ProPublica

by Logan Jaffe

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story is part of an ongoing series investigating the return of Native American ancestral remains. Sign up for ProPublica’s Repatriation Project newsletter to get updates as they publish and learn more about our reporting.

For more than 30 years, tribal nations have been asking the state of Illinois and its state-run institutions to return the remains of their ancestors for reburial within the state. For just as long, Illinois has made that nearly impossible.

But now, legislation moving through the Illinois General Assembly would finally pave the way for the remains of thousands of Native Americans to be repatriated.

The legislation, which unanimously passed the Illinois House of Representatives this month, comes after nearly two years of consultations among the leaders of more than two dozen tribal nations, the Illinois State Museum and the state Department of Natural Resources.

In January, a ProPublica investigation revealed that institutions have not returned the remains of at least 15,461 Native Americans who were excavated from Illinois. We also revealed how the Illinois State Museum had for decades displayed open Native American graves at Dickson Mounds, a burial site that was billed as a tourist attraction and then as an “educational” exhibit before its closure in the 1990s.

“We’re grateful for the bipartisan support we’ve received from Illinois legislators who are working to right historic wrongs that have, put simply, diminished us,” said Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation Chairperson Joseph “Zeke” Rupnick. “This legislation brings respect to our history and our ancestors the way they should’ve been respected centuries ago.”

State Rep. Mark L. Walker, a Democrat who represents part of Chicago’s northwest suburbs, said he introduced the bill after leaders of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation brought the issue to his attention. Walker, who has a master’s degree in anthropology, said it is “atrocious” that some museums and universities still keep the human remains and funerary items of Native Americans.

“These people were buried by their people with the goods they wanted to be buried with in spaces they wanted to be buried in and [we] disturbed that,” Walker said. “Just go repair it. It’s so simple.”

He added: “I don’t know what right we have to dig up somebody’s grandmother.”

Most excavated Native American remains in Illinois are held by state universities and museums. Our investigation found that the Illinois State Museum holds the remains of at least 7,000 Native Americans, yet it has returned only 2% of them to the tribal nations who could claim them under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, a 1990 federal law that pushed for the expeditious return of human remains and funerary items excavated from Indigenous burial sites. The museum has the country’s second-largest collection of unrepatriated Native American remains, and one of the lowest return rates.

Following ProPublica’s reporting, institutions across the U.S. have vowed to return the Native American remains held in their collections. In Illinois, the proposed legislation could signal a new era of proactive repatriation and consultation with tribal nations in a state that has favored the curation and scientific study of these remains over their return.

“Native tribes have existed since before colonization, and our land and culture are the foundation of our society,” Rupnick said. “Yet the remains of thousands of our ancestors are in the hands of governments and institutions, just as our Native lands have been for centuries.”

Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko, who until her death this year served as the director of the Illinois State Museum, previously told ProPublica that the state needed to revise its existing burial law and ensure that tribal nations have more say in how their ancestors are protected and returned. According to the minutes of a November meeting of the Illinois State Museum board of directors, Catlin-Legutko said she was working on legislation with the Department of Natural Resource’s legal team.

The museum and Department of Natural Resources declined interview requests for this story, citing policies against commenting on pending legislation.

If passed by the Senate and signed into law, the bill would create a cemetery on state land where repatriated Native American ancestors and their belongings could be reburied. The state would be responsible for protecting the cemetery, which would not be for public use, from potential looting or vandalization.

Since at least the mid-1990s, state officials have known that tribal nations with cultural and geographical connections to Illinois wished to have their ancestors reburied. ProPublica obtained records from 1995 showing that the Illinois State Museum conducted consultations with leaders from 15 tribes with ancestral ties to Illinois to discuss the cultural affiliations of human remains, as required by the federal law. In those conversations, every tribal leader told the museum that the human remains in its collection should be reburied in Illinois.

In the intervening years, the museum repatriated the remains of at least 156 Native Americans, most of them to the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma. But Illinois did not provide land for reburial and those ancestors were reburied in Oklahoma despite the preference that tribal leaders had expressed in the 1990s.

The Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma declined to comment for this story.

In addition to the creation of a cemetery, the bill would also establish a committee of leaders from more than 30 tribal nations to review state construction or other projects that might affect burial sites and other places of religious or ceremonial importance. The group would serve as an unprecedented Native voice in state affairs.

“For me, this work really is about recentering power,” said state Sen. Cristina H. Pacione-Zayas, a Chicago Democrat who sponsored the bill. “And [it’s about] communities who have been historically harmed and where policy has explicitly taken out their humanity, taken out their agency, taken out their ability to be self-determined.”

The legislation acknowledges that the state “has not maintained meaningful consulting relationships with tribal nations” and points to the “State of Illinois’ long history of removing tribal nations.” Today, there are no tribally held lands in Illinois.

“Without meaningful relationships between the State of Illinois and tribal nations, there has been harm caused to tribal nations and trust needs to be rebuilt as the State works to correct those harmful mistakes,” the bill reads.

Walker said that describing the historical context of forced removal in the bill is significant.

“It’s part of the larger discussion: Are we going to face our history or aren’t we?” he said. “As adult human beings, I think it’s time we embraced our entire history.”

The bill would establish a Tribal Repatriation Fund, which could only be used to help return ancestors and items and for reburial and would help pay for repatriation work using money from fines and other penalties collected from individuals or organizations that knowingly disturb burial sites.

Significantly, the proposed law shifts the ownership of any Native American remains and funerary items still buried in the state or accidentally unearthed from public lands to Native American nations. The current burial law, the Illinois Human Skeletal Remains Protection Act, passed in 1989, deems most Native American remains to be property of the state.

Help Us Investigate Museums’ Failure to Return Native American Human Remains and Cultural Items

More than 30 federally recognized tribes have cultural or geographical ties to the land that is now the state of Illinois. For this story, ProPublica reached out to representatives of the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, the Osage Nation, the Wyandotte Nation and the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation. If you are a representative of a tribe with ties to Illinois and would like to share comments with ProPublica, please email us at repatriation@propublica.org.

by Ziva Branstetter

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

Nine months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending nearly 50 years of federal protection of abortion rights, the impact of the landmark ruling known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization continues to ripple across the nation.

In Dobbs, the Supreme Court voted 6-3 that the U.S. Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.

The ruling essentially divided the nation into two territories: states where people have access to abortion care and states where most or all people are unable to obtain an abortion, even if their lives are at risk. An estimated 23 million Americans live in states that tightly restrict access to abortion. A few states, such as Tennessee, outlaw the procedure with no exceptions, forcing doctors to choose between risking their freedom and saving a pregnant patient’s life.

Since the Dobbs ruling on June 24, ProPublica has chronicled the nationwide fallout. Our stories have explored new concerns about data privacy, battle lines between blue and red states and the increasing popularity of civil lawsuits that seek to punish people for obtaining abortions.

A recent investigation by reporter Kavitha Surana explored the complicated story of a Tennessee woman who faced a life-threatening pregnancy after doctors decided they couldn’t risk prosecution to provide an abortion. ProPublica has also explored the harm created by parental involvement laws, on the books in many states long before the Dobbs ruling.

In a series of live events, ProPublica has also interviewed the nation’s top legal and medical experts about what they are seeing on the ground following the Dobbs ruling and what they expect going forward.

Last week, ProPublica talked to two leading experts on how the battle over abortion is impacting people in the most restrictive states and how legal challenges are likely to play out across the country. More than 1,400 people signed up to hear our live discussion with law professor Mary Ziegler and Tennessee OB-GYN Dr. Nikki Zite.

Ziegler is the Martin Luther King Jr. professor of law at the University of California, Davis School of Law. She is one of the world’s leading historians of the U.S. abortion debate and the author of six books on the law, history and politics of reproduction in the United States. Zite lives in Tennessee and is professor and vice chair of education and advocacy in the department of OB-GYN at the University of Tennessee Graduate School of Medicine.

Ziegler and Zite presented their personal perspectives on this issue during our discussion, and their thoughts do not reflect the positions of their institutions. This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Wyoming recently became the latest state to outlaw medication abortion. How do you see the criminal legal landscape playing out?

Ziegler: We’ve seen a rising trend within the anti-abortion movement of people who identify themselves as abolitionists. And they essentially argue that if the movement is serious that a fetus or an unborn child is a rights-holding person, then it would be logical to punish women too. The most recent manifestation that people may have heard about was in South Carolina. There were over 20 lawmakers sponsoring a bill that would treat abortion as murder and potentially subject women to the death penalty for having abortions. So far, the mainstream consensus within the anti-abortion movement that punishing women is a bad idea politically and morally is holding up, but it’s fragile.

We have the wrongful death lawsuit in Texas, in which a man is suing three women for allegedly helping his now-ex-wife obtain an abortion. Nikki, could you tell us about your experience in Tennessee?

Zite: The way our law is written, ending any pregnancy is illegal. Immediately, several of our outpatient abortion clinics closed. That not only had the effect of making abortion more challenging to access for people who needed that care, but it also made it harder for those of us who teach abortion to the next generation of OB-GYNs. Then we had all the unintended consequences: the cases like ectopic pregnancy, the cases of inevitable but not complete miscarriage, the cases of that ambiguous “How close to death does she need to be for it to meet the standards of protecting or saving her life?” It became this complicated legal situation where physicians not only felt like they had to make medical decisions, they then had to run it by hospital legal or a criminal attorney. We’ve lost a lot of physicians, and we don’t know whether or not medical students will want to train in states where they’re going to have restrictions on the type of care that they can learn.

Watch the Full Event I guess you’d call it a brain drain of doctors in this field who are leaving states like Wyoming?

Zite: There’s only a couple of OB-GYNs in some of those states. So if they leave, you really have these OB deserts.

Mary, you’ve mentioned fetal personhood laws. Does establishing fetal personhood make a pregnant person who has an abortion a murderer under the law?

Ziegler: There are proposals emerging on the right that we need to make birth free [of charge]. Georgia has its anti-abortion law requiring certain forms of child support during pregnancy. Then on the other hand, you have people saying if equal treatment is really the name of the game, then that requires murder prosecutions for people who have abortions.

So far it’s mostly been emerging in state legislators up to a point. We’ve seen it in the wrongful death lawsuit you mentioned. One question you might have is: Why bother with a wrongful death lawsuit? They wanted to say that if you provide someone else with abortion pills, you’re an accomplice to murder or you are a murderer, and that’s a personhood argument. We’re going to see it crop up more, and eventually the end game is a case brought to the U.S. Supreme Court. Whether they lead to prosecutions of women or just to nationwide abortion bans remains to be seen.

Nikki, you’ve been part of working on a bill to modify Tennessee’s law to create clear exceptions for maternal health care. Can you tell us about that effort and where it stands now?

Zite: Not in a good place. We were sticking with the things we could all agree on. The amendment passed 8 to 2 out of committee. Immediately, the right-to-life got all their members to call legislators and started threatening the legislators with losing their “ranking.” Unfortunately, we now have a very watered-down amendment. I don’t think that physicians are going to feel that it gives them much more leeway to provide lifesaving care without being criminalized.

What are the problems with policymakers trying to determine what constitutes a medical emergency?

Zite: The idea that it has to be a medical emergency is the first problem. We should be able to prevent an emergency, not just treat an emergency. The overwhelming evidence for most of these cases is that it doesn’t improve the outcome for the pregnancy to wait. That’s why laws for abortion have been liberalized in places like Poland, South and Central America and Ireland. Women died because they were made to stay pregnant until there was no longer a heartbeat and they got infected or bled. We don’t want to go back to that in the United States. Legislators don’t seem to understand that’s the inevitable outcome of what they’re forcing us to do.

I have had a question about that as a journalist. How are we going to know whether more people are dying or suffering measurable harm in states that have banned abortion?

Zite: And how long is it going to take us to get that data? When we look at the state and maternal mortality reports, they’re not always that accurate, and these reviews usually were two or three years behind.

Mary, you recently wrote that the court does not get the final word even on the meaning of its own important decisions. Can you talk about that?

Ziegler: I think what we saw with Roe, the judges pretty clearly thought that they were settling this and that Roe was going to mean abortion was a thing between a doctor and a woman. I think the court in Dobbs is trying to say the same thing: that history and tradition, in the court’s view, would not have recognized the right to abortion in the 19th century, and that’s the end of it. We’re already seeing Dobbs emerging as a symbol of things the Supreme Court didn’t want it to be. We’ve seen a lot of poll data documenting a really precipitous decline in trust of the Supreme Court and Dobbs being the most visible symbol of that decline. I think the court often holds itself out as having the last word on these constitutional struggles when it can’t.

