained by Reveal highlights how a patchwork system can be ill-equipped to tackle serious mental health episodes, leaving migrant children to bear the tremendous toll.
Scores of Migrant Children Considered or Attempted Suicide in US Custody, Records Show is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
The social media giant gathers data from crisis pregnancy centers through a tracking tool that works whether or not a person is logged in to their Facebook account.
Facebook and Anti-Abortion Clinics Are Collecting Highly Sensitive Info on Would-Be Patients is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
The story of True the Vote highlights how exploiting Trump’s Big Lie has become a lucrative enterprise, growing from a cottage industry to a thriving economy.
6 Takeaways From Our Investigation Into a Prominent Voter Fraud Nonprofit is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.