a Better Bubble™

ProPublica

Anchorage Police Say They Witnessed a Sexual Assault in Public. It Took Seven Years for the Case to Go to Trial.

1 month 1 week ago

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Anchorage Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

The evidence was overwhelming from the time it all began in 2017. A sexual assault in broad daylight at a popular Anchorage park, with a witness who dialed 911 and described the attack as it was happening. A police officer hoisting the suspect from atop one of the victims, the suspect’s pants still around his knees. DNA evidence corroborating the crime.

Yet in Alaska’s slow-motion court system, it took more than seven years for the case against Fred Tom Hurley III to finally go to trial, in December. Attorneys came and went with the passage of time — a series of six for the defense and four for the prosecution — as judges granted 50 delays. Most of the slowdowns came at the request of Hurley’s lawyers, long before and long after the COVID-19 pandemic paused jury trials across the state. At hearing after hearing, talks concerned scheduling, not the facts of the case.

For the two women Hurley was charged with assaulting, justice delayed meant justice denied in their lifetimes. Both died before the case ever reached the jury.

Told the details of the case, former Florida state prosecutor Melba Pearson called it “a travesty of justice.”

“That’s a travesty. Period. End of story,” said Pearson, who recently co-authored a report on trial delays across the country.

What’s surprising isn’t how long the Hurley case lingered unresolved, but how ordinary it is in Alaska’s court system.

A recent Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica investigation found hundreds of misdemeanor criminal cases in Anchorage thrown out of court because overwhelmed city prosecutors couldn’t meet speedy trial deadlines.

But when it comes to felonies in Anchorage and across the state, the opposite problem often exists for victims and witnesses: a wait of five, seven or even 10 years or more to reach trial, plea agreement or dismissal, often because of defense motions to delay. As a benchmark, the National Center for State Courts says 98% of felonies should be resolved in under a year.

The extreme pretrial delays in Alaska are especially striking because it has one of the nation’s strictest limits on how long cases can drag out: 120 days from the time a person is charged.

In reality, this deadline is rarely met. Over a recent 12-month period, only seven criminal cases went to trial within 120 days in Alaska state courts.

The problem is getting worse. The median time to resolve the most serious felony cases, such as murder and sexual assault, has nearly tripled over the past decade, from just over a year in 2013 to 1,160 days in 2023. About 54% of people held in Alaska jails and prisons last year were there to await trial or, in a smaller number of cases, to await sentencing. That’s up from just 30% in 2016.

A courts spokesperson, Rebecca Koford, said by email that the state “is well aware of the issues with case backlogs and has been actively working to improve time to disposition.” Koford cited an Anchorage presiding judge’s orders limiting when postponements may be used, as well as new training for judges on managing case flows.

“We have made inroads in that direction,” she said, “but it takes time and continues to be exacerbated by the low number of attorneys who are able to handle complex criminal cases."

Some defense attorneys request pretrial delays to cope with overwhelming caseloads. According to the Alaska court system, Hurley’s current attorney, Rex Butler, represents defendants in at least 375 active cases, for example. (In an interview, the attorney said he sometimes hires other lawyers to help with that workload and noted that most cases do not require a jury trial.)

Time is generally a friend to a defendant. Witnesses may get into trouble or their recollections may fade, which could work to your benefit.

—Assistant public advocate Jim Corrigan in an email to a client

Attorneys also can employ delays as a tactic, increasing the odds their clients will walk free as the prosecution’s case ages. Defendants sit in jail or live on monitored release pending trial, but the wait can avert a heftier prison sentence.

The thought was captured in a 2017 email from a state-appointed defense attorney to his client, later made public in a court proceeding.

“Time is generally a friend to a defendant,” assistant public advocate Jim Corrigan wrote. “Witnesses may get into trouble or their recollections may fade, which could work to your benefit.”

The defendant had been questioning why his lawyer asked to delay his sexual assault case.

“You should not be in any hurry to take these cases to trial,” Corrigan replied.

Corrigan did not respond to a recent request for comment.

Terrence Haas, a former judge who oversees public defenders in Alaska, said that any lawyer who believes a delay is necessary or would benefit a client’s case is “bound by the ethics of their profession and duty of loyalty to their client to request a continuance.”

But one person has the power to say no to such requests: the judge. Records show Alaska judges routinely agree to such requests even after years of delays. These preventable failures have existed for more than a decade. What’s more, everyone saw it coming.

Repeated Warnings

Victims advocates in Alaska have raised alarms about pretrial delays over and over again, largely without impact.

“It is not unusual for felony cases to take 2 to 3 years before victims see their case go to trial or result in a plea agreement,” the Alaska Office of Victims’ Rights wrote in 2014. Few judges were giving serious consideration to victims who asked them to speed up the process.

The agency issued similar warnings as the years went by:

  • 2015: Judges often allowed 20 or more status meetings before forcing the two sides to go to trial.

  • 2016: The most common victim complaint is “pre-trial delays allowed by the courts.”

  • 2017: The maxim that “justice delayed is justice denied” could not be more true than for victims of crime in Alaska. “Victims cannot heal or find closure when the wounds caused by the offender are constantly reopened by a prolonged court case. Victims are often held hostage to the system for far too long and in violation of their rights as victims.”

The victims’ rights office laid blame for the delays mostly with judges, particularly judges in Anchorage.

One week in 2018, the agency watched four Anchorage Superior Court judges hold pretrial hearings for 181 criminal cases. The judges let 161 be delayed up to two months. In most cases, the victims’ rights office said, neither the defense attorney nor the prosecutor gave a good reason for the delay. Not once did a judge ask what the victim wanted, the report said.

The next year, the Office of Victims’ Rights accused Anchorage judges of being enablers. “It is up to the judge to control the docket, to adhere to standing court orders, to follow the law and to protect victims’ rights as well as defendants’ rights,” the agency wrote. “Generally, what is seen is more of a rubber stamping of such requests.”

A common delay tactic during the pandemic known as the “off-record continuance” allowed attorneys to delay cases by email and skip court. But it persisted after courts reopened. Records show judges in 2024 allowed off-record continuances in dozens of cases, ranging from a 4-year-old felony assault to a 5-year-old sexual assault to a 6-year-old car theft.

(The Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica delivered questions to all Anchorage Superior Court judges by email and in hard copy, receiving a response from only two judges, who both said they mostly hear civil cases and rarely preside over criminal trials.)

Crime survivors pay a price for the inaction. They take time off work or pay for day care to attend hearings, advocates note. Victims fight to calm the pit in their stomachs before stepping into a courtroom, only to find the event is canceled.

The Office of Victims’ Rights in May filed paperwork on behalf of the alleged victim in a 2017 sexual abuse case, demanding the court honor the woman’s right to “timely disposition” under the Alaska Constitution. The agency asked Superior Court Judge Jack McKenna to hold a trial in June so that the woman and her family could move on with their lives. The judge delayed the case once again.

McKenna did not respond directly to an email or questions delivered to his courthouse mailbox. But Koford, the court spokesperson, said the trial in the 2017 case had to be delayed because the defense attorney was scheduled to appear in another trial. Other delays were because the prosecutor was unavailable.

The state of Alaska’s criminal justice system is operating on the fringes, barely able to protect against the deprivation of fundamental rights, barely able to respond in a professionally responsible manner.

—Fairbanks Superior Court Judge Michael MacDonald

Koford said the case illustrated Alaska’s shortage of experienced attorneys to handle major felonies, which often leaves judges with a choice between postponing a trial and forcing one with unprepared attorneys, unavailable witnesses or an incomplete examination of evidence.

“A victim’s right to a speedy trial is important,” Koford said, “but it is also important to try a case correctly the first time.”

One judge has publicly blamed backups on lawmakers and governors, whom he accused of skimping on money for public defenders.

Fairbanks Superior Court Judge Michael MacDonald was presiding over a case in 2019 involving the beating death of an Alaska Native woman in a Yukon River village. It was less than 2 years old and about to go before a jury. The defendant admitted to the killing.

Then the defendant’s state-appointed attorney requested a delay, saying she had been juggling 200 cases at once, felt burned out and couldn’t ethically move forward with a trial. (A 1998 audit for the Alaska Legislature said public defenders can “ethically” handle no more than 59 cases in a 60-hour workweek.)

MacDonald described the request as a sign of dysfunction.

“The state of Alaska’s criminal justice system is operating on the fringes,” MacDonald wrote, “barely able to protect against the deprivation of fundamental rights, barely able to respond in a professionally responsible manner” to violent crime.

He went ahead and ordered the trial postponed. The defendant eventually pleaded guilty to second-degree murder under an agreement with the prosecution. (The judge has since retired but declined to be interviewed for this story, saying he still occasionally fills in for other judges and presides over cases.)

Seven Years, No Trial

At the December sexual assault trial for Hurley in Anchorage, few people were more eager to see the case concluded than Eva Foxglove. The 53-year-old mother was the one who called 911 during the attack. Foxglove didn’t know the women, but she said she had been sexually assaulted before and knew they might not be able or willing to testify when the time arrived.

“I have to come and do this for them,” she told the jury.

The events Foxglove watched unfold in 2017 had their origins shortly after Hurley’s release from jail on a previous sexual assault charge.

Accused of sexually assaulting a woman in her home, Hurley was acquitted at trial, walked out of jail and wrote on Facebook July 13, 2017, “What’s up free at last.” Two days later, he showed up at an Anchorage soup kitchen, where he met the two women he was later charged with attacking, according to a police report.

The report said the three of them walked to the Delaney Park Strip, several city blocks of grass that skirt a gleaming oil company tower and the governor’s office building. One alleged victim told police Hurley said she was beautiful and tried to kiss her but that she turned her head and told him she was engaged to be married, the report said.

The Delaney Park Strip is a popular park that covers several city blocks in the heart of Anchorage. (Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News)

Foxglove recalled in a recent interview that she was charging her phone at an outlet in the park. It was about 4 p.m. in the thick of tourist season, 68 degrees under a clear, bright sky.

The women seemed to pass out after drinking from a half-gallon bottle, Foxglove said. She could see Hurley moving on top of one and then the other, she said. “I was like, ‘What the fuck is he doing?’” Foxglove said. Shortly after she dialed 911, a police officer jogged up to Hurley and yanked him from one of the two women, the officer, now a sergeant, told jurors in December.

Police later collected DNA matching Hurley’s from the second woman’s body and from the first woman’s clothing.

The case was assigned to Anchorage Superior Court Judge Kevin Saxby and given a trial date of Oct. 9, 2017. But that date came and went. Saxby and other judges agreed to delay the trial 50 times, most often at the request of Hurley’s lawyers. One example: Hurley’s attorney wanted to see the criminal records of the two alleged victims.

Saxby did not respond directly to emailed and hand-delivered questions. Koford, the court system spokesperson, said judges generally do not comment on their actions for “fairness and due process reasons” and “cannot and do not comment on decision-making and reasoning in a case.”

One of the alleged victims was described in enough detail in police reports for the Daily News and ProPublica to track down additional information about her life. She lived unhoused and was listed in police reports as a victim in at least two prior sexual assault cases.

The woman told officers that she had passed out and awoke to find Hurley on top of her, police records say. A charging document quoted her using the word “rape” to describe what happened. Unlike the arriving police officer, the woman could testify not only to sexual contact, but also her lack of consent.

She never got the chance.

A passerby found her body outside a public library in Anchorage on April 19, 2019, some time between Hurley’s 19th pretrial delay and his 20th. Police said there was no evidence of a crime. At some other point during the long wait for Hurley’s trial, the second woman died as well.

Prosecutors had the DNA and witnesses who could establish sexual contact. But without the victims, prosecutors needed to show that they were incapacitated and therefore inherently incapable of agreeing to sex. The job fell largely to Foxglove. On the witness stand, she wore an oversized T-shirt and loose ponytail. “I’ve never been to court before,” she told the jury. But she recounted the events from seven years ago clearly, with greater precision and consistency than she’d offered in an earlier interview with a reporter.

Eva Foxglove testifies during Fred Tom Hurley III’s sexual assault trial at the Nesbett Courthouse in Anchorage in December. (Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News)

When Butler, Hurley’s defense attorney, challenged her statement that the two women were passed out — rather than simply asleep — she never flinched. She could tell when someone wasn’t just napping but dead-to-the-world unconscious, she told the jury.

“I was a drunk. I know what sleep is. When you want to sleep you lay down and go to sleep. But when you drink so much, you pass out,” she said. “I know the difference, and I see.”

Fred Tom Hurley III, left, talks with his attorney, Rex Butler, during his trial. (Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News)

After seven years of delays, Hurley’s attorney gave no opening statement and did not call any witnesses. The trial took five days, including two days of jury selection.

The jurors returned their decision within two hours on Dec. 10: guilty on five of six felony sexual assault charges. As of Monday, the state court website indicated Hurley has not filed an appeal.

In the Defendant’s Favor

Although the Hurley case ended in a conviction, delays have worked to the defendants’ advantage in other Alaska criminal cases.

A man held at Fairbanks Correctional Center for two years without a trial had his drug charges thrown out after asserting his attorney waived his speedy trial rights violation without his consent.

And since October, at least 10 pretrial inmates at the Goose Creek Correctional Center have filed petitions in federal court challenging their state detention. They allege the state violated their speedy trial rights and in some cases appointed unreliable public defenders, saying they never signed forms saying they wanted to stop the 120-day countdown to a trial. Federal judges dismissed four of the petitions, while another six are awaiting a decision.

Haas, the official who supervises Alaska public defenders, said he wasn’t familiar with the petitions but said it’s not uncommon for defense attorneys and their clients to disagree about how long it will take to get ready for trial. “During the pandemic, of course, that got a little bit more extreme in terms of what delays were going on,” he said.

Pretrial delays can lead to a reversal for prosecutors even if they’ve won a conviction.

In a recent decision that could have far-reaching impact in Alaska, a man convicted of sexually abusing children succeeded in forcing the Superior Court to revisit his case.

Police arrested Ralph Hernandez in 2011 after an 11-year-old girl told her friend about the alleged abuse. Prosecutors said he abused, tortured or sexually assaulted children from toddlers to teenagers.

Over the seven years that it took the case to get to trial, Hernandez repeatedly voiced his demand for a speedy trial, often over the objections of his public defender. A jury convicted Hernandez of three counts of first-degree sexual abuse of a minor and one count of attempted second-degree sexual abuse of a minor.

But Alaska’s appeals court ruled in February that Hernandez had proven his pretrial delays were “presumptively prejudicial” and sent the case back to lower court for review.

In the 1978 federal ruling that set the precedent for the Hernandez case, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals made clear that states can’t get away with violating speedy trial rights simply by blaming a shortage of public defenders or prosecutors.

“A state government’s allocation of resources plays a major role in creating congested dockets, and it is unfair to require defendants to bear the entire burden that results from the government’s fiscal decisions,” the court wrote. “There must be a point at which delay due to a congested docket becomes so unacceptable that by itself it violates the right to a speedy trial.”

Although defendants may object to endless delays, they can benefit from them as time eats away at the prosecution’s case.

“We as prosecutors are obligated to present evidence in court and persuade a jury beyond a reasonable doubt about what happened,” said John Skidmore, Alaska deputy attorney general. “But when memories fade and people are less certain about what happened at some point in the past, that makes it more difficult for us to meet those burdens.”

Especially in cases of sexual violence, it’s prosecutors who are in a race against time. Often the evidence rests on a survivor’s word against an attacker’s. Losing the alleged victim’s testimony — a likelier outcome each day without a trial — can crush a prosecutor’s odds of a conviction.

It happened, a prosecutor said, in the case of Andre Corcoran.

“What She Deserved”

The charges say Corcoran met his alleged victim, an unhoused woman taking cooking classes at a soup kitchen, shortly after moving to Alaska. The woman told police Corcoran seemed safe because he volunteered to clear kitchen tables. When Corcoran told her he had no place to stay, the woman offered to show him an abandoned tent.

Inside, according to the charging document, Corcoran and the woman began kissing, but she said she felt uncomfortable and asked him to stop. The charging document says Corcoran admitted to holding her down and attempting to have sex as she screamed for help. A police report on Corcoran’s arrest describes his subsequent interview with a detective.

“I think women need to be raped,” Corcoran told the detective, according to a transcript. The defendant said his only regret was not completing the act, the report said.

She wanted to make sure that he was held accountable for what he did and that he wouldn’t be able to do this again.

—Prosecutor Betsy Bull

A grand jury indicted Corcoran on Aug. 30, 2018, on felony sexual assault charges. He waited in jail as defense attorneys had the case delayed at least 11 times. Still, when it finally reached trial in late April, Corcoran’s alleged victim was willing to testify despite suffering anxiety, a prosecutor later said.

“She wanted to make sure that he was held accountable for what he did and that he wouldn’t be able to do this again,” prosecutor Betsy Bull told the court.

Then the judge declared a mistrial. Corcoran’s attorney said he wasn’t told the alleged victim had a boyfriend at the time the assault was reported — which the attorney said gave the woman a potential motive to lie and cover up consensual sex with another man.

The prosecution was ready to give it a second try this fall, but as the new trial date approached, Corcoran’s alleged victim died of severe burns after her tent caught fire.

Bull said she was forced to offer a deal that let Corcoran plead guilty to a single count of felony assault. He would be sentenced to time served — his years in jail awaiting trial — and would not have to register as a sex offender. The prosecutor told the judge it was the best she could do.

“It’s not, from the state’s perspective, because he didn’t do it,” Bull said.

The courtroom was empty. No jury. No spectators. The judge asked the defendant if he wanted to say anything, and Corcoran stood.

“I do feel bad about who I used to be,” he said. “And I have made changes to who I want to be. I want to be a better person.”

Corcoran’s attorney, Jaffer Khimani, said Corcoran’s expression of remorse “was sincere to me.” Khimani said he was unaware of something else that, according to a report filed by a police detective, his client imparted moments after.

The report said Corcoran spoke to the court officer who escorted him to an elevator on his way to being set free.

It quoted Corcoran saying something very different from what he’d told the judge about his actions: “She got what she deserved.”

by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News

“BadAss Grandmas” Pushed for an Ethics Commission. Then the North Dakota Legislature Limited Its Power.

1 month 1 week ago

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the North Dakota Monitor. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Fed-up North Dakotans, led by a group of women calling themselves the BadAss Grandmas, voted to amend the constitution and establish a state Ethics Commission six years ago. Their goal was to investigate and stop unethical conduct by public officials.

But the watchdog agency has achieved less than the advocates had hoped, undermined in large part by the legislature the commission is charged with overseeing, an investigation by the North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica has found.

The commission has not substantiated any of the 81 complaints it has received. It has dismissed 47, most because it lacked the authority to investigate them. Thirty complaints are pending, some for more than a year. Numerous tips don’t get investigated because the agency can’t proceed without a formal complaint, and complainants have said they fear retaliation if they file one, the commission’s executive director said.

“I certainly was hoping for something more rapid,” said Carol Sawicki, one of the North Dakota residents who sponsored the ballot initiative that created the commission. Creating an ethical culture in government is “going to take time,” said Sawicki, who is also treasurer of the state’s League of Women Voters branch. “Much more time than I wanted it to.”

North Dakota was one of the last states in the country to form an ethics oversight agency. The 2018 amendment set some ethical rules for public officials and empowered the commission to both create more rules and investigate alleged violations related to corruption, elections, lobbying and transparency.

But the amendment also gave the legislature a role to play, directing it “to provide adequate funds” for the commission. The amendment did not spell out how the commission would operate, and amid that ambiguity, lawmakers took it upon themselves to pass laws governing the commission’s operations and investigations.

The legislature has consistently given the agency less money than initial estimates suggested it would need, leading to belt-tightening and at times a scramble for supplemental funding at the end of the budget cycle. The legislature also has restricted the type of complaints the body can investigate and limited the commission’s attempts to oversee lawmakers — familiar tactics to impede ethics commissions across the country, according to the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit that has studied the issue.

As a new legislative session begins this week in Bismarck, the Ethics Commission and its allies will ask lawmakers to approve the largest package of ethics-related legislation in recent history, including bills that could hasten investigations and allow the commission to investigate alleged wrongdoing without someone filing an official complaint. But already, lawmakers have pushed back.

Ethics reform advocates say a vigorous commission is crucial in a state where politics and the energy industry are intertwined. A North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica investigation last year detailed how Gov. Kelly Armstrong, who has extensive ties to the oil and gas industry, could face significant conflicts of interest as chair of two state bodies that regulate the industry. Armstrong said in an interview last year that he doesn’t believe his ties will present a conflict of interest, but rather that his experience will benefit the state.

The commission’s slow start is illustrated by its handling of two complaints filed in May against state Rep. Emily O’Brien. One alleges that she pushed for legislation on behalf of her employer; another accuses her of introducing and voting on bills in which she had a financial interest.

Rep. Emily O’Brien, R-Grand Forks, speaks during a meeting of the Legislative Management Committee in November. The Ethics Commission is investigating two complaints filed against her. (Michael Achterling/North Dakota Monitor)

O’Brien, who did not respond to multiple requests for comment, is the chief operating officer of the Bioscience Association of North Dakota, which has received more than $1 million in state grants funded by bills O’Brien supported. One of the bills, introduced by O’Brien, created a sales tax exemption for the bioscience industry her employer represents.

It took about seven months for the commission to complete its initial review and move the process forward — which it ultimately did on Dec. 23 after scrutiny about its lack of progress, including questions from the North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica sent to the commission three days earlier. As the process idled, O’Brien won a contested Republican primary by just 11 votes and was reelected in November to represent District 42 in Grand Forks.

The allegations against O’Brien were made public by a conservative activist, Dustin Gawrylow, who runs the North Dakota Watchdog Network. (State law requires that the commission keep complaints confidential, but citizens who file complaints can share their allegations publicly.)

The agency has made progress in some areas: It has put in place multiple ethics rules regulating gifting and conflicts of interest, expanded its public education efforts, and tried to improve transparency by requiring lobbyists to provide notice of any events they hold for lawmakers.

But Rebecca Binstock, the Ethics Commission’s executive director, has acknowledged that the investigations can get “drawn out.” “With limited staff and resources, as well as an unclear process to compel testimony and production of documents, careful review of complaints takes time,” Binstock wrote in response to questions.

That’s why the agency is asking the legislature to agree to changes and more staff.

“We’ve talked about it with legislative leadership about how we can improve this process,” said Binstock. “The hope is we can change that process to make it better, make it more efficient.”

Legislature “Tried to Subvert” the Amendment

It took a group of retired women to force the state legislature to enact ethics reform in North Dakota.

The bipartisan group, which became known as the BadAss Grandmas, began meeting for coffee in Bismarck in 2016. The leaders included Ellen Chaffee, a retired university president and onetime Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor, and Dina Butcher, a Republican who served as deputy agriculture commissioner in the 1980s.

The duo didn’t like what they saw in their home state: landowners being railroaded by officials perceived to be in league with the oil industry; legislators taking meals, trips and gifts from lobbyists; and more. They put together a “Bad Acts List” and decided to take action.

“It seemed like there was just no conscience left,” Butcher said. “I just thought it was getting to be so pervasive and obvious in some of the quid pro quo.”

State legislators have resisted ethics oversight for decades. When an anti-corruption ballot measure passed in 1954, legislators fought it all the way up to the state Supreme Court, which struck it down 14 years later. Legislators also voted against bills that would have created an ethics commission or equivalent entity in 2011, 2013 and 2015.

“Some legislators would say we don’t need it because we don’t make any mistakes or we don’t do bad things. Well, my experience has been that that is not the case,” said Sen. Tim Mathern, D-Fargo, a lawmaker who first proposed an ethics commission decades ago. “There are things that happen that should not be happening.”

The BadAss Grandmas realized that the people could do what the legislature wouldn’t. North Dakota is one of 18 states that allow citizens to propose and vote on amendments to the state constitution. So the group mounted a campaign to add Article XIV, establishing an ethics commission to “support open, ethical, and accountable government.” One of their main goals was to limit the oil and gas industry’s power in the state. They sent text messages, posted on social media, and visited small towns to urge voters to “stand against corruption” and get special-interest money out of politics.

From left: Sarah Vogel, Kathy Tweeten, Ellen Chaffee and Dina Butcher founded the BadAss Grandmas for Democracy. (Lea Black, courtesy of the BadAss Grandmas for Democracy)

A coalition of business groups and some legislators opposed the measure on free speech and other grounds, but it nonetheless passed in November 2018 with 53% of the vote.

When the legislature met two months later, it allocated a little more than half the funding proposed in a bill by Mathern, the only legislator who sponsored the ballot measure. Mathern’s suggested budget was less than that of the agency that oversees the state judiciary, which he cited in a committee hearing as a starting point for the appropriation. The legislation approved by lawmakers also restricted the way the Ethics Commission could function; because commission members had not yet been appointed, they had no input on these decisions.

In that bill, lawmakers prohibited the commission from investigating anonymous complaints, despite the constitutional requirement for a confidential hotline for whistleblowers. They set rules that dictated the commission’s investigative process, prohibiting it from launching a full investigation until it attempts to mediate a complaint. So far only two cases have been resolved during this stage of the process; in the O’Brien case, the commission offered mediation last month, but Gawrylow rejected it, saying he wanted to get “to the bottom of the issue on behalf of the public and taxpayers” and establish clearer guidelines for all lawmakers.

“There were places where they did not follow the intent of the constitution, nor even try to,” said Kathleen Tweeten, a member of the BadAss Grandmas, about those 2019 legislative moves. “They actually tried to subvert it.”

Rich Wardner, the Senate majority leader at the time and co-sponsor of the bill that set parameters for the commission, said lawmakers were concerned the commission would be weaponized and their goal was to ensure a “fair” process.

To that end, the legislature also required the body to keep complaints confidential — and not subject to disclosure through public records requests — unless they are substantiated, which has not yet happened. Confidentiality is common, though not universal, for ethics commissions. Montana has a public docket of pending complaints against public officials on its website. Nevada maintains an online database of determination letters it issues at the end of every investigation.

Secrecy is also a departure from existing North Dakota law for internal investigations by public entities. In most cases, those records are publicly available once the investigation is completed or 75 days from the date of the complaint, whichever is sooner, regardless of whether the alleged misconduct is substantiated.

“I would like to see more transparency in the cases they’re working on,” said Cathy Bliss, a member of the League of Women Voters who regularly attends Ethics Commission meetings. “The citizens of the state need to know what their representatives are doing.”

Some legislators would say we don’t need it because we don’t make any mistakes or we don’t do bad things. Well, my experience has been that that is not the case.

—Sen. Tim Mathern, D-Fargo

In addition to rules around the functioning of the body, lawmakers set up a procedure to remove commission board members, who are appointed by a bipartisan consensus of the governor and the Senate majority and minority leaders. All three elected officials are subject to oversight by the commission, and the rules put in place allow a vote by two of them to remove a board member. Chaffee, one of the BadAss Grandmas, called that provision “horrifying.”

The legislature continued to limit the commission’s powers in subsequent years. In 2021, lawmakers declined to give the Ethics Commission authority to issue subpoenas, which it had requested. In 2023, lawmakers rejected a request from the commission that would have allowed it to investigate executive branch employees. Neither provision was included in the amendment creating the commission, and proposals to add both were defeated in legislative committees.

During those years, the commission operated with a small staff, and at one point the legislature approved just one employee; there are now three. For its part, the commission has asked for relatively small budgets in order to appear fiscally responsible, according to Binstock and legislative testimony by her predecessor, and the legislature has consistently given it less than requested.

The legislature’s actions curtailing the Ethics Commission have led Chaffee to rethink how her group wrote the initial ballot initiative. She said that at the time they believed they had to back away from provisions that might anger legislators.

“In retrospect,” she said, “I wish we had been bolder.”

“I Wish We Could Have Had the Opinion”

In 2024, at least 38 complaints were filed with the commission — more than any prior year, records show. Because state law requires that the commission keep complaints confidential, there is very little insight into how the agency handles its investigations.

But new reporting by the North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica reveals how constraints have dulled the commission’s ability to take action on some complaints it has received.

One significant issue is that the commission lacks the authority to investigate certain government officials, such as employees of the executive branch. Because of that, the commission was forced to dismiss a 2023 complaint by a local ambulance board against an employee of the state auditor’s office.

In that case, voters in the Killdeer area, in western North Dakota, were preparing to vote on a proposed property tax increase that would have benefited the ambulance service. Just days before the vote, the complaint alleged, the employee in the auditor’s office violated ethics laws by sharing confidential information that portrayed the ambulance service negatively.

State Auditor Josh Gallion said in an interview that he doesn’t think the information was confidential. But the ambulance board disagreed. “It was, we felt, very inappropriate” to share the information, said Tracey Dolezal, president of the ambulance board.

The information became public just days before the vote on the referendum, which failed. The Ethics Commission said it could not comment because it is prohibited from acknowledging or discussing specific complaints.

Another factor holding back the commission’s work is that it is not allowed to investigate any allegations of criminal conduct; when a potential criminal violation comes up, it must stop its work on all parts of the complaint and instead refer it to law enforcement. Of the 11 complaints the agency referred to prosecutors, three stem from a single situation related to potential campaign misconduct in the June primary; in that case, a county prosecutor declined to press charges and returned the matter to the commission. But the commission was forced to dismiss the case: While it has authorized drafting rules around civil penalties for campaign misconduct, it has not enacted any.

It’s all in the lap of the Ethics Commission and the people that run it and that have had five years to figure out their way through things.

—Rep. Mike Nathe, R-Bismarck

Some and possibly all of the other eight complaints referred for criminal review are related to Rep. Jason Dockter, who was then convicted of a misdemeanor last year for voting on bills in which he had a financial interest. (The content of those complaints is confidential. However, Tyler Axness, a radio commentator on KFGO and former Democratic state lawmaker, filed one of the complaints and said he expected that more of them relate to Dockter because he had encouraged listeners to do the same.)

Dockter, a Bismarck Republican, is still in office. More than six months after Dockter’s conviction, and more than two years after the complaints were filed, the commission has not completed its own investigation, which could result in a financial penalty. Dockter testified at trial that he believed he had not broken any rules or laws.