One of our readers asks: What can people who live in states that still protect abortion rights do to safeguard maternal health for themselves and others in states that ban abortion?

Zite: I’m feeling pretty discouraged, frankly. I think it’s going to take ballot initiatives. We don’t have that option in Tennessee, but there are other states that do. Normally you say state elections are important, but when they’ve been gerrymandered so much, I don’t see things getting better in Tennessee for decades. I’m focusing at a federal level.

Ziegler: Based on what’s going on now in the federal courts, if you’re living in a state where abortion is legal, you should not take for granted that that will remain the case. The mifepristone case we’d been talking about in Texas could, depending on how the FDA responds, make it impossible for people in a state like California to have a medication abortion. We’ve seen some voices emerging essentially saying, “Look, even if you define yourself as pro-life, do you really want to spend a lot of taxpayer money enforcing criminal abortion laws?”

There’s a notion that medical exceptions to abortion bans give people appropriate access to the medical care they need. Nikki, can you talk about that a little bit?

Zite: I think that a lot of people think, well, if we add an exception, that’s going to get access for some. But access for some is not actually helping the majority. The type of care I provide in a hospital setting is less than 1% of abortion care. Without abortion care, we’re going to see maternal mortality go up. We’re going to see people stay in abusive relationships.

Dr. Zite, how are medical schools deciding what procedures are taught, and what is their legal standing?

Zite: Currently about half of the residency training programs are in banned states. It is a requirement to graduate from a residency and become a board-certified OB-GYN to be able to perform abortion care. We’ve been struggling in Tennessee to figure out how we’re going to get that training for our residents. Will it actually make it harder to become board-certified?

So you have some doctors leaving these states, training that is difficult to access and people who will be coming to emergency rooms needing abortion care in an emergency?

Zite: That’s the situation that I think is very poorly understood. I had a resident when I first got to the University of Tennessee that had opted out of all abortion training before I arrived. About three months before she finished training, we were called down to the trauma bay and a young woman who was about 16 weeks pregnant had been in a very bad car accident. There was still a fetal heartbeat. We did the case together, and afterward the resident had this moment of realizing “I’m going to be on my own in three months.” What happens if this patient comes into my ER? I am the person who should be able to save her life. We need to be able to train doctors to do these procedures.

Are You in a State That Banned Abortion? Tell Us How Changes in Medical Care Impact You.

by Tony Schick, Oregon Public Broadcasting

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

The federal government has announced plans to increase funding for the Columbia River Basin’s salmon hatcheries, the often-crumbling facilities that maintain the river’s dwindling salmon populations. But tribes and state agencies say the influx of funds is only a fraction of what is needed.

The Bonneville Power Administration, the federal agency that’s required to pay for salmon recovery using proceeds from selling power generated by hydroelectric dams, is putting an additional $50 million toward repairs at hatcheries operated by tribes and states. The agency also plans to increase annual funding for hatchery upkeep from $500,000 to $2.7 million.

In May, Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica reported on how the federal government’s neglect of an old and struggling hatchery system had put tribal fishing rights in jeopardy. The news organizations’ analysis showed that the outlook for fish survival was so poor that the hatchery system was at risk of collapsing under the strain of climate change, unable to produce meaningful levels of fish. Bonneville is the primary funder of the river’s hatcheries, with additional money coming from federal appropriations and local government. In August, OPB and ProPublica reported that Bonneville had resisted tribes’ restoration efforts and constrained salmon recovery funds even while generating hundreds of millions of dollars in surplus revenue.

Many salmon habitats were destroyed or drastically altered by the repeated damming of the Columbia in the mid-20th century to create hydropower, provide irrigation and improve shipping navigation. Throughout that period, Congress authorized the dams and turned to hatcheries to compensate for the fish losses.

But hatcheries never ensured that they produced the numbers of fish that tribes were promised. Around the time salmon reached endangered status in the late 1980s and 1990s, tribes opened their own hatcheries and began reforming them from mass fish-production facilities into nurseries for wild fish that could better preserve genetic diversity and bolster existing natural populations.

Now climate change and warming ocean waters are making matters worse. In recent years, salmon from Columbia River hatcheries have had some of their lowest survival rates on record. Federal scientists estimate salmon survival could further decline by as much as 90% over the next 40 years.

Throughout this unfolding crisis, lawmakers and government agencies have left poorly maintained infrastructure in place, including burst pipes, broken water pumps and crumbling concrete in the walls of aquatic pens that can harbor bacteria and sicken fish.

The $50 million and fivefold increase in hatcheries’ annual budget will begin to address problems stemming in large part from years of limited funding. It will barely make a dent, however, in the infrastructure needs at more than 50 Columbia basin hatchery programs. According to estimates assembled by state and tribal hatchery managers in 2020, all the needed upgrades and repairs across the Columbia River Basin would total more than $1 billion. Becky Johnson, director of hatchery production for the Nez Perce Tribe in Idaho, said the cost has only grown since then.

Tribes in the Northwest have struggled for years to get the federal government to recognize the inadequacy of its funding for salmon restoration, which is done primarily through the Bonneville Power Administration, an agency torn between mandates to fund conservation work and to operate as a business.

The Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians, a coalition of 57 tribes across Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana, passed a resolution in January urging the federal government to more effectively and efficiently fund salmon recovery. It passed a similar resolution in 2021.

Yet funding for salmon has not kept pace with inflation, particularly after Bonneville adopted a strategy in 2018 to shore up its budget and reduce debt in part by limiting its fish and wildlife spending.

State agencies and tribes are asking the Biden administration to use funds from the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal to upgrade aging hatcheries beyond what the Bonneville increases will cover.

Tribes also have gained the attention of Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee. A spokesperson for Murray confirmed she was working with tribes to identify needs and pursue additional funding.

“Salmon are foundational to Washington state and Tribes’ economy, culture, and traditions. Preserving and protecting fish populations will continue to be a top priority I fight for in the other Washington,” Murray said in a statement. “I’ll be considering every option to advance salmon recovery in Washington state and across the greater Pacific Northwest.”

Tribes and conservation groups were encouraged by commitments from the Biden administration last year to prioritize Native American rights and to find a long-term solution for the ongoing decline of Columbia River salmon.

“We heard a request to fully fund fish and wildlife restoration and to vest in Tribes and states a stronger role in managing those funds,” the White House said at the time. It went on: “We cannot continue business as usual. Doing the right thing for salmon, Tribal Nations, and communities can bring us together. It is time for effective, creative solutions.”

A year later, the Biden administration remains in negotiations with state officials, tribal governments and environmental groups over the potential for dam removal and how salmon recovery will be funded.

When the Bonneville Power Administration announced a $500 million revenue surplus this year — and its plans to use just 10% of that on fish and wildlife — those parties hoped the Biden administration would intervene. The office of then-Oregon Gov. Kate Brown implored the agency to use more of its surplus on salmon, calling 10% “simply unacceptable.”

Conservation groups and tribes agree. “BPA has sort of turned a blind eye,” Mitch Cutter of the Idaho Conservation League said. “We really looked to the administration to make the right decision happen at BPA, and we’re pretty disappointed that that didn’t happen.”

The White House Council on Environmental Quality said it is making sure portions of recent infrastructure bills go to Columbia River tribes, including up to $160 million in grants issued through the Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund. .

White House staff met to discuss Columbia River salmon last week with members of the Nez Perce Tribe, Washington’s Spokane Tribe, an adviser to Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, and representatives from American Rivers and the National Wildlife Federation.

“The Biden-Harris Administration is making significant investments to support hatcheries and other Tribally-led salmon initiatives,” White House Council on Environmental Quality spokesperson Alyssa Roberts said in an email. “We recognize more must be done and, as President Biden noted last week, we are committed to working together to bring healthy and abundant salmon runs back to the Columbia River System.”

In response to a request for comment, Bonneville spokesperson Kevin Wingert pointed to a document the agency assembled in January addressing the tribes’ and conservation groups’ concerns. The document asserted that Bonneville was meeting its legal obligations to fish and wildlife. It also said Bonneville’s obligations to salmon aren’t tied to how well the agency is doing financially.

“Just as a lack of revenue would not decrease those obligations, an influx of revenue does not increase those obligations,” the document stated.

But even if it were to address a maintenance backlog estimated at $1 billion, the Columbia hatchery system would still be lacking the upgrades scientists say are necessary to make the facilities and the fish they breed more resilient to the effects of climate change. Those include circular tanks instead of concrete pens, more precise control of water temperature and additional ponds and feeding techniques that better simulate the natural environment.

Those changes would require additional billions of dollars.

“It’s basically a drop in the bucket,” Johnson said of the funding increase. “But a start, right?”

by Elyssa Cherney, Crain’s Chicago Business, and Steve Mills, ProPublica

The statue of Buddha that was up for sale at Christie’s auction house was, according to art experts, an early test: Would recent controversy around objects once owned by two prominent Chicago collectors hinder its sale and send a signal about how the art market views the renowned collection?

The answer came quickly. The 7 1/4-inch copper-alloy Buddha from 9th-century Nepal, which had been on loan to the Art Institute of Chicago until last year, failed to sell last week, a Christie’s spokesperson said.

It never received a bid in the estimated price range of $60,000 to $80,000.

“Nobody wants to buy trouble,” said Erin Thompson, an associate professor of art crime at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York who has advocated for repatriation of Nepali artifacts. “Why would you buy someone else’s stolen cultural property?”

Although the Christie’s auction was a single sale of a single object, art experts said it was telling nonetheless. The rare Buddha had been in the collection of James and Marilynn Alsdorf, whose massive art holdings focused on pieces from Nepal and other parts of South and Southeast Asia.

The Christie’s spokesperson said 63% of the auction’s 124 lots found buyers.

The Alsdorfs obtained the Buddha at a time when protocols around collecting were lax, and it was sold to them by a New York dealer who at the end of his career acknowledged engaging in questionable practices. Ethical standards for acquiring antiquities became more strict after a 1970 UNESCO convention prohibited the import of looted cultural property.

The Buddha was on loan to the Art Institute beginning in the late 1990s and was last on display in 2018 at the museum, which has galleries dedicated to the Alsdorfs’ vast Asian collection. Marilynn Alsdorf, who died in 2019, left much of the collection to the museum. James Alsdorf, who once led the museum’s board of trustees, died in 1990.

Last week, ProPublica and Crain’s Chicago Business published an investigation into Nepal’s claims that the Art Institute should return a 17th-century gilt-copper necklace that is on display in its Alsdorf Galleries, as well as questions about other objects in the couple’s collection.

The investigation identified nine pieces once owned by the Alsdorfs that have been returned to other countries based on concerns they were looted or illicitly exported, a pattern some art historians said should spur the Art Institute to take a deeper look at the approximately 500 Alsdorf objects in its collection.

The investigation also showed that the Art Institute hasn’t kept up with other museums that take a more transparent approach to these problems by publicly sharing information when an object is repatriated.

Marilynn Alsdorf’s son, Jeffrey Alsdorf, did not respond to requests for comment. He is listed as an executor of his mother’s estate and sits on the board of the Alsdorf Foundation, according to the most recent publicly available tax records. Linda Feinstein, a Chicago attorney who, according to records, has represented Marilynn Alsdorf’s trust, also did not respond to a request for comment.

The Buddha up for sale at Christie’s was taken off display at the Art Institute in 2018 when the museum reinstalled its galleries, a museum spokesperson said. After Marilynn Alsdorf’s death, all of her remaining loans to the museum were concluded in 2022, the spokesperson said.

The Art Institute has said it follows best practices for investigating and documenting ownership history, or provenance, of the objects in its collection and has added staff dedicated to that process. The museum also has said it takes all repatriation claims seriously but has noted that they’re complex and often take time to resolve.

The fate of the rare Buddha is not unlike what’s happened when other controversial objects have gone up for sale. Bronzes from the West African country of Benin that were stolen by British colonialists have failed to sell or have been pulled from bidding before auctions begin. Museums are now repatriating the objects to Nigeria.

Pieces from Italy and Greece have also recently been removed from auctions after researchers linked their provenance to known antiquities smugglers and publicized concerns about them.

In such cases, prospective buyers may be worried about the potential resale value of an object that has garnered controversy, said Patty Gerstenblith, a distinguished research professor specializing in cultural heritage law at DePaul University.

