In late February, Dr. Mahendra Amin settled his defamation suit with MSNBC (for an undisclosed amount) after they falsely claimed that he had performed medically unnecessary hysterectomies on illegal immigrant women in the custody of ICE, erroneously dubbing him “the uterus collector.” NewsBusters recently spoke with Dr. Amin’s lead counsel Georgia State Representative Stacey Evans (D) and co-counsel Scott Grubman about the case and the future of defamation law.
Evans, who has been practicing law for 22 years and defamation law for 15, is an elected Democrat in the Georgia House of Representatives and was shocked when learning about the accusations against her client. “[W]hen I had heard the allegations and, you know, they sounded horrible” and “particularly stood out because the allegations against him were so egregious,” she said.
Even with the political nature of the case and the on-going election year at the time, Evans said she didn’t shy away from it because “we need to hold [MSNBC] accountable for it” and get the truth out:
I have learned, you know, that the media doesn't always get it right. And so while I think Scott [Grubman] and his partner may have thought at first that I would shy away from this one because of my politics and because that we were in the middle of an election cycle. I said, ‘no, absolutely not.’ If they got this wrong, we need to hold them accountable for it. And while I knew it was going to be challenging because of the fact that the media had already run him through the wringer, so to speak, I was very glad to, to dig in and get to the truth.
Grubman noted that politics played a role in why the story against his client gained traction. “It is a political issue, and we believe that a big part of why all these allegations were made, and then … it spread so much through the media, is because of all the political stuff going on,” he said.
On Dr. Amin’s politics, Grubman noted that his client “is not a political person in any way, shape, or form.” Adding: “He doesn't get involved in politics … he practices medicine, he keeps his head down and that's it.”
What happened was MSNBC ignored “an alarm bell going off to them that they did not have this story right,” Evans explained. “And in the face of all of that, they broadcast to the world that Dr. Amin was this evil caricature of a doctor in his basement collecting uteruses.”
Explaining how the MSNBC’s lies hurt Dr. Amin, Evans said the false reports, “really cut to the heart of who he is as a person, which is a very caring, very dedicated, very selfless doctor.”
Dr. Amin’s practices in a very rural part of southeast Georgia, which Evans explained to NewsBusters as “very remote, very rural area” with “a lot of poverty” that Dr. Amin very much wanted to help. “[H]e treats patients regardless of the ability to pay, and he's often been the only OBGYN in the county and sometimes in a pretty large radius of the area of Georgia,” she stated.
Both Evans and Grubman pointed out that MSNBC’s false claims particularly hurt him because they accused him of targeting migrants when he was an immigrant himself.
The reporting also led to Dr. Amin receiving death threats, as recounted by Evans:
The fact that he received death threats, that he was being followed, that even when he wasn't being followed, he felt like he was being followed. He was compared to Nazi doctors experimenting on patients. He was called some of the vilest names that I think any of us would probably ever even imagine being called and that was his life. I mean, it was awful. It affected his, his family, his staff, because they were getting harassing phone calls at work. And of course the toll that it took on him affected everyone around him. Because Doctor Amin is a selfless doctor whose dedicated himself to a very underserved area of the country and the state of Georgia.
Looking up Google reviews of Dr. Amin’s practice, NewsBusters can verify that people were indeed saying very heinous things about him while trying to sink him. “He’s a eugenicist and sterilizes migrant women without telling them in order to pad his wallet. Pure evil,” one reviewer wrote. Another unrionically proclaimed “Do your research!!” before going on a 345-word tirade against him parroting the same lies MSNBC pushed.
Regarding some of those statements made by MSNBC, Grubman pointed that Judge Lisa Godbey Wood found in summary judgment that “multiple of these statements, crucial statements made by MSNBC and Rachel Maddow on the air, were false as a matter of law.”
The media outlets that were reaching out to Dr. Amin to comment essentially wanted him to break HIPPA laws. They wanted him to answer the allegations they were baselessly leveling against him, but in order to do that he needed to break doctor-patient confidentially, which he refused to do.
When asked if we’re seeing more defamation suits against the media these days, Evans wasn’t sure about raw numbers but did think more outlets were willing to call each other out over it. She was also seeing more “good faith” efforts to have certain aspects of defamation law better defined and work for victims:
I do think that folks are getting braver at trying cases and pushing for good faith changes in the law and standards. And I think you've seen a lot of effort to try to have higher courts look again at actual malice standards and private versus public figures and how we treat people differently, and what that actually means. You're seeing a lot more, you know, nerdy academic discussion of the law and what have we put in place and should we have and should that change.
So, I do think you're getting a lot more discussion about defamation cases. I'm not sure that we're actually having more defamation cases.
Evans was happy to see those efforts taking place “because it is important for folks to know that that old adage that you learned as a kid, sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me. They do. They do hurt and it's real pain, and it's real damage.”
“And in today's day and age, because of the fact that things can get amplified so quick and go around the world so fast, it can ruin you in a second, and that matters,” she declared. “And people should be held accountable when they are so reckless with their words that they destroy somebody's reputation, which you work your whole life to develop, and the fact that someone can destroy it in a second. Should not go unchecked.”