Some have asserted that any shortcomings are the fault of the commission itself, which Rep. Mike Nathe, R-Bismarck, accused of “wandering kind of aimlessly through this process.”

“It’s all in the lap of the Ethics Commission and the people that run it and that have had five years to figure out their way through things,” Nathe said in an interview. “Believe me, that’s not the legislature’s fault.”

In one case that dragged on, for example, a public official asked the commission to weigh in on a potential conflict of interest.

In that case, the state’s pension board was suing the legislature over a radical overhaul of the state employee pension. But some of the board members of the Public Employees Retirement System are lawmakers appointed by legislative leaders. Mona Tedford Rindy, who was then the chair of the Public Employees Retirement System, had asked the commission whether those legislators on the pension board had a conflict of interest and should recuse themselves from voting on whether to continue the lawsuit.

Commission staff did draft an advisory opinion, concluding that the legislators had a disqualifying conflict of interest in that situation. But before they could issue the opinion, the commission chair at the time, Paul Richard, disagreed with the attorneys’ analysis and directed them to research the matter further. The commission ultimately concluded it should not issue guidance when the requestor was asking about someone else’s actions rather than their own.

“I wish we could have had the opinion of the Ethics Commission on our situation,” Tedford Rindy said in an interview. “I was amazed that people didn’t see this as a conflict.”

“Uphill Battle” Ahead

As the new legislative session starts this week, the Ethics Commission will again ask lawmakers to pass reforms intended to reduce the backlog of cases and increase the agency’s authority.

Rebecca Binstock, left, executive director of the North Dakota Ethics Commission, speaks during a meeting of the legislature's Judiciary Committee in September. (Michael Achterling/North Dakota Monitor)

One bill, being developed in consultation with the secretary of state, would enact new financial disclosure requirements for elected and appointed government officials, including making those disclosures annually instead of only when candidates are running for office. North Dakota is one of five states that do not already require annual disclosures.

Other measures would guarantee whistleblower protections for people who file complaints with the Ethics Commission and change how the agency investigates alleged violations of ethics rules and laws. The commission is asking for authority to request subpoenas by the district court, to initiate an investigation without a formal complaint and to have more flexibility in how it conducts investigations.

Binstock, who has received bipartisan praise since she was hired shortly before the 2023 legislative session, hopes that the proposed changes will encourage more people to come forward with concerns.

The commission also plans to ask for a two-year budget of $1.8 million, an increase from $1.13 million. The funds would be used in part to hire an additional employee to focus on education and outreach, and to purchase a case management system. The commission’s current budget is one of the smallest for any ethics commission in comparably sized states.

“We understand this is a significant request,” Dave Anderson, chair of the Ethics Commission, said of the request for a fourth employee.

Legislators contacted for this article said they couldn’t commit to a position on the budget or most proposed reforms until they see draft bills. But the Senate’s vote last month against conflict-of-interest rules supported by the Ethics Commission signaled potential opposition to reform.

One legislator, Rep. Jim Kasper, R-Fargo, summed up his position bluntly: “They should stay in their lane and stay out of trying to tell the legislature how to do their business.”

by Jacob Orledge, North Dakota Monitor

Has Your Car Been Towed in Connecticut? Share Your Story and Help Us Investigate.

1 month 1 week ago

Leer en español.

The Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica, a national newsroom, need your help to investigate towing practices in Connecticut. We’d like to hear from you if your car was towed. Your response will help us understand how towing companies operate and if they are following policies so we can do journalism that helps and informs the public.

We’re especially interested in hearing from people who weren’t able to get their cars back. As we continue reporting, it’s possible we can find out more about what happened in your case. Filling out our form will help us do that, and we can share what we find.

We take your privacy seriously. We are gathering these responses for the purposes of our reporting and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of them. You can call or text us at 203-626-4705‬.

Asia Fields of ProPublica contributed reporting.

by Ginny Monk, Dave Altimari and Shahrzad Rasekh, The Connecticut Mirror

Gone in 15 Days: How the Connecticut DMV Allows Tow Companies to Sell People’s Cars

1 month 1 week ago

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Connecticut Mirror. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Leer en español.

Melissa Anderson was trying to wrestle her squirmy 2-year-old daughter into a winter coat in December 2021 when she heard the neighbors yelling outside, “She’s coming right now!”

Anderson immediately knew what was happening. The tow truck company that regularly roamed her Hamden, Connecticut, apartment complex was back, and it had zeroed in on her recently purchased 1998 Dodge Neon.

She rushed downstairs only to see a MyHoopty.com tow truck driving away with her car.

Her temporary parking pass from the apartment complex had expired. She’d tried to get an extension because her Department of Motor Vehicles appointment to register the car was two days away. But she said the management wouldn’t give her one.

“I only came upstairs to put the baby’s jacket on,” Anderson said. “It was within like five minutes, my car was gone.”

She never saw her car again.

Exactly 15 days later, as Anderson realized she didn’t have the money to pay the mounting bill, MyHoopty took advantage of a little-known state law available to towing companies: It submitted a form to the Connecticut DMV to sell Anderson’s car.

On the form, MyHoopty typed that the Dodge was worth $600, half of what Anderson had paid for it less than three months earlier. And, DMV records show, the agency quickly approved MyHoopty’s application to sell the car.

What happened to Anderson exemplifies how Connecticut’s laws have come to favor tow companies at the expense of low-income residents. Connecticut’s window allowing towers to sell people’s cars is one of the shortest in the country — just 15 days if they deem the value to be $1,500 or less. Only two states — Iowa and North Carolina — have shorter time spans. Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island require at least 60 days, giving owners more time to reclaim their vehicles.

Melissa Anderson’s Dodge Neon was towed from her apartment complex in December 2021. She never saw her car again. (Shahrzad Rasekh/CT Mirror)

The Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica reviewed thousands of the forms that towers submit requesting the DMV’s permission to sell people’s cars. Many cases didn’t start with parking tickets, accidents or police involvement. Instead, people were towed for breaking parking rules at their apartment complexes.

Towing and storage charges can quickly add up to several hundred dollars. And once cars are hauled away, some tow companies make it harder for people to get their cars back. Some only take cash. Others refuse to release cars unless they’re registered in the person’s name — even if that person had recently bought the vehicle and wasn’t required to register it yet.

In some cases, the 15-day window can be shorter than the time it takes to get a registration appointment at the DMV. And it’s far shorter than it takes for a complaint to be heard challenging the legitimacy of a tow.

When cars are sold, the owners are again at a disadvantage. Under Connecticut law, tow companies are required to hold on to the proceeds for one year so owners can claim the money. After that, tow companies are supposed to subtract their storage fees and turn over any remaining funds to the state. But the DMV has never established a process for towers to submit the money, and the state treasurer’s office said it has no record of receiving any money from the sale of a towed car.

How to Lose a Car in 15 Days

Connecticut has a statute that allows towing companies to sell people’s cars after 15 days if the tower deems the car’s value to be $1,500 or less. If a towed vehicle isn’t claimed in 48 hours, the tower must notify the owner via certified mail that they intend to sell it. Towers can charge up to $125, plus $5.65 per mile. With daily storage fees, charges can quickly add up to hundreds of dollars. If the owner doesn’t pay, the tower can notify the DMV of intent to sell. Many tow companies only take cash and aren’t open on weekends, which can make it hard to get vehicles back. Some towers won’t release cars without proof of registration, even if the owner shows the title and bill of sale. The registration requirement can create problems for people who recently bought a car and haven’t had to register it yet; it can take weeks to get a DMV appointment. So someone might be following DMV rules but still run into problems. If the car is worth $1,500 or less, the towing company can sell or junk it after 15 days. If it’s worth more, towers must wait 45 days and sell it at a public auction. Tow companies must keep the proceeds for one year so the car owner can claim the money. Towers say there are rarely proceeds after deducting towing and storage fees. But we have found some towers devaluing cars only to sell them for more Any funds left from the sale are supposed to be turned over to the state. But the DMV has never set up a process for towers. And the state treasurer said no funds have ever been turned over to the unclaimed property account. We’re interested in any barriers you faced to getting your car back and whether the tow company followed the required steps. (Anuj Shrestha, special to ProPublica)

We’re investigating towing practices in Connecticut. If you’ve been affected, you can share your experience here.

That’s the system Anderson faced as she fought with MyHoopty and sought the DMV’s help.

“We live paycheck to paycheck and Christmas was coming, and we just couldn’t afford to try and get the car back,” Anderson said.

Michael Festa, the owner of MyHoopty, said he is simply following the law, which allows property owners to remove cars that break rules. In an emailed response to written questions, Festa said he’s never turned over money to the state because the proceeds have never satisfied the towing and storage bill.

The majority of the cars are “in severe mechanical and structural disrepair,” he said. “Any vehicle of any value is either redeemed by its registered owner or lending institution.”

Exactly how many Connecticut residents this system affects has been hard to pin down because the DMV has been slow to provide information. The CT Mirror requested the DMV forms 2 1/2 years ago under the state Freedom of Information Act. Agency officials initially said the request would cost $47,000 but lowered the cost after the CT Mirror’s attorney intervened. Yet the DMV still hasn’t produced all the forms.

The DMV is supposed to review each form and record the car’s book value in the top right corner, which ensures tow companies don’t undervalue cars and sell them faster. If a car is worth more than $1,500, towers have to wait 45 days. The book values regularly exceed the towers’ estimates.

Still, more than half of the roughly 4,200 forms the CT Mirror and ProPublica have received so far show the tow company requested to sell the vehicle citing the 15-day rule. In nearly 700 of those cases, the company asked to sell a car within three weeks.

DMV Commissioner Tony Guerrera said in a written statement that he believes the 15-day window “strikes the right balance for consumers and towers,” protecting drivers’ rights while ensuring vehicles don’t “remain on a tow company’s property for months, amassing large storage charges.”

The DMV said it rigorously reviews the towers’ forms and requests additional documentation from them when their estimate differs greatly from the book value. Officials also said that the initial $47,000 records fee was “an error” and that the request has taken time because they have to manually redact thousands of documents.

State Rep. Roland Lemar, D-New Haven, who co-chairs the legislature’s Transportation Committee, said lawmakers need to look at the 15-day threshold and other towing practices in the upcoming legislative session.

“There are obvious abuses happening to residents across Connecticut, and those impacted are folks with lower economic means who can’t possibly be expected to access that amount of cash in such a quick time frame,” said Lemar, who will chair the General Law Committee, which oversees consumer protection, next session. “There needs to be reform within the DMV, but I think there’s also clear and obvious consumer protection issues.”

“Somebody Is Going to Get Hurt”

Connecticut’s towing law initially passed in 1921 with good intentions: As more people owned cars, more were abandoned, and municipalities needed a way to get them off the streets.

As car ownership grew with the development of highways and suburbs, state lawmakers in the 1960s increased penalties for abandoning vehicles and made it easier for towing companies to sell them.

Before those adjustments, towers had to store a vehicle for 90 days. If no one claimed it, they were required to notify the owner of the intended sale via registered mail and advertise it three times in the newspaper. In 1963, the legislature decided to allow sales within 30 days if the vehicle was worth $35 or less, about $360 today.

Lawmakers cut that time in half to 15 days in 1987 for vehicles worth less than $500 at the time. Local police officials said in public hearings that there were so many junk cars that even local scrapyards didn’t want them and that the shorter time frame would help towns dispose of abandoned vehicles more quickly.

How Connecticut’s Towing Laws Compare to Nearby States

The state has the shortest time before sale among northeastern states.

In Connecticut, New Hampshire and New York, the time varies based on the age or value of the vehicle. Maryland has a different time period for Baltimore. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

The measure did face some pushback, though. State Sen. Thomas Upson, R-Waterbury, questioned whether the new law would violate due process because it did not offer a sufficient way for drivers to challenge a tow. Still, the measure passed easily.

Lawmakers continued to crack down on abandoned cars through the 1990s. They expanded the ability of tow companies to remove vehicles from private lots, where residents and owners complained people were parking without permission, and lowered to 45 days the time after which more expensive vehicles could be sold.

But by the late 1990s, lawmakers started to recognize the effects that towing policies had on people with low incomes.

“I’ve seen a car towed overnight and people not able to pay one and two days of charges, and every day they try to hustle the money to put it together, they can’t do it because the choice now is whether I pay rent, pay the food, pay the doctor or redeem my car,” Rep. Richard Tulisano, D-Rocky Hill, said during a 1998 debate in the House. “Somebody is going to get hurt.”

Yet instead of heeding Tulisano’s warning, the next year, following concerns about parking from property owners, lawmakers expanded the number of cars that could be sold within 15 days by raising the threshold from $500 to $1,500.

Timothy Vibert, president of the Towing & Recovery Professionals of Connecticut, defended the industry, noting that in many cases, vehicles are towed because owners have been skirting the law by driving without registration and insurance. So they don’t try to get their towed cars back because they can’t afford the towing fees or the cost of owning a car.

“I’m not stealing cars,” he said. “I am removing cars that are either illegally parked, whether they be law or condominium rules.”

Most of the complaints, he said, relate to what’s known in the industry as “trespass towing,” when companies tow from private lots rather than in response to police stops and accidents. Some companies have contracts with apartment and public housing complexes to search their lots for cars that don’t belong to residents or violate other rules like not being backed into their parking spaces.

One large trespass tow company in Connecticut that has faced scrutiny is MyHoopty, which is based in Watertown, a small town northwest of New Haven. Since 2022, Watertown police have responded to 87 complaints from people who had gone to MyHoopty. Most said they either couldn’t get their cars back or were being overcharged.

In an incident last January, the police threatened to charge Festa with larceny when he wouldn't release a car to its owner. Body-camera footage shows that the woman presented Festa with the title and bill of sale and asked him to let her have it towed out of his lot. Festa told the police he couldn’t release her car until she showed proof it was registered in her name.

The department did not follow through with its threat. Festa said MyHoopty “goes above and beyond” to help customers get their cars back. “We understand that having a vehicle towed without consent can leave a person feeling violated, and some may even perceive it as theft,” he wrote in an email. The company provides several resources, he said, “ensuring a smooth and efficient process for vehicle recovery.”

Since 2022, police have responded to 87 complaints from people who had gone to towing company MyHoopty.com in Watertown, Connecticut. Most said they either couldn’t get their cars back or were being overcharged. (Shahrzad Rasekh/CT Mirror)

Festa, who wears his own body camera as an “extra measure of security,” has sued the police twice in state court in the past few years after the complaints prompted the department to take the rare action of removing MyHoopty from a list of tow companies they call after accidents and police stops. One lawsuit was dismissed. The other accuses Watertown officers of launching a “campaign of persecution” against Festa.

Watertown police Chief Joshua Bernegger declined to comment on MyHoopty, citing the pending litigation, and the town has asked the judge to dismiss the suit. But Bernegger said, generally, while “many standup towing companies” perform “crucial public services” in a dangerous environment, “there are, however, some tow companies that are operating on the fringe of a very ambiguous law.”

Festa has also faced criticism at the state level. In late 2022, Festa led an effort with other towers and the towing association to get the DMV to increase towing rates, arguing at a DMV hearing that expenses on everything from truck insurance to workers’ compensation had gone up. The DMV approved a modest increase, but the hearing also offered an opportunity for several people, including Anderson, to complain about MyHoopty refusing to give their cars back.

In response to those concerns, Lemar proposed a bill to require tow companies to give drivers 24 hours’ notice before a tow and to take multiple payment methods, including credit cards. The bill passed the committee, but facing fierce opposition from towers and property managers, it wasn’t called on the House floor. The 15-day rule was not part of that legislation.

Complaints to the DMV Go Nowhere

In some cases, Connecticut’s laws and the DMV’s processes make it harder for people to get their cars back once they’re towed. And for low-income people, the consequences of having their car sold can extend far beyond the cost of the car.

After her Dodge Neon was towed, Anderson pleaded with MyHoopty to release her car. She told them she had the bill of sale, title and proof of insurance and was going to the DMV in two days. But Anderson said Festa told her it wasn’t his problem; he wouldn’t release the car until it was registered.

This is where low-income people can get trapped. The law says that tow companies shall release vehicles to their owners once the fees have been paid and they present proof of registration. But there’s another law that seems to conflict with that: The DMV allows up to three months for drivers to register vehicles purchased out of state. And for private sales in Connecticut, the DMV says there is no deadline. So people can still run into problems even if they follow DMV rules.

Because Anderson bought her car in a private sale, she didn’t receive the temporary license plates usually provided by car dealers. She instead had to make an appointment at the DMV, which at the time took weeks to get, or go to an authorized dealer, which costs extra.

Plus, it was difficult for Anderson to get to MyHoopty’s lot, which was a 40-minute drive from her apartment. She said, one day, a person who answered the phone told her, “You’re wasting your time coming down here anyway, with all the fees and everything, you ain’t getting your car back, sweetheart.”

Anderson said her husband lost his job shortly after the car was towed because he couldn’t always get rides and it took more than an hour on multiple buses to get from Hamden to the restaurant he worked at in Milford.

To make matters worse, Anderson said, in the car were all of her husband’s chef tools, including knives he had been given in culinary school, which he estimates were worth more than $1,000.

After learning her rights from a tenants union, Anderson filed a complaint with the DMV in early 2023. In a three-page letter, she wrote, “It may be just a car to some, but for my family it was sanity, peace of mind stolen from us by MyHoopty.”

DMV records show MyHoopty sold her car to a Waterbury auto salvage facility for $800 within two months of towing it from her apartment complex. Anderson said her husband’s chef tools were never returned.

Festa declined to comment about specific cases, including Anderson’s. But he said MyHoopty employees “take the handling and return of personal property very seriously” by documenting every step of the towing process and “allowing customers to retrieve all personal belongings from their vehicles.”

The CT Mirror and ProPublica interviewed dozens of people across the state who had their cars sold after being towed. Like Anderson, they said their complaints to the DMV went nowhere.

This does not seem to be unusual. From 2021-23, the DMV conducted 17 investigations into complaints from drivers accusing MyHoopty of exorbitant bills and questionable reasons for towing their cars, according to records obtained by CT Mirror and ProPublica.

But most of the cases ended with no action being taken, records show. The law allows tow companies to sell people’s cars and doesn’t give owners a quick process to challenge a tow. The DMV has the power to issue fines of up to $1,000 or suspend or revoke companies’ licenses, and in a few cases, the department issued an infraction for overcharging on a towing bill — the legal equivalent of a speeding ticket.

Guerrera said the agency wants to make sure that everybody is held to the same standard. “If we receive complaints, we investigate and we adhere to the statutes that allow us to do things in regards to penalties or whatever it may be,” he said. “If it’s a formal complaint, we look into it, and if we find there’s something wrong, then we hold them to the letter of the law.”

Guerrera and other DMV officials said that tow companies could be charged with filing a false statement for lying on the forms, although they acknowledged they don’t remember a case when that happened.

Rachel Massaro filed a complaint against MyHoopty after the company towed her 2004 Honda Civic from her townhouse at Seramonte Estates in Hamden in 2021. But the DMV didn’t find any violations.

Massaro had just bought the car for $3,000 two days earlier. She brought it home that weekend and said she was told by the property manager that she couldn’t get a temporary pass until Monday.

“She told me, if I park, I had to park where the visitors” parked, Massaro said. “I did that and I was still towed.”

Massaro said MyHoopty told her it would cost more than $700 to get her car back. State regulations permit companies to charge $125, plus $5.65 per mile, for a tow, and daily storage fees range from $23 to $37.

“I told them I just bought the car, and I can’t spend another — he wanted $740,” Massaro said, “and he was like, ‘I don’t know what to tell you, honey.’”

Rachel Massaro filed a complaint with the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles after the car she bought two days earlier was towed. Massaro paid $3,000, but the towing company told the DMV it was worth only $600. (Shahrzad Rasekh/CT Mirror)

MyHoopty submitted the form, seeking permission to sell the car, to the DMV 17 days after towing Massaro’s vehicle. On the form the company listed the car’s value as only $600.

The reason: There was no key to see how well the vehicle ran. It was the same explanation MyHoopty gave the DMV for the price of Anderson’s car.

Massaro said the car was worth a lot more and that MyHoopty knew she had the key. “I told them to let me go in and at least get my stuff out of there,” she said. “He told me that until I paid that fee, I couldn’t.”

Massaro never got back the shoes and clothes she had just bought at TJ Maxx. And the Honda was also sold to a salvage dealer in Waterbury for $800, according to DMV records.

Massaro cried when she saw a copy of the DMV form showing her car had been junked.

“It’s just an abuse of power that they hold over people they know can’t afford to pay the fees,” Massaro said.

Under the statute, when a towing company removes a vehicle from private property, it must inform the local police within two hours. The law is designed to ensure that police don’t mistake stolen cars for ones that were towed.

Hamden is a town of 60,000 people. But call logs from the police department show that from January 2022 to June 2024, more than half of the agency’s 1,082 tows were from Seramonte Estates, where MyHoopty had a contract to tow vehicles.

The law requires tow companies to send a certified letter to the car’s registered owner informing them it’s going to be sold. Several people, however, said they were never notified.

Abdul-Basit Ajia was studying business and playing basketball at Post University in Waterbury in April 2023 when someone broke into his Toyota Avalon in his apartment complex parking garage, shattering the window and damaging the steering wheel and gear shift. He reported the break-in to police and left it parked until he could afford to make the repairs necessary to take it home to Rhode Island.

Ajia said he didn’t know it had been sold until a reporter called him to ask what had happened. He said he never got any notification from the state or the towing company, Durable Radiator & Autobody, about the request to sell the car.

DMV records list Ajia’s mother’s address in Rhode Island, but he said no notice arrived there either.

Durable Radiator declined to comment and referred questions to the Waterbury towing association, which didn’t return calls and emails.

Ajia said the lack of transportation as he finished college made it more financially difficult to get started. He still hasn’t been able to purchase another car and rents one from his uncle.

“You need a car for almost anything,” he said. “So I was really out there just struggling, even to find a job.”

Has Your Car Been Towed in Connecticut? Share Your Story and Help Us Investigate.

Shahrzad Rasekh, José Luis Martínez and Andrew Brown of The Connecticut Mirror and Asia Fields and Ryanne Mena of ProPublica contributed reporting.

by Dave Altimari and Ginny Monk, The Connecticut Mirror, and Haru Coryne, ProPublica

The Militia and the Mole

1 month 1 week ago

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

John Williams kept a backpack filled with everything he’d need to go on the run: three pairs of socks; a few hundred dollars cash; makeshift disguises and lock-picking gear; medical supplies, vitamins and high-calorie energy gels; and thumb drives that each held more than 100 gigabytes of encrypted documents, which he would quickly distribute if he were about to be arrested or killed.

On April 1, 2023, Williams retrieved the bag from his closet and rushed to his car. He had no time to clean the dishes that had accumulated in his apartment. He did not know if armed men were out looking for him. He did not know if he would ever feel safe to return. He parked his car for the night in the foothills overlooking Salt Lake City and curled up his 6-foot-4-inch frame in the back seat of the 20-year-old Honda. This was his new home.

He turned on a recording app to add an entry to his diary. His voice had the high-pitched rasp of a lifelong smoker: “Where to fucking start,” he sighed, taking a deep breath. After more than two years undercover, he’d been growing rash and impulsive. He had feared someone was in danger and tried to warn him, but it backfired. Williams was sure at least one person knew he was a double agent now, he said into his phone. “It’s only a matter of time before it gets back to the rest.”

In the daylight, Williams dropped an envelope with no return address in a U.S. Postal Service mailbox. He’d loaded it with a flash drive and a gold Oath Keepers medallion.

It was addressed to me.

The documents laid out a remarkable odyssey. Posing as an ideological compatriot, Williams had penetrated the top ranks of two of the most prominent right-wing militias in the country. He’d slept in the home of the man who claims to be the new head of the Oath Keepers, rifling through his files in the middle of the night. He’d devised elaborate ruses to gather evidence of militias’ ties to high-ranking law enforcement officials. He’d uncovered secret operations like the surveillance of a young journalist, then improvised ways to sabotage the militants’ schemes. In one group, his ploys were so successful that he became the militia’s top commander in the state of Utah.

Now he was a fugitive. He drove south toward a desert four hours from the city, where he could disappear.

1. Prelude

I’d first heard from Williams five months earlier, when he sent me an intriguing but mysterious anonymous email. “I have been attempting to contact national media and civil rights groups for over a year and been ignored,” it read. “I’m tired of yelling into the void.” He sent it to an array of reporters. I was the only one to respond. I’ve burned a lot of time sating my curiosity about emails like that. I expected my interest to die after a quick call. Instead, I came to occupy a dizzying position as the only person to know the secret Williams had been harboring for almost two years.

We spoke a handful of times over encrypted calls before he fled. He’d been galvanized by the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol, Williams told me, when militias like the Oath Keepers conspired to violently overturn the 2020 presidential election. He believed democracy was under siege from groups the FBI has said pose a major domestic terrorism threat. So he infiltrated the militia movement on spec, as a freelance vigilante. He did not tell the police or the FBI. A loner, he did not tell his family or friends.

Williams seemed consumed with how to ensure this wasn’t all a self-destructive, highly dangerous waste of time. He distrusted law enforcement and didn’t want to be an informant, he said. He told me he hoped to damage the movement by someday going public with what he’d learned.

The Capitol riot had been nagging at me too. I’d reported extensively on Jan. 6. I’d sat with families who blamed militias for snatching their loved ones away from them, pulling them into a life of secret meetings and violent plots — or into a jail cell. By the time Williams contacted me, though, the most infamous groups appeared to have largely gone dark. Were militias more enduring, more potent, than it seemed?

Some of what he told me seemed significant. Still, before the package arrived, it could feel like I was corresponding with a shadow. I knew Williams treated deception as an art form. “When you spin a lie,” he once told me, “you have to have things they can verify so they won’t think to ask questions.” While his stories generally seemed precise and sober — always reassuring for a journalist — I needed to proceed with extreme skepticism.

So I pored over his files, tens of thousands of them. They included dozens of hours of conversations he secretly recorded and years of private militia chat logs and videos. I was able to authenticate those through other sources, in and out of the movement. I also talked to dozens of people, from Williams’ friends to other members of his militias. I dug into his tumultuous past and discovered records online he hadn’t pointed me to that supported his account.

The files give a unique window, at once expansive and intimate, into one of the most consequential and volatile social movements of our time. Williams penetrated a new generation of paramilitary leaders, which included doctors, career cops and government attorneys. Sometimes they were frightening, sometimes bumbling, always heavily armed. It was a world where a man would propose assassinating politicians, only to spark a debate about logistics.

Federal prosecutors have convicted more than 1,000 people for their role in Jan. 6. Key militia captains were sent to prison for a decade or more. But that did not quash the allure that militias hold for a broad swath of Americans.

Now President-elect Donald Trump has promised to pardon Jan. 6 rioters when he returns to the White House. Experts warn that such a move could trigger a renaissance for militant extremists, sending them an unprecedented message of protection and support — and making it all the more urgent to understand them.

(Unless otherwise noted, none of the militia members mentioned in this story responded to requests for comment.)

Williams is part of a larger cold war, radical vs. radical, that’s stayed mostly in the shadows. A left-wing activist told me he personally knows about 30 people who’ve gone undercover in militias or white supremacist groups. They did not coordinate with law enforcement, instead taking the surveillance of one of the most intractable features of American politics into their own hands.

Skeptical of authorities, militias have sought to reshape the country through armed action. Williams sought to do it through betrayals and lies, which sat with him uneasily. “I couldn’t have been as successful at this if I wasn’t one of them in some respects,” he once told me. “I couldn’t have done it so long unless they recognized something in me.”

2. The Struggle

If there is one moment that set Williams on his path into the militia underground, it came roughly a decade before Jan. 6, when he was sent to a medium-security prison. He was in his early 30s, drawn to danger and filled with an inner turbulence.

Williams grew up in what he described to me, to friends and in court records as a dysfunctional and unhappy home. He was a gay child in rural America. His father viewed homosexuality as a mortal sin, he said. Williams spent much of his childhood outdoors, bird-watching, camping and trying to spend as little time as possible at home. (John Williams is now his legal name, one he recently acquired.)

Once he was old enough to move out, Williams continued to go off the grid for weeks at a time. Living in a cave interested him; the jobs he’d found at grocery stores and sandwich shops did not. He told me his young adulthood was “a blank space in my life,” a stretch of “petty crime” and falling-outs with old friends. He pled guilty to a series of misdemeanors: trespassing, criminal mischief, assault.

What landed Williams in prison was how he responded to one of those arrests. He sent disturbing, anonymous emails to investigators on the case, threatening their families. Police traced the messages back to him and put him away for three years.

Williams found time to read widely in prison — natural history books, Bertrand Russell, Cormac McCarthy. And it served as a finishing school for a skill that would be crucial in his undercover years. Surviving prison meant learning to maneuver around gang leaders and corrections officers. He learned how to steer conversations to his own benefit without the other person noticing.

When he got out, he had a clear ambition: to become a wilderness survival instructor. He used Facebook to advertise guided hikes in Utah’s Uinta Mountains. An old photo captures Williams looking like a lanky camp counselor as he shows students an edible plant. He sports a thick ponytail and cargo pants, painted toenails poking out from his hiking sandals.

Many people in Utah had turned to wilderness survival after a personal crisis, forming a community of misfits who thrived in environments harsh and remote. Even among them, Williams earned a reputation for putting himself in extreme situations. “Not many people are willing to struggle on their own. He takes that struggle to a high degree,” one friend told me admiringly. Williams took up krav maga and muay thai because he enjoyed fistfights. He once spent 40 days alone in the desert with only a knife, living off chipmunks and currants (by choice, to celebrate a birthday).

Williams struggled to get his survival business going. He’d hand out business cards at hobbyist gatherings with promises of adventure, but in practice, he was mostly leading seminars in city parks for beer money. He would only take calls in emergencies, another friend recalled, because he wanted to save money on minutes.

Then around New Year’s in 2019, according to Williams, he received an email from a leader in American Patriots Three Percent, or AP3. He wanted to hire Williams for a training session. He could pay $1,000.

Finally, Williams thought. I’m starting to get some traction.