“I might say to myself, ‘Am I buying a lawsuit? Am I buying bad publicity?’” Gerstenblith said. “There’s a lot of short-term and longer-term concerns, and I do believe that once something is out there, it can influence the market.”

This isn’t the first time that bidders have been wary of an Alsdorf piece on the auction circuit. In June 2020, a Benin bronze sculpture of a fish, acquired by the Alsdorfs in 1957, failed to sell at a Christie’s auction in Paris, according to news reports.

In the most recent auction, the Buddha up for sale had been purchased by the Alsdorfs from an art dealer named William Wolff, who had acquired it by 1972, according to information from Christie’s. It isn’t clear when the Alsdorfs purchased the piece from him.

For years, Wolff had a gallery on Madison Avenue in New York City. Although he was widely considered one of the nation’s top dealers in Asian antiquities, Wolff acknowledged near the end of his career that some of his dealings had occurred under questionable circumstances.

Wolff, who died in 1991, said that in many countries where he acquired objects, their export was illegal. He said he utilized a network of “scouts” to transport the pieces, sometimes across mountain ranges.

“The fellows I bought from knew how to get it out of the country,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1990, when he closed his gallery because of rising rent. “Otherwise they would not have been able to sell it.”

For Nepalis, the increased attention on cultural artifacts in museums and private Western collections is long overdue. Activists with the Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign, an organization that works to repatriate stolen objects to the country, have been pressing the Art Institute to return more objects donated to the museum by the Alsdorfs, who were major financial supporters of Chicago’s arts community.

A gilt-copper necklace at the Art Institute is perhaps the strongest symbol of the questions plaguing the Alsdorf collection. The Nepali government first asked the Art Institute to return the necklace in August 2021, alleging the piece had been stolen from a secure location in Nepal and illicitly exported from the country. The necklace is said to have been offered to the Hindu goddess Taleju by a Nepali king in about 1650.

The slow pace of negotiations has frustrated Nepali activists, art historians and cultural heritage scholars following the case. New details reported by Crain’s and ProPublica showed that the Art Institute asked Nepal to provide more evidence establishing ownership of the necklace, despite the decades that have passed since the piece went missing from the country.

Following the ProPublica-Crain’s investigation, Gerstenblith said it’s unlikely those records exist. She called on the Art Institute to return the necklace if Nepal can show it came from the country and has ongoing cultural significance to its people.

“To ask a country to come up with that type of documentation is as if they’re in a court of law,” Gerstenblith said. “It’s my opinion that the point of having an ethical policy is to actually move beyond that and, if anything, to shift the burden to the Art Institute.”

by Craig Silverman and Bianca Fortis

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

Just after midnight on Sept. 13, Kristian “Murda” Murphy was watching TV at home in Boca Raton, Florida, when his phone began buzzing.

“Murda u always outside we gon see you,” read a message from an account he didn’t recognize.

Murphy is a music manager, producer and entrepreneur who has worked with high-profile rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine, among other artists. Hours before the threats began, 6ix9ine posted a message to his more than 20 million followers on Instagram that mocked the recent death of rapper PnB Rock. Taking exception to the post, people began blowing up Murphy’s phone.

“I’m sitting home by myself literally watching TV, all of a sudden I see these texts started coming in and I’m like, ‘What the fuck?’” said Murphy, in a gravelly voice that retains the accents of his native Yonkers, New York. In addition to threatening bodily harm, the anonymous messengers told Murphy they were coming for one of his most valuable assets — the @murdamurphy Instagram account. It had more than 300,000 followers and brought in thousands of dollars a month thanks to people and companies who paid Murphy to share sponsored posts.

“WE PACKING ACCOUNTS SOON 🤣🤣” read a message from a person who identified himself as OBNBrandon.

Meta suspended Kristian “Murda” Murphy’s Instagram account hours after OBN threatened to take it down. (Kendrick Brinson, special to ProPublica)

Murphy didn’t know it, but he was in the crosshairs of one of the most prolific and notorious members of a booming underground community of Instagram scammers and hackers who shut down profiles on the social network and then demand payment to reactivate them. While they also target TikTok and other platforms, takedown-for-hire scammers like OBN are proliferating on Instagram, exploiting the app’s slow and often ineffective customer support services and its easily manipulated account reporting systems. These Instascammers often target people whose accounts are vulnerable because their content verges on nudity and pornography, which Instagram and its parent company, Meta, prohibit.

A ProPublica investigation found that OBN, who also goes by OBNbrandon and Brandon, has prompted Meta to ban an array of influencers and entertainment figures. In an article he wrote for factz.com last year, OBN dubbed himself the “log-out king” because “I have deleted multiple celebrities + influencers on Meta & Instagram.”

“I made about $300k just off banning and unbanning pages,” he wrote.

OBN exploits weaknesses in Meta’s customer service. By allowing anyone to report an account for violating the company’s standards, Meta gives enormous leverage to people who are able to trick it into banning someone who relies on Instagram for income. Meta uses a mix of automated systems and human review to evaluate reports. Banners like OBN test and trade tips on how to trigger the system to falsely suspend accounts. In some cases OBN hacks into accounts to post offensive content. In others, he creates duplicate accounts in his targets’ names, then reports the original accounts as imposters so they’ll be barred for violating Meta’s ban on account impersonation. In addition, OBN has posed as a Meta employee to persuade at least one target to pay him to restore her account.

Models, businesspeople, marketers and adult performers across the United States told ProPublica that OBN had ruined their businesses and lives with spurious complaints, even causing one woman to consider suicide. More than half a dozen people with over 45 million total followers on Instagram told ProPublica they lost their accounts temporarily or permanently shortly after OBN threatened to report them. They say Meta failed to help them and to take OBN and other account manipulators seriously. One person who said she was victimized by OBN has an ongoing civil suit against Meta for lost income, while others sent the company legal letters demanding payment.

“Once you’re put on Brandon’s radar, whether someone’s paying him or not, he has this personal investment in making sure that your life is miserable and that he’ll try and get as much money out of you as he possibly can,” said Kay Jenkins, a Miami real estate agent and model. Her main Instagram account with roughly 100,000 followers has been repeatedly deactivated since 2021.

Kay Jenkins, a Miami real estate agent and model, says that OBN got her Instagram account banned and then duped her into paying him to get it back. (Kendrick Brinson, special to ProPublica)

A Meta spokesperson acknowledged that OBN has had short-term success in getting accounts removed by abusing systems intended to help enforce community standards. But the company has addressed those situations and taken down dozens of accounts linked to OBN, the spokesperson said. Most often, the spokesperson said, OBN scammed people by falsely claiming to be able to ban and restore accounts.

“We know the impact these scams can have on people which is why we continue investing to protect our users, including updating our support systems and keeping the scammers out,” said the spokesperson, who asked not to be identified due to security concerns. “This remains a highly adversarial space, with scammers constantly trying to evade detection by social media platforms.”

The story of how OBN has manipulated Meta’s systems is a cautionary tale for social media platforms. While the company is often criticized for being slow to take down misleading or offensive material, OBN was able to make a lucrative living by finding the pressure points that prompt Meta to act quickly based on false reports.

Murphy said that’s exactly what happened to him. Until OBN came along, he was earning between $15,000 and $20,000 a month from his Instagram account. It was filled with pictures of him with rappers and well-known figures from the Miami nightlife. Murphy, a stocky man with short blond hair and permanent five o’clock shadow, typically posed in black clothes, aviator sunglasses and thick diamond chains, with one or both of his middle fingers extended at the camera. He charged aspiring entrepreneurs between $2,000 and $5,000 per story to be featured in a post on his verified account.

“People pay me all the time to post promos for music, crypto,” he said. “I can make five, 10 grand by accident if I needed to. … The money’s crazy.”

Murphy had never heard of OBN until that September morning. He went to bed shortly after 3 a.m. and woke up to discover his Instagram account was disabled.

“That’s the first time I’ve ever had my account taken, ever, in my life. My heart dropped,” he said.

He was initially successful in getting Meta to reactivate it. But it’s been offline since December. Meta declined to comment on Murphy’s experience.

“I make money with that account, so it’s not fair to me that this guy has more power than Meta — it’s like a multibillion-billion-billion-dollar company,” Murphy said. “And they can’t do nothing about it.”

Online, OBN portrays himself as something of a gangster. Videos and photos he’s posted indicate he drives a white Lamborghini and wears expensive watches.

His main marketing vehicle for his services is the messaging app Telegram, where he has run a channel called @teamobn since August 2021. He posts about accounts he says he got banned, unbanned or verified. He touts software he uses to file false reports that allege an account violated Meta’s community guidelines, triggering a takedown.

He describes various strategies he uses to get accounts banned. For example, he says he can get a legitimate account suspended for violating Meta’s rule against impersonation by taking a verified Instagram account and changing its display name, profile photo and content to mirror his target’s. Then he sends Meta a report claiming that the legitimate account is impersonating the verified account.

Jilted lovers, jealous friends and business rivals use his services. OBN wrote that he also targets people for his own amusement, because they insulted a friend or client, or because they offer rival services. After banning an account, he frequently offers to reactivate it for a fee as high as $5,000, kicking off a cycle of bans and reactivations that continues until the victim runs out of money or stops paying.

Several notable people in the often-intertwined worlds of hip-hop, Miami nightlife, OnlyFans models and online influencers, including Celina Powell and Myron Gaines, have endorsed OBN. Powell is an online influencer who claims to have had sexual relationships with prominent rappers and has amassed more than 3 million followers on Instagram. Gaines co-hosts the “Fresh & Fit” podcast, a YouTube channel with more than 1 million subscribers that bills itself as providing “the TRUTH to Females, Fitness, and Finances.” Gaines, whose legal name is Amrou A. Fudl, was temporarily banned from TikTok for misogynistic comments.

On Oct. 21, 2021, Gaines paused the broadcast to offer a plug. “​Shouts out to our boy Brandon. For y’all that don’t know or follow me on Instagram on @unplugfit, I got my shit banned and then I’m back up now and my boy @obn.here was the one that got it back,” Gaines said, as an image of OBN’s Instagram account flashed on the screen. “So if you’ve got issues with Instagram, you get banned, whatever it is, this is the guy that you want to fucking contact.” Gaines didn’t respond to requests for comment. After ProPublica contacted Gaines, the video of the “Fresh & Fit” episode that featured his OBN shoutout was set to private, removing it from public view.

“Fresh & Fit” co-host Myron Gaines promoted OBN’s services and Instagram account. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Those who said they were targeted by OBN include Adam22, the host of the popular hip-hop podcast “No Jumper,” who has 1.6 million Instagram followers, and Tommy Rodriguez, a Florida businessman with 1 million followers. OBN has said that he was responsible for banning Asian Doll, a rapper with 4.2 million followers; she did not respond to requests for comment. Meta declined to comment on all three cases.

OBN often targets women who rely on Instagram to draw people to their pages on OnlyFans, where they charge subscribers to view sexually explicit content.

“This is how I feed myself and my family,” said Danii Banks, an OnlyFans model with close to 8 million Instagram followers. She said she lost $300,000 in income when OBN induced Instagram to take down her account. He extorted thousands of dollars from her to restore her account, but it remained down, she said.

“It’s like someone lighting a fire on your business and just walking away.”

Meta declined to comment on Banks.

Banks lives in the Las Vegas area, as does OBN, according to posts, emails and public records. Banks reported him to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and the FBI for defrauding her, but she hasn’t heard back, she said. OBN, meanwhile, appears to have pursued a job with the Las Vegas police while mocking attempts by Meta and law enforcement to investigate him.

Last summer, he posted an email from the LVMPD’s Office of Human Resources that said the recipient, whose name was redacted, had met the requirements to continue the application process for becoming a police cadet. It said a written exam would be held; the date was also redacted.

“Wish me luck boys,” OBN wrote in his Telegram channel.

OBN told his followers that he’d applied to become a Las Vegas police cadet. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

The next day, he shared a video shot in the LVMPD parking lot. “It went well,” he wrote and added a thumbs-up emoji.

Roughly a month later, OBN joked about an email from Meta telling him that it had complied with a request from an unnamed law enforcement agency for data regarding one of his accounts.

“Bro instagram or meta at this point is beyond cringe lmao,” he wrote on Telegram, using the popular acronym for “laughing my ass off.”

Despite his frequent activity on Telegram and Instagram, and the shoutouts from major podcasts and influencers, OBN’s true identity — and even whether the account is run by one person or more than one — has remained a mystery.

ProPublica’s investigation led to one person who either is OBN or is closely linked to him: 20-year-old Edwin Reyes-Martinez, who lives with his mother in an apartment complex roughly 13 miles north of the Las Vegas strip.

Numerous clues connected Reyes-Martinez to OBN. Victims said OBN told them to send money to a bank account in the name of Edwin Reyes, or via an email address, ermtz030@icloud.com, that included Reyes-Martinez’s initials. That address also matched a partially redacted email, 030@icloud.com, that’s listed in the Las Vegas police letter OBN posted on Telegram.

A similar string of letters and numbers appears in a Twitter username, @ermtz030. That account bears Reyes-Martinez’s name and photo and features videos filmed inside a white Lamborghini. Although the videos don’t show the driver’s face, he is wearing a gold ring that resembles one worn by Reyes-Martinez in photos from his Facebook account. Another Facebook photo showed Reyes-Martinez posing in front of a white Lamborghini similar to the one featured in OBN’s Telegram profile.

The email address that OBN told victims to send payments to includes a string of characters that match the username on a Twitter account linked to Reyes-Martinez. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Visited at his home in early February, Reyes-Martinez was dressed in a baggy, orange long-sleeve shirt, brown pants and brown slippers. A pair of gold and diamond studs sparkled in his ears. At first, he denied knowing who OBN is or having anything to do with him.

After being told that his own bank account had accepted more than $10,000 in payments intended for OBN in just the past few months, he changed his story. He said that someone named Brandon asked him to funnel money through his bank account to unknown recipients.

“There’s an individual that asked me if I can receive a payment,” he said. “I have no idea what that payment is for. I received them as a favor for the person.”

He pulled out his phone and showed an Instagram account called @madetoomuchmoney that he said belongs to the Brandon who contacted him. He said he didn’t know where the money went or what Brandon’s last name is. “I know a lot of Brandons.”

He said he works full time in a warehouse. “You see my hands? These are hard work hands,” he said, holding them out. “If I was OBN, I wouldn’t be working.”

ProPublica also submitted a request to the Las Vegas police for records related to any application by Reyes-Martinez to the department’s cadet program. The department declined, citing a Nevada law that allows it to withhold personnel records.

After the meeting in his apartment, Reyes-Martinez did not respond to follow-up questions. Meta sent him a cease-and-desist letter on March 17, about two weeks after ProPublica contacted the company for comment on OBN’s activities and on the evidence connecting Reyes-Martinez to OBN. A spokesperson said Meta had banned him from its platforms but declined to share the letter.

Account banning is just one of several lucrative schemes that prey on Instagram, which is uniquely important for celebrities, entrepreneurs, influencers and anyone seeking clout and status. Last year, a ProPublica investigation exposed a million-dollar operation that saw people pay $25,000 or more to fraudulently obtain verified accounts.

The verification badge, a blue tick added next to an account’s name, is applied to accounts that Instagram determines are authentic, unique, complete and notable. Verified accounts can charge more for sponsored posts, are given prominence by Instagram’s algorithms, and are seen as more difficult for people like OBN to take down. The ProPublica story prompted Meta to remove verification badges from hundreds of accounts.

OBN has said that he can take down verified accounts. “If you want someone smoked we talk 4 figures or nothing,” he wrote in his Telegram channel. In a separate post, he offered to create verified accounts for a $15,000 fee.

Meta has acknowledged that it needs to invest more in customer support. In February, founder Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta would offer people the ability to pay for account verification and enhanced support, including “​​access to a real person for common account issues.” The Meta spokesperson said the company has invested in new account security and recovery measures, including a tool to help users who’ve been hacked. It’s also giving more users an opportunity to complain to a human agent rather than a bot.

The 1996 federal Communications Decency Act generally exempts platforms from legal liability related to the behavior of their users. However, the Federal Trade Commission has required several online platforms to bolster their security.

“If somebody is able to get into the account, the FTC doesn’t treat that company as a victim. They treat them as part of the problem,” said Eric Goldman, a professor and co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at the Santa Clara School of Law.

Meta has been under a consent decree with the FTC since 2012 because of allegations that the company, then known as Facebook, violated its privacy promises to users.

Some OBN victims have tried to hold Meta accountable. In late 2021, Tiara Johnson, a former adult performer who had more than 2.8 million Instagram followers when she lost her account, filed a breach of contract suit against Meta, which is pending in federal court. She said the company wrongly removed her account. Her suit includes screenshots of a conversation with OBN in which he says someone paid him $3,000 to ban her account. She then paid him the same amount to get it back, but he didn’t get it reactivated.

In February, Meta moved to dismiss the case, saying it has no obligation to provide an Instagram account to Johnson. The court is scheduled to consider the motion in June.

OBN can’t deactivate accounts by himself; he needs Meta to do it, either by triggering its automated systems or by getting a worker to take action. He has often boasted of bribing workers at Instagram and Meta, which recently acknowledged firing or disciplining workers who took bribes to access user accounts. ProPublica could not identify any Meta workers who accepted bribes from OBN.

But OBN did appear to have advance knowledge of a cease-and-desist letter sent on behalf of Meta to online marketer Joey Hickson.

Hickson built a business running large social media accounts like @break and @lmao, and he had four Instagram accounts with tens of millions of followers. He said he paid OBN for services such as helping people get an Instagram username they wanted or obtaining verified accounts.

After initially cooperating, OBN stopped delivering, according to Hickson. Then OBN started threatening to take Hickson’s accounts down. Last Sept. 22, OBN taunted Hickson on Instagram. “Enjoy your c&d,” he wrote, referring to the cease-and-desist letter sent by a law firm representing Meta.

Hickson immediately checked his email and saw that he had received just such a letter from Perkins Coie, a law firm that said it was writing on behalf of Meta. The letter said an investigation found that he and his company were “abusing Instagram” by offering account reactivation and verification services and by selling fake engagement such as likes and followers. It was banning Hickson and taking down his accounts.

OBN “knew before I did,” Hickson said.

OBN posted a message in his Telegram channel to celebrate that Hickson’s personal Instagram account, @joey, had been deactivated. He accused Hickson of stealing $20,000 from him and said, “enjoy the c&d my brother.”

When Meta sent marketer Joey Hickson a cease-and-desist letter, OBN bragged about it on Telegram. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

OBN then tried to convince Hickson to pay him $15,000 to reverse the ban. He said he could get Meta and its law firm to withdraw the sanction because he was responsible for it. He said another hacker had created several Instagram accounts with fabricated accusations against Hickson and then sent the complaints to a Perkins Coie attorney. Referring to the lawyer as “my people,” he said he’d tell her that the accounts were “falsely made” to frame Hickson.

“Buddy I’m the one who did it who do you think she [the lawyer] gon listen to lmao I bring her clients everyday,” OBN wrote.

OBN asked Hickson to pay him through an intermediary: Dan Folger, a former photographer for rap star Wiz Khalifa who has over 300,000 Instagram followers and a Telegram channel where he sells Instagram services such as account reactivation. OBN has posted screenshots in his Telegram channel that show crypto payments from Folger to OBN. OBN has also shared video security footage, presumably supplied by Folger, of a ProPublica reporter visiting Folger’s Nevada home. In a Telegram chat, Folger denied working with OBN. He did not respond to detailed questions sent via his attorney.

Hickson rejected OBN’s offer, saying he wasn’t aware of anyone who had gotten a cease-and-desist retracted. He denies that he broke Meta’s rules. “I’ve spent a decade of my life building what I built only to have someone come in and tarnish that. I’m just trying to get my accounts back and my life back.”

Meta said Hickson’s accounts were appropriately taken down for violating Instagram’s terms of service. Perkins Coie and the attorney mentioned by OBN did not respond to requests for comment.

Before the bans and the victims, before the white Lambo, OBN was just a teenager with a PlayStation. “We used to just play games online,” Syenrai said in a telephone interview. Syenrai is the internet handle of a young man who was once prominent in the Instagram banning community. He requested that his real name not be used. Syenrai knew OBN as Brandon when they met online around 2018. They have never met face-to-face. He said he believes that Reyes-Martinez is at least partially responsible for the online activities carried out under the OBN handle, but that more than one person may be involved.

Syenrai said that Brandon earned money by selling a how-to guide to scamming. “The guides were easily found online for free, but OBN sold them for $45 a pop,” he said.

Brandon used the OBN moniker specifically for scamming, Syenrai said. Asked what the acronym stands for, Syenrai said he was told it was “only bands” — a reference to the paper band that holds a stack of bills together — followed by the version of the N-word that ends in “a.”

Everything changed for Brandon and Syenrai in the middle of 2020. A mutual friend named Abu “learned how to ban and showed it to me and Brandon,” Syenrai said. Syenrai caught on so well that he earned a measure of fame in 2021 by “memorializing” the account of Instagram head Adam Mosseri. When an account owner dies, Instagram can enable a memorial setting that locks the account and informs viewers that the person is dead. Mosseri’s memorializing only lasted an hour, but it embarrassed the company.

“It was a wild transition for us guys, from playing games to taking down celeb pages,” Syenrai said.

That kind of high-profile takedown is a way for a banner to gain clout, a flexing of skills to showcase Instagram’s vulnerability and make fellow banners jealous — like OBN, who also took credit for memorializing Mosseri.

It was also a quick route to a stern warning.

Syenrai received a cease-and-desist notice from Meta in November 2021. He said he stopped banning and working with OBN.

Kay Jenkins’ Instagram popularity helped her earn between $15,000 and $20,000 a month from sponsorships and OnlyFans subscriptions. But after she moved to Miami from her native Utah in March 2021, both her main Instagram account and her secondary accounts for her real estate and personal coaching businesses were repeatedly suspended. Months later, she learned by chance what had happened. In November 2021, she was a guest on “Fresh & Fit,” along with Celina Powell. Powell, who rose to fame by claiming to have slept with rappers and discussing the alleged affairs on hip-hop podcasts such as “No Jumper,” had recently given a shoutout to OBN.

“I’m telling you right now if you need any Instagram services, you need your account back, whatever the fuck you need, you have to go to my boy @obn.here,” Powell had said in an Instagram video that OBN shared in his channel.

Instagram influencer Celina Powell gave at least two shoutouts to OBN. (Obtained by ProPublica)

After the broadcast, Powell and Jenkins rode the elevator from the studio up to Jenkins’ apartment. Powell called someone she referred to as Brandon and started talking about banning accounts.

“Who is this guy?” Jenkins asked her. “Can he bring my account back?”

“Yeah, he can bring it back if I tell him to,” Powell said. “Because he’s the one who shut it down.”

Powell explained that she had OBN ban Jenkins. Powell was upset after seeing a video of her then-boyfriend dancing with Jenkins at a Miami club, Jenkins said.

Jenkins hid her anger. “I was so hopeful that like, OK, if she’s the source that brought it down, she’s probably my only hope to fucking get it back,” Jenkins said.

Powell agreed to get OBN to restore Jenkins’ accounts. And soon they were reactivated. On Dec. 5, less than a week after the “Fresh & Fit” appearance, Powell posted another shoutout for OBN.

Still furious at Powell, Jenkins ended their friendship. Her main account promptly went down again.

Jenkins finished 2021 with her main Instagram account suspended and no indication from Meta about if or when it might come back.

“I had the worst Christmas of my life, I contemplated slitting my wrists, I didn’t feel like living anymore,” Jenkins said.

Powell was imprisoned in June 2022 for violating parole on a 2015 conviction for driving a getaway car in a theft. Powell, who was recently released, declined to comment. Around the time of Powell’s re-arrest, Jenkins’ Instagram account was restored. But the reprieve was short-lived. On Sept. 23, OBN messaged Jenkins. He offered to get her account verified for a fee. She declined and told him not to contact her again.

“Dumb ass b!tch,” read a private Instagram message sent to her the next day from an account linked to OBN. “I’m going to ruin you.”

Two days later, Meta suspended Jenkins’ account.

Jenkins says that OBN scammed her out of more than $10,000. (Kendrick Brinson, special to ProPublica)

Jenkins decided the only way to protect her account and income was to make peace with OBN. It proved to be an expensive decision.

OBN assured Jenkins that he would be happy to work with her. He told her that he had a senior-level Instagram contact in Europe who could help unban and verify her account. He shared a screenshot of a conversation with the contact but, in an apparent oversight, failed to fully redact the name, according to Jenkins.