3. The Decision

They had agreed there’d be no semiautomatic rifles, Williams told me, so everyone brought a sidearm. Some dozen militiamen had driven into the mountains near Peter Sinks, Utah, one of the coldest places in the contiguous U.S. Initially they wanted training in evasion and escape, Williams said, but he thought they needed to work up to that. So for three days, he taught them the basics of wilderness survival, but with a twist: how to stay alive while “trying to stay hidden.” He showed them how to build a shelter that would both keep them dry and escape detection. How to make a fire, then how to clean it up so no one could tell it was ever there.

As the days wore on, stray comments started to irk him. Once, a man said he’d been “kiked” into overpaying for his Ruger handgun. At the end of the training, AP3 leaders handed out matching patches. The ritual reminded Williams of a biker gang.

He’d already been to some shorter AP3 events to meet the men and tailor the lesson to his first meaningful client, Williams told me. But spending days in the woods with them felt different. He said he found the experience unpleasant and decided not to work with the group again.

(Katherine Lam for ProPublica)

This portion of Williams’ story — exactly how and why he first became a militia member — is the hardest to verify. By his own account, he kept his thoughts and plans entirely to himself. At the time, he was too embarrassed to even tell his friends what happened that weekend, he said. In the survival community, training militias was considered taboo.

I couldn’t help but wonder if Williams was hiding a less gallant backstory. Maybe he’d joined AP3 out of genuine enthusiasm and then soured on it. Maybe now he was trying to fool me. Indeed, when I called the AP3 leader who set up the training, he disputed Williams’ timeline. He remembered Williams staying sporadically but consistently involved after the session in the mountains, as a friend of the group who attended two or three events a year. To further muddy the picture, Williams had warned me the man would say something like that — Williams had worked hard to create the impression that he never left, he said, that he’d just gone inactive for a while, busy with work. (Remarkably, the AP3er defended Williams’ loyalty each time I asserted he’d secretly tried to undermine the group. “He was very well-respected,” he said. “I never questioned his honesty or his intentions.”)

Even Williams’ friends told me he was something of a mystery to them. But I found evidence that supports his story where so many loners bare their innermost thoughts: the internet. In 2019 and early 2020, Williams wrote thousands of since-deleted entries in online forums. These posts delivered a snapshot of his worldview in this period: idiosyncratic, erudite and angry with little room for moderation. “There are occasionally militia types that want these skills to further violent fringe agendas and I will absolutely not enable them,” he wrote in one 2020 entry about wilderness survival. In another, he called AP3 and its allies “far right lunatics.” The posts didn’t prove the details of his account, but here was the Williams I knew, writing under pseudonyms long before we’d met.

One day, he’d voice his disdain for Trump voters, neoliberalism or “the capitalist infrastructure.” Another, he’d rail against gun control measures as immoral. When Black Lives Matter protests broke out in 2020, Williams wrote that he was gathering medical supplies for local protestors. He sounded at times like a revolutionary crossed with a left-wing liberal arts student. “The sole job of a cop is to bully citizens on behalf of the state,” he wrote. “Violent overthrow of the state is our only viable option.”

Then came Jan. 6. As he was watching on TV, he later told me, Williams thought he recognized the patch on a rioter’s tactical vest. It looked like the one that AP3 leaders had handed out at the end of his training.

Did I teach that guy? he wondered. Why was I so cordial to them all? If they knew I was gay, I bet they’d want me dead, and I actually helped them. Because I was too selfish to think of anything but my career.

Shame quickly turned to anger, he told me, and to a desire for revenge. Pundits were saying that democracy itself was in mortal peril. Williams took that notion literally. He assumed countless Americans would respond with aggressive action, he said, and he wanted to be among them.

4. A New World

Williams stood alone in his apartment, watching himself in the mirror.

“I’m tall.”

“I’m Dave.”

“I’m tall.”

“I’m Dave.”

He tried to focus on his mannerisms, on the intonation of his voice. Whether he was saying the truth or a falsehood, he wanted to appear exactly the same.

Months had passed since the Capitol riot. By all appearances, Williams was now an enthusiastic member of AP3. Because he already had an in, joining the group was easy, he said. Becoming a self-fashioned spy took some trial and error, however. In the early days, he had posed as a homeless person to surveil militia training facilities, but he decided that was a waste of time.

The casual deceit that had served him in prison was proving useful. Deviousness was a skill, and he stayed up late working to hone it. He kept a journal with every lie he told so he wouldn’t lose track. His syllabus centered on acting exercises and the history of espionage and cults. People like sex cult leader Keith Raniere impressed him most — he studied biographies to learn how they manipulated people, how they used cruelty to wear their followers down into acquiescence.

Williams regularly berated the militia’s rank and file. He doled out condescending advice about the group’s security weaknesses, warning their technical incompetence would make them easy targets for left-wing hackers and government snoops. Orion Rollins, the militia’s top leader in Utah, soon messaged Williams to thank him for the guidance. “Don’t worry about being a dick,” he wrote. “It’s time to learn and become as untraceable as possible.” (The AP3 messages Williams sent me were so voluminous that I spent an entire month reading them before I noticed this exchange.)

Williams was entering the militia at a pivotal time. AP3 once had chapters in nearly every state, with a roster likely in the tens of thousands; as authorities cracked down on the movement after Jan. 6, membership was plummeting. Some who stayed on had white nationalist ties. Others were just lonely conservatives who had found purpose in the paramilitary cause. For now, the group’s leaders were focused on saving the militia, not taking up arms to fight their enemies. (Thanks to Williams’ trove and records from several other sources, I was eventually able to write an investigation into AP3’s resurgence.)

On March 4, 2021, Williams complained to Rollins that everyone was still ignoring his advice. Williams volunteered to take over as the state’s “intel officer,” responsible for protecting the group from outside scrutiny.

“My hands are tied,” Williams wrote. “If I’m not able to” take charge, the whole militia “might unravel.” Rollins gave him the promotion.

“Thanks Orion. You’ve shown good initiative here.” Privately, he saw a special advantage to his appointment. If anyone suspected there was a mole in Utah, Williams would be the natural choice to lead the mole hunt.

Now he had a leadership role. What he did not yet have was a plan. But how could he decide on goals, he figured, until he knew more about AP3? He would work to gather information and rise through the ranks by being the best militia member he could be.

He took note of the job titles of leaders he met, like an Air Force reserve master sergeant (I confirmed this through military records) who recruited other airmen into the movement. Williams attended paramilitary trainings, where the group practiced ambushes with improvised explosives and semiautomatic guns. He offered his comrades free lessons in hand-to-hand combat and bonded with them in the backcountry hunting jackrabbits. When the militia joined right-wing rallies for causes like gun rights, they went in tactical gear. Williams attended as their “gray man,” he said — assigned to blend in with the crowd and call in armed reinforcements if tensions erupted.

Since his work was seasonal, Williams could spend as much as 40 hours a week on militia activities. One of his duties as intel officer was to monitor the group’s enemies on the left, which could induce vertigo. A militia leader once dispatched him to a Democratic Socialists of America meeting at a local library, he said, where he saw a Proud Boy he recognized from a joint militia training. Was this a closet right-winger keeping tabs on the socialists? Or a closet leftist who might dox him or inform the police?

He first contacted me in October 2022. He couldn’t see how the movement was changing beyond his corner of Utah. AP3 was reinvigorated by then, I later found, with as many as 50 recruits applying each day. In private chats I reviewed, leaders were debating if they should commit acts of terrorism. At the Texas border, members were rounding up immigrants in armed patrols. But Williams didn’t know all that yet. On our first call, he launched into a litany of minutiae: names, logistical details, allegations of minor players committing petty crimes. He could tell I wasn’t sure what it all amounted to.

Williams feared that if anything he’d helped AP3, not damaged it. Then, in early November, Rollins told him to contact a retired detective named Bobby Kinch.

(Katherine Lam for ProPublica)

5. The Detective and the Sheriff

Williams turned on a recording device and dialed. Kinch picked up after one ring: ​​“What’s going on?” he bellowed. “How you doing, man?”

“I don’t know if you remember me,” Kinch continued, but they’d met years before.

“Oh, oh, back in the day,” Williams said, stuttering for a second. He knew Kinch was expecting the call but was confused by the warm reception. Maybe Kinch was at the training in 2019?

“Well I’m the sitting, current national director of the Oath Keepers now.”

The militia’s eye-patched founder, Stewart Rhodes, was in jail amid his trial for conspiring to overthrow the government on Jan. 6. Kinch said he was serving on the group’s national board when his predecessor was arrested. Rhodes had called from jail to say, “Do not worry about me. This is God’s way.”

“He goes, ‘But I want you to save the organization.’”

Kinch explained that Rollins, who’d recently defected to the Oath Keepers, had been singing Williams’ praises. (Bound by shared ideology, militias are more porous than outsiders would think. Members often cycle between groups like square dance partners.) “I imagine your plate is full with all the crazy stuff going on in the world, but I’d love to sit down.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Williams said. “AP3 and Oath Keepers should definitely be working together.” He proposed forming a joint reconnaissance team so their two militias could collaborate on intelligence operations. Kinch lit up. “I’m a career cop,” he said. “I did a lot of covert stuff, surveillance.”

By the time they hung up 45 minutes later, Kinch had invited Williams to come stay at his home. Williams felt impressed with himself. The head of the most infamous militia in America was treating him like an old friend.

To me, Williams sounded like a different person on the call, with the same voice but a brand new personality. It was the first recording that I listened to and the first time I became certain the most important part of his story was true. To authenticate the record, I independently confirmed nonpublic details Kinch discussed on the tape, a process I repeated again and again with the other files. Soon I had proof of what would otherwise seem outlandish: Williams’ access was just as deep as he claimed.

I could see why people would be eager to follow Kinch. Even when he sermonized on the “global elitist cabal,” he spoke with the affable passion of a beloved high school teacher. I’d long been fascinated by the prevalence of cops on militia rosters, so I started examining his backstory.

Kinch grew up in upstate New York, the son of a World War II veteran who had him at about 50. When Kinch was young, he confided in a later recording, he was a “wheelman,” slang for getaway driver. “I ran from the cops so many fucking times,” he said. But “at the end of the day, you know, I got away. I never got caught.”

He moved to Las Vegas and, at the age of 25, became an officer in the metro police. Kinch came to serve in elite detective units over 23 years in the force, hunting fugitives and helping take down gangs like the Playboy Bloods. Eventually he was assigned to what he called the “Black squad,” according to court records, tasked with investigating violent crimes where the suspect was African American. (A Las Vegas police spokesperson told me they stopped “dividing squads by a suspect’s race” a year before Kinch retired.)

Then around Christmas in 2013, Kinch’s career began to self-destruct. In a series of Facebook posts, he said that he would welcome a “race war.” “Bring it!” he wrote. “I’m about as fed up as a man (American, Christian, White, Heterosexual) can get!” An ensuing investigation prompted the department to tell the Secret Service that Kinch “could be a threat to the president,” according to the Las Vegas Sun. (The Secret Service interviewed him and determined he was not a threat to President Barack Obama, the outlet reported. Kinch told the paper he was not racist and that he was being targeted by colleagues with “an ax to grind.”) In 2016, he turned in his badge, a year after the saga broke in the local press.

Kinch moved to southern Utah and found a job hawking hunting gear at a Sportsman’s Warehouse. But he “had this urge,” he later said on a right-wing podcast. “Like I wasn’t done yet.” So he joined the Oath Keepers. “When people tell me that violence doesn’t solve anything, I look back over my police career,” he once advised his followers. “And I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s interesting, because violence did solve quite a bit.’”

Kinch added Williams to an encrypted Signal channel where the Utah Oath Keepers coordinated their intel work. Two weeks later on Nov. 30, 2022, Williams received a cryptic message from David Coates, one of Kinch’s top deputies.

Coates was an elder statesman of sorts in the Oath Keepers, a 73-year-old Vietnam veteran with a Hulk Hogan mustache. There’d been a break-in at the Utah attorney general’s office, he reported to the group, and for some unspoken reason, the Oath Keepers seemed to think this was of direct relevance to them. Coates promised to find out more about the burglary: “The Sheriff should have some answers” to “my inquiries today or tomorrow.”

That last line would come to obsess Williams. He sent a long, made-up note about his own experiences collaborating with law enforcement officials. “I’m curious, how responsive is the Sheriff to your inquiries? Or do you have a source you work with?”

“The Sheriff has become a personal friend who hosted my FBI interview,” Coates responded. “He opens a lot of doors.” Coates had been in D.C. on Jan. 6, he’d told Williams. It’d make sense if that had piqued the FBI’s interest.

To Williams, it hinted at a more menacing scenario — at secret ties between those who threaten the rule of the law and those duty-bound to enforce it. He desperately wanted more details, more context, the sheriff’s name. But he didn’t want to push for too much too fast.

6. The Hunting of Man

A plaque quoting Ernest Hemingway was mounted in the home of Bobby Kinch, a retired detective and the national leader of the Oath Keepers militia. (Courtesy of John Williams)

A forest engulfed Kinch’s house on all sides. He lived in a half-million-dollar cabin in summer home country, up 8,000 feet in the mountains outside Zion National Park. Williams stood in the kitchen on a mid-December Saturday morning.

Williams had recently made a secret purchase of a small black device off Amazon. It looked like a USB drive. The on-off switch and microphone holes revealed what it really was: a bug. As the two men chatted over cups of cannoli-flavored coffee, Williams didn’t notice when Kinch’s dog snatched the bug from his bag.

The night before, Williams had slept in the guest room. The house was cluttered with semiautomatic rifles. He had risked photographing three plaques on the walls inscribed with the same Ernest Hemingway line. “There is no hunting like the hunting of man,” they read. “Those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else.”

They spotted the dog at the same time. The bug was attached to a charging device. The animal was running around with it like it was a tennis ball. As Kinch went to retrieve it, Williams felt panic grip his chest. Could anyone talk their way out of this? He’d learned enough about Kinch to be terrified of his rage. Looking around, Williams eyed his host’s handgun on the kitchen counter.

If he even starts to examine it, I’ll grab the gun, he thought. Then I’ll shoot him and flee into the woods.

Kinch took the bug from the dog’s mouth. Then he handed it right to Williams and started to apologize.

Don’t worry about it, Williams said. He’s a puppy!

(Katherine Lam for ProPublica)

On their way out the door, Kinch grabbed the pistol and placed it in the console of his truck. It was an hour’s drive to the nearest city, where the Oath Keepers were holding a leadership meeting. Williams rode shotgun, his bug hooked onto the zipper of his backpack. On the tape, I could hear the wind racing through the car window. The radio played Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ’69.”

Kinch seemed in the hold of a dark nostalgia — as if he was wrestling with the monotony of civilian life, with the new strictures he faced since turning in his badge. Twenty minutes in, he recited the Hemingway line like it was a mantra. “I have a harder time killing animals than a human being,” Kinch continued. Then he grew quiet as he recounted the night he decided to retire.

He’d woken up in an oleander bush with no memory of how he’d gotten there. His hands were covered in blood. He was holding a gun. “I had to literally take my magazine out and count my bullets, make sure I didn’t fucking kill somebody,” he said. “I black out when I get angry. And I don’t remember what the fuck I did.”

Kinch went on: “I love the adrenaline of police work,” and then he paused. “I miss it. It was a hoot.”

By the time they reached Cedar City, Utah, Kinch was back to charismatic form. He dished out compliments to the dozen or so Oath Keepers assembled for the meeting — “You look like you lost weight” — and told everyone to put their phones in their cars. “It’s just good practice. Because at some point we may have to go down a route,” one of his deputies explained, trailing off.

Kinch introduced Williams to the group. “He’s not the feds. And if he is, he’s doing a damn good job.”

Williams laughed, a little too loud.

7. Doctor, Lawyer, Sergeant, Spy

Early in the meeting, Kinch laid out his vision for the Oath Keepers’ role in American life. “We have a two-edged sword,” he said. The “dull edge” was more traditional grassroots work, exemplified by efforts to combat alleged election fraud. He hoped to build their political apparatus so that in five or 10 years, conservative candidates would be seeking the Oath Keepers’ endorsement.

Then there was the sharp edge: paramilitary training. “You hone all these skills because when the dull edge fails, you’ve got to be able to turn that around and be sharp.” The room smelled like donuts, one of the men had remarked.

An Oath Keepers training session in early 2023 (Obtained by ProPublica)

The week before, Kinch’s predecessor had been convicted of seditious conspiracy. This was their first meeting since the verdict, and I opened the recordings later with the same anticipation I feel sitting down for the Super Bowl. What would come next for the militia after this historic trial: ruin, recovery or revolt?

The stature of men leading the group’s post-Jan. 6 resurrection startled me. I was expecting the ex-cops, like the one from Fresno, California, who said he stayed on with the militia because “this defines me.” Militias tend to prize law enforcement ties; during an armed operation, it could be useful to have police see you as a friend.

But there was also an Ohio OB-GYN on the national board of directors — he used to work for the Cleveland Clinic, I discovered, and now led a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group. The doctor was joined at board meetings by a city prosecutor in Utah, an ex-city council member and, Williams was later told, a sergeant with an Illinois sheriff’s department. (The doctor did not respond to requests for comment. He has since left his post with the UnitedHealth subsidiary, a spokesperson for the company said.)

Over six hours, the men set goals and delegated responsibilities with surprisingly little worry about the federal crackdown on militias. They discussed the scourges they were there to combat (stolen elections, drag shows, President Joe Biden) only in asides. Instead, they focused on “marketing” — “So what buzzwords can we insert in our mission statement?” one asked — and on resources that’d help local chapters rapidly expand. “I’d like to see this organization be like the McDonald’s of patriot organizations,” another added. To Williams, it felt more like a Verizon sales meeting than an insurrectionist cell.

Kinch had only recently taken over and as I listened, I wondered how many followers he really had outside of that room. They hadn’t had a recruitment drive in the past year, which they resolved to change. They had $1,700 in the bank. But it didn’t seem entirely bravado. Kinch and his comrades mentioned conversations with chapters around the county.

Then as they turned from their weakened national presence to their recent successes in Utah, Williams snapped to attention.

“We had surveillance operations,” Kinch said, without elaboration.

“We’re making progress locally on the law enforcement,” Coates added. He said that at least three of them can get “the sheriff” on the phone any time of day. Like the last time, Coates didn’t give a name, but he said something even more intriguing: “The sheriff is my tie-in to the state attorney general because he’s friends.” Williams told me he fought the urge to lob a question. (The attorney general’s office did not respond to requests for comment.)

Closing out the day, Kinch summarized their plan moving forward: Keep a low profile. Focus on the unglamorous work. Rebuild their national footprint. And patiently prepare for 2024. “We still got what, two more years, till another quote unquote election?” He thanked Williams for coming and asked if they could start planning training exercises.

“Absolutely, yeah, I’m excited about that.” Williams was resolved to find his way onto the national board.

8. The Stakeout

On Dec. 17, 2022, a week after the meeting, Williams called a tech-savvy 19-year-old Oath Keeper named Rowan. He’d told Rowan he was going to teach him to infiltrate leftist groups, but Williams’ real goal was far more underhanded. While the older Oath Keepers had demurred at his most sensitive questions recently, the teenager seemed eager to impress a grizzled survival instructor. By assigning missions to Rowan, he hoped to probe the militias’ secrets without casting suspicion on himself.

“You don’t quite have the life experience to do this,” Williams opened on the recording. But with a couple years’ training, “I think we can work towards that goal.” He assigned his student a scholarly monograph, “Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in a Capitalist Society,” to begin his long education in how leftists think. “Perfect,” Rowan responded. He paused to write the title down.

Then came his pupil’s first exercise: build a dossier on Williams’ boss in AP3. Williams explained it was safest to practice on people they knew.

In Rowan, Williams had found a particularly vulnerable target. He was on probation at the time. According to court records, earlier that year, Rowan had walked up to a stranger’s truck as she was leaving her driveway. She rolled down her window. He punched her several times in the face. When police arrived, Rowan began screaming that he was going to kill them and threatened to “blow up the police department.” He was convicted of misdemeanor assault.

Williams felt guilty about using the young man but also excited. (“He is completely in my palm,” he recorded in his diary.) Within a few weeks, he had Rowan digging into Kinch’s background. “I’m going to gradually have him do more and more things,” he said in the diary, “with the hopes that I can eventually get him to hack” into militia leaders’ accounts.

The relationship quickly unearthed something that disturbed him. The week of their call, Williams woke up to a series of angry messages in the Oath Keepers’ encrypted Signal channel. The ire was directed toward a Salt Lake Tribune reporter who, according to Coates, was “a real piece of shit.” His sins included critical coverage of “anyone trying to expose voter fraud” and writing about a local political figure who’d appeared on a leaked Oath Keepers roster.

Williams messaged Rowan. “I noticed in the chat that there is some kind of red list of journalists etc? Could you get that to me?” he asked. “It would be very helpful to my safety when observing political rallies or infiltrating leftists.”

“Ah yes, i have doxes on many journalists in utah,” Rowan responded, using slang for sharing someone’s personal data with malicious intent.

He sent over a dossier on the Tribune reporter, which opened with a brief manifesto: “This dox goes out to those that have been terrorized, doxed, harassed, slandered, and family names mutilated by these people.” It provided the reporter’s address and phone number, along with two pictures of his house.

Then Rowan shared similar documents about a local film critic — he’d posted a “snarky” retweet of the Tribune writer — and about a student reporter at Southern Utah University. The college student had covered a rally the Oath Keepers recently attended, Rowan explained, and the militia believed he was coordinating with the Tribune. “We found the car he drove through a few other members that did a stakeout.”

“That’s awesome,” Williams said. Internally, he was reeling: a stakeout? In the dossier, he found a backgrounder on the student’s parents along with their address. Had armed men followed this kid around? Did they surveil his family home?

His notes show him wrestling with a decision he hadn’t let himself reckon with before: Was it time to stop being a fly on the wall and start taking action? Did he need to warn someone? The journalists? The police? Breaking character would open the door to disaster. The incident with Kinch’s dog had been a chilling reminder of the risks.

Williams had been in the militia too long. He was losing his sense of objectivity. The messages were alarming, but were they an imminent threat? He couldn’t tell. Williams had made plans to leave Utah if his cover was blown. He didn’t want to jeopardize two years of effort over a false alarm. But what if he did nothing and this kid got hurt?

9. The Plan

By 2023, Williams’ responsibilities were expanding as rapidly as his anxiety. His schedule was packed with events for AP3, the Oath Keepers and a third militia he’d recently gotten inside. He vowed to infiltrate the Proud Boys and got Coates to vouch for him with the local chapter. He prepared plans to penetrate a notorious white supremacist group too.

His adversaries were gaining momentum as well. Williams soon made the four-hour drive to Kinch’s house for another leadership meeting and was told on tape about a national Oath Keepers recruiting bump; they’d also found contact information for 40,000 former members, which they hoped to use to bring a flood of militiamen back into the fold.

Despite the risk to his own safety and progress, Williams decided to send the journalists anonymous warnings from burner accounts. He attached sensitive screenshots so that they’d take him seriously. And then … nothing. The reporters never responded; he wondered if the messages went to spam. His secret was still secure.

But the point of his mission was finally coming into focus. He was done simply playing the part of model militia member. His plan had two parts: After gathering as much compromising information as he could, he would someday release it all online, he told me. He carefully documented anything that looked legally questionable, hoping law enforcement would find something useful for a criminal case. At the very least, going public could make militiamen more suspicious of each other.

In the meantime, he would undermine the movement from the inside. He began trying to blunt the danger that he saw lurking in every volatile situation the militiamen put themselves in.

On Jan. 27, 2023, body camera footage from the police killing of Tyre Nichols, an unarmed Black man, became public. “The footage is gruesome and distressing,” The New York Times reported. “Cities across the U.S. are bracing for protests.” The militias had often responded to Black Lives Matter rallies with street brawls and armed patrols.

Williams had visions of Kyle Rittenhouse-esque shootings in the streets. He put his newly formulated strategy into action, sending messages to militiamen around the country with made-up rumors he hoped would persuade them to stay home.

In Utah, he wrote to Kinch and the leaders of his other two militias. He would be undercover at the protests in Salt Lake City, he wrote. If any militiamen went, even “a brief look of recognition could blow my cover and put my life in danger.” All three ordered their troops to avoid the event. (“This is a bit of a bummer,” one AP3 member responded. “I’ve got some aggression built up I need to let out.”)

After the protests, Williams turned on his voice diary and let out a long sigh. For weeks, he’d been nauseous and had trouble eating. He’d developed insomnia that would keep him up until dawn. He’d gone to the rally to watch for militia activity. When he got home, he’d vomited blood.

Even grocery shopping took hours now. He circled the aisles to check if he was being tailed. Once while driving, he thought he caught someone following him. He’d reached out to a therapist to help “relieve some of this pressure,” he said, but was afraid to speak candidly with him. “I can check his office for bugs and get his electronics out of the office. And then once we’re free, I can tell him what’s going on.”

He quickly launched into a litany of items on his to-do list. A training exercise to attend. A recording device he needed to find a way to install. “I’m just fucking sick of being around these toxic motherfuckers.”

“It’s getting to be too much for me.”

(Katherine Lam for ProPublica)

10. The Deep State

On March 20, Williams called Scot Seddon, the founder of AP3. If he was on the verge of a breakdown, it didn’t impact his performance. I could tell when Williams was trying to advance his agenda as I listened later, but he was subtle about it. Obsequious. Methodical. By day’s end, he’d achieved perhaps his most remarkable feat yet. He’d helped persuade Seddon and his lieutenants to fire the head of AP3’s Utah chapter and to install Williams in his place.

Now he had access to sensitive records only senior militia leaders could see. He had final say over the group’s actions in an entire state. He knew the coup would make him vastly more effective. Yet that night in his voice diary, Williams sounded like a man in despair.

The success only added to his paranoia. Becoming a major figure in the Utah militia scene raised a possibility he couldn’t countenance: He might be arrested and sent to jail for some action of his comrades.

With a sense of urgency now, he focused even more intently on militia ties to government authorities. “I have been still collecting evidence on the paramilitaries’ use of law enforcement,” he said in the diary entry. “It’s way deeper than I thought.”

He solved the mystery of the Oath Keepers’ “sheriff”: It was the sheriff for Iron County, Utah, a tourist hub near two national parks. He assigned Rowan to dig deeper into the official’s ties with the movement and come back with emails or text messages. (In a recent interview, the sheriff told me that he declined an offer to join the Oath Keepers but that he’s known “quite a few” members and thinks “they’re generally good people.” Coates has periodically contacted him about issues like firearms rules that Coates believes are unconstitutional, the sheriff said. “If I agree, I contact the attorney general’s office.”)

Claiming to work on “a communication strategy for reaching out to law enforcement,” Williams then goaded AP3 members into bragging about their police connections. They told him about their ties with high-ranking officers in Missouri and in Louisiana, in Texas and in Tennessee.

The revelations terrified him. “When this gets out, I think I’m probably going to flee overseas,” he said in his diary. “They have too many connections.” What if a cop ally helped militants track him down? “I don’t think I can safely stay within the United States.”

Four days later, he tuned into a Zoom seminar put on by a fellow AP3 leader. It was a rambling and sparsely attended meeting. But 45 minutes in, a woman brought up an issue in her Virginia hometown, population 23,000.

The town’s vice mayor, a proud election denier, was under fire for a homophobic remark. She believed a local reporter covering the controversy was leading a secret far-left plot. What’s more, the reporter happened to be her neighbor. To intimidate her, she said, he’d been leaving dead animals on her lawn.

“I think I have to settle a score with this guy,” she concluded. “They’re getting down to deep state local level and it’s got to be stopped.” After the call, Williams went to turn off his recording device. “Well, that was fucking insane,” he said aloud.

He soon reached out to the woman to offer his advice. Maybe he could talk her down, Williams thought, or at least determine what she meant by settling a score. But she wasn’t interested in speaking with him. So again he faced a choice: do nothing or risk his cover being blown. He finally came to the same conclusion he had the last time he’d feared journalists were in jeopardy. On March 31, he sent an anonymous warning.

“Because she is a member of a right wing militia group and is heavily armed, I wanted to let you know,” Williams wrote to the reporter. “I believe her to be severely mentally ill and I believe her to be dangerous. For my own safety, I cannot reveal more.”

He saw the article the next morning. The journalist had published 500 words about the disturbing email he’d gotten, complete with a screenshot of Williams’ entire note. Only a few people had joined that meandering call. Surely only Williams pestered the woman about it afterwards. There could be little doubt that he was the mole.

He pulled the go bag from his closet and fled. A few days later, while on the run, Williams recorded the final entries in his diary. Amid the upheaval, he sounded surprised to feel a sense of relief: “I see the light at the end of the tunnel for the first time in two and a half years.”

Coda: Project 2025

It was seven days before the 2024 presidential election. Williams had insisted I not bring my phone, on the off chance my movements were being tracked. We were finally meeting for the first time, in a city that he asked me not to disclose. He entered the cramped hotel room wearing a camo hat, hiking shoes and a “Spy vs. Spy” comic strip T-shirt. “Did you pick the shirt to match the occasion?” I asked. He laughed. “Sometimes I can’t help myself.”

(Katherine Lam for ProPublica)

We talked for days, with Williams splayed across a Best Western office chair beside the queen bed. He evoked an aging computer programmer with 100 pounds of muscle attached, and he seemed calmer than on the phone, endearingly offbeat. The vision he laid out — of his own future and of the country’s — was severe.

After he dropped everything and went underground, Williams spent a few weeks in the desert. He threw his phone in a river, flushed documents down the toilet and switched apartments when he returned to civilization. At first, he spent every night by the door ready for an attack; if anyone found him and ambushed him, it’d happen after dark, he figured. No one ever came, and he began to question if he’d needed to flee at all. The insomnia of his undercover years finally abated. He began to sketch out the rest of his life.

Initially, he hoped to connect with lawmakers in Washington, helping them craft legislation to combat the militia movement. By last summer, those ambitions had waned. Over time, he began to wrestle with his gift for deceiving people who trusted him. “I don’t necessarily like what it says about me that I have a talent for this,” he said.