Seeing no alternative, Jenkins paid OBN $5,000, receipts show. Her account briefly came back online but was soon taken down by Meta. Then OBN blocked her on Telegram and deleted their conversation, according to Jenkins. She decided she had one more option: go directly to OBN’s high-level connection at Instagram. She found the employee’s Telegram account, which had the same username, photo and bio as his verified Instagram account. She messaged the account to say that she’d been working with OBN but he failed to deliver the services promised.

The response was sympathetic: “We made insane money no clue what went wrong.” They struck an agreement to reactivate and verify Jenkins’ account for $4,000. She sent the money, and her account was unlocked on Nov. 18, but it was suspended again four days later; the contact demanded another $4,000 to fix it. Again, Jenkins sent the money.

An excerpt from a Telegram chat between Jenkins and someone she thought was a Meta employee about getting her account restored (Obtained by ProPublica)

On the morning of Nov. 24, she woke up and immediately checked Instagram to see if her account was back. It wasn’t. And she had a new Telegram message from OBN.

“Haha ur talking to my rep such a slut 🤣 he won’t help you for shit anymore I’ll make sure of that,” OBN wrote.

Jenkins’ account never came back. She hired a lawyer and sent Meta a demand letter for $25,000 in damages for the repeated loss of her main Instagram account. Meta hasn’t replied. In reality, Jenkins was paying OBN all along. In an elaborate scam, he had posed on Telegram as the Meta employee. The cryptocurrency wallet to which Jenkins sent payments matched a wallet that OBN has used for other transactions.

ProPublica also traced the IP address of the server that the alleged Meta employee used to access the internet. It wasn’t in Europe. It was used by a cellphone in Las Vegas.

Meta acknowledged that its employee was impersonated. As a result, the employee and his family have faced threats and harassment for years. The employee reported the account to Telegram. After being contacted by ProPublica, Telegram removed the account, which a spokesperson described as “fraudulent.”

Following Reyes-Martinez’s conversation with a ProPublica reporter in his North Las Vegas apartment, the @madetoomuchmoney Instagram account he said belonged to “Brandon” was deactivated. OBN blocked the reporter from his Twitter account and Telegram channel and announced he would no longer offer account banning as a service.

“I’m done with banning if you mention anything about bans I’ll block you,” OBN wrote to his followers.

But he wanted people to know he was still in business.

“Only doing instagram claims & verification, and C&Ds only for high paying nothing less let’s work 🙏.”

by Patrick Rucker, Maya Miller and David Armstrong

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

Do you have experiences with health insurance denials? Please get in touch.

When a stubborn pain in Nick van Terheyden’s bones would not subside, his doctor had a hunch what was wrong.

Without enough vitamin D in the blood, the body will pull that vital nutrient from the bones. Left untreated, a vitamin D deficiency can lead to osteoporosis.

A blood test in the fall of 2021 confirmed the doctor’s diagnosis, and van Terheyden expected his company’s insurance plan, managed by Cigna, to cover the cost of the bloodwork. Instead, Cigna sent van Terheyden a letter explaining that it would not pay for the $350 test because it was not “medically necessary.”

The letter was signed by one of Cigna’s medical directors, a doctor employed by the company to review insurance claims.

Something about the denial letter did not sit well with van Terheyden, a 58-year-old Maryland resident. “This was a clinical decision being second-guessed by someone with no knowledge of me,” said van Terheyden, a physician himself and a specialist who had worked in emergency care in the United Kingdom.

Nick van Terheyden (Jared Soares for ProPublica)

The vague wording made van Terheyden suspect that Dr. Cheryl Dopke, the medical director who signed it, had not taken much care with his case.

Van Terheyden was right to be suspicious. His claim was just one of roughly 60,000 that Dopke denied in a single month last year, according to internal Cigna records reviewed by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum.

The rejection of van Terheyden’s claim was typical for Cigna, one of the country’s largest insurers. The company has built a system that allows its doctors to instantly reject a claim on medical grounds without opening the patient file, leaving people with unexpected bills, according to corporate documents and interviews with former Cigna officials. Over a period of two months last year, Cigna doctors denied over 300,000 requests for payments using this method, spending an average of 1.2 seconds on each case, the documents show. The company has reported it covers or administers health care plans for 18 million people.

Before health insurers reject claims for medical reasons, company doctors must review them, according to insurance laws and regulations in many states. Medical directors are expected to examine patient records, review coverage policies and use their expertise to decide whether to approve or deny claims, regulators said. This process helps avoid unfair denials.

But the Cigna review system that blocked van Terheyden’s claim bypasses those steps. Medical directors do not see any patient records or put their medical judgment to use, said former company employees familiar with the system. Instead, a computer does the work. A Cigna algorithm flags mismatches between diagnoses and what the company considers acceptable tests and procedures for those ailments. Company doctors then sign off on the denials in batches, according to interviews with former employees who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“We literally click and submit,” one former Cigna doctor said. “It takes all of 10 seconds to do 50 at a time.”

Not all claims are processed through this review system. For those that are, it is unclear how many are approved and how many are funneled to doctors for automatic denial.

Insurance experts questioned Cigna’s review system.

Patients expect insurers to treat them fairly and meaningfully review each claim, said Dave Jones, California’s former insurance commissioner. Under California regulations, insurers must consider patient claims using a “thorough, fair and objective investigation.”

“It’s hard to imagine that spending only seconds to review medical records complies with the California law,” said Jones. “At a minimum, I believe it warrants an investigation.”

Do You Have Insights Into Health Insurance Denials? Help Us Report on the System.

Within Cigna, some executives questioned whether rendering such speedy denials satisfied the law, according to one former executive who spoke on condition of anonymity because he still works with insurers.

“We thought it might fall into a legal gray zone,” said the former Cigna official, who helped conceive the program. “We sent the idea to legal, and they sent it back saying it was OK.”

Cigna adopted its review system more than a decade ago, but insurance executives say similar systems have existed in various forms throughout the industry.

In a written response, Cigna said the reporting by ProPublica and The Capitol Forum was “biased and incomplete.”

Cigna said its review system was created to “accelerate payment of claims for certain routine screenings,” Cigna wrote. “This allows us to automatically approve claims when they are submitted with correct diagnosis codes.”

When asked if its review process, known as PXDX, lets Cigna doctors reject claims without examining them, the company said that description was “incorrect.” It repeatedly declined to answer further questions or provide additional details. (ProPublica employees’ health insurance is provided by Cigna.)

Former Cigna doctors confirmed that the review system was used to quickly reject claims. An internal corporate spreadsheet, viewed by the news organizations, lists names of Cigna’s medical directors and the number of cases each handled in a column headlined “PxDx.” The former doctors said the figures represent total denials. Cigna did not respond to detailed questions about the numbers.

Cigna's explanation that its review system was designed to approve claims didn’t make sense to one former company executive. “They were paying all these claims before. Then they weren’t,” said Ron Howrigon, who now runs a company that helps private doctors in disputes with insurance companies. “You’re talking about a system built to deny claims.”

Cigna emphasized that its system does not prevent a patient from receiving care — it only decides when the insurer won’t pay. “Reviews occur after the service has been provided to the patient and does not result in any denials of care,” the statement said.

"Our company is committed to improving health outcomes, driving value for our clients and customers, and supporting our team of highly-skilled Medical Directors,” the company said.

PXDX

Cigna’s review system was developed more than a decade ago by a former pediatrician.

After leaving his practice, Dr. Alan Muney spent the next several decades advising insurers and private equity firms on how to wring savings out of health plans.

In 2010, Muney was managing health insurance for companies owned by Blackstone, the private equity firm, when Cigna tapped him to help spot savings in its operation, he said.

Insurers have wide authority to reject claims for care, but processing those denials can cost a few hundred dollars each, former executives said. Typically, claims are entered into the insurance system, screened by a nurse and reviewed by a medical director.

For lower-dollar claims, it was cheaper for Cigna to simply pay the bill, Muney said.

“They don’t want to spend money to review a whole bunch of stuff that costs more to review than it does to just pay for it,” Muney said.

Muney and his team had solved the problem once before. At UnitedHealthcare, where Muney was an executive, he said his group built a similar system to let its doctors quickly deny claims in bulk.

In response to questions, UnitedHealthcare said it uses technology that allows it to make “fast, efficient and streamlined coverage decisions based on members benefit plans and clinical criteria in compliance with state and federal laws.” The company did not directly address whether it uses a system similar to Cigna.

At Cigna, Muney and his team created a list of tests and procedures approved for use with certain illnesses. The system would automatically turn down payment for a treatment that didn’t match one of the conditions on the list. Denials were then sent to medical directors, who would reject these claims with no review of the patient file.

Cigna eventually designated the list “PXDX” — corporate shorthand for procedure-to-diagnosis. The list saved money in two ways. It allowed Cigna to begin turning down claims that it had once paid. And it made it cheaper to turn down claims, because the company’s doctors never had to open a file or conduct any in-depth review. They simply denied the claims in bulk with an electronic signature.

“The PXDX stuff is not reviewed by a doc or nurse or anything like that,” Muney said.

The review system was designed to prevent claims for care that Cigna considered unneeded or even harmful to the patient, Muney said. The policy simply allowed Cigna to cheaply identify claims that it had a right to deny.

Muney said that it would be an “administrative hassle” to require company doctors to manually review each claim rejection. And it would mean hiring many more medical directors.

“That adds administrative expense to medicine,” he said. “It’s not efficient.”

But two former Cigna doctors, who did not want to be identified by name for fear of breaking confidentiality agreements with Cigna, said the system was unfair to patients. They said the claims automatically routed for denial lacked such basic information as race and gender.

“It was very frustrating,” one doctor said.

Some state regulators questioned Cigna’s PXDX system.

In Maryland, where van Terheyden lives, state insurance officials said the PXDX system as described by a reporter raises “some red flags.”

The state’s law regulating group health plans purchased by employers requires that insurance company doctors be objective and flexible when they sit down to evaluate each case.

If medical directors are “truly rubber-stamping the output of the matching software without any additional review, it would be difficult for the medical director to comply with these requirements,” the Maryland Insurance Administration wrote in response to questions.

Medicare and Medicaid have a system that automatically prevents improper payment of claims that are wrongly coded. It does not reject payment on medical grounds.

Within the world of private insurance, Muney is certain that the PXDX formula has boosted the corporate bottom line. “It has undoubtedly saved billions of dollars,” he said.

Insurers benefit from the savings, but everyone stands to gain when health care costs are lowered and unneeded care is denied, he said.

Speedy Reviews

Cigna carefully tracks how many patient claims its medical directors handle each month. Twelve times a year, medical directors receive a scorecard in the form of a spreadsheet that shows just how fast they have cleared PXDX cases.

Dopke, the doctor who turned down van Terheyden, rejected 121,000 claims in the first two months of 2022, according to the scorecard.

Van Terheyden’s denial letter from Cigna (highlights and redactions added by ProPublica)

Dr. Richard Capek, another Cigna medical director, handled more than 80,000 instant denials in the same time span, the spreadsheet showed.

Dr. Paul Rossi has been a medical director at Cigna for over 30 years. Early last year, the physician denied more than 63,000 PXDX claims in two months.

Rossi, Dopke and Capek did not respond to attempts to contact them.

Howrigon, the former Cigna executive, said that although he was not involved in developing PXDX, he can understand the economics behind it.

“Put yourself in the shoes of the insurer,” Howrigon said. “Why not just deny them all and see which ones come back on appeal? From a cost perspective, it makes sense.”

Cigna knows that many patients will pay such bills rather than deal with the hassle of appealing a rejection, according to Howrigon and other former employees of the company. The PXDX list is focused on tests and treatments that typically cost a few hundred dollars each, said former Cigna employees.

“Insurers are very good at knowing when they can deny a claim and patients will grumble but still write a check,” Howrigon said.

Muney and other former Cigna executives emphasized that the PXDX system does leave room for the patient and their doctor to appeal a medical director’s decision to deny a claim.

But Cigna does not expect many appeals. In one corporate document, Cigna estimated that only 5% of people would appeal a denial resulting from a PXDX review.

“A Negative Customer Experience”

In 2014, Cigna considered adding a new procedure to the PXDX list to be flagged for automatic denials.

Autonomic nervous system testing can help tell if an ailing patient is suffering from nerve damage caused by diabetes or a variety of autoimmune diseases. It’s not a very involved procedure — taking about an hour — and it costs a few hundred dollars per test.

The test is versatile and noninvasive, requiring no needles. The patient goes through a handful of checks of heart rate, sweat response, equilibrium and other basic body functions.

At the time, Cigna was paying for every claim for the nerve test without bothering to look at the patient file, according to a corporate presentation. Cigna officials were weighing the cost and benefits of adding the procedure to the list. “What is happening now?” the presentation asked. “Pay for all conditions without review.”

By adding the nerve test to the PXDX list, Cigna officials estimated, the insurer would turn down more than 17,800 claims a year that it had once covered. It would pay for the test for certain conditions, but deny payment for others.

These denials would “create a negative customer experience” and a “potential for increased out of pocket costs," the company presentation acknowledged.

But they would save roughly $2.4 million a year in medical costs, the presentation said.

Cigna added the test to the list.

“It’s Not Good Medicine”

By the time van Terheyden received his first denial notice from Cigna early last year, he had some answers about his diagnosis. The blood test that Cigna had deemed “not medically necessary” had confirmed a vitamin D deficiency. His doctor had been right, and recommended supplements to boost van Terheyden’s vitamin level.

Van Terheyden (Jared Soares for ProPublica)

Still, van Terheyden kept pushing his appeal with Cigna in a process that grew more baffling. First, a different Cigna doctor reviewed the case and stood by the original denial. The blood test was unnecessary, Cigna insisted, because van Terheyden had never before been found to lack sufficient vitamin D.

“Records did not show you had a previously documented Vitamin D deficiency,” stated a denial letter issued by Cigna in April. How was van Terheyden supposed to document a vitamin D deficiency without a test? The letter was signed by a Cigna medical director named Barry Brenner.

Brenner did not respond to requests for comment.

Then, as allowed by his plan, van Terheyden took Cigna’s rejection to an external review by an independent reviewer.

In late June — seven months after the blood test — an outside doctor not working for Cigna reviewed van Terheyden’s medical record and determined the test was justified.

The blood test in question “confirms the diagnosis of Vit-D deficiency,” read the report from MCMC, a company that provides independent medical reviews. Cigna eventually paid van Terheyden’s bill. “This patient is at risk of bone fracture without proper supplementations,” MCMC’s reviewer wrote. “Testing was medically necessary and appropriate.”

Van Terheyden had known nothing about the vagaries of the PXDX denial system before he received the $350 bill. But he did sense that very few patients pushed as hard as he had done in his appeals.

As a physician, van Terheyden said, he’s dumbfounded by the company’s policies.

“It’s not good medicine. It’s not caring for patients. You end up asking yourself: Why would they do this if their ultimate goal is to care for the patient?” he said.

“Intellectually, I can understand it. As a physician, I can’t. To me, it feels wrong.”

Doris Burke contributed research.

Clarification, March 27, 2023: This article was updated to clarify that a response from the Maryland Insurance Administration referred to medical directors in general.

by Kathleen McGrory and Neil Bedi

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.

The Environmental Protection Agency took an unusual step last week: It opened a new period in which the public can comment on its proposed asbestos ban. The agency had gotten new information, officials said, including a series of ProPublica reports on dangerous working conditions in factories that use asbestos to make chlorine.

Asbestos has been long known to cause deadly cancers and other serious illnesses. While dozens of countries have outlawed the substance, the U.S. still imports hundreds of tons each year, mostly for use in chlorine manufacturing.

Last spring, the EPA proposed a ban on chrysotile, or white asbestos, the most common type. People had until July to submit comments. More than 150 did, the EPA said.

In their comments, the chlorine companies said that workers in their plants had handled asbestos safely for decades and that requiring manufacturers to quickly transition to newer, asbestos-free technology could cause a shortage of the chlorine used to disinfect drinking water.

Then, in October, ProPublica revealed that workers in a Niagara Falls, New York, plant were regularly exposed to asbestos until the facility closed in 2021 for unrelated reasons. Experts called the conditions described by workers “unacceptable” and “fraught with danger.” The company that ran the plant, OxyChem, said the workers’ accounts were not accurate but would not specify what information was incorrect. ProPublica’s report also detailed how chlorine companies have quietly fought against a ban for decades, even though they use modern, asbestos-free technology in some of their plants.

ProPublica later reported that workers at four other plants had observed unsafe practices involving asbestos at their facilities, too. One longtime janitor at an Alabama plant run by Olin Corp. said she was given no personal protective equipment, even while pregnant, as she scraped dried asbestos from bathroom floors. Olin did not return repeated calls or emails from ProPublica.

Last Friday, the EPA announced it was publishing additional information it had obtained from chlorine companies and the nonprofit Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization during meetings that took place in recent months. The agency also said it was publishing written comments submitted during that time.

ProPublica’s reports were among the subjects of the meetings and comments, the EPA said.

The submissions from the chlorine companies focused largely on the EPA’s proposed two-year timeline to comply with a ban, records show. The companies said that shortages of rare metals and other factors would make it difficult to transition to different technology that quickly. They also pushed back on an alternative plan that would give them five years if they complied with requirements for monitoring worker exposure to asbestos, saying that option was not technically feasible. They want at least 15 years to transition away from the toxic mineral.

Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization president Linda Reinstein was critical of the information from the chlorine companies and industry groups, some of which had been previously submitted to the EPA. “This ‘new information’ from industry is another desperate attempt to delay transitioning their archaic plants to modern technology,” she said in a statement.

OxyChem and Olin did not return emails from ProPublica.

The American Chemistry Council, a trade organization for the chlorine producers, told ProPublica that the companies had provided “data and information that outlines the multiple steps required for large manufacturing operations to begin conversion, including engineering design, permitting and regulatory approvals, delivery of critical components, construction and startup.” The group added: “Conversion to another technology is extremely capital intensive and will take many years to complete.”

Members of the public have until April 17 to comment on the material. The EPA has specifically requested feedback on its proposed timeline for implementing a ban, on the suggested exposure monitoring requirements and on the safety issues raised in ProPublica’s reports.

The agency — which was recently the subject of a Government Accountability Office report that found it consistently missed deadlines relating to chemical regulation — told ProPublica this week that it was still on track to finalize the rule in the fall.

Reinstein, in her statement, urged the agency to “move forward with a transition plan that puts people over profits.”

She and her organization are also continuing their push to get an even tougher asbestos ban through Congress. In years past, lawmakers have filed a bill named for Reinstein’s husband, Alan, who died from mesothelioma, a cancer caused by asbestos exposure. Sen. Jeff Merkley and Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, both Oregon Democrats, said they plan to reintroduce the bill soon.

by Duaa Eldeib

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

Federal officials have released a bleak assessment of the country’s progress in understanding and preventing stillbirths, calling the rate “unacceptably high” and issuing a series of recommendations to reduce it through research and prevention.

The National Institutes of Health report, titled “Working to Address the Tragedy of Stillbirth,” mirrored findings of an investigation by ProPublica last year into the U.S. stillbirth crisis, in which more than 20,000 pregnancies every year are lost at 20 weeks or more and the expected baby is born dead.

ProPublica’s reporting found that a number of factors contributed to the nation’s failure to bring down the stillbirth rate: medical professionals dismissing the concerns of their pregnant patients, a lack of research and data, and too few autopsies being performed. Additionally, alarming racial disparities in stillbirth rates have compounded the crisis.

“The extent of the problem is massive,” said Dr. Lucky Jain, who served as co-chair of the Stillbirth Working Group of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Council, which issued the report last week. “All of my life, I have maintained that what I cannot measure, I cannot improve. And so if I don’t have proper data, records, autopsy findings, genetics, the background information of why a fully formed baby died suddenly, how do I even begin improving things as a scientist?”

The working group concluded that barriers to lowering the stillbirth rate could not be traced to one federal agency or a single state health department or local hospital, Jain said, but to problems “at every level.”

“The report has reinforced what you all have already been saying,” said Jain, who is chair of pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine and pediatrician-in-chief at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. “ProPublica has emphasized the need for an autopsy, has emphasized the need for reporting stillbirths. There’s plenty of overlap and the same type of concern that ProPublica has expressed around stillbirths.”

ProPublica found that federal health agencies had not prioritized stillbirth-focused research, data collection or analysis, and that those agencies, along with state health departments, hospitals and medical providers, had done a poor job of raising awareness about stillbirth risk and prevention.

Although many people, including some medical providers, believe that stillbirths are inevitable, research shows that as many as 1 in 4 may be preventable.

The newly released report, which called stillbirth “a major public health concern,” was the result of a congressional mandate that required the Department of Health and Human Services to develop a stillbirth task force. The working group was charged with examining health disparities and communities that face a higher risk of stillbirth; barriers to collecting data; the psychological impact of and treatment received after a stillbirth; and known risk factors.

Dr. Diana W. Bianchi, director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the branch of the National Institutes of Health that led the working group, said in an email that one of the agency’s goals is to advance efforts to “better understand and ultimately prevent” stillbirths. Among its priorities, Bianchi said, is moving forward on the working group’s recommendation to create a research agenda to “develop specific, actionable approaches to prevent stillbirth.”

Work to implement the report’s recommendations, she said, will begin this spring and summer.

In total, the working group issued 12 recommendations, the majority of which were aimed at the NIH and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A CDC spokesperson said the agency is investigating risk factors and health disparities and is considering which existing CDC projects could be used for stillbirth research, such as those that already collect data on birth defects and pregnancy risks.

“Findings on factors associated with stillbirths will inform CDC’s next steps, including further research and potential prevention efforts,” the spokesperson said.

Several of the working group’s recommendations were related to improving the quality of stillbirth data at the local, state and national levels. Specific changes included standardizing definitions, enhancing training for employees who collect data for fetal death certificates, and making it easier to amend that data when needed.

One of the reasons stillbirth data often is incomplete or inaccurate is that autopsies, placental exams and genetic testing are not uniformly performed. And even if one or more of those exams are carried out and do reveal a cause of death, that critical piece of information is typically not updated in state or federal databases.

ProPublica found that in 2020, placental exams were performed or planned in only 65% of stillbirth cases and autopsies were conducted or planned in less than 20% of cases. The federal report identified several of the same barriers that ProPublica had spotlighted.

“Many parents report that hospital staff discouraged them from requesting an autopsy of their stillborn baby because of cost, because it might be inconclusive, or because it would disfigure the baby,” the working group concluded. “Doctors may also be worried about liability.”

The report noted that while Medicaid covers a large portion of pregnancies and births, it does not cover the cost of an autopsy. Experts previously told ProPublica that they believed an autopsy after a stillbirth should be covered as a continuation of maternal care.

A spokesperson for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said autopsies are not covered because they do not fall “within the definition of medical assistance established by Congress.”

The working group also suggested that states could model their policies for stillbirth autopsies after policies relating to sudden infant death syndrome. Many states, which have designated SIDS as a “public health emergency,” pay for autopsies if a baby is suspected to have died of SIDS. In 2020, the number of stillbirths was 15 times the number of SIDS deaths.

The report also addressed the devastating psychological effects of a stillbirth. Many parents withdraw from the world and are at a higher risk of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety, the working group found. Those feelings may be compounded if patients are dismissed or blamed for the stillbirth.

“It is not uncommon for individuals of color, in particular, to speak of healthcare providers who treated them with a dismissive attitude or who feel that there is no point in speaking up about certain concerns because they will not be heard and it will not make a difference,” the report said.

Black women are more than twice as likely — and in some states close to three times as likely — as white women to have a stillbirth, according to 2020 CDC data. The national stillbirth rate for Black women that year was 10.3 per 1,000 births, and for white women it was 4.7. But it’s not just Black babies who are dying at a disproportionate rate. So are their mothers.

The same week that the NIH stillbirth report was released, the CDC issued a separate report on maternal mortality that found that the rate of mothers dying while pregnant or shortly after birth increased in 2021, while the rate of maternal mortality in Black women was more than double that of white women.

Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon, said the stillbirth report, coupled with ProPublica’s reporting and the most recent CDC data on maternal mortality, “underscores the fact that stillbirths and maternal mortality are shockingly high in the United States compared with other similarly developed nations, and that Black women are paying the highest price.”

Merkley, who last year had co-sponsored a stillbirth bill that did not ultimately pass, called for change and said one way to “stem the tide of these horrific outcomes” is to ensure that states use federal maternal health funding to implement stillbirth interventions, as he proposed doing in his legislation.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the nation’s leading organization of OB-GYNs, supports the report’s findings, particularly the need for additional research, said Dr. Christopher Zahn, ACOG’s chief of clinical practice and health equity and quality. Many stillbirths, he said, remain unexplained.