To me, it seemed that the ordeal might be starting to change him. He’d become less precise in consistently adhering to the facts in recent weeks, I thought, more grandiose in his account of his own saga. But then for long stretches, he’d speak with the same introspection and attention to detail that he showed on our first calls. His obsession with keeping the Tyre Nichols protestors safe was myopic, he told me, a case of forgetting the big picture to quash the few dangers he could control.

Williams believes extremists will try to murder him after this story is published. And if they fail, he thinks he’ll “live to see the United States cease to exist.” He identifies with the violent abolitionist John Brown, who tried to start a slave revolt two years before the American Civil War and was executed. Williams thinks he himself may not be seen as such a radical soon, he told me. “I wonder if I’m maybe a little too early.”

I’d thought Williams was considering a return to a quiet life. Our two intense years together had been a strain sometimes even for me. But in the hotel room, he explained his plans for future operations against militias: “Until they kill me, this is what I’m doing.” He hopes to inspire others to follow in his footsteps and even start his own vigilante collective, running his own “agents” inside the far right.

In August, I published my investigation into AP3. (I used his records but did not otherwise rely on Williams as an anonymous source.) It was a way of starting to lay out what I’d learned since his first email: what’s driving the growth of militias, how they keep such a wide range of people united, the dangerous exploits that they’ve managed to keep out of public view.

Two months later, Williams published an anonymous essay. He revealed that he’d infiltrated the group as an “independent activist” and had sent me files. He wanted to test how the militia would respond to news of a mole.

The result was something he long had hoped for: a wave of paranoia inside AP3. “It’s a fucking risky thing we get involved in,” Seddon, the group’s founder, said in a private message. “Fucking trust nobody. There’s fucking turncoats everywhere.” (Seddon declined to comment for this story. He then sent a short follow-up email: “MAGA.”)

Sowing that distrust is why Williams is going on the record, albeit without his original name. He still plans to release thousands of files after this article is published — evidence tying sheriffs and police officers to the movement, his proudest coup, plus other records he hopes could become ammo for lawsuits. But Williams wants to let his former comrades know “a faggot is doing this to them.” He thinks his story could be his most effective weapon.

Every time militia members make a phone call, attend a meeting or go to a gun range together, he wants them “to be thinking, in the back of their heads, ‘This guy will betray me.’”

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

by Joshua Kaplan

EPA Report Finds That Formaldehyde Presents an “Unreasonable Risk” to Public Health

1 month 1 week ago

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

A long-awaited report from the Environmental Protection Agency has found that formaldehyde presents an unreasonable risk to human health. But the report, released Thursday, downplayed the threat the chemical poses to people living near industrial plants that release large quantities of the carcinogen into the air.

The health risk assessment was published weeks after a ProPublica investigation found that formaldehyde, one of the most widely used chemicals in commerce, causes more cases of cancer than any other chemical in the air and triggers asthma, miscarriages and fertility problems.

Our analysis of the EPA’s own data showed that in every census block in the U.S., the risk of getting cancer from a lifetime of exposure to formaldehyde in outdoor air is higher than the goal the agency has set for air pollutants. The risk is even greater indoors, where formaldehyde leaks from furniture and other products long after they enter our homes.

In its report, the EPA evaluated 63 situations in which consumers and workers encounter formaldehyde and found that 58 of them contribute to the chemical’s unreasonable risk to health — a designation that requires the agency to mitigate it. Among the products that can emit dangerous levels of formaldehyde in these scenarios, according to the report, are automotive-care products like car waxes, along with crafting supplies, ink and toner, photographic supplies and fabrics, building materials, textiles and leather goods.

While a note accompanying the EPA’s report stated that workers have the greatest exposure to the chemical, the agency’s risk assessment adopted weaker standards for protecting workers from formaldehyde than had been proposed in a previous draft. The move was decried by some environmentalists, including one who said it would affect hundreds of thousands of people whose jobs require them to come into contact with the chemical.

By law, the EPA should now begin the next stage of regulation: drafting restrictions to mitigate the risks it identified. But even before the agency released the report, House Republicans urged the administration to invalidate it. And a chemical industry group immediately attacked the report as flawed, accusing the EPA of “pursuing unaccountable lame duck actions that threaten the U.S. economy and key sectors that support health, safety and national security.”

How — and whether — to rein in the risks of formaldehyde promises to be one of the first tests of the EPA under a second Trump administration. The relatively inexpensive chemical is ubiquitous, used for everything from preserving dead bodies to making plastics and semiconductors. On the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump repeatedly said he supports clean air. But he has also vowed to roll back regulations he views as anti-business — and industry has rallied around formaldehyde for decades.

When Trump first assumed office in 2017, the agency was preparing to publish a report on the toxicity of the chemical. But one of his EPA appointees, who was given a high-ranking role in the agency’s Office of Research and Development, was a chemical engineer who had worked to fend off the regulation of formaldehyde as an employee of Koch Industries, whose subsidiary made formaldehyde and many products that emit it. The report was not released until August 2024, long after Trump’s appointee left the agency.

According to ProPublica’s analysis of the EPA’s 2020 AirToxScreen data, some 320 million people live in areas of the U.S. where the lifetime cancer risk from outdoor exposure to formaldehyde is 10 times higher than the agency’s ideal. ProPublica released a lookup tool that allows anyone in the country to understand their outdoor risk from formaldehyde.

Still, the EPA decided in its finalized assessment that those health risks are not unreasonable, echoing a draft the agency released in March. Back then, to determine whether formaldehyde posed an unreasonable risk of harm, the EPA compared levels in outdoor air to the highest concentrations measured by monitors in a six-year period. The ProPublica investigation found that the measurement the draft report used as a reference point was a fluke and had not met the quality control standards of the local air monitoring body that registered it.

That explanation was absent from the final version released this week. Instead, it offered several new rationales, including that some formaldehyde degrades in the air and that levels vary over people’s lifetimes, but it came to the same conclusion as the draft had: that formaldehyde in outdoor air isn’t a threat that needs to be addressed.

That decision leaves people living near industrial plants — known as fence line areas — with little hope of protection, according to Katherine O’Brien, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, who has closely followed the EPA’s efforts to regulate formaldehyde.

“Despite calculating very high cancer risks for people in their homes and also fence line community residents, EPA has completely written off those risks, and set the stage for no regulation to address those risks,” said O’Brien. “That’s deeply disappointing and very hard to comprehend.”

Compared to the draft published in March, which was heavily criticized by industry, the final version contained weaker standards for protecting workers. The acceptable levels of workplace formaldehyde exposure set in the final version of the assessment were significantly higher than the levels in the earlier draft of the report.

Maria Doa, senior director of chemicals policy at the Environmental Defense Fund, expressed alarm over the decision. “This is a less protective standard that would leave workers at risk,” said Doa, a chemist who worked at the EPA for 30 years. She noted that the report’s figures show an estimated 450,000 workers could be left vulnerable to the effects of formaldehyde as a result.

The EPA press office did not immediately respond to questions about its determination for outdoor air or the change it made to the value set to protect workers.

It’s unclear what parts, if any, of the new report will be allowed to stand.

Last month, Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, urged the incoming administration to make revisiting the Biden EPA’s work on formaldehyde “a top priority for 2025.” In a letter to Lee Zeldin, Trump’s pick to run the agency, Sessions derided this week’s report as “based upon unscientific data that was utilized by unaccountable officials at the EPA to tie the hands of the new Administration and hamper economic growth.” (The letter was first reported by InsideEPA.)

Sessions, who is a co-chair of the new Delivering Outstanding Government Efficiency caucus and a staunch ally of Trump, recommended scrapping the EPA’s assessments of formaldehyde and reversing course on “broader Biden policies” on chemicals.

by Sharon Lerner

Trump Has Promised to Build More Ships. He May Deport the Workers Who Help Make Them.

1 month 2 weeks ago

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Early last year, President-elect Donald Trump promised that when he got back into the Oval Office, he’d authorize the U.S. Navy to build more ships. “It’s very important,” he said, “because it’s jobs, great jobs.”

However, the companies that build ships for the government are already having trouble finding enough workers to fill those jobs. And Trump may make it even harder if he follows through on another pledge he’s made: to clamp down on immigration.

The president-elect has told his supporters he would impose new limits on the numbers of immigrants allowed into the country and stage the largest mass deportation campaign in history. Meanwhile the shipbuilding industry, which he also says he supports and which has given significant financial support to Republican causes, is struggling to overcome an acute worker shortage. Immigrants have been critical to helping fill the gaps.

According to a Navy report from last year, several major shipbuilding programs are years behind schedule, owing largely to a lack of workers. The shortfall is so severe that warship production is down to its lowest level in a quarter century.

Shipbuilders and the government have poured millions of dollars into training and recruiting American workers, and, as part of a bipartisan bill just introduced in the Senate, they have proposed to spend even more. Last year the Navy awarded nearly $1 billion in a no-bid contract to a Texas nonprofit to modernize the industry with more advanced technology in a way that will make it more attractive to workers. The nonprofit has already produced splashy TV ads for submarine jobs. One of its goals is to help the submarine industry hire 140,000 new workers in the next 10 years. “We build giants,” one of its ads beckons. “It takes one to build one.”

Still, experts say that these robust efforts have so far resulted in nowhere near enough workers for current needs, let alone a workforce large enough to handle expanded production. “We’re trying to get blood from a turnip,” said Shelby Oakley, an analyst at the Government Accountability Office. “The domestic workforce is just not there.”

In the meantime, the industry is relying on immigrants for a range of shipyard duties, with many working jobs similar to those on a construction site, including on cleanup crews and as welders, painters and pipefitters. And executives worry that any future immigration crackdown or restrictions on legal immigration, including limits on asylum or temporary protected status programs, could cause disruptions that would further harm their capacity for production.

Ron Wille, the president and chief operating officer of All American Marine in Washington state, said that his company was “clawing” for workers. And Peter Duclos, the president of Gladding-Hearn Shipbuilding in Somerset, Massachusetts, said the current immigration system is “so broken” that he was already having trouble holding onto valuable workers and finding more.

There is no publicly available data that shows how much the shipbuilding industry relies on immigrant labor, particularly undocumented immigrant labor. Both Wille and Duclos said that they do not employ undocumented workers, and industry experts say undocumented workers are unlikely to be working on projects requiring security clearances. However, reporting by ProPublica last year found that some shipbuilders with government contracts have used such workers. That reporting focused on a major Louisiana shipyard run by a company called Thoma-Sea, where undocumented immigrants have often been hired through third-party subcontractors.

The story reported on a young undocumented Guatemalan immigrant who was helping build an $89 million U.S. government ship for tracking hurricanes. When he died on the job after working at Thoma-Sea for two years, neither the company nor the subcontractor paid death benefits to his partner and young son.

ProPublica also reported that executives at Thoma-Sea, which declined to comment, had made tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to Republican candidates. However, if Trump’s last time in office is any guide, the shipbuilding industry wouldn’t be exempted from any future crackdown. One of the final workplace raids under Trump’s first administration was conducted at an even larger shipbuilder in Louisiana called Bollinger.

In July 2020, federal immigration agents arrested 19 “unlawfully present foreign nationals” at Bollinger’s Lockport shipyard, according to a story in the Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate. Immigration and Customs Enforcement refused to provide information on the raid. According to Bollinger’s website, that yard produces U.S. Coast Guard and Navy patrol boats. Five of the workers arrested were sent to an ICE detention center and 14 were released with pending deportation cases, according to the news report.

Bollinger denied any wrongdoing following the raid. Four years later, there’s no evidence in publicly available federal court records that Bollinger executives faced any charges in connection to it. Meanwhile, federal electoral records show that the company’s executives donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican elected officials last year, including Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, both Republicans from Louisiana. The company did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.

President Joe Biden’s administration ended workplace raids like the one at Bollinger, saying that it would instead focus on “unscrupulous employers.” Department of Homeland Security officials did not answer questions or provide data on how many employers had been prosecuted since then. However, Trump’s designated “border czar,” Tom Homan, has signaled that the incoming administration will return to carrying out the raids. When asked how the second Trump administration will increase shipbuilding while limiting immigration, a spokesperson for Trump’s transition team only doubled down on the president-elect’s deportation promises, saying they would focus enforcement on “illegal criminals, drug dealers, and human traffickers.”

A few days after Trump won the election, a group of undocumented shipyard welders leaving a Hispanic grocery store near the port in Houma, Louisiana, expressed a dim view when asked what they thought lay ahead. One man, who declined to provide his name, broke into a nervous laugh and blurted, “Well, we could be deported.” Another man, a welder from the Mexican state of Coahuila who’d been working in the U.S. for about two years, also declined to give his name but said he worried about losing the life he’d managed to build in this country.

“When they grab you,” he said, “they’ll take you, and you’ll have to leave everything behind.”

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

Do you have information about undocumented immigrants in the workforce? Contact nicole.foy@propublica.org or reach her on Signal 661-549-0572.

by Nicole Foy

Arizona Regulators Closed a Failing Charter School. It Reopened as a Private Religious School Funded by Taxpayers.

1 month 2 weeks ago

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

One afternoon in September, parents started arriving for pickup at Title of Liberty Academy, a private Mormon K-8 school in Mesa, Arizona, on the eastern outskirts of Phoenix.

Individually, the moms and dads were called in to speak to the principal. That’s when they were told that the school, still just a few months old, was closing due to financial problems.

There would be no more school at Title of Liberty.

Over the course of that week, more parents were given the news, as well as their options for the remainder of the school year: They could transfer their children to another private or charter school, or they could put them in a microschool that the principal said she’d soon be setting up in her living room. Or there was always homeschooling. Or even public school.

These families had, until this moment, embodied Arizona’s “school choice” ideal. Many of them had been disappointed by their local public schools, which some felt were indoctrinating kids in subjects like race and sex and, of course, were lacking in religious instruction. So they’d shopped for other educational options on the free market, eventually leading them to Title of Liberty.

One mom had even discovered the school by window shopping: It was in the same strip mall as her orthodontist’s office, next to a China Palace, and she’d noticed the flags outside with Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints imagery. (The school was not formally affiliated with the church.)

An LDS member herself, she was soon ready to start paying tuition to the school from her son’s Empowerment Scholarship Account — a type of school voucher pioneered in Arizona and now spreading in various forms to more than a dozen other states. ESAs give parents an average of over $7,000 a year in taxpayer funds, per child, to spend on any private school, tutoring service or other educational expense of their choice.

A sign for Title of Liberty is still standing. The abandoned school can be seen in the background. (Adriana Zehbrauskas for ProPublica)

Yet Arizona’s ESA program provides zero transparency as to private schools’ financial sustainability or academic performance to help parents make informed school choices.

For instance, the state never informed parents who were new to Title of Liberty and were planning to spend their voucher money there that it had previously been a charter school called ARCHES Academy — which had had its charter revoked last school year due to severe financial issues. Nor that, as a charter, it had a record of dismal academic performance, with just 13% of its students proficient in English and 0% in math in 2023.

When it was a charter (which is a type of public school), these things could be known. There was some oversight. The Arizona State Board for Charter Schools had monitored the school’s finances and academics, unanimously coming to the conclusion that it should be shut down.

Yet just a month after the board’s decision, ARCHES was re-creating itself as a renamed, newly religious private school, simply by pivoting to accept voucher dollars.

In other words, it was closed down by a public governing body but found a way to keep existing and being funded by the public anyway, just without the standards and accountability that would normally come with taxpayer money.

Arizona does no vetting of new voucher schools. Not even if the school or the online school “provider” has already failed, or was founded yesterday, or is operating out of a strip mall or a living room or a garage, or offers just a half hour of instruction per morning. (If you’re an individual tutor in Arizona, all you need in order to register to start accepting voucher cash is a high school diploma.)

There is “nothing” required, said Michelle Edwards, the founder and principal of ARCHES and then of Title of Liberty, in an interview with ProPublica. It was “shocking how little oversight” the state was going to provide of her ESA-funded private school, Edwards said.

Materials and books were left behind by Title of Liberty staff after the school closed. (Adriana Zehbrauskas for ProPublica)

According to charter board members as well as parents and family members of her former students, Edwards is a well-intentioned career educator who cares deeply about children. But she has repeatedly struggled to effectively or sustainably run a school.

She said that when she first transformed her charter school into a private school, she and her team called up “every agency under the sun” asking what standards the new school would have to meet, including in order to accept voucher funds. For example, what about special education students and other vulnerable children — would there be any oversight of how her school taught those kids? Or instructional time — any required number of minutes to spend on reading, writing, math, science?

State agencies, she said, each responded with versions of a question: “Why are you asking us? We don’t do that for private schools.”

“If you’re gonna call yourself a school,” Edwards told ProPublica, “there should be at least some reporting that has to be done about your numbers, about how you’re achieving. … You love the freedom of it, but it was scary.”

This school year, ProPublica has been examining Arizona’s first-of-its-kind “universal” education savings account program. We are doing so both because other states have been modeling their own new ESA initiatives after this one, and also because President-elect Donald Trump has prioritized the issue, most recently by nominating for secretary of education someone whose top priority appears to be expanding school choice efforts nationwide. (And Betsy DeVos, his first education secretary, was and remains a leading school voucher proponent.)

These programs are where the U.S. education system is headed.

In our stories, we’ve reported that Arizona making vouchers available even to the wealthiest parents — many of whom were already paying tuition for their kids to go to private school and didn’t need the government assistance — helped contribute to a state budget meltdown. We’ve also reported that low-income families in the Phoenix area, by contrast, are largely not being helped by vouchers, in part because high-quality private schools don’t exist in their neighborhoods.

But the lack of any transparency or accountability measures in Arizona’s ESA model is perhaps the most important issue for other states to consider as they follow this one’s path, even some school choice supporters say.

“If you’re a private school that gets most of its money now from the public, which has happened in Arizona, at that point there should be accountability for you as there is for public schools,” said Michael J. Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a center-right and pro-voucher education reform think tank. “If the public is paying your bills, I don’t see what the argument is for there not to be.”

To illustrate this double standard: Private school parents can speak at public school board meetings, and they vote in school board elections. But public school parents can’t freely attend, let alone request the minutes of, a private school governing body’s meetings, even if that school is now being funded with taxpayer dollars.

Arizona’s School Transparency Rules Don’t Apply to Private Schools, Even if They Get Public Funding

Public schools include regular neighborhood schools as well as charter schools.

Note: ESL stands for English as a second language.

Defenders of universal voucher programs counter that the goal of American education should be a free market of educational options for families to choose from, unburdened by excessive state regulations and paperwork. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank associated with Trump, has maintained that in such a system, schools would have “a strong incentive to meet the needs of their students since unsatisfied parents can take their children and education dollars elsewhere,” which the group says would create “direct accountability to parents.”

Yet in a truly free market, opponents say, consumers would have information, including about vendors’ past performance, to make purchasing decisions in their own best interests.

And if the product fails and has had a history of similar problems — as Title of Liberty did — there would be recourse, as with “lemon laws” that protect consumers who’ve unknowingly bought a defective car.

Abandoned reading and spelling materials are scattered on the floor of what was once Title of Liberty. (Adriana Zehbrauskas for ProPublica)

Several ESA parents across the Phoenix area said in interviews that they absolutely want educational choice and flexibility, but that they also want the sort of quality assurance that only government can provide. Most said that the Arizona Department of Education should provide at least some information as to the background and credentials of private schools and other educational providers that accept voucher money, and also that the department should do something to protect families from badly unqualified providers.

Rebekah Cross, a mother of five in the northwest Phoenix suburb of Peoria, said that the ESA program, overall, has been “life-changing” for her family; she is also an administrator of multiple Facebook groups of ESA parents. Still, she said, it’s “on you” to check the credentials and the criminal history of every private school founder and provider to whom you’re considering paying your ESA dollars, because in Arizona, “anybody can start a private school, you have no idea.” There are mostly “just rumors to rely on,” she said.

Cross pointed out that many local private schools and other educational vendors have started advertising on Facebook and elsewhere that they are “ESA certified,” even though there’s no state “certification” beyond simply signing up to receive the voucher payments. “There’s no criteria; that’s not a thing,” she said.

“You’re putting your kid in [a school], hoping it’s going to work,” Cross said. “If it closes midyear, you’re kind of screwed.”

Doug Nick, spokesperson for the Arizona Department of Education, responded that state law “makes it clear that we have no authority to oversee private schools,” even ones receiving public dollars.

Regarding publicly funded private schools closing midyear, he said that parents “have the wherewithal” to find another schooling option “regardless of the time of year,” and that the law “does not contemplate the department making recommendations to parents” at all.

Asked if the department knew how much public money had gone to Title of Liberty, Nick responded, “We don’t track that information since there’s no business reason to do so.”

The main entrance of the now-shuttered Title of Liberty. Its founder previously ran a failed charter school, ARCHES Academy. (Adriana Zehbrauskas for ProPublica)

Edwards, the Title of Liberty founder, first had the idea for her own school more than a decade ago. She’d long been an educator; she even ran a tutoring business in high school, she told me. At the beginning of her career, she taught Head Start and kindergarten in public and charter schools.

Through that experience and also seeing her own six kids not always having their individual needs met in Arizona’s K-12 system, she came to the conclusion that “to try to teach every child the same is ridiculous.”

Edwards began pitching the state charter board on a concept for a school that would meld principles of hands-on learning, borrowed from the Boy Scouts of America, with a proposal that students be grouped by learning level — “novice,” “apprentice” and so on — rather than into standard grade levels.

The board ultimately allowed her to open this school, ARCHES, in 2018. But it kept a close eye on her finances, in no small part to try to prevent a damaging outcome for students like a midyear closure. While giving her room to innovate, which is a chief goal of charter schools, the board monitored her enrollment numbers and staffing.

As it turned out, Edwards had persistent problems not just with low state test scores but also with unsustainably low enrollment, which would later plague Title of Liberty.

In our interview, she attributed those issues to the transience of many students during the pandemic and post-pandemic period as well as her business managers not being as experienced “as they probably should have been.”

This March, the charter board issued a notice of its intent to revoke ARCHES’ charter contract — a rare, serious move, according to ProPublica’s interviews with board members. (Edwards later reached an agreement with the board to surrender the charter.)

At that hearing, one of the board members commented to Edwards that “I love the fact that you have, you know, ideas and plans and things. … [But] I’m concerned about the kids. I’m concerned about the staff. I’m concerned about the families.”

Another added: “Don’t let that take away personally, on your end, the value of your intent.”

She didn’t. Edwards wanted to keep helping kids, she told me, including several ARCHES students whose families decided to stick with her.

She had the private school idea almost immediately. A post appeared on ARCHES’ Facebook page: “Hey parents! Interested in joining us next year at Title of Liberty Academy?” This was accompanied by an invitation to an “ESA workshop” to help them fill out voucher applications.

Meanwhile, Jason Mow, an ARCHES board member who was helping with its transition to Title of Liberty, tried to recruit new students: “Get your kids out of the government run schools,” he posted, adding, somewhat paradoxically: “The state ESA program will pay for tuition!!!!”

At one point, a parent asked him whether — if state money was going to be funding the school — it would be required to take part in state testing.

“As a private school using ESA, we have a great deal of latitude and not mandated to,” Mow answered.

He also said, “This is how we save the Republic.”

A banner found folded on the floor of the vacated Title of Liberty reads “Students can learn — no excuses!” (Eli Hager/ProPublica)

This last comment was part of a larger move that Edwards’ school was making: not just from charter to private and from some public accountability to none, but also from secular to religious with a right-wing bent, which was fully allowed even though it would be bankrolled by taxpayers. So, where ARCHES had touted an “American Revolutionary Classical Holistic Educational System,” Title of Liberty would simply be a “private faith-based school focused on the values of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”

Meanwhile, Edwards had already been planning to move the school into a new space: a series of storefronts in a strip mall that another charter school had previously occupied.

Over the summer, largely through sheer force of personality, she enrolled about two dozen students.

But Title of Liberty was ultimately even more disorganized than ARCHES had been. For one, Edwards told me, “We didn’t yet have [enough] students enrolled to be able to afford teachers. … But we had to have teachers in order to be able to get students.” She ended up hiring mostly her own family members, both for teaching positions and to do much of the school’s financial paperwork.

She also blamed difficulties with the ESA process, like some parents being told that they hadn’t submitted their email addresses or signatures in the right format. She made clear that none of this involved the state actually scrutinizing her school; still, she wasn’t able to obtain ESA funding as quickly as she had expected to.

The landlord, waiting on unpaid rent, finally asked Edwards to pack up the school and leave. According to one of the property managers, “She just left the space for us to deal with this shit,” which he said amounted to six large dumpsters’ worth.

Edwards responded that she couldn’t afford moving vehicles or storage space for all of those desks, bookshelves, books and files. She said that she’d provided the landlord with information about another school that could have moved in and used the furniture and supplies. (A representative of the owner of the building said that they were done with questionably funded schools by that point, and that they gave Edwards time to clear out.)

“It all depends on how you define success,” Edwards told me. “I feel like the time that our kids had with us was valuable and they learned a lot and took a lot with them from that.”

“We did try to hold to a super high standard,” she added, noting that there’s no one at the state level checking on all the other private schools out there that might not care to meet that standard.

Michelle Edwards, Title of Liberty’s founder, said that she couldn’t afford moving vehicles or storage space for all of her school’s desks, bookshelves, books and files, and that she had believed another school might be moving in. (Adriana Zehbrauskas for ProPublica)

Calls for school transparency and accountability used to be a feature of the center-right education reform movement. No Child Left Behind, one of President George W. Bush’s signature legislative achievements, mandated that public school students in certain grades undergo standardized testing in core subjects, on the grounds that schools should have to prove that they’re educating kids up to state standards and, if they’re not, to improve or else risk losing funding.

That testing was often rote, providing incomplete information as to the varied lives of students and pressuring many teachers to “teach to the test,” critics alleged. But it did offer a window into school performance — which, in turn, gave the voucher movement ammunition to criticize failing public schools.

Still, early voucher efforts too included basic transparency and accountability measures. When vouchers were first proposed in Arizona, for instance, a state task force said that “private schools must also participate in the same accountability process as public schools in order to qualify for state funding.” Louisiana’s voucher program, similarly, required participating private schools to administer state student achievement tests just like public schools did.

But voucher advocates changed course between 2017 and 2020. By that time, several academic studies had found that larger voucher programs had produced severe declines in student performance, especially in math.

Asked about a set of particularly negative findings out of Louisiana, DeVos, Trump’s secretary of education, blamed the state’s voucher program for being “not very well conceived.” Part of the problem was that it was overregulated, she and other advocates said.

In the years since, fully unregulated universal ESA programs have become the favored program design of many school choice supporters.

The result is a situation in which, on the one hand, the Arizona Department of Education annually publishes detailed report cards on all public schools in the state, including charter schools. You can look up any Arizona public school’s overall letter grade (ARCHES had a D when it was still a charter school); the academic performance and progress of that school’s students, including by demographic categories; the experience levels of its teachers, and so on.

On the other hand, Arizona private schools receiving public funding have to do no public reporting at all. If they want, they can self-report their enrollment and performance numbers to be published on websites like Niche.com, but they are free to exaggerate.

In other words, it’s not that this newer ESA model has been a clear academic success or failure. It’s just that the public, and more specifically parents, can’t know.

Not all states keep information as hidden as Arizona. At least five, for example, require schools that accept voucher money to be accredited or to provide evidence that they don’t have financial troubles.

Yet even these minimal efforts at transparency and accountability have been opposed by big-money voucher supporters.

Walmart heir Jim Walton, for instance, gave $500,000 this year to defeat a proposed Arkansas state constitutional amendment that would have required private schools receiving state funds to meet the same educational standards that public schools do. At the Ohio Legislature, provisions of a proposed bill that would’ve made voucher schools submit an annual report showing how they’re using state funding were recently removed under pressure from voucher advocates.

And in Arizona, Republicans in the Legislature have opposed every effort by Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs to increase oversight of private schools that receive ESA money — except for one reform: They decided that such schools must fingerprint their teachers.

But the new law doesn’t require the ESA schools to run those fingerprints through any database or to use them in any way.

A hallway separates abandoned classrooms at Title of Liberty. A ProPublica reporter and a photographer went inside the space this month. (Adriana Zehbrauskas for ProPublica)

About a month ago, I asked parents if they could still pay Title of Liberty from their taxpayer-funded voucher accounts. I was curious not because I thought Edwards was collecting voucher money for a closed school but because it remained listed in ClassWallet, the Arizona Department of Education’s privately owned payment interface for ESA schools and vendors.

One mom sent me screenshots showing that she could indeed still pay the shuttered school from her ESA account, though she would need to produce an invoice.

What’s more, when she’d clicked on it in ClassWallet, “ARCHES Academy” was what had popped up — the name of the failed charter school that was repurposed into Title of Liberty.

The school, whatever it was called, was still open, as far as the state of Arizona was concerned. (It was only disabled in ClassWallet after recent inquiries from ProPublica.)

Title of Liberty was still an active vendor in ClassWallet, where Arizona parents can use their voucher money to pay private school tuition, long after the school had closed. The website also conflated Title of Liberty with its failed predecessor, ARCHES.

Wanting to make triple-sure that I wasn’t missing something, I drove over to the strip mall a few weeks ago to see if anything was still going on there.

What I found inside was a scene of school choice in its endstage. A sort of zombie voucher school, with dozens or possibly hundreds of books and papers scattered across the floor. Student records, containing confidential information, had been left out. There was food in the cafeteria area, molding.

Under quotes from the Book of Mormon painted on the walls and a banner proclaiming that Title of Liberty would strive to be a “celestial stronghold of learing [sic],” a document was sitting on a table. It offered guidance for parents on how to select the right school for their little ones, including this line: “You might be surprised how many schools are just flying by the seat of their pants.”

And on top of a file cabinet next to that was a stack of postcard-sized flyers that had been printed off at Walmart, reading, “Sign up your student for ESA.”

Help ProPublica Report on Education

Mollie Simon contributed research.

by Eli Hager

Her Mental Health Treatment Was Helping. That’s Why Insurance Cut Off Her Coverage.

1 month 2 weeks ago

This article discusses suicide.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Geneva Moore’s therapist pulled out her spiral notebook. At the top of the page, she jotted down the date, Jan. 30, 2024, Moore’s initials and the name of the doctor from the insurance company to whom she’d be making her case.