Members of PUSH for Empowered Pregnancy, a New York-based nonprofit that works to prevent stillbirths, emerged as vocal advocates during the working group sessions. Samantha Banerjee, executive director of PUSH, said the organization forwarded ProPublica’s reporting to the working group and pressed for families who’ve experienced a stillbirth to be included in the process. After a rocky start in the early sessions, she said, she and her team witnessed a shift in the way the group approached the issue.

Banerjee, whose email signature includes “Mom to Alana, born still in 2013,” said the final report exceeded her expectations.

“This is the first time in over a decade that we have seen the U.S. take a substantial step in the right direction when it comes to ending preventable stillbirths,” she said. “The dire landscape of stillbirth prevention is accurately described, and there are clear calls to action for systemic change intended to prevent stillbirths.”

by Eli Hager

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.

Over the weekend, New Mexico abolished life without parole prison sentences for juveniles, affirming that people who make even the most serious mistakes as teenagers should have a second chance. The new law, signed by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, also requires that current prisoners serving decades behind bars for crimes they committed as minors get a parole hearing.

ProPublica reported earlier this month that the New Mexico Corrections Department had lost track of at least 21 “juvenile lifers,” apparently unaware of who the eligible prisoners are, where they are and how they will be identified for the parole hearings that they now, under the law, deserve.

In a statement Monday in response to ProPublica’s reporting, Grisham’s office said that the corrections agency, which answers to the governor, is working to screen all prisoners in its custody who are serving life sentences, in order to compile a list of those newly eligible for parole.

The effort to find them may require the department to go back through the individual court records of prisoners who entered NMCD custody at or around 18 years old — including some who are now being held in out-of-state facilities — to see if their crime was committed before that age. It also will mean working with the ACLU of New Mexico, which has led the effort to identify these individuals.

The New Mexico law is premised on multiple recent Supreme Court decisions and studies of brain science that have found that kids are impulsive, prone to risk-taking, bad at understanding the consequences of their actions and highly susceptible to peer pressure (often committing their offenses among groups of friends), all of which make them less culpable than adults when they commit crimes. They are also, according to the high court, more capable of redemption.

The brain doesn’t fully develop until around age 25, extensive research shows, and most people are likely to “age out” of criminality.

The law doesn’t guarantee freedom to juvenile lifers in the state, but it will provide them a chance to articulate to the parole board how they have changed, including whether they’ve taken accountability for their actions, followed prison rules and completed educational programming. (Prisoners who have already served 15 years in prison for crimes committed as minors, or 20 to 25 years in the case of some more severe crimes, will also now be eligible for parole.)

The corrections department has until June, after which the law goes into effect, to identify all of the prisoners affected.

“I want to be productive. I want to do something good instead of bad,” said Jerry Torres, one of the lost juvenile lifers found by ProPublica in an out-of-state prison in Arizona.

If identified by New Mexico prison officials, Torres could get a chance at freedom that he never expected. “It’s as simple as that,” he said.

Help Us Identify New Mexico Juvenile Lifers Who May Qualify for Parole Hearings

If you are aware of someone who committed a crime as a juvenile (under the age of 18) in New Mexico and who has since served more than 15 years in prison for that offense, please let us know. As we continue to cover this issue, we will routinely ask the New Mexico Corrections Department if they are aware of the individuals we learn of who may be eligible for a parole hearing if proposed legislation passes. Please enter their information below. If you would prefer to talk to a reporter before you share, please email Eli Hager at Eli.Hager@propublica.org. We appreciate you sharing your story and we take your privacy seriously. We are gathering this information for the purposes of our reporting and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of what you tell us.

window.jQuery || document.write('') This form requires JavaScript to complete. Powered by CityBase Screendoor. // Uncomment this line and set it to the CSS class that your website uses for buttons: // FormRenderer.BUTTON_CLASS = ''; new FormRenderer({"project_id":"oPxLzVmdz7qI9jb1"});

by Jodi S. Cohen, ProPublica, and Jennifer Smith Richards, Chicago Tribune

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. This story was co-published with the Chicago Tribune.

In the three years since Amara Harris was ticketed for theft over a pair of missing AirPods at her high school, she has graduated, earned an associate degree and moved from Naperville, Illinois, to Atlanta to attend Spelman College.

Meanwhile, a statewide reckoning over the harm caused by ticketing students has Illinois lawmakers considering a bill that would outlaw the practice. Naperville police have not ticketed any students this school year.

But the city of Naperville is still committed to prosecuting Harris, who was 17 when she was ticketed for a municipal ordinance violation, and her case is headed toward a jury trial, an extraordinarily rare outcome for such a low-level civil infraction.

This week, Harris’ attorneys and a city prosecutor faced off yet again before a DuPage County Circuit Court judge.

Her attorneys asked the judge at the end of February to dismiss the case, noting that the original ticket accused her only of having the classmate’s AirPods, not of intentionally taking them, which is required to prove theft. In response, prosecutor Joseph Solon Jr. updated Naperville’s allegation to state that Harris had “knowingly” taken the classmate’s AirPods. Judge Monique O’Toole set a hearing for next month to give Harris’ attorneys time to formally respond.

The city has never produced any evidence that Harris knew she had another student’s AirPods, her attorneys say. From the beginning, Harris has said the whole incident was a simple mix-up.

“You have no surveillance video. You have no eyewitness accounts. You have no confession, obviously. What do you have? What is your proof?” Juan Thomas, one of Harris’ attorneys, said after the hearing on Monday. “I’ve never seen a prosecutor update the charge without providing information to support the charge.”

Thomas is one of two prominent civil rights attorneys who took Harris’ case after ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune wrote about it last year.

“This feels very retaliatory. Why hold on to an ordinance violation for three and a half years?” said S. Todd Yeary, Harris’ other attorney and the former chief executive officer of the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a Chicago-based civil rights organization founded by the Rev. Jesse Jackson. “At the end of the day, the city of Naperville will regret going to such ends. This is not a good use of public resources.”

Solon declined to comment after the hearing.

This would be the first time in at least a decade that a Naperville ordinance violation case went to trial. A Naperville spokesperson said the city hasn’t spent extra money on legal fees for the case because it’s being handled by a city prosecutor. She would not answer questions about what evidence supports the theft citation.

“The City will present the evidence at trial and will not try this case to the press,” spokesperson Linda LaCloche wrote in an email to reporters. Naperville Community Unit District 203 — home of Naperville North High School, the school Harris attended — declined to comment on the case.

ProPublica and the Tribune featured Harris’ case last June as part of a broader investigation into the widespread practice of police in Illinois schools issuing costly tickets to students for violating municipal ordinances. The investigation prompted state education officials to call for the end of school-based ticketing, the state attorney general to initiate a civil rights investigation into a suburban school district northwest of Chicago, and school superintendents to rethink when police should be involved in student discipline.

The Tribune and ProPublica investigation found that at Naperville North High School, Black students were nearly five times more likely than their white peers to be ticketed in the three-year period ending in spring 2021. The police chief said last month that the department now focuses “even more closely on restorative justice measures,” which could account for the lack of tickets issued to students this school year.

Most students and other people ticketed for ordinance violations — civil matters that carry no threat of jail time — admit liability and pay their fine. It’s difficult to fight a ticket because the standard of proof is lower than the one used in criminal court; defendants are held liable if the allegation is deemed more likely to be true than not, and the ticket itself is considered evidence.

Harris’ ticket ordeal began in the fall of 2019, when the father of another student called the school to say he thought his daughter’s AirPods had been stolen. The student then told a school dean that she believed Harris had them because a nearby laptop showed that the AirPods were in range. When the dean asked Harris for the AirPods so he could investigate, she handed them over and explained that she had lost her pair of AirPods and picked up this pair where she thought she had left them, in a school common area. It turned out that the serial number matched the classmate’s missing ones and not the ones Harris had bought a few months earlier.

“When I found out the mistake, I didn’t try to hide it. When the mix-up happened, I didn’t try to keep them and say they were mine. I gave them back,” Harris, now 20, said during a video call this month from a lounge in her dorm at Spelman.

The ticket issued to Harris in 2019 (Redactions by ProPublica)

School administrators did not discipline Harris but relayed the incident to the Naperville police officer assigned to the school. The classmate’s father said he wanted to press charges against Harris for theft, according to the police report. A few weeks later, police issued her a ticket.

Harris’ mother, Marla Baker, has encouraged her daughter to fight the ticket, even as the family has paid significantly more in attorneys’ fees than it would have cost to pay a fine. Harris has said she cannot plead guilty when she is innocent.

Harris’ family has spent at least $2,000 in fees for previous lawyers, Baker said. Legal fees are now being paid for by a nonprofit organization that the family’s current lawyers said wants to remain anonymous.

The maximum fine for violating Naperville’s theft ordinance is $500, plus a $100 court fee.

“I had someone say to me recently, ‘Don’t you wish you just paid the fine?’ I still say, to this day, ‘No,’” Baker said. “I do believe strongly that if she would have paid the fine, it would have stuck with her in her life, all of her life. And probably would not have produced perseverance. I feel like she probably would have developed a defeated mentality.”

by Anita Lee, Sun Herald, photography by Hannah Ruhoff, Sun Herald

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

By 2015, it was clear that Mississippi oysters were in crisis. It was a devastating development for the state: As late as 2009, the oyster industry had contributed an estimated $24 million in sales to the state’s economy, and it sustained 562 full- and part-time jobs.

Then-Gov. Phil Bryant convened an oyster council to come up with solutions.

“This is the soybean of the sea,” Bryant said at a community gathering in 2015 at which he unveiled the council’s report. “We’re going to make sure everyone enjoys it.” The council set a goal of producing 1 million sacks of oysters a year by 2025.

But almost a decade later, that goal is nowhere in sight: In a region that helped pioneer the oyster industry, only 457 sacks were harvested in 2022, none of them from the public reefs that the state had worked to restore.

A lot has gone wrong for oysters here, where the region’s blend of saltwater and freshwater has historically nurtured them. Brutal storms and federal flood-management protocols that send freshwater flowing into oyster habitats have both taken their toll, and have escalated as a result of climate change.

But new reporting from ProPublica and the Sun Herald shows that the state has also failed to stem the crisis, investing millions of dollars to rebuild reefs in ways that did not respond to changing conditions. Some of that money came from funds the state received as a result of the BP oil spill.

“They’re just wasting money,” said Keath Ladner, a former oyster fisherman whose family was in the seafood business for three generations. “And the fishermen know this.”

For decades, the state has focused on rebuilding reefs, restoring them with shell or rock to give baby oysters a place to settle and grow. Since Hurricane Katrina damaged or destroyed more than 90% of state reefs in 2005, two state agencies have spent $55 million to restore Mississippi Sound oysters, which are critical to the estuary’s health.

Mississippi maintains the majority of the state’s reefs, opening them to licensed fishermen for harvest. But reefs maintained by the state have shrunk: The state estimates that the Mississippi Sound historically had about 12,000 acres of oyster reefs, compared to 8,112 acres today. There hasn’t been a harvest on Mississippi’s public reefs since 2018. Fishermen have left the industry in droves.

Oyster boats once lined the docks in Hancock County but are scarce these days.

Locals in the fishing industry say the state has failed to do routine maintenance, which includes planting rocks or shells on solid ground and later turning or raking them to knock off silt so baby oysters can settle there.

Joe Spraggins, executive director of the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources, which regulates and oversees the state’s oysters, said his agency does not have enough money and personnel to maintain oyster reefs in today’s climate.

Spraggins himself acknowledged the high costs and poor outcomes. “I could probably go buy 100,000 sacks of oysters in Texas every year and give them to y’all to sell and come out cheaper,” he told oystermen at a meeting in the fall of 2021. He thinks private operators could expand oyster reefs beyond the acres that the Marine Resources Department plants with rock and tries to maintain.

That’s the conclusion of state Sen. Mike Thompson, an attorney who piloted offshore boats when he was younger. In his opinion, it’s time to give “the fishermen who know and understand the fishery the opportunity to restore the reefs.” He recently introduced legislation that would expand private leasing of oyster grounds.

The sense of urgency about saving the oysters stems from more than falling seafood sales. Oyster reefs are critical for the health of the Mississippi Sound and other estuaries. They serve as nurseries, refuge and foraging grounds for many aquatic animals, including fish, shrimp and crabs. They protect the shoreline from erosion in storms. And oysters filter and clean the water as they feed, with one oyster capable of filtering up to 50 gallons a day.