She had only one chance to persuade him, and by extension Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas, to continue covering intensive outpatient care for Moore, a patient she had come to know well over the past few months.

The therapist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation from insurers, spent the next three hours cramming, as if she were studying for a big exam. She combed through Moore’s weekly suicide and depression assessments, group therapy notes and write-ups from their past few sessions together.

If you or someone you know needs help, here are a few resources:

She filled two pages with her notes: Moore had suicidal thoughts almost every day and a plan for how she would take her own life. Even though she expressed a desire to stop cutting her wrists, she still did as often as three times a week to feel the release of pain. She only had a small group of family and friends to offer support. And she was just beginning to deal with her grief and trauma over sexual and emotional abuse, but she had no healthy coping skills.

Less than two weeks earlier, the therapist’s supervisor had struck out with another BCBS doctor. During that call, the insurance company psychiatrist concluded Moore had shown enough improvement that she no longer needed intensive treatment. “You have made progress,” the denial letter from BCBS Texas read.

Moore’s denial letter from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas contradicts many of her therapist’s assessments. (Obtained and highlighted by ProPublica)

When the therapist finally got on the phone with a second insurance company doctor, she spoke as fast as she could to get across as many of her points as possible.

“The biggest concern was the abnormal thoughts — the suicidal ideation, self-harm urges — and extensive trauma history,” the therapist recalled in an interview with ProPublica. “I was really trying to emphasize that those urges were present, and they were consistent.”

She told the company doctor that if Moore could continue on her treatment plan, she would likely be able to leave the program in 10 weeks. If not, her recovery could be derailed.

The doctor wasn’t convinced. He told the therapist that he would be upholding the initial denial. Internal notes from the BCBS Texas doctors say that Moore exhibited “an absence of suicidal thoughts,” her symptoms had “stabilized” and she could “participate in a lower level of care.”

The call lasted just seven minutes.

Moore was sitting in her car during her lunch break when her therapist called to give her the news. She was shocked and had to pull herself together to resume her shift as a technician at a veterinary clinic.

“The fact that it was effective immediately,” Moore said later, “I think that was the hardest blow of it all.”

After BCBS Texas denied Moore’s treatment, her therapist, pictured here, urged the company to reconsider. (Ilana Panich-Linsman, special to ProPublica)

Many Americans must rely on insurers when they or family members are in need of higher-touch mental health treatment, such as intensive outpatient programs or round-the-clock care in a residential facility. The costs are high, and the stakes for patients often are, too. In 2019 alone, the U.S. spent more than $106.5 billion treating adults with mental illness, of which private insurance paid about a third. One 2024 study found that the average quoted cost for a month at a residential addiction treatment facility for adolescents was more than $26,000.

Health insurers frequently review patients’ progress to see if they can be moved down to a lower — and almost always cheaper — level of care. That can cut both ways. They sometimes cite a lack of progress as a reason to deny coverage, labeling patients’ conditions as chronic and asserting that they have reached their baseline level of functioning. And if they make progress, which would normally be celebrated, insurers have used that against patients to argue they no longer need the care being provided.

Their doctors are left to walk a tightrope trying to convince insurers that patients are making enough progress to stay in treatment as long as they actually need it, but not so much that the companies prematurely cut them off from care. And when insurers demand that providers spend their time justifying care, it takes them away from their patients.

“The issues that we grapple with are in the real world,” said Dr. Robert Trestman, the chair of psychiatry and behavioral medicine at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine and chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Council on Healthcare Systems and Financing. “People are sicker with more complex conditions.”

Mental health care can be particularly prone to these progress-based denials. While certain tests reveal when cancer cells are no longer present and X-rays show when bones have healed, psychiatrists say they have to determine whether someone has returned to a certain level of functioning before they can end or change their treatment. That can be particularly tricky when dealing with mental illness, which can be fluid, with a patient improving slightly one day only to worsen the next.

Though there is no way to know how often coverage gets cut off mid-treatment, ProPublica has found scores of lawsuits over the past decade in which judges have sharply criticized insurance companies for citing a patient’s improvement to deny mental health coverage. In a number of those cases, federal courts ruled that the insurance companies had broken a federal law designed to provide protections for people who get health insurance through their jobs.

Reporters reviewed thousands of pages of court documents and interviewed more than 50 insiders, lawyers, patients and providers. Over and over, people said these denials can lead to real — sometimes devastating — harm. An official at an Illinois facility with intensive mental health programs said that this past year, two patients who left before their clinicians felt they were ready due to insurance denials had attempted suicide.

Dr. Eric Plakun, a Massachusetts psychiatrist with more than 40 years of experience in residential and intensive outpatient programs, and a former board member of the American Psychiatric Association, said the “proprietary standards” insurers use as a basis for denying coverage often simply stabilize patients in crisis and “shortcut real treatment.”

Plakun offered an analogy: If someone’s house is on fire, he said, putting out the fire doesn’t restore the house. “I got a hole in the roof, and the windows have been smashed in, and all the furniture is charred, and nothing’s working electrically,” he said. “How do we achieve recovery? How do we get back to living in that home?”

Unable to pay the $350-a-day out-of-pocket cost for additional intensive outpatient treatment, Moore left her program within a week of BCBS Texas’ denial. The insurer would only cover outpatient talk therapy.

During her final day at the program, records show, Moore’s suicidal thoughts and intent to carry them out had escalated from a 7 to a 10 on a 1-to-10 scale. She was barely eating or sleeping.

A few hours after the session, Moore drove herself to a hospital and was admitted to the emergency room, accelerating a downward spiral that would eventually cost the insurer tens of thousands of dollars, more than the cost of the treatment she initially requested.

Moore’s wrists still show scars from where she was cutting herself. (Ilana Panich-Linsman, special to ProPublica) How Insurers Justify Denials

Buried in the denial letters that insurance companies send patients are a variety of expressions that convey the same idea: Improvement is a reason to deny coverage.

“You are better.” “Your child has made progress.” “You have improved.”

In one instance, a doctor working for Regence Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Oregon wrote that a patient who had been diagnosed with major depression was “sufficiently stable,” even as her own doctors wrote that she “continued to display a pattern of severe impairment” and needed round-the-clock care. A judge ruled that “a preponderance of the evidence” demonstrated that the teen’s continued residential treatment was medically necessary. The insurer said it can’t comment on the case because it ended with a confidential settlement.

In another, a doctor working for UnitedHealth Group wrote in 2019 that a teenage girl with a history of major depression who had been hospitalized after trying to take her own life by overdosing “was doing better.” The insurer denied ongoing coverage at a residential treatment facility. A judge ruled that the insurer’s determination “lacked any reasoning or citations” from the girl’s medical records and found that the insurer violated federal law. United did not comment on this case but previously argued that the girl no longer had “concerning medical issues” and didn’t need treatment in a 24-hour monitored setting.

To justify denials, the insurers cite guidelines that they use to determine how well a patient is doing and, ultimately, whether to continue paying for care. Companies, including United, have said these guidelines are independent, widely accepted and evidence-based.

Insurers most often turn to two sets: MCG (formerly known as Milliman Care Guidelines), developed by a division of the multibillion-dollar media and information company Hearst, and InterQual, produced by a unit of UnitedHealth’s mental health division, Optum. Insurers have also used guidelines they have developed themselves.

MCG Health did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Optum division that works on the InterQual guidelines said that the criteria “is a collection of established scientific evidence and medical practice intended for use as a first level screening tool” and “helps to move patients safely and efficiently through the continuum of care.”

A separate spokesperson for Optum also said the company’s “priority is ensuring the people we serve receive safe and effective care for their individual needs.” A Regence spokesperson said that the company does “not make coverage decisions based on cost or length of stay,” and that its “number one priority is to ensure our members have access to the care they need when they need it.”

In interviews, several current and former insurance employees from multiple companies said that they were required to prioritize the proprietary guidelines their company used, even if their own clinical judgment pointed in the opposite direction.

“It’s very hard when you come up against all these rules that are kind of setting you up to fail the patient,” said Brittainy Lindsey, a licensed mental health counselor who worked at the Anthem subsidiary Beacon and at Humana for a total of six years before leaving the industry in 2022. In her role, Lindsey said, she would suggest approving or denying coverage, which — for the latter — required a staff doctor’s sign-off. She is now a mental health consultant for behavioral health businesses and clinicians.

A spokesperson for Elevance Health, formerly known as Anthem, said Lindsey’s “recollection is inaccurate, both in terms of the processes that were in place when she was a Beacon employee, and how we operate today.” The spokesperson said “clinical judgment by a physician — which Ms. Lindsey was not — always takes precedence over guidelines.”

In an emailed statement, a Humana spokesperson said the company’s clinician reviewers “are essential to evaluating the facts and circumstances of each case.” But, the spokesperson said, “having objective criteria is also important to provide checks and balances and consistently comply with” federal requirements.

The guidelines are a pillar of the health insurance system known as utilization management, which paves the way for coverage denials. The process involves reviewing patients’ cases against relevant criteria every handful of days or so to assess if the company will continue paying for treatment, requiring providers and patients to repeatedly defend the need for ongoing care.

Federal judges have criticized insurance company doctors for using such guidelines in cases where they were not actually relevant to the treatment being requested or for “solely” basing their decisions on them.

Wit v. United Behavioral Health, a class-action lawsuit involving a subsidiary of UnitedHealth, has become one of the most consequential mental health cases of this century. In that case, a federal judge in California concluded that a number of United’s in-house guidelines did not adhere to generally accepted standards of care. The judge found that the guidelines allowed the company to wrongly deny coverage for certain mental health and substance use services the moment patients’ immediate problems improved. He ruled that the insurer would need to change its practices. United appealed the ruling on grounds other than the court’s findings about the defects in its guidelines, and a panel of judges partially upheld the decision. The case has been sent back to the district court for further proceedings.

Largely in response to the Wit case, nine states have passed laws requiring health insurers to use guidelines that align with the leading standards of mental health care, like those developed by nonprofit professional organizations.

Cigna has said that it “has chosen not to adopt private, proprietary medical necessity criteria” like MCG. But, according to a review of lawsuits, denial letters have continued to reference MCG. One federal judge in Utah called out the company, writing that Cigna doctors “reviewed the claims under medical necessity guidelines it had disavowed.” Cigna did not respond to specific questions about this.

Timothy Stock, one of the BCBS doctors who denied Moore’s request to cover ongoing care, had cited MCG guidelines when determining she had improved enough — something judges noted he had done before. In 2016, Stock upheld a decision on appeal to deny continued coverage for a teenage girl who was in residential treatment for major depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety. Pointing to the guidelines, Stock concluded she had shown enough improvement.

The patient’s family sued the insurer, alleging it had wrongly denied coverage. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois argued that there was evidence that showed the patient had been improving. But, a federal judge found the insurer misstated its significance. The judge partially ruled in the family’s favor, zeroing in on Stock and another BCBS doctor’s use of improvement to recommend denying additional care.

“The mere incidence of some improvement does not mean treatment was no longer medically necessary,” the Illinois judge wrote.

In another case, BCBS Illinois denied coverage for a girl with a long history of mental illness just a few weeks into her stay at a residential treatment facility, noting that she was “making progressive improvements.” Stock upheld the denial after an appeal.

Less than two weeks after Stock’s decision, court records show, she cut herself on the arm and leg with a broken light bulb. The insurer defended the company’s reasoning by noting that the girl “consistently denied suicidal ideation,” but a judge wrote that medical records show the girl was “not forthcoming” with her doctors about her behaviors. The judge ruled against the insurer, writing that Stock and another BCBS doctor “unreasonably ignored the weight of the medical evidence” showing that the girl required residential treatment.

Stock declined to comment. A spokesperson for BCBS said the company’s doctors who review requests for mental health coverage are board certified psychiatrists with multiple years of practice experience. The spokesperson added that the psychiatrists review all information received “from the provider, program and members to ensure members are receiving benefits for the right care, at the right place and at the right time.”

The BCBS spokesperson did not address specific questions related to Moore or Stock. The spokesperson said that the examples ProPublica asked about “are not indicative of the experience of the vast majority of our members,” and that it is committed to providing “access to quality, cost-effective physical and behavioral health care.”

A Lifelong Struggle

A former contemporary dancer with a bright smile and infectious laugh, Moore’s love of animals is eclipsed only by her affinity for plants. She moved from Indiana to Austin, Texas, about six years ago and started as a receptionist at a clinic before working her way up to technician.

Moore’s depression has been a constant in her life. It began as a child, when, she said, she was sexually and emotionally abused. She was able to manage as she grew up, getting through high school and attending Indiana University. But, she said, she fell back into a deep sadness after she learned in 2022 that the church she found comfort in as a college student turned out to be what she and others deemed a cult. In September of last year, she began an intensive outpatient program, which included multiple group and individual therapy sessions every week.

Moore, 32, had spent much of the past eight months in treatment for severe depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety when BCBS said it would no longer pay for the program in January.

The denial had come to her without warning.

“I was starting to get to the point where I did have some hope, and I was like, maybe I can see an actual end to this,” Moore said. “And it was just cut off prematurely.”

At the Austin emergency room where she drove herself after her treatment stopped, her heart raced. She was given medication as a sedative for her anxiety. According to hospital records she provided to ProPublica, Moore’s symptoms were brought on after “insurance said they would no longer pay.”

A hospital social worker frantically tried to get her back into the intensive outpatient program.

“That’s the sad thing,” said Kandyce Walker, the program’s director of nursing and chief operating officer, who initially argued Moore’s case with BCBS Texas. “To have her go from doing a little bit better to ‘I’m going to kill myself.’ It is so frustrating, and it’s heartbreaking.”

After the denial and her brief admission to the hospital emergency department in January, Moore began slicing her wrists more frequently, sometimes twice a day. She began to down six to seven glasses of wine a night.

“I really had thought and hoped that with the amount of work I’d put in, that I at least would have had some fumes to run on,” she said.

She felt embarrassed when she realized she had nothing to show for months of treatment. The skills she’d just begun to practice seemed to disappear under the weight of her despair. She considered going into debt to cover the cost of ongoing treatment but began to think that she’d rather end her life.

“In my mind,” she said, “that was the most practical thing to do.”

Whenever the thought crossed her mind — and it usually did multiple times a day — she remembered that she had promised her therapist that she wouldn’t.

Moore’s therapist encouraged her to continue calling BCBS Texas to try to restore coverage for more intensive treatment. In late February, about five weeks after Stock’s denial, records show that the company approved a request that sent her back to the same facility and at the same level of care as before.

But by that time, her condition had deteriorated so severely that it wasn’t enough.

Eight days later, Moore was admitted to a psychiatric hospital about half an hour from Austin. Medical records paint a harrowing picture of her condition. She had a plan to overdose and the medicine to do it. The doctor wrote that she required monitoring and had “substantial ongoing suicidality.” The denial continued to torment her. She told her doctor that her condition worsened after “insurance stopped covering” her treatment.

Her few weeks stay at the psychiatric hospital cost $38,945.06. The remaining 10 weeks of treatment at the intensive outpatient program — the treatment BCBS denied — would have cost about $10,000.

Bracelets and a watch cover Moore’s scars from cutting herself. (Ilana Panich-Linsman, special to ProPublica)

Moore was discharged from the hospital in March and went back into the program Stock had initially said she no longer needed.

It marked the third time she was admitted to the intensive outpatient program.

A few months later, as Moore picked at her lunch, her oversized glasses sliding down the bridge of her nose every so often, she wrestled with another painful realization. Had the BCBS doctors not issued the denial, she probably would have completed her treatment by now.

“I was really looking forward to that,” Moore said softly. As she spoke, she played with the thick stack of bracelets hiding the scars on her wrists.

A few weeks later, that small facility closed in part because of delays and denials from insurance companies, according to staff and billing records. Moore found herself calling around to treatment facilities to see which ones would accept her insurance. She finally found one, but in October, her depression had become so severe that she needed to be stepped up to a higher level of care.

Moore was able to get a leave of absence from work to attend treatment, which she worried would affect the promotion she had been working toward. To tide her over until she could go back to work, she used up the money her mother sent for her 30th birthday.

She smiles less than she did even a few months ago. When her roommates ask her to hang out downstairs, she usually declines. She has taken some steps forward, though. She stopped drinking and cutting her wrists, allowing scar tissue to cover her wounds.

But she’s still grieving what the denial took from her.

“I believed I could get better,” she said recently, her voice shaking. “With just a little more time, I could discharge, and I could live life finally.”

We’re Investigating Mental Health Care Access. Share Your Insights.

Kirsten Berg contributed research.

by Maya Miller and Duaa Eldeib

Our Year in Visual Journalism

1 month 2 weeks ago

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Photography by Stephanie Mei-Ling for “New Yorkers Were Choked, Beaten and Tased by NYPD Officers. The Commissioner Buried Their Cases.” Photo editing by Andrea Wise. Photography by Danielle Villasana for “Despite Persistent Warnings, Texas Rushed to Remove Millions From Medicaid. That Move Cost Eligible Residents Care.” Photo editing by Andrea Wise. Photography by Nydia Blas for “Life of the Mother.” Photo editing by Andrea Wise. Photography by Danielle Villasana for “Life of the Mother.” Photo editing by Andrea Wise. Embroidery and collage by Han Cao and photography by Akilah Townsend for “Maylia and Jack: A Story of Teens and Fentanyl.” Art direction by Alex Bandoni. Design and development by Zisiga Mukulu for “Still Born.” Photo editing by Peter DiCampo. Additional development by Jason Kao.

Watch video ➜

Photography by Sarahbeth Maney for “Utah Bills Itself as ‘Family-Friendly’ Even as Lawmakers Have Long Neglected Child Care.” Photo editing by Boyzell Hosey. Illustration by Nate Sweitzer for “The Genesis of Christian Nationalism.” Art direction by Peter DiCampo. Design and development by Anna Donlan. Photography by Stacy Kranitz for “The Year After a Denied Abortion.” Photo editing by Andrea Wise. Design by Anna Donlan and Allen Tan. Illustration by Dadu Shin for “The FDA Hasn’t Inspected This Drug Factory After 7 Recalls for the Same Flaw, 1 Potentially Deadly.” Art direction by Andrea Wise. Photography by Tony Luong for “Why I Left the Network.” Art direction by Alex Bandoni. Design by Zisiga Mukulu and Allen Tan. Illustration by Hokyoung Kim for “‘It Feels Impossible to Stay’: The U.S. Needs Wildland Firefighters More Than Ever, but the Federal Government Is Losing Them.” Art direction by Alex Bandoni and Lisa Larson-Walker. Photography by Adria Malcolm for “Record-Setting Blazes Are Growing More Common. Here’s What Survivors of One Want You to Know.” Photo editing by Peter DiCampo. Design by Zisiga Mukulu. Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni for “What’s Missing From Railroad Safety Data? Dead Workers and Severed Limbs.”; “Even When Big Cases Intersect With Their Families’ Interests, Many Judges Choose Not to Recuse”; and “Multiple Trump Witnesses Have Received Significant Financial Benefits From His Businesses, Campaign.” Development by Chris Zubak-Skees for “What No One Tells You About Car Loan Deferments.” Design by Lucas Waldron.

Watch video ➜

Illustrations by Michael Haddid for “A Supreme Court Justice Warned That a Ruling Would Cause ‘Large-Scale Disruption.’ The Effects Are Already Being Felt.” Art direction by Alex Bandoni. Photography by Sarahbeth Maney for “In a Town Full of Segregation Academies, One Black Family Grapples With the Best School Choice for Their Daughter.” Photo editing by Boyzell Hosey. Video by Liz Moughon for “Cookie & Zo’e: A Georgia Family Wrestles With School Choice 60 Years After the Start of Desegregation”

Watch video ➜

Illustration by Dominic Bodden for “The Unbefriended.” Art direction by Andrea Wise. Photography by Haruka Sakaguchi for “How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe.” Photo editing by Peter DiCampo. Illustration by Max Guther for “Selling a Mirage.” Art direction by Alex Bandoni and Anna Donlan. Design and development by Anna Donlan.

Watch video ➜

Graphics by Lucas Waldron for “Selling a Mirage.”

Watch video ➜

Illustration by Peter Arkle for “The American Oil Industry’s Playbook, Illustrated: How Drillers Offload Costly Cleanup Onto the Public.” Art direction by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photography by Sarahbeth Maney for “Ten Years After the Flint Water Crisis, Distrust and Anger Linger.” Photo editing by Alex Bandoni. Illustrations by Matt Rota and animation by Henrike Lendowski for “Swept Away.” Art direction by Lisa Larson-Walker.

Watch video ➜

Illustrations by Matt Rota for “Swept Away.” Design and development by Ruth Talbot and Zisiga Mukulu. Additional design and development by Al Shaw. Art direction by Alex Bandoni and Lisa Larson-Walker. Illustration by Eva Redamonti for “Decrepit Pipes Put Jackson, Mississippi, on the Edge of Catastrophe. State Regulators Didn’t Act.” Art direction by Peter DiCampo. Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni for “Battle Over Ballot Drop Boxes Rages On in Wisconsin as Officials Put Them at Center of Election Integrity Debate.” Video by Gerardo del Valle and Perla Trevizo for “How the Race for Sheriff in Del Rio, Texas, Became a Referendum on Immigration.”

Watch video ➜

Photography by Louise Johns for “‘Eat What You Kill.’” Photo editing by Alex Bandoni. Photography by Jake Dockins for “A Pair of Billionaire Preachers Built the Most Powerful Political Machine in Texas. That’s Just the Start.” Photo editing by Alex Bandoni. Illustration by Jonathan Djob Nkondo for “Nike Pledged to Shrink Its Carbon Footprint. It Just Slashed the Staff Charged With Making That Happen.” Art direction by Peter DiCampo.

Watch video ➜

Illustration by Erik Carter for “After Nike Leaders Promised Climate Action, Their Corporate Jets Kept Flying — and Polluting.” Art direction by Peter DiCampo and Lisa Larson-Walker.

Watch video ➜

Photography by Matt Eich for “The Ghosts of John Tanton.” Photo editing by Alex Bandoni. Collages by Vanessa Saba for “‘I Don’t Want to Die’: Needing Mental Health Care, He Got Trapped in His Insurer’s Ghost Network.” Art direction by Andrea Wise. Design and development by Lucas Waldron for “Documents Show Internal Clash Before U.S. Officials Pushed to Weaken Toddler Formula Rules.”

Watch video ➜

Photograph by Salgu Wissmath for “Trump’s Near Sweep of Texas Border Counties Shows a Shift to the Right for Latino Voters.” Photo editing by Andrea Wise. Photography by Zaydee Sanchez for “The New Immigration.” Photo editing by Boyzell Hosey and Cengiz Yar. Photography by Fred Ramos for “Held for Ransom in Animal Pens, Migrants Face Mass Kidnappings as U.S. and Mexico Ramp Up Enforcement.” Photo editing by Boyzell Hosey and Cengiz Yar. Photography by Shuran Huang for “The U.S. Business Community Used to Be a Force for Immigration Reform. What Happened?” Photo editing by Boyzell Hosey and Cengiz Yar. Photography by Sofia Aldinio for “What Happened in Whitewater.” Photo editing by Alex Bandoni. Photograph by Kathleen Flynn for “When a Florida Farmer-Legislator Turned Against Immigration, the Consequences Were Severe. But Not for Him.” Photo editing by Boyzell Hosey and Cengiz Yar. Photography by Edmund D. Fountain for “The Story of One Mississippi County Shows How Private Schools Are Exacerbating Segregation.” Photo editing by Boyzell Hosey and Cengiz Yar. Illustration by Edel Rodriguez for “What You Need to Know If You’re Hurt While Working on a Wisconsin Dairy Farm.” Art direction by Alex Bandoni. Video by Gerardo del Valle for “‘The Right Way’: From Venezuela to Juárez and New York to Denver, One Family’s Asylum Journey.”

Watch video ➜

Illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker for “A 13-Year-Old With Autism Got Arrested After His Backpack Sparked Fear. Only His Stuffed Bunny Was Inside.” Photography by Loren Elliot for “Three Days of Tragedy: How a VA Clinic’s Inability to Help Veterans in Crisis Destroyed Two Families.” Photo editing by Alex Bandoni and Anna Donlan. Collage by Joan Wong for “Without Knowledge or Consent.” Art direction, design and development by Anna Donlan.

Watch video ➜

Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni for “How Trump Plans to Seize the Power of the Purse From Congress.” Illustrations by Stefano Summo for “Fields of Green.” Art direction by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photography by Greg Kahn for “Microsoft Chose Profit Over Security and Left U.S. Government Vulnerable to Russian Hack, Whistleblower Says.” Photo editing by Andrea Wise. Illustration by Lucinda Rogers for “How Much Formaldehyde Is in Your Car, Your Kitchen or Your Furniture? Here’s What Our Testing Found.” Art direction by Andrea Wise.

Watch video ➜

Illustration by Richard Chance for “Armed and Underground: Inside the Turbulent, Secret World of an American Militia.” Art direction by Alex Bandoni. Photography by Adriana Zehbrauskas for “Arizona Cracked Down on Medicaid Fraud That Targeted Native Americans. It Left Patients Without Care.” Photo editing by Lisa Larson-Walker. Illustration by Simon Bailly for “Oregon’s Largest Natural Gas Company Said It Was Going Green. It Sells as Much Fossil Fuel as Before.” Art direction by Peter DiCampo. Photography by Jenn Ackerman for “EPA Scientists Said They Were Pressured to Downplay Harms From Chemicals. A Watchdog Found They Were Retaliated Against.” Photo editing by Andrea Wise.

Visual Storytelling Department
  • Boyzell Hosey, senior editor, visual storytelling
Visuals
  • Lisa Larson-Walker, art director
  • Andrea Wise, visual strategy editor
  • Alex Bandoni, visuals editor
  • Peter DiCampo, visuals editor
  • Cengiz Yar, visuals editor
  • Sarahbeth Maney, visual fellow
  • José Ginarte, temporary visuals editor
  • Tiffany Herring, temporary visuals editor
  • Lauren Joseph, temporary visuals editor
Graphics
  • Lena V. Groeger, graphics director
  • Anna Donlan, interactive story designer
  • Zisiga Mukulu, interactive story designer
  • Lucas Waldron, graphics editor
Video
  • Almudena Toral, executive producer
  • Lisa Riordan Seville, senior producer
  • Katie Campbell, video journalist and filmmaker
  • Mauricio Rodríguez Pons, video journalist and filmmaker
  • Nadia Sussman, video journalist and filmmaker
  • Margaret Cheatham Williams, video and film editor
  • Gerardo del Valle, video and film fellow
  • Liz Moughon, video and film fellow
Product
  • David Sleight, senior director, design and product
  • Ben Werdmuller, senior director of technology
  • Jeff Frankl, editorial experience designer
  • Allen Tan, editorial experience designer
  • Emenike Godfreey-Igwe, associate product developer
  • Artemis Sparks, principal engineer, devops
  • Alanna McLafferty, senior product engineer
  • Dan Phiffer, senior engineer
  • Sarah Glen, product manager
  • Melody Kramer, product manager
News Apps
  • Ken Schwencke, senior editor, data and news apps
  • Al Shaw, senior news apps developer
  • Alec Glassford, senior engineer, news apps and product
  • Sergio Hernandez, news apps developer
  • Nat Lash, news apps developer
  • Andrea Suozzo, news apps developer
  • Ruth Talbot, news apps developer
  • Brandon Roberts, news apps developer

by ProPublica’s Visual Storytelling Department

Insurers Continue to Rely on Doctors Whose Judgments Have Been Criticized by Courts

1 month 2 weeks ago

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article contains descriptions of mental illness, eating disorders and suicide.

In a New Orleans courtroom one afternoon this April, three federal appeals court judges questioned a lawyer for the country’s largest health insurance company.

They wanted to know why United Healthcare had denied coverage for a 15-year-old girl named Emily Dwyer, whose anorexia had taken such a toll on her body that she had arrived at a residential treatment facility wearing her 8-year-old sister’s jeans.

If you or someone you know needs help:

  • Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988
  • Text the Crisis Text Line from anywhere in the U.S. to reach a crisis counselor: 741741

The company’s lawyer explained that United’s denial came after three separate psychiatrists working on behalf of the insurer concluded that Dwyer was no longer engaging in concerning behaviors — not over-exercising and not struggling as much at meals. As a result, United’s doctors agreed that, after five months, she didn’t need the additional treatment at the facility that her own doctors said was essential.

The judges on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals didn’t appear to buy it. Judge Andrew Oldham said he didn’t understand how the insurance company’s lawyer could stand by a defense that “seems to be not true.”

“The record is teeming, teeming with concerning behaviors,” a frustrated Oldham said.

Listen to Judge Andrew Oldham respond to a lawyer for United Healthcare

Oldham, according to a recording of the hearing, ticked off a list. Dwyer, he said, compulsively checked her body. She altered her gait so that her thighs didn’t touch as she walked. And during a three-day weekend meant to see how she would do away from the facility, she lost a couple of the hard-earned pounds she had gained while in treatment.

“How in the world can you say, ‘Oh, well, that’s not a problem’?” Oldham, who had been named to the appeals court by President Donald Trump, asked at the hearing. United’s approach, the judge said, essentially boiled down to “We’ll just gamble with her life.”

Many Americans have faced the denial of mental health treatment by their insurance companies — at times despite vivid evidence of the risk such decisions pose. In most cases, patients don’t appeal. But in a tiny percentage, patients and their families decide to fight the denials in federal court, setting up a David-versus-Goliath battle where insurers frequently have the upper hand.

Editor’s Note

Over the past two years, ProPublica and other news outlets have reported on how insurers deny coverage for millions of Americans, both for physical and mental health treatment. As part of our reporting process, we seek comment from people named in our stories. Following the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, each of the companies we reported on for this story asked us not to name their doctors out of concern for their safety; the doctors who responded to our questions made similar requests. We take concerns for safety seriously and weigh them against the need for transparency and accountability. We decided to name only those doctors whose work was examined in multiple lawsuits and who were cited in publicly available court records.

The cases, ProPublica found, expose in blunt terms how insurance companies can put their clients’ health in jeopardy, in ways that some judges have ruled “arbitrary and capricious.” To do so, court records reveal, the insurers have turned to a coterie of psychiatrists and have continued relying on them even after one or more of their decisions have been criticized or overturned in court.

In their rulings, judges have found that insurers, in part through their psychiatrists, have acted in ways that are “puzzling,” “disingenuous” and even “dishonest.” The companies have engaged in “selective readings” of the medical evidence, “shut their eyes” to medical opinions that opposed their conclusions and made “baseless arguments” in court. Doctors reviewing the same cases have even repeated nearly identical language in denial letters, casting “significant doubt” on whether they’re independent.

Some doctors made critical errors, contradicted by the very records they claimed they reviewed, according to thousands of pages of court documents, interviews and insurance records. Ruling after ruling reveals how they failed to meaningfully engage with patients’ families or medical providers or to adequately explain their decisions.

And when insurers have faced pushback over why they’re denying treatment, they have sometimes abandoned one rationale and shifted to other grounds to deny coverage.

In dozens of court cases, ProPublica found, judges ruled that insurance companies had violated a federal law meant to protect people who get health insurance through their jobs. The companies in several cases also broke a provision in the law designed to end discrimination between coverage of mental health and medical claims. As a federal judge wrote of one company last year, the insurer was “applying separate and unequal treatment limitations” to mental health patients.

The U.S. Department of Labor, which regulates health insurance plans for about 136 million Americans, is responsible for making sure that insurance companies are loyal to the patients, not just to the company’s bottom line.

Grant Vaught, a spokesperson for the federal agency, said it has opened “some investigations into the conduct of the individual doctors and psychiatrists employed by insurers,” but declined to specify an exact number. One case resulted in the removal of a doctor and the review organization they worked for. Vaught did not elaborate on whether physicians in any other cases faced professional repercussions. Agency officials said they don’t have the budget or staff to adequately police insurers. Despite repeated requests to Congress for more funding and stronger enforcement tools, the agency has not received much of what it asked for.

ProPublica reached out to six insurance companies that court records show have continued to rely on doctors who, judges found, wrongly recommended denying mental health coverage. The doctors aren’t named as parties in the lawsuits, but their decisions are included in complaints, exhibits and judgments. None of the insurers responded to questions about whether they take those repeated cases into account — by, say, refraining from using those doctors — or whether there’s a need for reform.

Optum — the United unit responsible for mental health — and the other insurance companies said they employ licensed physicians to conduct reviews. An Optum spokesperson said the company requires its doctors to undergo testing each year to make sure they are issuing appropriate coverage decisions, and the company conducts regular audits of doctors’ decisions.

“Our priority is ensuring the people we serve receive safe and effective care for their individual needs,” the spokesperson said.

These denials, which frequently come when patients are in the thick of treatment, can have grave consequences. Patients have relapsed into alcohol or drug use, become violent or died after prematurely leaving mental health facilities.

To keep Emily in treatment, the Dwyers would have to burn through their savings and refinance the mortgage on their home in Austin, Texas. They also wrote to the insurance company, hoping to persuade it to continue paying, but United wouldn’t budge.

Her parents came to suspect that the company had broken the law. But if they wanted to prove it, they’d have to go to court.

A “Striking Lack of Care”

Taking on United wasn’t going to be easy.

Dwyer’s first denial had come in June 2015, after her treatment team couldn’t convince a United staff psychiatrist that she was critically ill. At the time, Dwyer’s body image was distorted and she constantly shook her legs to burn calories. Her red blood count, hemoglobin levels and blood pressure were all low.

“I was far from being ready to go home and maintain an active recovery,” Dwyer said in a recent interview. (Ilana Panich-Linsman, special to ProPublica)

Dwyer still suffered from many of the same symptoms when, about one month later, United tapped another company doctor for an additional review, as insurers often do. By then, her family had already reluctantly agreed to move her down from residential treatment to partial hospitalization, but had to pay about $350 a day for costs the insurance company would not cover.

Then, the insurer denied even partial hospitalization.

The Dwyers didn’t give up, and the facility filed an appeal. For that review, United turned to Prest & Associates, a firm that health insurers hire to review cases like Dwyer’s. The firm referred the case to psychiatrist Dr. Barbara Center.

Dwyer’s psychologist, her primary care provider and the Austin doctor who diagnosed her eating disorder got on the phone with Center and described the disastrous weekend away from the facility, according to court records. During that weekend, while Dwyer was shopping with her mom, she broke down in tears when she saw her reflection in a dressing room mirror. Her doctors pleaded with United to continue covering her treatment.

But Center recommended that United uphold the denial.

Center specialized in child and adolescent psychiatry after graduating from medical school. She joined Prest & Associates as a reviewer in 2000 and within five years was promoted to chief medical officer of the company, according to her resume. She is licensed as a doctor in at least 20 states. In some cases, her reviews took place early on in the process and were a jumping-off point for other doctors; in others, she served as the final word. In a 2016 sworn deposition, Center said that she earned a base salary, plus additional pay contingent on productivity, or the time it takes her to review a case.

In the 15 years before the Dwyers’ April hearing in the federal appeals court, Center’s recommendations were referenced in at least 12 lawsuits around the country that alleged insurers had wrongly denied insurance coverage to patients who needed intensive mental health care. Four of those lawsuits ended in rulings in favor of the insurer, in which judges found that Center’s denial “was not deficient,” as alleged; the insurers’ “decisions were reasonable and appropriate”; and the plan “correctly denied benefits.”

Out of the other eight cases ProPublica identified, four ended in confidential settlements with no admission of wrongdoing by the insurers, one in a partial judgment in favor of the insurer and a partial settlement, and three in judgments finding the insurance company had improperly denied coverage, one of which was appealed and then settled.

The most critical of those rulings came in 2014, the year before Center reviewed Dwyer’s appeal. Center was assigned to assess the case of a 43-year-old woman with an eating disorder, severe depression and suicidal thoughts. A United doctor had already recommended denying a request for the woman to remain at a California hospital.

Center wrote that the woman was not suicidal when, her medical records showed, she was actively planning to either overdose or starve herself to death. Center also incorrectly listed her weight, a key detail given her anorexia. And she undercounted the number of laxatives the woman was taking, saying she took 75 to 100 a day when the treatment notes repeatedly said 130.

The case made it all the way up to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where, in a unanimous opinion, the judges wrote that “Center’s ‘independent’ evaluation and coverage decision were based on obvious factual errors.” The court wrote that a third doctor quoted nearly verbatim from Center’s erroneous report. The judges concluded there was a “striking lack of care” by all three psychiatrists.

The Labor Department filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case, one of only 15 it filed that year related to the federal employee benefits law, that said Center’s case summary “contained errors on practically every aspect” of the woman’s condition and treatment.

Timothy Hauser, then an associate solicitor at the Labor Department, was one of the attorneys who signed the brief. In an interview with ProPublica, he called the facts of the 9th Circuit case “quite disturbing.” He said the agency has tried to address the issue of doctors whose denials repeatedly appear in lawsuits by filing amicus briefs and updating regulations. The agency spokesperson said the department cannot comment on specific investigations into doctors, including Center.

But with just a few hundred investigators and nearly 4 million benefit plans, Hauser said the agency is “necessarily selective in opening investigations” that could lead to fines or penalties. The department also has no legal authority over insurers’ hiring or personnel decisions. Insurers, he stressed, have a responsibility when it comes to the doctors they hire.

Lisa Kantor, the lawyer who represented the hospital in the 9th Circuit case, said that after reading the appeals court’s ruling, she assumed insurance companies would stop working with Center.

“I really thought after that decision, which was quite a while ago, I’d never see her name again,” Kantor said. But less than a year later, a new client sent her a denial letter citing Center’s review.

Over the next decade, United and other insurance companies across the country hired Center even as her recommendations to deny continued to be singled out in court cases.

When Center sat for the sworn deposition in 2016, she acknowledged that she had not reviewed the patient’s full medical records when deciding to deny coverage. Center said she generally reviews only the information sent to her by the insurance company that hires her; in this case, she said the insurer had not sent her the patient’s complete records.

Determining a doctor’s denial rate is difficult because it’s not publicly tracked. ProPublica obtained data from a company representing more than 100 facilities in their appeals with insurance companies. While the data is not necessarily representative of the thousands of other mental health facilities across the country, it provides a small window into Center’s work. According to an analysis of this data, Center’s rate for recommending denials over the last three years was about 90%, compared with an overall rate of about 55%.

Center declined to comment. But in a statement, a Prest & Associates spokesperson said that Center is committed to providing the highest standards of service. The spokesperson added that the firm “reviews complex, nuanced behavioral health cases” at the request of insurance providers using “standardized guidelines identified by the insurance provider.” The reviewers consider medical records, case notes and, when requested by the insurers, interviews with patient providers, but a patient’s full records are not typically made available to them.

The firm, the spokesperson said, provides advisory opinions on whether treatment is medically necessary but does not usually decide whether to terminate coverage. In the vast majority of cases, that’s done by the insurer.

“Prest and its licensed healthcare professionals have not been sued in relation to their medical necessity review work,” the spokesperson said. “No Prest reviewer — including Dr. Center — has been sued for wrongfully denying coverage, as Prest is not responsible for benefit determinations.” And as a contractor, the spokesperson said, the company isn’t “privy to information related to litigation involving cases reviewed by Prest.”

The spokesperson for United’s mental health arm, Optum, did not respond to specific questions about Dwyer’s lawsuit or Center.

Not Considered the Practice of Medicine

Having the weight of an MD behind a decision can be powerful, but lawyers and judges who’ve handled these sorts of cases say it can be misleading. Although doctors ultimately determine whether to cut off insurance coverage for a particular treatment, those decisions are generally not considered the practice of medicine and therefore cannot be challenged in a malpractice lawsuit. The doctors advising insurance companies can’t be individually sued on medical grounds, even if something goes wrong after the denial. As a result, their names are cited in lawsuits filed against the insurers, but they are not defendants in suits brought by people denied insurance.

Four lawyers who spoke to ProPublica said seeing the same insurance company doctors come up in case after case signaled that they may be improperly denying coverage, though the lawyers stressed that the doctors work within a system designed by the insurers. They said each case must be examined individually to assess whether, or to what degree, a psychiatrist erred.

“There are certain lists of doctors that are repeat players. We see them over and over,” said Brian King, a Utah attorney who sues insurers for wrongfully denying mental health claims. “When we see those reviewers, it makes us more skeptical about whether a full and fair review has been provided.”

King said many of his cases end in settlements — with confidentiality clauses that prevent the parties from disclosing the terms — in large part because families want to avoid the uncertainty of going to court and a process that often lasts several years. Residential treatment can cost families well into six figures; based on his experience, King said families who settle can expect to recover at least half of what they paid.

For lawyers as well as families, identifying doctors and their denial histories is challenging given a lack of public information. That leaves lawsuits as one of the few windows into their work records.

“That information is probably the best we have, but it’s patently inadequate,” said D. Brian Hufford, a New York lawyer who focuses on health insurance class-action suits.

In addition, multiple doctors typically weigh in on the same case during its different stages. Some denial letters don’t even list the doctors’ names.

To identify some doctors whose denials are repeatedly cited, ProPublica examined insurance letters and interviewed dozens of lawyers, mental health providers and reviewers. A national company that conducts appeals on behalf of mental health facilities also shared internal data tracking appeal calls with insurers. ProPublica then ran the doctors’ names through legal databases and reviewed each lawsuit.

One of those doctors was Cigna’s Dr. Mohsin Qayyum, whose coverage recommendations have been cited in at least 17 lawsuits that allege wrongful denial of coverage by the insurer. Eleven of the 17 ended in settlements, in which Cigna denied allegations of wrongdoing. Judges ruled in Cigna’s favor in four cases, though two of those were appealed and then settled. One case was partially ruled in favor of Cigna and partially settled. And one ended in a judgment against Cigna.

In one of the two cases where judges ruled in Cigna’s favor without a settlement, a judge wrote that the reviewing physicians — including Qayyum — “acted reasonably and in good faith.” In the other, the judge wrote that while the record paints a picture of the patient as “troubled and in need of mental health treatment,” the court could not say that Cigna’s decision not to cover treatment was unreasonable “given the deferential standard this Court must apply.”

In the case where a judge ruled against Cigna, Qayyum had upheld the denial of coverage for a teenage boy with depression, substance use disorder and high anxiety. The judge wrote that the company’s denials failed to engage with the information and assessments that the patient’s providers had submitted. She also found that the denial letter misstated the level of care the patient was actually seeking. As a result, the company acted “arbitrarily and capriciously,” a key legal threshold in these cases.

In an email, Qayyum wrote that he is not a named party in any of the 17 lawsuits and stressed that settlements do not mean he or Cigna improperly denied a requested service. He said his approval rates are “in line” with his peers’, though he would not say what those rates are. “As a board-certified psychiatrist for 26 years, I am proud of the work I do every day, as both a clinician in my private practice, and a medical director at Cigna,” Qayyum wrote.

A Cigna spokesperson said its doctors “are committed to improving the health of patients.” If a denial is ultimately overturned, the spokesperson said that the company’s clinical leaders “use it as a learning opportunity” and meet with the doctor to review cases. The spokesperson said the company provides mentorship and coaching opportunities, requires its doctors to attend case studies and expects them to “perform a thorough and independent review of the services being requested.”

The spokesperson added that the company is concerned that ProPublica’s reporting on lawsuits, “some dating back nearly a decade … is designed to paint a deeply biased picture of medical directors in our industry.” The spokesperson also said the company’s “approach to behavioral health access and treatment has evolved substantially as the landscape and the clinical evidence has evolved.”

Insurers have tried to defend against lawsuits by pointing out that multiple doctors all reached the decision to deny coverage. But judges have criticized doctors for rubber-stamping denials and for “multiple levels of deficient arbitrary and capricious determinations.” Just last year, a judge wrote that “three deficient denials considered together does not amount to substantial evidence to save any one of them.”

In interviews with ProPublica, federal judges criticized a system that fails to address problems that arise in court case after court case. They faulted the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, which governs many insurance claims in court, for not allowing for punitive damages, the sort that can rise into the millions of dollars and deter companies from bad conduct.

To one federal judge, who like others spoke about cases on condition of anonymity, doctors and the insurance companies they work for essentially get off scot-free. “They might have to pay 10 claims,” the judge said, “but if they can avoid paying a thousand claims, then why would they change anything?”

In the summer of 2023, United’s decision-making led one federal judge in Utah to quote Alice from the famed “Through the Looking-Glass.” The insurer had reversed course on why it was denying coverage for a 13-year-old boy with autism. United first said that the facility where the boy was being treated wasn’t a licensed residential treatment center. It was. Then the company said the facility primarily offered educational services. It didn’t.

United’s argument, Judge Bruce Jenkins wrote, called to mind Alice asking “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

He went on to write that it sometimes appears the insurer’s only duty is to “preserve the plan’s financial assets rather than offering aid to the plan’s human assets (its members and beneficiaries).”

An Uphill Battle

For years, Emily Dwyer hid her eating disorder from her family. She found ways to flush food down the toilet or convince her parents that she was going for a walk when she was actually retrieving sneakers she had stashed in the neighbor’s hedges and exhausting herself on hourlong runs.

At 5’2”, she was not to be underestimated. The oldest of four girls, she excelled at almost everything. Straight A’s in her liberal arts and science magnet school. A lively friend group. Medals in cross-country. Experts have found that many anorexia patients are high achievers who set nearly impossible standards for themselves. That was the case for Dwyer, who said her extreme drive included succeeding at her eating disorder.

By January 2015, her parents pulled her out of school. They could finally see through the lies she was telling them about having already eaten at school or needing to stay through dinner to work on a project. If she ate at all, it would take her hours to get through a meal. When her family was sleeping, she would wake up at 3 a.m. to secretly exercise in her bedroom.

They took her to Dr. Ed Tyson, who specializes in eating disorders and who diagnosed Dwyer with anorexia. He told her parents she was in danger and desperately needed residential treatment. He made it clear that the treatment would be successful only if she completed it.

In February, when the Dwyers made the trip from Austin to an eating disorder treatment center near the mountains of Utah, Emily weighed 75 pounds. Records show her body mass index, which compares someone’s weight relative to their height, was dangerously low at 13.9. She was lethargic and hollow-eyed.

As her father, Kelly, drove from the airport to the facility, he caught sight of his daughter in the rearview mirror with her head in her mother Allison’s lap. He knew that she wouldn’t survive without the treatment.

The team at the facility placed Dwyer on a 4,000-calorie-a-day diet and 24-hour monitoring. In addition to the anorexia, her doctors diagnosed her with anxiety, depression and severe malnutrition. She refused to engage with her therapists.

“I was not willing to think deeply or be reflective of anything,” Dwyer said in a recent interview. “I was very angry.”

When United issued its denial after five months, saying she was ready for intensive outpatient treatment, her parents knew she wasn’t. They consulted Tyson, who emphasized that releasing their daughter prematurely would increase the likelihood of her needing residential treatment again and could put her health at grave risk.

“Emily was still struggling, so it would be difficult to get all the food that she would need,” Tyson said in an interview with ProPublica. “Pretty soon the other physical parameters would start to go south. The red blood cells, the white blood cells. The heart muscle gets smaller. The muscle itself becomes weaker, so when it pumps, it can’t pump as hard.”

Dr. Ed Tyson diagnosed Dwyer with anorexia and went head to head with United on her behalf after her coverage request was denied.

For Kelly Dwyer, a lawyer who counsels clients on mergers and acquisitions, facing the prospect of releasing her too early was too much to bear. He couldn’t imagine putting Emily back in a facility if she relapsed. The first time, when she clung to him in those final moments, it was the hardest thing he’d ever had to do.

“I never, ever wanted to do it again,” he said.

Without so much as a whisper to their daughter, they filled out the paperwork to refinance their mortgage.

In 2017, nearly two years after the initial denial, the Dwyers sued United for wrongfully denying coverage. In 2019, a federal district judge held a trial that lasted about 90 minutes, but it took him nearly four years to issue a decision. He ruled in favor of United. The Dwyers appealed.

“Talk about delayed justice,” said the Dwyers’ lawyer, Elizabeth Green, who previously worked at Kantor’s firm, which took the case on contingency, meaning without any guarantees that it would get paid. Most lawyers in these kinds of cases take them on a contingency basis.

The federal appeals court — just one level below the U.S. Supreme Court — didn’t take nearly so long to issue a ruling. In September, about five months after hearing the case, the three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision and ruled unanimously in favor of the Dwyers. The judges, led by Oldham, dissected the denial letters issued by the three doctors and found they were “not supported by the underlying medical evidence.” In fact, the judges wrote, they were “contradicted by the record.”

When United denied Emily Dwyer’s coverage, the judges wrote, “she was still very ill.”

Judges have repeatedly warned insurance companies that they cannot ignore the opinions of the doctors who are actually treating the patients. What’s more, they must explain how they engaged with them. As in many cases examined by ProPublica, the psychiatrists reviewing Dwyer’s treatment used boilerplate language in their denial letters and failed to provide or offer a sufficient explanation.

“We therefore join a growing number of decisions rejecting similar denial letters issued by United across the country,” Oldham and his fellow judges wrote.

The Dwyers recognize the privilege that allowed them to pay for their daughter’s continued treatment without knowing if or when they’d get their money back. They also understood how to navigate the legal system. Their goal, in addition to getting reimbursed, was to make it harder for insurance companies to kick children out of treatment when they need it.

For their daughter, the extra seven weeks made all the difference. That time, Emily said in an interview, forced her to confront her eating disorder and get comfortable in her new body. She had gained more than half of what she weighed when she arrived in Utah, but she made a point of avoiding knowing her weight. She developed deep connections with the other girls in the program and witnessed them battle the same compulsions.

Toward the end of her time there, she even mentored new patients and earned a key to the bathroom, one of the final steps before going home.

A collage made by a friend of Dwyer’s from treatment (Ilana Panich-Linsman, special to ProPublica)

No insurance company doctor, Dwyer said, could understand her situation in a quick call to her doctors — even if she had reached her target weight.

“You can’t just make this decision, wipe your hands and leave work for the day,” she said. “Your actions have real consequences.”

When the Dwyers learned from ProPublica that Center had rejected their appeal about a year after a judge had issued the blistering opinion against her in a different case, her denial stung even more. It was maddening to hear that she has been involved in multiple lawsuits that have been settled or where a judge found the insurer wrongfully denied coverage.

“There is no accountability,” Allison Dwyer said.

A New Beginning

Of all the girls Emily Dwyer met while in treatment, most relapsed or needed to be readmitted to a residential facility.

“The treatment definitely saved my life,” said Dwyer, who is now 24. “I have no doubt that if I left in July, I would have relapsed.”

“The fact that they can look at papers or numbers and decide when someone is ready for something, that’s just ridiculous,” Dwyer said in a recent interview. (lana Panich-Linsman, special to ProPublica)

Afraid that her high school would buzz about the anorexic girl who was so sick she had to spend months at a facility out of state, she transferred schools. Her first year back was filled with doctor and therapy appointments. She had sprouted 2 inches during and after treatment, which meant she was still significantly shorter than the rest of the family, but at least she was growing again. She was so determined to prove that she was better that she once hid 23 batteries in her pockets during a weigh-in.

When she moved away for college, she still struggled. But in her junior year, Kyle, a boy she met at freshman orientation, became more than a friend. He thought she was the most beautiful person in the world, on the inside and out, and for the first time since she got sick, she began to see herself in that way.

This summer, they married on a clear September day in a redwood grove in California, her brown hair swept up in a loose braid that fell onto her shoulders.

Three weeks after her wedding, she started her second year at Stanford Law School. She has traded in her running shoes for a yoga mat and is working to perfect her stew recipe. Most mornings, she and Kyle eat breakfast together before he heads out to teach English to fifth graders, and she pulls out her bike for the 10-minute ride to campus.

We’re Investigating Mental Health Care Access. Share Your Insights.

Agnel Philip contributed data analysis.

by Duaa Eldeib and Maya Miller, with research by Kirsten Berg

The American Oil Industry’s Playbook, Illustrated: How Drillers Offload Costly Cleanup Onto the Public

1 month 2 weeks ago

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

In December 1990, officials in the federal agency tasked with regulating offshore oil and gas drilling received a memo with a dire warning: America faced a ticking time bomb of environmental liability from unplugged oil and gas wells, wrote the agency’s chief of staff. Those wells and their costly cleanup obligations were being concentrated in the hands of cash-strapped drillers at the same time as production was shrinking. (The document, unearthed by public interest watchdog organization Documented, was shared with ProPublica and Capital & Main.)

More than three decades later, little action has been taken to heed that warning, and the time bomb is threatening to explode.

Watch video ➜

More than 2 million oil and gas wells sit unplugged across the country. Many leak contaminants like brine, methane and benzene into waterways, farmland and neighborhoods. The industry has already left hundreds of thousands of old wells as orphans, meaning companies walked away, leaving taxpayers, government agencies or other drillers on the hook for cleanup.

America’s oil fields are increasingly split between a small number of wells producing record profits and everything else. Researchers estimate roughly 90% of wells are already dead or barely producing.

Consider the Permian Basin, the world’s most productive oil field, stretching from West Texas across southeastern New Mexico.

“The Permian is the oil patch’s Alamo — that’s where it’s retreating to,” Regan Boychuk, a Canadian oil cleanup researcher, said of the oil industry. “That’s their last stand.”

Even here, many wells sit idle and in disrepair. It’s time to plug them, according to a growing chorus of researchers, environmentalists and industry representatives.

The question of who pays for cleanup remains unanswered. Time and again, oil companies have offloaded their oldest wells. Their tactics are not written down in one place or peddled by a single law firm — but companies follow an unmistakable pattern. The strategy, which is legal if followed properly, has become such a tried-and-true endeavor that researchers and environmentalists dubbed it “the playbook.”

Clark Williams-Derry, an analyst with clean-energy-focused think tank the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, studies fossil fuel companies’ cleanup costs. “There’s almost a cheerleading squad for shedding your liabilities, like a snake sheds its skin and just slithers away,” he said.

Should you want to become an oil executive and try this strategy yourself, here’s how it works …

As you launch your business, begin by collecting subsidies, tax breaks and other incentives from the government to guarantee you can pump oil and gas profitably. Globally, fossil fuel subsidies total in the trillions each year, according to organizations such as the International Monetary Fund.

Next, start pumping and profiting.

As you set up your business, create layers of shell companies. Down the road, they’ll provide a firewall between you and your liabilities — key among them, cleanup costs.

Once oil and gas production slows, sell low-producing wells. Smaller drillers operating on thinner margins, known in the business as “scavenger companies,” will be happy to take them off your hands.

Rinse and repeat by selling wells as their profits slow to a trickle. They’ll be sold again to ever-smaller companies that teeter on the edge of insolvency. Maintenance and environmental stewardship will usually fall by the wayside as companies eke out a profit. Studies show that the number of environmental violations rises as wells pass to less-capitalized drillers. But these wells aren’t your problem any longer.

Pull any remaining profits before regulators hit you with violations and fines for your remaining wells that aren’t pumping and may be leaking.

Then, idle the wells — pausing production, but not plugging them or cleaning up — and walk away. Regulators are typically tasked with ensuring that as much oil as possible is pumped out of the ground, so rules allow wells to sit idle, instead of being plugged, in case prices surge and it becomes profitable to restart them. However, a study in California found that, after wells are inactive for only 10 months, there’s a 50-50 chance they will never produce again.

Regulators will likely grow tired of asking you to clean up your wells, but you can make the case for leaving them unplugged for now. Pitch grand plans, as other drillers have — maybe repurposing the wells for bitcoin mining, carbon sequestration or the synthesis of hydrogen fuel — that require the wells to remain open.

When regulators’ patience has reached its limit, remind them what will happen if they come down hard on you. Fines or other extra costs could force your business into bankruptcy, leaving your unplugged wells as orphans and taxpayers on the hook. Ask them if they want to be responsible for that catastrophe.

“The root of the problem is there’s no regulator of the oil industry across North America,” Boychuk said, adding that “the rule of law has never applied to oil and gas.”

When regulators finally act, declare bankruptcy. The Bankruptcy Code is meant to protect businesspeople like you who took risks. More than 250 oil and gas operators in the U.S. filed for bankruptcy protection between 2015 and 2021, according to law firm Haynes Boone. (Industry groups estimate there are several thousand oil companies in the country.)

Regulators only require oil and gas companies to set aside tiny bonds that act like a security deposit on an apartment. Because you didn’t clean up your wells, you’ll lose that money, but it’s a fraction of the profits you’ve banked or the cost of the cleanup work. ProPublica and Capital & Main found that bonds typically equal less than 2% of actual cleanup costs.

And as you finalize your exit, the labyrinth of shell corporations you set up should act as corporate law intends, protecting you from future responsibility. Such companies, little more than stacks of paper, will be responsible for your liabilities, not you. Even if regulators know who is behind a company, it becomes increasingly difficult to penetrate each layer of a business to go after individual executives.

“It’s the essence of corporate law,” Williams-Derry said.

Now that you’ve offloaded your wells, you’re free to start fresh — launch a new oil company and buy some of your old wells for pennies on the dollar, a proven option. Maybe you leave oil entirely — that’s also tried-and-true. Or become a vintner and open a winery just down the road from the wells you left as orphans — you wouldn’t be the first.

For its part, the oil industry downplays the so-called playbook and the country’s orphan well epidemic. “There’s a general trend, which is there are very few orphan wells,” said Kathleen Sgamma, who has been among oil companies’ most vocal proponents as president of the Western Energy Alliance, an industry trade group. Plus, she said, companies’ bonds and states’ orphan well funds help pay for plugging.

But those tasked with addressing the reality of the country’s orphan wells disagree. “We have a welfare system for oil and gas. I hope you understand that,” said New Mexico Commissioner of Public Lands Stephanie Garcia Richard, who oversees the state’s public lands. New Mexico has already documented more than 1,700 orphan wells across the state. “We have oil and gas welfare queens.”

In New Mexico, Garcia Richard is trying to hold accountable one of the myriad drillers that have followed key steps in the playbook, the oil company known as Siana.

Siana is made up of two related entities — Siana Oil and Gas Co. LLC and Siana Operating LLC — based in Midland and Conroe, Texas. The company operated 11 wells in southeastern New Mexico in the heart of the Permian Basin.

In reality, Siana is the corporate shield for a man named Tom Ragsdale. After he aggregated his few wells, he generated cash through a trickle of oil and gas production and set up a business injecting other companies’ wastewater into his wells to dispose of it. But the state worried that Ragsdale’s operations were polluting the environment and that he was refusing to pay royalties and rental fees he owed the state, according to State Land Office staff.

Ragsdale did not respond to repeated requests for comment from ProPublica and Capital & Main. He also did not appear for a pretrial conference after the state brought legal action against Siana, court records show, and a state court judge ruled against his companies.

Siana was responsible for at least 16 spills, according to New Mexico Oil Conservation Division data, mainly spilling what’s called produced water, a briny wastewater that comes to the surface alongside oil and gas. “Corrosion” and “Equipment Failure” were among the causes.

The State Land Office hired an engineering firm to study the damage. The firm produced a damning 201-page report in 2018, finding oil and salt contamination exceeding state limits at Siana’s most polluted site. At high enough levels, these substances can kill plants, harm wildlife and impact human health.

The State Land Office estimated that cleaning up that site alone would cost about $1 million.

In 2020, New Mexico won a judgment against Ragsdale’s companies that, with interest, is now worth more than $3.5 million. But it won’t cover the cleanup cost. Between a small bond and the judgment, the state has been able to recover a mere $50,000 or so from Siana and related entities.

When the state tried to collect the rest, Ragsdale placed Siana Oil and Gas in bankruptcy protection in June 2023. Although he listed the company as having millions in assets at the time of the bankruptcy, the company had only $20,500 in a bank account. Court records show Siana is responsible for between $1 million and $10 million in liabilities, including money owed to the state of New Mexico, other oil companies, various counties and others.

Stickers plastered around Siana’s drill sites — on which the company’s name is misspelled — provide phone numbers to call in case of leaks or other emergencies. None went to Ragsdale or Siana employees. A man named William Dean answered one number. He owned a local oil field services company called Dean’s Pumping that was contracted to work on Siana’s wells, but Ragsdale stopped paying its bills, ultimately owing his company tens of thousands of dollars, Dean said.

“He was trying to half-ass things,” Dean said of Ragsdale. “I don’t know what happened to Tom.”

Siana’s bankruptcy case is ongoing, but Ragsdale has been largely unresponsive even in those proceedings.

Siana is, Garcia Richard said, “an exemplar of how our system has failed.” Although he was very nearly free of his old wells, Ragsdale flouted the playbook and ignored the bankruptcy judge’s demands that he participate in the case. In an unusual move, the judge in late September issued a warrant for Ragsdale’s arrest to compel him to hand over certain data. The U.S. Marshals Service was investigating Ragsdale’s whereabouts but had not taken him into custody as of mid-December, according to an agency representative.

The day after the judge issued the arrest warrant, the bankruptcy trustee filed a complaint alleging Ragsdale had committed fraud, siphoning about $2.4 million from Siana to purchase real estate in Houston.

That money could have gone toward cleaning up the mess left to New Mexico taxpayers.

ProPublica and Capital & Main visited Siana’s 11 wells in late 2023. At one drill site, methane leaked from a wellhead that had also stained the surrounding land black from spilled oil. The air was sour with the smell of toxic hydrogen sulfide. A nearby tank that held oil for processing was rusted through. Another had leaked an unidentified liquid. There appeared to be hoofprints where cattle had tracked through the polluted mud.

ProPublica and Capital & Main found oil spills at multiple Siana wells. At others, the idle pump jacks stood silent — corroded skeletons at the end of the line, the detritus of another run through the playbook.

Efforts to reform the system that has shielded oil companies from liability have been haphazard. When the federal government rewrote its rule setting bond levels on federal public land earlier this year, a simple math error meant the government would ask oil companies to set aside around $400 million less in bonds than it would’ve otherwise. And when states have tried to pass reforms, they’ve been stymied by state legislators’ and regulators’ chummy relationships with the industry.

As an ever-greater share of wells go offline and the economy transitions to cleaner forms of energy, policymakers face a choice: Do they focus attention on propping up or cleaning up the industry?

Watch video ➜

Sgamma of the Western Energy Alliance gives voice to one path forward. “Any time a well goes into an orphan status, it’s not a good thing,” Sgamma said, yet her group has been instrumental in killing efforts to address the orphan well epidemic and the oil industry’s contributions to climate change. Her organization is suing to halt the federal rule that sought to bring bonding levels closer to true plugging costs.

Sgamma co-authored the energy section of Project 2025, the conservative policy paper with deep ties to the first Trump administration that lays out policy priorities for a conservative White House. The plan would “Stop the war on oil and natural gas,” reopen undeveloped habitat from Alaska to Colorado for drilling, increase the number of sales for oil leases on public lands and shrink federal environmental agencies. President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly indicated this closely aligns with his vision for pumping America’s “liquid gold.” He has begun staffing his administration with pro-oil and gas figures.

The future for which Sgamma is fighting sees a resilient American oil and gas industry, able to “take a lot of punches” while continuing to grow unabated.

Or there’s the future Garcia Richard, who oversees New Mexico’s public land, envisions. She has paused the leasing of public land to drillers until the Legislature forces oil companies to pay state taxpayers higher royalties that reflect fair market rates. She directed her staff to aggressively pursue companies like Siana. And her office is preparing to raise required bonding levels. As she talked about this work, she held up the literal rubber stamp that imparts the State Land Office’s seal on documents, suggesting that’s not how business is done anymore. She also held up a small notebook where she tracks the numerous companies her office is pursuing for polluting the state’s land and water.

In her future, Garcia Richard said, oil drillers wouldn’t behave like Siana and Ragsdale. “A good-acting company is a company that understands there’s a cost of doing business that shouldn’t be borne by the landowner, shouldn’t be borne by the taxpayers,” she said. But in the modern American oil industry, she added, the playbook and the still-burning fuse of the cleanup time bomb represent little more than “Wild West behavior.”

Watch video ➜

by Mark Olalde, illustrations by Peter Arkle, special to ProPublica

He Frantically Called 911 to Revive His Infant Son. Now He Could Face 12 Years in Prison.

1 month 2 weeks ago

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

On the 911 call, Nick Flannery’s voice was frantic as he tried to revive his infant son. “Come on, buddy,” he pleaded with the 2-month-old, who had gone limp. “Come on, buddy. Breathe.”

Nick, who was on paternity leave from his IT job, had been caring for his two boys while his wife, Felecia, was at a doctor’s appointment. Not long before he called 911, on Sept. 7, 2023, his baby, Arlo, vomited while being given a bottle. Nick, who was cradling him, turned him over to ensure that he did not choke, then changed him into fresh clothes and put him in his bouncy seat. Suddenly, Arlo’s eyes rolled back and his body stiffened. Then he went still.

Paramedics rushed to the Flannerys’ house in Blue Ash, Ohio, a suburb of Cincinnati. They revived the infant, but his breathing remained shallow. Felecia, who returned home to find emergency medical workers swarming her driveway, staggered across the front yard toward her family, uncomprehending.

In the emergency room at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, the Flannerys looked on as doctors worked to save their son. Soon, a social worker took them aside. She explained that a CT scan revealed the presence of subdural hematomas, or bleeding between the brain and the skull: a symptom, she said, commonly seen in abuse cases. Nick and Felecia were dumbfounded.

More tests still needed to be run, she told the Flannerys, but mandatory reporting laws required that the police and child welfare officials be alerted. Nick and Felecia, upset but certain that any concerns would be allayed once doctors gathered more information, said they understood.

Detectives arrived, and the attending physician told them that subdural hematomas could indicate an underlying medical condition — or that the baby had been shaken. It was the latter scenario that Felecia remembers the doctor mentioning to her that evening. “I’ll never forget him telling me, ‘You would probably know this as shaken baby syndrome,’” she says. Felecia, having once listened to a podcast that characterized the diagnosis as controversial, grew alarmed.

No outward signs suggested Arlo had endured harm. (Arlo is a nickname his parents asked that I use to protect his privacy.) He had no bruises, scratches or cuts. No external evidence of head trauma, like a scalp injury or a skull fracture. No broken bones. No symptoms of neglect or malnutrition. Nick and Felecia were his sole caregivers, and neither of them had any prior interaction with child protective services or a criminal history.

The next day, as they sat at their son’s bedside in the pediatric ICU, they were visited by two doctors with the hospital’s child abuse team. Dr. Steven Pham, who was halfway through a three-year fellowship in child abuse pediatrics, and Dr. Pratima Shanbhag, a child abuse pediatrician, each examined Arlo. Child abuse pediatrics is a relatively new subspecialty whose practitioners work closely with police officers and social workers to investigate potential cases of intentional harm. These physicians are entrusted with a profound responsibility: deciding whether a child’s symptoms indicate abuse or are due to an unrelated medical issue. Their findings often determine whether parents face criminal charges and whether children are separated from their families.

Pham asked the Flannerys whether anything had happened to their son — a fall? a car accident? — that might account for the bleeding on his brain. More tests still needed to be performed, he said, but the absence of any reasonable explanation for Arlo’s symptoms suggested that the infant had suffered abusive head trauma.

Pham was using the term that the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended physicians employ since 2009 instead of “shaken baby syndrome.” That year, the AAP endorsed the use of the more comprehensive term “abusive head trauma” to describe not only brain, skull and spinal injuries that result from shaking but also those resulting from blunt impact or a combination of the two.

The name change came amid controversy over whether shaken baby syndrome’s signature symptoms — brain swelling and bleeding around the brain and from the retina — were always evidence of abuse. Once believed to be proof of shaking, the symptoms had by then been shown to have other causes, including accidental falls, illness, infection and congenital disorders. The courts took notice, and in 2008, a Wisconsin appeals court held that “a shift in mainstream medical opinion” raised questions about the diagnosis’s core assumptions.

It was in the wake of the Wisconsin decision that the AAP’s Committee on Child Abuse and Neglect, a small group of child abuse specialists, spearheaded the name change. The committee’s work came at a time when confidence was eroding in a diagnosis that the child protection community saw as vital to safeguarding children. The new name, abusive head trauma, was not only more precise, according to its 2009 consensus statement on the matter, it would also shore up credibility in the courts. “Legal challenges to the term ‘shaken baby syndrome’ can distract from the more important questions of accountability of the perpetrator and the safety of the victim,” the statement read.

Fifteen years later, the diagnosis is still shaping criminal prosecutions and child welfare investigations. Child abuse pediatricians say they do rigorous workups to rule out the possibilities of both natural and accidental causes before they settle on the diagnosis. But doctors — and the police, prosecutors and judges who look to them for guidance — don’t always get it right. Thirty-five people whose convictions rested on the diagnosis are currently listed on the National Registry of Exonerations. Not yet counted is Joshua Burns, whose wrongful conviction was vacated by a Michigan court in November.

This year, convictions that hinged on the diagnosis were overturned in California, Minnesota and Kentucky. In Texas, doubts about the guilt of a death row inmate, Robert Roberson, galvanized a bipartisan group of lawmakers to call for a wholesale reappraisal of the evidence; the legal battle that followed succeeded in postponing his scheduled execution in October. In a similar case in Arkansas, another father, Cody Webb, was acquitted of capital murder. Some judges, meanwhile, have started looking at the diagnosis with more skepticism. Last year, a New Jersey appellate court backed a lower-court judge who pronounced the diagnosis “akin to junk science.”

That tension — between child abuse pediatricians who stand by their ability to identify abuse from telltale symptoms and a mounting number of criminal cases that point to the fallability of the diagnosis — leaves families like the Flannerys vulnerable. “The rebranding of shaken baby syndrome preserved the diagnosis and allowed it to live on with less scrutiny,” says Randy Papetti, an Arizona trial attorney and author of the 2018 book “The Forensic Unreliability of the Shaken Baby Syndrome.” “Shaken baby syndrome is alive and well but mostly operates under an alias.”

Felecia and Nick (Anne Vetter)

Nick and Felecia had been together ever since they were juniors in high school in Troy, Ohio — he, earnest and mild-mannered, with chunky black glasses that channeled Buddy Holly; she, warm and unguarded, with a mane of red hair. They were strivers, intent on muscling their way out of what Nick called “the bottom end of the lower middle class.” He enlisted in the Army to pay for college, serving a combat deployment to Afghanistan, and Felecia worked her way into management at a national retail chain. They were intentional about starting a family, waiting until they were financially secure enough, in their late 20s, for Felecia to stay at home when they had their first child, Arlo’s older brother, in 2021. They built a house in a good school district, with room for a big family, and painted it a cheerful lavender.

The Flannerys did not hire a lawyer when the specter of abuse was first raised by doctors. They remained singularly focused on their infant son, who lay intubated in the pediatric ICU, his tiny body dwarfed by medical machinery. Before his hospitalization, they had told his pediatrician how he slept so much that Felecia often had to wake him for feedings, but their pediatrician had not been overly concerned; Arlo was meeting all his milestones and appeared to be thriving. Three days after he arrived at the hospital, he underwent surgery to relieve the excess fluid that had been building up inside his head. Nick and Felecia were relieved to see that he gradually improved with each day that followed.

In a report that Pham forwarded to the Blue Ash Police Department a week after the operation, he wrote that Arlo’s symptoms — which a recent exam had shown included retinal hemorrhages — raised a “concern” for abusive head trauma. Further testing, he noted, had not turned up any evidence of a genetic condition or a bleeding disorder that could explain his symptoms. Though it was not a definitive diagnosis, it was enough to set in motion a chain of events that would upend the Flannerys’ lives.

Two days later, on Sept. 20, 2023, a social worker came to their home to inform them that Hamilton County Job and Family Services, which oversees child protective services for the area, was filing for temporary custody of their children. Moments later, Blue Ash police detectives served a search warrant, demanding that the Flannerys allow them entry and turn over their phones.

Police body cameras captured the Flannerys’ anguish: Nick buckled, nearly falling to his knees. Felecia, wide-eyed, stared back at the officers’ hardened expressions.

What followed was a grinding bureaucratic journey that stripped them of everything they had worked so hard to build. They were forbidden from bringing Arlo home when he was released after a two-week stay at the hospital; a court order mandated that he and his brother live with Felecia’s aunt. Limited to supervised interactions with their children, Nick and Felecia did everything they could to maintain a sense of normalcy, arriving at the aunt’s house each morning before dawn, so they could be there when the boys awoke, and caring for them throughout the day, until Felecia nursed Arlo to sleep. Barred from spending the night, they returned home each evening to an empty house.

Desperate to be a family again, and hoping that voluntarily submitting to an extra degree of scrutiny might convince the authorities they had nothing to hide, the Flannerys had cameras installed in every room of their house. At a hearing in Hamilton County Juvenile Court that October, Magistrate Nicholas Varney offered a tentative path forward: The children could return home, but under strict conditions. Nick and Felecia were barred from being alone with them, and the boys’ grandmothers, who had come to court and volunteered to help, agreed to take turns and maintain a constant presence.

The threat of losing their children never went away. A caseworker would appear unannounced, entering their home and probing whether the Flannerys had deviated in any way from the court order. Their original caseworker, and then her replacement, often sought to get Felecia alone, pressing her to accept that her husband was an abuser. “I was not seen as protective of my children because I did not believe that Nick hurt our son,” she told me. In a November hearing, a prosecuting attorney put the county’s objectives plainly: “We maintain that the Flannery children would be at imminent risk of harm were they to continue to reside in their parents’ home today and were custody not to be granted to Job and Family Services.”

Then, on Jan. 3, Blue Ash police detectives made an unannounced visit, arresting Nick on assault and child endangerment charges. Nick, who was handcuffed in front of his older son, was careful not to react. “I knew they wanted to see me as this horrible, violent person with a hairpin trigger,” he says. From that moment onward, the Flannerys found themselves in parallel legal battles: one in juvenile court over custody of their children, and another in criminal court, where Nick faced prosecution.

Two days after his arrest, when he was set to be released on bond, the Flannerys’ caseworker arrived at the house without warning. Though Nick was within his rights to return home — the court had not imposed a no-contact order — the caseworker removed the infant and toddler that afternoon.

Felecia hurriedly nursed Arlo before he was taken away. “I was sitting on the stairs, just crying and crying,” Felecia told me. “My toddler started wiping my tears away, and I remember thinking, ‘I have to get it together, because this might be the last time I ever see them.’”

The boys were not placed in foster care, as she had been told was a possibility — they went to her aunt — and they were returned home the following week at the direction of the juvenile court. But the knowledge that her children could be taken from her at any moment left her unmoored. Stalked by the fear of what might happen if one of the boys fell or hurt themselves, she rarely left home, trusting the cameras she had installed to document her every interaction with her children. She and Nick scrupulously followed the court’s order to have an approved family member present around the clock, but she began losing sleep over any possible breach — even imagined — that could cost them custody. “I started having nightmares,” she says, “where the nightmare was that I was found alone with my children.”

The Flannerys felt certain there was a logical explanation for Arlo’s symptoms, and they began to piece together what they knew, starting with his difficult delivery, which had ended in an emergency cesarean section. More than 24 hours of labor — augmented with Pitocin, to make contractions stronger — had left a deep hollow above his forehead. The Flannerys had been assured that this was a normal consequence of a challenging delivery, and the indentation, though conspicuous, had eventually gone away. In retrospect, they wondered if this had anything to do with the bleeding on his brain.

Also notable, looking back, was the dramatic increase in Arlo’s head circumference in the weeks after his birth. By one month, his medical records showed, he had leapt from the 81st percentile for head size to the 99th, which was a possible cause for concern. The Flannerys had been told that his head growth would have to be monitored, and that if it continued to expand at the same rate, that he would be referred to a specialist for evaluation. (His next head measurement was scheduled to be taken the day after Nick called 911.)

Nick holds Arlo the day he was born. A difficult delivery left a deep hollow above his forehead. (Courtesy of Flannery Family)

As their questions multiplied, the Flannerys consulted three doctors: a pediatrician who was qualified to testify in court as a child abuse expert, a pediatric neurologist and a radiologist. After studying Arlo’s medical records and imaging, they each concluded that he had not suffered a sudden trauma just before he was rushed to the ER. In written reports, and later testimony given in juvenile court by two of the experts, they laid out their findings. Arlo, they determined, had a preexisting health condition: the bleeding on his brain was chronic, likely originating at birth. Fluid had then collected between his brain and skull, and pressure built, eventually triggering seizures. This explained Arlo’s rapid head growth and the excessive sleepiness that the Flannerys had reported to their pediatrician.

In his report, Pham dismissed the idea that Arlo’s birth was to blame, pointing to the baby’s sudden collapse a full two months after he was born. Pham made no mention of the details in Arlo’s medical records that noted the baby’s head circumference at one month or the unusual rate of growth that his pediatrician had flagged for further monitoring.

But several facts in the medical record suggested an ongoing condition: In addition to his quickly expanding head circumference, there was his pronounced sleepiness — possibly a symptom of seizures related to fluid around the brain. There were also the post-operative notes of Arlo’s neurosurgeon, which described the subdural hematomas as “chronic,” suggesting they had been present for an indeterminate period of time. The blood on the infant’s brain was straw-colored, the surgeon had observed, not the pink or red typically associated with acute trauma. During a 2023 juvenile court hearing, Pham acknowledged speaking with the neurosurgeon and reviewing the surgical notes, but he said he did not include them in his report because he focused on other indicators, such as Arlo’s rapid decline. “The thing that I focused on is his acute presentation,” Pham said.

I wanted to better understand Pham’s perspective and that of the pediatrician who had examined Arlo with him, Shanbhag. The Flannerys agreed to provide a letter authorizing the doctors to talk to me about their son’s protected health information, but a spokesperson for Cincinnati Children’s declined to make them available for an interview. The hospital also did not respond to a detailed list of questions.

The Flannerys believed the new expert opinions provided by the three doctors would exonerate Nick. “I thought investigators would consult the doctors we were talking to, and this whole misunderstanding would be swept away,” Felecia says.

But the suspicion of abusive head trauma, once raised, is hard to undo. Kristina Kerlus, a Las Vegas mother I spoke with, whose 2-month-old, Jocai Davis, was rushed to the hospital in 2018 in cardiac arrest, told me that doctors developed “tunnel vision” after finding that her son had the diagnosis’s signature symptoms. Jocai died three days later, and she was charged with murder. It took years of legal wrangling — during which her three other children were removed from her custody — for Kerlus to be vindicated. Prosecutors dropped charges in 2022 after the defense’s medical experts determined that Jocai had died from complications of sickle cell trait, an inherited blood disorder.

Even if accused parents challenge an abusive head trauma diagnosis with medical experts of their own, prosecutors tend to view these witnesses cynically. Their distrust stems from a core belief among some child advocates that physicians who question the diagnosis — whom some dismiss as “denialists” — are bad actors. “Denialists persist in generating false controversy against the diagnosis of AHT and unwarranted skepticism about shaking being an important mechanism of AHT,” states an opinion piece co-authored by three prominent child abuse experts that appeared last year in JAMA Pediatrics, a journal of the American Medical Association. “Misinformation generated by science denialists may harm children.”

Dr. Cindy Christian, a lead author of the American Academy of Pediatrics’s 2009 statement, called it “cynical” to suggest that the shift to abusive head trauma was made to evade scrutiny of the diagnosis. Rather, she wrote in an email, the name change ensured “that physicians were using correct terminology in medical records and in courts.” The controversy around shaken baby syndrome, she added, is largely contained to the legal arena. “The diagnosis is not controversial in children’s hospitals around the world,” she wrote. “The courtroom is not designed to be the arbiter of scientific truth.”

In its most recent policy statement about the diagnosis, the AAP said in 2020 that the name change to abusive head trauma “was misinterpreted by some in the legal and medical communities as an indication of some doubt in or invalidation of the diagnosis and the mechanism of shaking as a cause of injury.” The AAP “continues to embrace the ‘shaken baby syndrome’ diagnosis as a valid subset of the AHT diagnosis.”

The antipathy for physicians who challenge the diagnosis was hard to miss at the International Conference on Shaken Baby Syndrome/Abusive Head Trauma, held in Salt Lake City this September. The conference — which draws child abuse pediatricians, social workers, police and prosecutors — featured multiple presentations that cast doctors who testify for the defense as both ill-informed and mercenary. During a keynote presentation, a Milwaukee prosecutor, Deputy District Attorney Matthew Torbenson, questioned whether doctors operate in good faith when they rebut an abusive head trauma diagnosis. “Is that practicing medicine,” he asked a sympathetic crowd, “or is that providing reasonable doubt for sale?”

The expert opinions of doctors from outside the field of child abuse pediatrics who weigh in on these cases — including radiologists, neurologists and pathologists — are rarely given the same deference by the courts, one reason most legal efforts to counter the diagnosis fail. In July, I chronicled the efforts of prosecutors at the Nashville DA’s office to overturn the 2004 shaken-baby conviction of Russell Maze; though seven medical experts concluded that his son’s death was the result of natural causes, the presiding judge refused to grant a new trial.

For the Flannerys, having three physicians who provided an alternate explanation for Arlo’s symptoms did not prove to be enough. During a hearing in juvenile court in March, Shanbhag took the stand to dismiss the notion that a birth injury could explain the infant’s presentation at the ER, emphasizing that abusive head trauma was the only possible cause. “There was no other medical condition that could account for those injuries,” she said.

After hearing from both sides, Varney, the magistrate, handed down a ruling late this summer in which he leaned heavily on Shanbhag’s testimony, finding that the infant had been abused. Still, the magistrate was careful to state that due to doctors’ differing opinions, both “the origin and cause of the injuries” remained “unknown.” The attorneys whom the Flannerys retained to represent them in juvenile court, James Whitfield and Aaron Rapier, criticized this conclusion as logically inconsistent with a finding of abuse and the equivalent of claiming there “may be ‘abuse’ without any ‘abuser.’” The guardian ad litem — the attorney appointed by the court to represent Arlo’s interests — opposed the magistrate’s ruling that abuse had occurred, noting that such a conclusion was “not supported by the manifest weight of the evidence.”

Protective orders remain in place, requiring the Flannerys to keep living under the watchful eyes of family members, cameras and caseworkers. They have done everything the court has asked — taking parenting classes, submitting to mental health evaluations, complying with the safety plan — but more than a year after their boys were returned home, they are still living in limbo. “We’ve asked our caseworker, ‘So what comes next?’” Felecia says. “And the answer is that they are still pursuing custody. They offer us no plan — just that we need to say that Nick harmed Arlo.” (A spokesperson for Hamilton County Job and Family Services declined to comment on pending litigation.)

Felecia longs for their old life, unencumbered by the quiet terror of an abuse investigation. She looks at other mothers at the grocery store — mothers who are unaware that their lives can be turned upside down in an instant — and she feels “like a different species, like an alien,” she told me. Nick speaks of what feels like a primal wound: “the shame and stigma of being called an unfit parent.”

Still, the Flannerys know they are lucky. Unlike other parents who have faced the same kinds of accusations, they had the means to post bond and get Nick out of jail. They had family members who were able to serve as caregivers, which prevented Arlo and his brother from being put in foster care. Their friends stuck by them. Nick did not lose his job. And they did not suffer the worst possible outcome: Their baby lived. Arlo, now a healthy 1 1/2-year-old, has enjoyed a full recovery; ever since the surgery that relieved the excess fluid on his brain, he has not needed any medical interventions.

Yet the future is filled with uncertainty. Nick, who is expected to stand trial next year, faces up to 12 years in prison if convicted. Felecia once wanted to fill their lavender house with children, but she no longer thinks beyond the present. “We used to have plans and dreams,” she told me. “And now our future is a huge question mark.”

Arlo (Anne Vetter) Correction

Dec. 29, 2024: This story originally misstated the name of Dr. Steven Pham’s fellowship. It is child abuse pediatrics, not childhood pediatrics.

by Pamela Colloff

What I Learned Reporting in Cities That Take Belongings From Homeless People

1 month 3 weeks ago

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

On a May afternoon, Teresa Stratton sat on her walker near a freeway in Portland, Oregon, talking about how much she wanted to live inside. She missed sleeping uninterrupted in a bed and having running water.

When you live outside, “the dirt embeds in your skin,” the 61-year-old said. “You have to pick it out, because it just doesn’t come out anymore.”

Living inside would also mean no longer having her belongings repeatedly confiscated by crews the city hires to clear encampments. These encounters, commonly known as “sweeps,” are the “biggest letdown in the world,” she said, noting that she lost the ashes of her late husband to a sweep.

Over the past year, my colleagues Ruth Talbot, Asia Fields, Maya Miller and I have investigated how cities have sometimes ignored their own policies and court orders, which has resulted in them taking homeless people’s belongings during encampment clearings. We also found that some cities have failed to store the property so it could be returned. People told us about local governments taking everything from tents and sleeping bags to journals, pictures and mementos. Even when cities are ordered to stop seizing belongings and to provide storage for the property they take, we found that people are rarely reunited with their possessions.

The losses are traumatizing, can worsen health outcomes, and can make it harder for people like Stratton to find stability and get back inside.

Our reporting is particularly relevant because cities have recently passed new camping bans or started enforcing ones already on the books following a Supreme Court decision in June that allows local officials to punish people for sleeping outside, even if shelter isn’t available.

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to ban urban camping and “get the homeless off our streets,” by creating “tent cities” and by making it easier to institutionalize people with severe mental illness. “Our once-great cities have become unlivable, unsanitary nightmares, surrendered to the homeless, the drug addicted, and the violent and dangerously deranged. We are making many suffer for the whims of a deeply unwell few, and they are unwell indeed,” he said in a campaign video.

But our reporting shows there are more effective and compassionate ways for cities to deal with these issues.

The U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness earlier this year released updated strategies for addressing encampments “humanely and effectively,” advising communities to treat encampment responses with the same urgency they would any other crises — such as tornadoes or wildfires. The council recommends providing 30 days’ notice before a removal and giving people two days to pack, unless there’s an urgent public health and safety issue. (Most cities don’t give any notice if encampments are deemed hazardous or a threat to public safety.)

The council also recommends that cities store belongings for as long as it typically takes for someone to get permanent housing. We found that the longest any city stores property is 90 days. But the wait for permanent housing can be much longer.

If officials, alongside case managers and health care professionals, worked with unhoused people over weeks, rather than days, before sweeping an encampment to help them get inside, they wouldn’t be separated from their belongings and their possessions wouldn’t need to be stored in warehouses, said Marc Dones, the policy director for the Benioff Homelessness and Housing initiative, a homelessness research group that developed recommendations for addressing encampments.

This approach would place case workers and service providers on the front lines of encampment removals. Instead, sanitation workers usually handle these traumatic displacements, research shows. And in America’s 100 largest cities, police are usually working alongside sanitation workers to not only conduct encampment closures, but also run warrant checks and cite people for camping or trespassing.

People are usually forced to move without any — or minimal — connections to housing or support. We heard from people that offers of shelter sometimes were just a piece of paper with phone numbers for congregate shelters on it or city workers mentioning a shelter.

In many American cities, this perpetuates a cycle by pushing people into surrounding neighborhoods, which causes housed residents to complain more, which leads to more sweeps.

“We have gone all in on sweeps, and we have not really explored other options,” said Megan Welsh Carroll, co-founder and director of the Project for Sanitation Justice at San Diego State University, who has advocated for spaces where people experiencing homelessness can shower and use the restroom. “And I wonder if we could bring back some compassion and some empathy if our sidewalks felt cleaner and safer to walk down.”

Punitive policies, whether they originate with Trump or local governments, make homeless people more invisible, which will continue to erode public compassion, said Sara Rankin, a law professor at Seattle University who studies the criminalization of homelessness. “All of those approaches are designed to create the illusion that the problems are getting better, when really it’s just sweeping human beings under the rug without regard to their humanity, without regard to what really happens to them,” she said.

Those experiencing homelessness told us they already feel like they’re seen as problems to be solved, not people to be helped. In reporting on the issue, we wanted to help ProPublica’s readers recognize the humanity of the people we had met and talked to, so we gave them notecards and asked them to describe their experiences with sweeps in their own words.

We wanted our readers to better understand people like Kyra Gonzales, a woman I met in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She told me that city officials had recently taken the only pictures she had of her daughter. While talking, we discovered her daughter and my 4-year-old share the same birthday. Making that connection helped me understand how emotionally devastating sweeps can be.

She told me she knows that her belongings are an “eyesore,” so she tries to keep them out of the way. She also told me that her tent had been taken by the city. Temperatures that month dropped as low as 14 degrees. “I cried because it was cold,” she said.

I asked her what the public doesn’t understand about homelessness.

“I was just like you once,” she said, looking me in the eye. “I’m not any different now, I’m just without housing, without a house.”

by Nicole Santa Cruz

“I Have Lost Everything”: The Toll of Cities’ Homeless Sweeps

1 month 3 weeks ago

A record number of Americans are living outside. Cities have responded by removing encampments from public spaces, a practice commonly referred to as “sweeps.” In the process, workers often take people’s belongings — including important documents, survival gear and irreplaceable mementos.

Over and over, people across the country told ProPublica they were devastated by such losses. We gave them notecards so they could explain in their own words how the sweeps have affected them.

Here are some of their stories.

by Asia Fields, Nicole Santa Cruz, Ruth Talbot and Maya Miller, design by Ruth Talbot

The Most-Read ProPublica Stories of 2024

1 month 3 weeks ago

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Over the past year, as the 2024 election dominated headlines, ProPublica’s reporters and editors dove deeply into the issues atop many voters’ minds.

Kavitha Surana, Cassandra Jaramillo and Lizzie Presser uncovered the deaths of at least five women who weren’t able to access timely reproductive and medical care under abortion bans in Texas and Georgia. As part of our series examining new patterns of immigration, Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel reported on what was happening in Whitewater, Wisconsin, as the city became a Republican talking point. Eli Hager and Lucas Waldron dug into why low-income families in Arizona weren’t using school vouchers as voucher supporters were pitching similar programs across the country.

That’s not all. Our reporters also spent months investigating other issues that touch readers’ lives, from the challenges of finding a mental health care provider who takes insurance to the human toll of the fentanyl crisis.

ProPublica reporters will continue this work in the new year as Donald Trump’s second administration takes shape. In the meantime, revisit ProPublica’s 25 most-read stories published in 2024, as measured by the total amount of time spent reading them across several of our publishing platforms.

1. The Year After a Denied Abortion By Stacy Kranitz, special to ProPublica, and Kavitha Surana

Tennessee law prohibits women from having abortions in nearly all circumstances. But once the babies are here, the state provides little help. ProPublica followed Mayron Michelle Hollis and her family for a year as they struggled to make it.

2. “Eat What You Kill” By J. David McSwane; co-published with Montana Free Press

Hailed as a savior upon his arrival at St. Peter’s Hospital in downtown Helena, Montana, Dr. Thomas C. Weiner became a favorite of patients and the hospital’s highest earner. As the myth surrounding the high-profile oncologist grew, so did the trail of patient harm and suspicious deaths.

3. Armed and Underground: Inside the Turbulent, Secret World of an American Militia By Joshua Kaplan

Internal messages reveal how AP3, one of the largest U.S. militias, rose even as prosecutors pursued other paramilitary groups after the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol.

4. How 3M Executives Convinced a Scientist the Forever Chemicals She Found in Human Blood Were Safe By Sharon Lerner, photography by Haruka Sakaguchi, special to ProPublica; co-published with The New Yorker

Decades ago, Kris Hansen showed 3M that its PFAS chemicals were in people’s bodies. Her bosses halted her work. As the EPA took steps to force the removal of the chemicals from drinking water, she wrestled with the secrets that 3M kept from her and the world.

Candace Fails holds a photograph of her daughter Nevaeh Crain, who died last year after seeking help from two hospitals for pregnancy complications. (Danielle Villasana for ProPublica)

5. A Pregnant Teenager Died After Trying to Get Care in Three Visits to Texas Emergency Rooms By Lizzie Presser and Kavitha Surana

It took three ER visits and 20 hours before a hospital admitted 18-year-old Nevaeh Crain as her condition worsened. Doctors insisted on two ultrasounds to confirm “fetal demise.” She’s one of at least three Texas women who died under the state’s abortion ban.

6. Multiple Trump Witnesses Have Received Significant Financial Benefits From His Businesses, Campaign By Robert Faturechi, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski

Witnesses in the various criminal cases against Donald Trump have gotten pay raises, new jobs and more. If any benefits were intended to influence testimony, that could be a crime.

7. “Not Medically Necessary”: Inside the Company Helping America’s Biggest Health Insurers Deny Coverage for Care By T. Christian Miller, ProPublica; Patrick Rucker, The Capitol Forum; and David Armstrong, ProPublica

When companies like Aetna or UnitedHealthcare want to rein in costs, they turn to EviCore, whose business model depends on turning down payments for care recommended by doctors for their patients.

8. IRS Audit of Trump Could Cost Former President More Than $100 Million By Paul Kiel, ProPublica, and Russ Buettner, The New York Times

The tax agency concluded in its long-running investigation that Donald Trump effectively claimed the same massive write-off twice on his failed Chicago tower.

9. A Woman Died After Being Told It Would Be a “Crime” to Intervene in Her Miscarriage at a Texas Hospital By Cassandra Jaramillo and Kavitha Surana

Josseli Barnica is one of at least three pregnant Texas women who died after doctors delayed emergency care. She’d told her husband that the medical team said it couldn’t act until the fetal heartbeat stopped.

10. Abortion Bans Have Delayed Emergency Medical Care. In Georgia, Experts Say This Mother’s Death Was Preventable. By Kavitha Surana

At least two women in Georgia died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care in their state, ProPublica has found. This is one of their stories.

11. How Walmart’s Financial Services Became a Fraud Magnet By Craig Silverman and Peter Elkind

Scammers have duped consumers out of more than $1 billion by exploiting Walmart’s lax security. The company has resisted taking responsibility while breaking promises to regulators and skimping on training.

12. He Was Convicted of Killing His Baby. The DA’s Office Says He’s Innocent, but That Might Not Be Enough. By Pamela Colloff, photography by Stacy Kranitz; co-published with The New York Times Magazine

When new scientific evidence casts doubt on convictions, the justice system has no easy path to freedom — even when it’s the prosecutors doing the asking.

13. Trump’s Lawyers Told the Court That No One Would Give Him a Bond. Then He Got a Lifeline, but They Didn’t Tell the Judges. By Robert Faturechi, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski

An appeals court reduced Donald Trump’s bond by more than 60% after his attorneys claimed it was a “practical impossibility” to pay the full amount. Their failure to disclose a proposal from a billionaire financier may have violated ethics rules.

14. For the Women Who Accused the Trump Campaign of Harassment, It’s Been More Harassment By Marilyn W. Thompson

Donald Trump is well known for publicly bullying his political rivals, but the president-elect’s campaign has also used similar tactics to launch private, relentless attacks against some of its own workers.

15. Inside the Historic Suit That the Gun Industry and Republicans Are on the Verge of Killing By Vernal Coleman, photography by Sarahbeth Maney

For 25 years, gunmakers have repeatedly tried to end one city’s lawsuit over illegal gun sales. Meanwhile, illicit purchases of firearms continued at an unrelenting and hazardous pace.

16. Inside Ziklag, the Secret Organization of Wealthy Christians Trying to Sway the Election and Change the Country By Andy Kroll, ProPublica, and Nick Surgey, Documented

The little-known charity is backed by famous conservative donors, including the families behind Hobby Lobby and Uline. It spent millions to make a big political push for the 2024 election — but it may have violated the law.

(Collage by Han Cao for ProPublica. Source images: Brown County, Wisconsin, court document and photographs courtesy of Maylia Sotelo and Carrie Harrison.)

17. Maylia and Jack: A Story of Teens and Fentanyl By Lizzie Presser; co-published with Teen Vogue

Police knew she was selling fake Percocet but did not stop her. His mother sought the right treatment for his addiction but could not find it. Two teens got caught up in a system unprepared to handle kids on either side of the drug trade.

18. Inside Project 2025’s Secret Training Videos By Andy Kroll, ProPublica, and Nick Surgey, Documented

“Eradicate climate change references”; only talk to conservative media; don’t leave a paper trail for watchdogs to discover. In a series of never-before-published videos, Project 2025 detailed how a second Trump administration would operate.

19. What Happened in Whitewater By Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel, photography by Sofia Aldinio, special to ProPublica

Before Springfield, Ohio, became a flashpoint in the immigration debate, Trump and right-wing pundits exploited a police chief’s plea for resources to claim Whitewater was being subjected to an “invasion.” The truth turned out to be much more complicated.

Anna DiNoto in her office in Monroe, Washington. (Tony Luong, special to ProPublica)

20. Why I Left the Network By Annie Waldman, Maya Miller, Duaa Eldeib and Max Blau, photography by Tony Luong, special to ProPublica, design by Zisiga Mukulu; co-published with NPR

Those who need therapy often have to pay out of pocket or go without care, even if they have health insurance. Hundreds of mental health providers told us they fled networks because insurers made their jobs impossible and their lives miserable.

21. An 11-Year-Old Denied Making a Threat and Was Allowed to Return to School. Tennessee Police Arrested Him Anyway. By Aliyya Swaby, ProPublica, and Paige Pfleger, WPLN/Nashville Public Radio

A state law makes threats of mass violence at school a felony, even if they’re not credible. Judges and school officials say the law unnecessarily traumatizes kids.

22. Skipping School: America’s Hidden Education Crisis By Alec MacGillis; co-published with The New Yorker

Absenteeism has nearly doubled since the pandemic. With state and federal governments largely abdicating any role in getting kids back into classrooms, some schools have turned to private companies for a reimagined version of the truant officer.

Fabiola Velasquez walks her youngest child to school. (Ash Ponders, special to ProPublica)

23. In a State With School Vouchers for All, Low-Income Families Aren’t Choosing to Use Them By Eli Hager and Lucas Waldron

Working-class parents often express interest in vouchers. But in Arizona, the nation’s school choice capital, these families aren’t using them due to the inaccessibility of private schools and the costs of transportation, meals and uniforms.

24. Judge Aileen Cannon Failed to Disclose a Right-Wing Junket By Marilyn W. Thompson and Alex Mierjeski

Aileen Cannon, whose oversight of the Donald Trump classified documents case garnered widespread criticism, has repeatedly violated a rule requiring that federal judges disclose their attendance at private seminars.

25. A Third Woman Died Under Texas’ Abortion Ban. Doctors Are Avoiding D&Cs and Reaching for Riskier Miscarriage Treatments. By Lizzie Presser and Kavitha Surana

Thirty-five-year-old Porsha Ngumezi’s case raises questions about how abortion bans are pressuring doctors to avoid standard care even in straightforward miscarriages.

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

by ProPublica

Microsoft Bundling Practices Focus of Federal Antitrust Probe

1 month 3 weeks ago

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

The Federal Trade Commission is investigating Microsoft in a wide-ranging probe that will examine whether the company’s business practices have run afoul of antitrust laws, according to people familiar with the matter. In recent weeks, FTC attorneys have been conducting interviews and setting up meetings with Microsoft competitors.

One key area of interest is how the world’s largest software provider packages popular Office products together with cybersecurity and cloud computing services, said one of the people, who asked not to be named discussing a confidential matter.

This so-called bundling was the subject of a recent ProPublica investigation, which detailed how, beginning in 2021, Microsoft used the practice to vastly expand its business with the U.S. government while boxing competitors out of lucrative federal contracts.

At the time, many federal employees used a software license that included the Windows operating system and products like Word, Outlook and Excel. In the wake of several devastating cyberattacks, Microsoft offered to upgrade those license bundles for free for a limited time, giving the government access to its more advanced cybersecurity products. The company also provided consultants to install the upgrades.

Vast swaths of the federal bureaucracy accepted, including all of the military services in the Defense Department — and then began paying for those enhanced services when the free trial ended. Former sales leaders involved in the effort likened it to a drug dealer hooking a user with free samples, as they knew federal customers would be effectively locked into the upgrades once they were installed. Microsoft’s offer not only displaced some existing cybersecurity vendors but also took market share from cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, as the government began using products that ran on Azure, Microsoft’s own cloud platform.

Some experts told ProPublica that the company’s tactics might have violated laws regulating contracting and competition, and the news organization reported that even some of Microsoft’s own attorneys had antitrust worries about the deals.

Microsoft has said its offer was “structured to avoid antitrust concerns.” The company’s “sole goal during this period was to support an urgent request by the Administration to enhance the security posture of federal agencies who were continuously being targeted by sophisticated nation-state threat actors,” Steve Faehl, the security leader for Microsoft’s federal business, told ProPublica.

Some of those incursions were the result of Microsoft’s own security lapses. As ProPublica reported in June, Russian state-sponsored hackers in the so-called SolarWinds attack exploited a weakness in a Microsoft product to steal sensitive data from the National Nuclear Security Administration and the National Institutes of Health, among other victims. Years before the attack was discovered, a Microsoft engineer warned product leaders about the flaw, but they refused to address it for fear of alienating the federal government and losing ground to competitors, ProPublica reported.

While the engineer’s proposed fix would have kept customers safe, it also would have created a “speed bump” for users logging on to their devices. Adding such “friction” was unacceptable to the managers of the product group, which at the time was in a fierce rivalry with competitors in the market for so-called identity tools, the news organization reported. These tools, which ensure that users have permission to log on to cloud-based programs, are important to Microsoft’s business strategy because they often lead to demand for the company’s other cloud services.

According to a person familiar with the FTC’s probe, one such identity product, Entra ID, formerly known as Azure Active Directory, is another focus of the agency’s investigation.

Microsoft has defended its decision against addressing the SolarWinds-related flaw, telling ProPublica in June that the company’s assessment included “multiple reviews” at the time and that its response to security issues is based on “potential customer disruption, exploitability, and available mitigations.” It has pledged to put security “above all else.”

The FTC views the fact that Microsoft has won more federal business even as it left the government vulnerable to hacks as an example of the company’s problematic power over the market, a person familiar with the probe told the news organization.

The commission is not alone in that view. “These guys are sort of a version of ‘too big to fail,’” said Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who chairs the Senate Finance Committee and a longtime critic of Microsoft. “I think it’s time to amp up the antitrust side of the house, dealing with antitrust abuses.”

The FTC’s investigation of Microsoft, which was first reported by the Financial Times and Bloomberg, is far from the company’s first brush with federal regulators over antitrust issues. More than two decades ago, the Department of Justice sued the company in a landmark antitrust case that nearly resulted in its breakup. Federal prosecutors alleged that Microsoft maintained an illegal monopoly in the operating system market through anticompetitive behaviors that prevented rivals from getting a foothold. Ultimately, the Justice Department settled with Microsoft, and a federal judge approved a consent decree that imposed restrictions on how the company could develop and license software.

John Lopatka, a former consultant to the FTC who now teaches antitrust law at Penn State, told ProPublica that the Microsoft actions detailed in the news organization’s recent reporting followed “a very familiar pattern” of behavior.

“It does echo the Microsoft case” from decades ago, said Lopatka, who co-authored a book on that case.

In the new investigation, the FTC has sent Microsoft a civil investigative demand, the agency’s version of a subpoena, compelling the company to turn over information, people familiar with the probe said. Microsoft confirmed that it received the document.

Company spokesperson David Cuddy did not comment on the specifics of the investigation but said the FTC’s demand is “broad, wide ranging, and requests things that are out of the realm of possibility to even be logical.” He declined to provide on-the-record examples. The FTC declined to comment.

The agency’s investigation follows a public comment period in 2023 during which it sought information on the business practices of cloud computing providers. When that concluded, the FTC said it had ongoing interest in whether “certain business practices are inhibiting competition.”

The recent demand to Microsoft represents one of FTC Commissioner Lina Khan’s final moves as chair, and the probe appears to be picking up steam as the Biden administration winds down. The commission’s new leadership, however, will decide the future of the investigation.

President-elect Donald Trump said this month that he will elevate Commissioner Andrew Ferguson, a Republican attorney, to lead the agency. Following the announcement, Ferguson said in a post on X, “At the FTC, we will end Big Tech’s vendetta against competition and free speech. We will make sure that America is the world’s technological leader and the best place for innovators to bring new ideas to life.”

Trump also said he would nominate Republican lawyer Mark Meador as a commissioner, describing him as an “antitrust enforcer” who previously worked at the FTC and the Justice Department. Meador is also a former aide to Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican who introduced legislation to break up Google.

Doris Burke contributed research.

by Renee Dudley

Thailand Bans Advertising for Toddler Milk

1 month 3 weeks ago

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

New regulations in Thailand will force baby formula companies to stop advertising, giveaways and discounts for so-called toddler milk, which experts say can contribute to growing obesity and other health problems among the nation’s children.

The action follows a ProPublica investigation that revealed how the U.S. worked to weaken Thailand’s last major attempt to ban formula advertising, in 2017.

Thai health authorities at the time had hoped to end marketing for all formula products as part of their efforts to increase the country’s breastfeeding rate, which was among the lowest in the world. Of particular concern was toddler milk, a type of formula made especially for young children, often pitched with bold and, experts say, unsupported health claims. But formula makers like Mead Johnson asked U.S. trade officials to intervene, setting off a 15-month diplomatic and political pressure campaign that resulted in an exemption for toddler milk ads.

By last year, toddler milk — a processed drink that typically includes powdered milk, vegetable oil and sweeteners — accounted for more than half of all formula sales in Thailand, according to Euromonitor, which tracks sales data.

The U.S. intervention in Thailand was one of roughly two dozen such efforts documented by ProPublica this year as it investigated the federal government’s long-running support for the multibillion-dollar formula industry. In recent years, that advocacy has often centered on opposing local efforts to regulate formula marketing around the globe.

Health officials and activists say such advertising can mislead parents and even prompt mothers to abandon breastfeeding too soon, depriving children of a range of health protections. Mead Johnson did not respond to a request for comment. But the industry has defended its promotion of toddler milk, saying it “can contribute to nutritional intake and potentially fill nutrition gaps for children 12 months and older.”

In Thailand in 2023, ProPublica observed towering displays of powdered toddler milk boxes lining grocery store shelves beside boxes of baby formula. Companies offered steep discounts for toddler drinks and gave away items such as toys, musical instruments or even small swing sets in exchange for purchases.

“The marketing is quite aggressive,” said Dr. Titiporn Tuangratananon, who worked on the Thai health ministry’s effort to enact the new restrictions.

In 2016 and 2017, U.S. trade officials lambasted Thailand on the floor of the World Trade Organization for proposing restrictions on toddler milk advertising. Officials then said the rules raised questions about whether they were “more trade restrictive than necessary.”

This year, however, the U.S. took a different approach. In a letter to Thai authorities, officials said the U.S. “supports Thailand’s objective to prevent deceptive marketing practices thereby protecting the health and wellbeing of both infants and young children.”

While trade officials asked questions such as which products would be covered and why the new rules would restrict marketing that was not deceptive or inaccurate, they did not echo concerns industry representatives raised about whether the rules were inconsistent with trade treaties, documents obtained by ProPublica show.

In response to questions, a spokesperson for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative said the agency and others involved in trade policy support regulatory decisions “based on science.”

“Since the start of the Biden Harris Administration, USTR has made no secret our commitment to making sure our trade policy works for people,” spokesperson Angela Perez said in a statement. USTR does not “blindly” advance the will of corporations, the statement said, and has been moving “away from the formerly standard view that too often deemed legitimate regulatory initiatives as trade barriers.”

Before adopting the new rules on toddler formula, the Thai health ministry had a hearing and met with representatives of formula companies, which strongly opposed the changes.

A letter from the industry group the Infant Nutrition Council of America said restrictions on trademarked brands of toddler milk — also known as growing-up milk — could “violate Thailand’s obligations” under a WTO agreement on intellectual property.

“The Ministry’s focus on restricting information about formula and growing up milk products up to 36 months of age overlooks other public health and public policy concerns,” the letter said, citing the challenges faced by working women, the impact of local dietary practices on malnutrition and the importance of milk products for child development.

Another group, the US-ASEAN Business Council, said the changes could violate trade treaties and “deny Thai consumers important information to identify reputable, scientifically-formulated products that are safe and effective.”

The business council declined to comment further. The nutrition council did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

With the new rules, Thailand joins roughly three dozen countries to adopt restrictions on the marketing of formula drinks for children through age 3 or even older — measures the World Health Organization has supported because of concerns about the drinks’ nutrition and potential to disrupt breastfeeding.

The regulations will go into effect in July.

by Heather Vogell

A North Carolina Supreme Court Candidate’s Bid to Overturn His Loss Is Based on Theory Election Deniers Deemed Extreme

1 month 3 weeks ago

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Months before voters went to the polls in November, a group of election skeptics based in North Carolina gathered on a call and discussed what actions to take if they doubted any of the results.

One of the ideas they floated: try to get the courts or state election board to throw out hundreds of thousands of ballots cast by voters whose registrations are missing a driver’s license number and the last four digits of a Social Security number.

But that idea was resisted by two activists on the call, including the leader of the North Carolina chapter of the Election Integrity Network. The data was missing not because voters had done something wrong but largely as a result of an administrative error by the state. The leader said the idea was “voter suppression” and “100%” certain to fail in the courts, according to a recording of the July call obtained by ProPublica.

This novel theory is now at the center of a legal challenge by North Carolina appeals court Judge Jefferson Griffin, a Republican who lost a race for a state Supreme Court seat to the Democratic incumbent, Allison Riggs, by just 734 votes and is seeking to have the result overturned.

The state election board dismissed a previous version of the challenge, which is now being considered in federal court. Before the election, a Trump-appointed judge denied an attempt by the Republican National Committee to remove 225,000 voters from the rolls based on the same theory.

The latest case is getting attention statewide and across the country. But it has not yet been reported that members of the group that had helped publicize the idea had cast doubt on its legality.

“I don’t comment on pending litigation,” Griffin wrote to ProPublica in response to a detailed list of questions. “It would be a violation of our code of judicial conduct.”

Embry Owen, Riggs’ campaign manager, disputed the challenge and called on Griffin to concede. “It’s not appropriate for this election to be decided in court, period. NC voters have already made the decision to send Justice Riggs back to the Supreme Court,” she said.

The theory Griffin is citing originated with a right-wing activist, Carol Snow, who described herself to ProPublica in an email as “a Bona Fide Grade-A Election Denier.” Snow promoted it with the help of the state chapter of the Election Integrity Network, a national group whose leader worked with President Donald Trump in his failed effort to overturn the 2020 election. The network also was behind extensive efforts to prepare to contest a Trump loss this year in other states, as ProPublica has reported, as well as in North Carolina, according to previously unreported recordings and transcripts of meetings of the state chapter.

State election officials have found that missing information on a voter’s registration is not disqualifying because there are numerous valid reasons for the state’s database to lack that those details.

Those reasons include voters registering before state paperwork was updated about a year ago to require that information or using alternate approved documents, such as a utility bill, to verify their identities. What’s more, voters must still prove their identity when casting a ballot — most often with a driver’s license. “There is virtually no chance of voter fraud resulting from a voter not providing her driver’s license or social security number on her voter registration,” attorneys for the state election board wrote in response to the RNC lawsuit.

Bob Orr, a former GOP state Supreme Court justice who left the Republican Party in 2021, said he too doubts the theory. “I appreciate fighting for every vote: If you honestly think illegal votes have been cast, it’s legitimate to try to prove that,” he said. “But the bottom line is: Did anyone vote illegally? Have you been able to prove one person voted illegally? At this point, no. And we’re weeks past the election and multiple recounts, and there’s no evidence of that.”

In modern history, the state board’s decision on who wins elections has been final, said Chris Cooper, a professor specializing in North Carolina politics at Western Carolina University. That includes an even tighter race in 2020, when a Democratic justice conceded to a Republican after protesting her 401-vote loss to the board.

“We’re used to close elections, we’re used to protests, we’re used to candidates pushing every legal action up to the point the state election board rules,” Cooper said. But, he added, there is an important difference with Griffin’s petition, which goes beyond the state election board to the courts.

“This is basically saying the state elections system is wrong, and we’re going to court to try to change the rules of the game after the game has been played — which is unprecedented.”

In July 2024, the North Carolina chapter of the Election Integrity Network convened online to plan its efforts ahead of the presidential election. Worried about a surge of voter registrations from nonwhite voters who they believed would back Democrats, the activists discussed how to assemble a “suspicious voters list” of people whose ballots they could challenge.

Then, one of the group’s board members, Jay DeLancy, said he had another idea “that’s a lot slicker.”

DeLancy said that if a candidate lost a close election, the loss could be overturned by questioning the validity of voters whose registrations are missing their driver’s license and Social Security information. “Those are illegal votes,” he claimed. “I would file a protest.”

Jim Womack, the leader of the chapter, immediately pushed back: “That’s a records keeping problem on the part of the state board. That’s not illegal.”

Later in the call Womack said, “I’m 100% sure you’re not going to get a successful prosecution.” And he told the group, “That’s considered to be voter suppression, and there’s no way a court is going to find that way.”

But DeLancy asked for backup from the originator of that theory: Carol Snow. She argued that her theory could in fact overturn the outcome of an election.

“I guess we’re gonna find that out,” Snow said.

Snow is a leader of the conservative activist group North Carolina Audit Force and lives in the state’s rural mountains. After Trump’s loss in 2020, she threw herself into questioning the election’s results. In 2022, she accompanied a pair of far-right activists to a North Carolina election office where the two men unsuccessfully tried to forcefully access voting machines, and she participated in a failed pressure campaign to oust the election director who resisted them, ProPublica previously reported.

She also began filing overwhelming numbers of records requests and complaints to state election officials, an effort that Womack praised on the July call: “I think Carol has shown a way of really harassing — not that we want to do it for harassment purposes — but really needling the Board of Elections to do their jobs by just constantly deluging them.”

Since late 2021, the state elections board had spent far more time on her requests and complaints than those of any other individual, spokesperson Patrick Gannon said in a statement. “Ms. Snow’s constant barrage of requests and complaints causes other priorities and responsibilities to suffer,” Gannon said.

Snow described her work to ProPublica as “simply taking the time to learn about my state’s electoral process” and acting for the public good. “The records I’ve requested are owned by the public. In other words, I’m asking for what belongs to me,” Snow wrote to ProPublica. “If government agencies are understaffed and unable to comply with this state’s Public Records law, they should address the issue with the entities that fund them.”

In the fall of 2023, Snow filed a complaint alleging that North Carolina’s voter registration form did not clearly require voters to provide their driver’s license number and the last four digits of their Social Security number, as required by federal law — instead that information was coded as optional. Snow later described the missing information as a “line of attack” through which bad actors could cast fraudulent votes using fake identities. (A right-wing conspiracy theory holds that this was how Biden won the 2020 election.)

But she was not able to demonstrate that the missing information had led to anyone improperly voting. After obtaining public records for hundreds of thousands of voter registrations, Snow provided the state board with only seven examples of what she called potential double voting. The state board found all seven to be innocuous things like data entry errors.

The state board quickly updated the form to require the information. But from late 2023 through the fall of 2024, six complaints, some of which were partly based on Snow’s theory, were filed with the state election board. Aside from the updates to the form, the state board dismissed the complaints.

By the time of the July call, some of Snow’s peers seemed dismissive as well.

“I’m not suggesting that we can’t arm a candidate that loses a short, a close race with the information they need to file a protest using this,” Womack said on the call. “But I would just suggest to you that that’s not the way to win on this thing.”

Yet the information did end up in the Republican National Committee’s lawsuit trying to disqualify 225,000 voters, a challenge DeLancy filed against Riggs’ victory in North Carolina’s most populous county, and, the day after that was dismissed, Griffin’s challenge to over 60,000 voters.

DeLancy wrote to ProPublica that he filed the challenge on his own and did not coordinate with Griffin. He also said he disagreed with Womack’s description of such challenges as “voter suppression.” Instead, he said, he saw it as “a proper response” to the state election board’s “violation of federal law.” “Carol Snow deserves an Order of the Long Leaf Pine for exposing this treasonous behavior on the part of the election officials,” he wrote, referring to an award bestowed by North Carolina’s governor.

Womack wrote to ProPublica that the group he leads “is a non-partisan, neutral organization” that does “not favor one party over another.”

He also said that recordings of the group’s calls are “prohibited and violate our internal policies” and “whatever bootleg recording you may have is unauthorized and may well be altered.” ProPublica has seen a video recording of the call and verified portions of it with some participants.

Though Griffin’s challenge of Riggs’ victory is now being considered in federal court, legal experts say it could still end up back where he intended: in front of the state Supreme Court.

Griffin’s petition is making what experts describe as extreme asks to the Supreme Court: to allow him to bypass the lower courts, to allow ballots to be thrown out without proving that voters did anything knowingly wrong and to essentially decide whether to change its composition to six Republicans and one Democrat.

“Even if they do their best to be open-minded and independent, the facts of the potential conflicts of interest are just too obvious to the public,” said Orr, the former Republican justice.

Griffin has described Republican Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul Newby as a “good friend and mentor,” and Newby promoted Griffin’s 2020 run for the court of appeals. What’s more, a ProPublica review of campaign finance reports show that the spouses of three justices, including Newby’s wife, donated over $12,000 to Griffin’s most recent or previous campaigns. (The husband of the Supreme Court’s other Democratic justice donated to Riggs.)

Newby and other justices did not respond to a detailed list of questions sent to spokespeople for the Supreme Court.

When announcing his candidacy for the Supreme Court, Griffin declared, “We are a team that knows how to win — the same team that helped elect Chief Justice Paul Newby and three other members of the current Republican majority.”

A cartoon illustration that hangs in the Supreme Court depicts all the Republican appellate jurists as superheroes from the Justice League, with Newby caricatured as Superman and Griffin as the Flash.

by Doug Bock Clark

Nonprofit Explorer Adds Powerful Tools to Help You Research Organizations’ Financials

1 month 3 weeks ago

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

During the year’s busiest season of charitable giving, donors may wonder whether the nonprofits they are considering donating to are going to be good stewards of their money.

ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer already allows users to thoroughly research charities, and now we’re adding more features to help you understand the financial health of organizations. Starting Monday, you can search for organizations that have reported a significant theft, as well as those that have had auditors flag serious financial issues.

Although tax forms are the primary documents we make available on Nonprofit Explorer, we have also added audits available since 2017. Federal and state regulators use them to get a more nuanced look at the financial management and governance of an organization, including information about financial controls and compliance with government grant programs.

With this update, you can search for all 33,400 organizations that filed audits with the federal government because they spent more than $750,000 in federal funds in a given fiscal year.

We’ve also made it possible to easily scan findings where auditors raised a variety of concerns, the most serious being a “going concern” flag; that is, the possibility that the organization won’t be able to meet its financial obligations in the near future. This may signal that the organization’s expenses have outstripped its revenue, or it may indicate other issues, like risky investments or financial mismanagement.

There are other findings you can search for as well, like “material noncompliance,” “material weakness in internal controls” and “significant deficiency in internal controls” — all of which are findings that donors or researchers may want to investigate further. Findings from the organization’s most recent audit will also appear as flags on an organization’s page to make them easy to find.

Our search also now includes the option to see organizations that reported a significant diversion of assets on their most recent tax filing. This is a rare but serious issue, in which the organization has discovered an unauthorized diversion of either 5% of an organization’s assets or $250,000, whichever is smaller.

To search for any organization that matches these criteria without knowing their name, just click the search button without filling in any text and you can view the entire set of nonprofits. You can use the tools on the right of the screen and hit the “apply” button to filter.

We have lots of ideas for future improvements and additions to Nonprofit Explorer. If you have feedback on these improvements or features you’d like to see added to the site, please get in touch! We’d love to hear from you.

And as always, if you use Nonprofit Explorer and value the information it provides, please consider donating. It’s support from people like you that lets us keep updating and improving this app!

by Andrea Suozzo