“That is a keystone species for any estuary, and that’s exactly what we have here in the Mississippi Sound,” said Erik Broussard, deputy director of marine fisheries for the Marine Resources Department. “So it’s extremely important for everything that inhabits the Mississippi Sound to have a healthy shellfish population.”

A global analysis published in 2009 concluded that “oyster reefs are one of, and likely the most, imperiled marine habitat on earth. The oyster fisheries of the Gulf of Mexico need to be managed for what they represent: likely the last opportunity in the world to achieve both large-scale reef conservation and sustainable fisheries.”

But signs of recovery are hard to find in this Gulf of Mexico estuary. On a sunny day in October aboard a fishing boat called the Salty Boy, coastal science professor Eric Powell and crew scoured the bottom of the western Mississippi Sound for oysters.

A graduate research assistant at The University of Southern Mississippi’s Gulf Coast Research Laboratory shovels oyster shells for sorting. Oyster biologist Eric Powell, center, has been monitoring the growth of oysters on Mississippi’s reefs.

Over six hours, they found only five live adult oysters large enough to be harvested. Powell was encouraged to see more young oysters growing on the reefs, but said the population is still “well short” of recovery.

Years of Decline

The Jenkins family ran a seafood business on the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia until disease ravaged the oyster beds there.

By the 1990s, they were buying their oysters from Mississippi, which had been a major seafood producer since the early 20th century: Oyster shells paved the beach highway and seafood factories once lined the shores in Biloxi, where casinos dominate the commercial waterfront today.

So the Jenkins family followed the oysters to Pass Christian, on the western side of the Mississippi Sound, a Gulf of Mexico estuary where saltwater from the Gulf mixes with freshwater from rivers and other sources. The family found a fleet of around 100 oyster boats docked in the harbor to supply their new company, Crystal Seas Seafood. Business was good.

“My dad worked there all day long during oyster season, helping unload the boats for us and load the trucks for us and some of our customers,” Jennifer Jenkins said.

Jennifer Jenkins manages Crystal Seas Seafood in Pass Christian. First image: Workers shuck oysters at Crystal Seas. Second image: Oysters will be frozen and boxed up for distribution.

Today, however, most of the oyster boats in Pass Christian’s harbor have been sold or re-fitted for crabbing or shrimping. In 2004, the state had 13 companies licensed to process oysters. By 2022, there were only three, state records show.

“Oysters, it’s shot,” said Roscoe Liebig, a former oyster fisherman who runs a live bait shop from a steel barge in Pass Christian’s harbor. “They’re finding a few here and a few there, but it’s mainly just petrified shells.”

The region’s reefs have taken dramatic hits in the last two decades, triggering mass oyster deaths. The first blow was Hurricane Katrina, the August 2005 storm that scoured reefs and buried oysters in mud. The Marine Resources Department estimated that 90% of reefs were damaged or destroyed.

The storm also devastated local infrastructure. Keath Ladner’s grandfather had opened a seafood market in the region in 1942, serving the picturesque city of Bay St. Louis, which drew tourists and New Orleans residents who built second homes along the shorelines.

The business eventually expanded to Bayou Caddy in Hancock County, which borders Louisiana. There, Ladner’s father operated a seafood and ice business with docks where the family bought and sold oysters and shrimp. Ladner and his brother followed his father into the business, expanding with a marina.

Ladner said his family lost $8 million in buildings and equipment to Katrina. The story of loss was common along the 70 miles of Mississippi coastline pummeled by the hurricane’s storm surge, which reached up to 28 feet.

Harold Strong, left, and his lifelong friend Keath Ladner grew up fishing for oysters together before Ladner left the industry.

The oyster population suffered again five years later, when oil gushed from a BP well in the Gulf for 87 days, fouling 1,300 miles of coastline from Texas to Florida and killing sea turtles, dolphins and birds.

As damage from the oil spill was still being assessed, the Army Corps of Engineers opened the Bonnet Carré Spillway in May 2011 for 42 days to prevent Mississippi River flooding. The spillway empties river water into Lake Pontchartrain, in Louisiana, which flows into the Mississippi Sound. Opening that waterway follows federal protocols for preventing flooding in the region, but doing so can reduce salinity in nearby waterways to levels at which oysters are unable to survive. The 2011 opening killed 85% of oysters in the Mississippi Sound.

The struggling oyster population took another hit in 2016, when many were killed by low oxygen levels. The hypoxia event is unexplained, but not uncommon in the Sound, said Powell, the coastal scientist.

But as disasters go, it was the huge quantity of freshwater released by the Bonnet Carré Spillway in 2019 that topped them all. The spillway was opened twice, for a record-high total of 123 days, because of severe Mississippi River flooding caused by heavy rainfall. The river water killed almost all the oysters in the western Sound and, for the first time in memory, Spraggins of Marine Resources said, killed oysters all the way to Pascagoula, more than 100 nautical miles away, near the Alabama state line.

As climate change ushers in more intense rainfall, one 2020 paper from University of Mississippi scientists suggested that the continued reliance on this method of preventing floods could render oyster harvesting unsustainable in the western Sound.

“If the decision is, ‘We’re going to depend totally on that one spillway, which means that periodically Mississippi Sound is going to become a freshwater lake,’ then let’s not worry about spending a lot of money trying to restore oyster reefs because you’re just pouring money down a rathole,” Powell said.

Failed Interventions

Oysters reproduce by releasing sperm and eggs into the water during spawning season, which in the Mississippi Sound occurs between May and October. These larvae float freely for two to three weeks before cementing for life to a hard surface.

But as reefs disappear, hard surfaces can be difficult to find. So as the disasters in the Sound escalated, Mississippi poured millions of dollars into physically rebuilding the reefs that oysters need to grow.

Since 2005, Mississippi’s Department of Marine Resources has spent $35.6 million on oyster restoration. And after a federal settlement with BP over its oil spill sent money for economic development and environmental restoration to the region, the state’s Department of Environmental Quality has spent another $19.8 million on the effort.

One $10 million project that the Environmental Quality and Marine Resources departments carried out a decade ago involved spraying limestone mixed with a small quantity of oyster shell from a barge onto 12 western Sound reefs covering 1,430 acres.

Limestone is blasted from a barge into the Mississippi Sound in 2011 as part of an effort to restore the oyster reefs. (Tim Isbell/Sun Herald)

The majority of the material was sprayed in spring 2013. A 2016 monitoring report filed by Marine Resources found that on five of those reefs, between 30% and 90% of the material sprayed sank into the mud, where oysters are unable to grow.

A final report filed on the project in July 2021 tells the story: zero adult oysters found in samples from the 12 sites sprayed.

“It’s very unfortunate that our goal was not met,” the report concludes. “Natural Disasters and events beyond our control led to the failure of accomplishing our goal.”

The report attributes the project’s failure to a range of causes including hypoxia, the 2019 Bonnet Carré openings, tropical storms and commercial harvesting that the governing board of Marine Resources allowed on the newly restored reefs.

By January 2021, the Marine Resources Department publicly conceded the “uncertainty” of investing in western Sound oyster restoration because of more frequent Bonnet Carré openings. Marine Resources managers said they had started shifting efforts to the east, where water bottoms suitable for oysters are far more limited, by 2016.

The Environmental Quality agency has had a reef project in the central Sound since 2016. Since it started, the project has struggled with materials, cost and timing. Final results are still pending, but monitoring shows more reef loss than gain in the areas planted. Most of the sites tested so far show live oysters, although they were present in significant numbers on only half the subplots planted with limestone. Marine Resources says the project was intended to test reef material, not grow large amounts of oysters.

Environmental Quality spent almost $2.5 million deploying the limestone. The overall project, which includes mapping, monitoring and other components, is expected to cost $11.7 million.

“The point of this project was to see if this technique would be helpful across the program,” said Valerie Alley, program management division chief of Environmental Quality’s Office of Restoration. “So anything it tells us is good. It’s either we do it this way or we need to find another way, right?”

Another BP-funded oyster project in the eastern Sound was awarded $4.1 million in 2019. Located off the shores of Pascagoula, a city known for building military ships, it will not proceed as originally planned.

Environmental Quality had planned to move oysters from a Pascagoula reef where water is polluted to an area where they could purge themselves and be safe for consumption.

But Environmental Quality Executive Director Chris Wells said that too few oysters were found on the reef for relocation. Instead, the agency hopes to use most of the funding to build up the reef, which would be good for the oysters and for the environment. “If we can replenish that oyster reef, or any oyster reefs over there, you get oysters in the water and they start filtering and that improves water quality,” Wells said.

Should Reefs Be Privatized?

Aaron Tillman used to love fishing for oysters off the shores of Pass Christian. The reefs are close enough to shore that he could catch his limit for the day and be home for dinner.

The 48-year-old is a third-generation fisherman; his nine brothers and stepbrothers were also fishermen, but he’s the only one left in the business.

It hasn’t been easy, and today, he’s running out of the Pass Christian harbor and fishing for oysters. Just not in Mississippi.

Instead, Tillman is fishing private leases that Crystal Seas Seafood maintains in Louisiana, where oyster grounds have been leased to individuals and businesses since the 1800s.

By the early 1900s, gasoline-powered luggers had replaced sail-driven schooners for catching oysters in the Mississippi Sound. (L.J. Joe Scholtes Collection/Southern Possum Tales)

One reef is only 10 miles over the Mississippi-Louisiana state line, and was damaged by freshwater flooding in 2019, but the private lease grounds in Louisiana are producing oysters, while the public grounds he fished in Mississippi are closed because there are too few adult oysters to harvest.

After the die-off caused by the 2019 Bonnet Carré openings, Jenkins said Crystal Seas sprayed clean, dry oyster shell from its processing plant and turned over old oyster shell on its Louisiana reefs so oysters would grow again.

“The oysters in Louisiana are growing real good,” Tillman said after a recent three-day trip. “Plenty of oysters growing all over.”

Crystal Seas workers unload bags of oysters that were harvested from one of the company’s Louisiana leases.

There are a lot of differences between the two states: Louisiana has much more water and more harvestable reefs than Mississippi does, and the water flows in different ways, so the impacts of natural and manmade disasters are not the same in both states.

But even accounting for those differences, officials who work on oyster projects in both states said Louisiana’s reefs are healthier in part because of who manages them: Fishermen hold leases on about 400,000 acres of Louisiana water bottoms, while the state maintains 38,000 acres of reefs. The state concedes that the private lease grounds are in far better shape than the state-maintained grounds.

In Louisiana, 99% of the oyster harvest came from private leases in 2021, said Carolina Bourque, oyster program manager for the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries. In Mississippi, by contrast, records show no harvest of significance on leased reefs since 2016; that year, the catch on privately leased reefs was less than 1% of the total.

The spillway openings did damage in Louisiana, Bourque said. But even though the freshwater damaged some private leases, she said “they were fast coming back.” She said this was possible because private fishermen were able to replace material on the reefs right away.

Mississippi has been slow to expand private leasing, one of many recommendations that were made in the June 2015 Governor’s Oyster Council report. The state Legislature in 2015 expanded lease terms from one to five years and is currently working on a bill to open more areas for private leasing. Marine Resources administrators say they work with private leaseholders in Mississippi, but only a few are active.

One of the upsides of private leasing is that companies are highly motivated to keep their acres in good shape.

“When it’s your money on the line,” Jenkins, the manager of Crystal Seas, said, “you learn fast.”

In Louisiana, Bourque said leaseholders were able to replant quickly after the 2019 Bonnet Carré openings, while states can wait several years for federal disaster funding and depend on Mother Nature to replenish reefs.

Jenkins thinks oysters can still be grown in the western Sound with the right management techniques.

“They’re growing them in Louisiana 3 miles away,” she said, “so there’s no big wall out there that doesn’t allow it to happen here.”

by Andrea Bernstein

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

Correction, March 22, 2023: This story’s headline has been corrected to remove an inaccurate description of Rep. Jim Jordan’s requests for information, which were not subpoenas.

House Republicans have sent letters to at least three universities and a think tank requesting a broad range of documents related to what it says are the institutions' contributions to the Biden administration’s “censorship regime.”

The letters are the latest effort by a House subcommittee set up in January to investigate how the federal government, working with social media companies, has allegedly been “weaponized” to silence conservative and right-wing voices. So far, the committee’s investigations have amplified a variety of dubious, outright false and highly misleading Republican grievances with law enforcement, many of them espoused by former President Donald Trump. Committee members have cited supposed abuses that include the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago, its investigations of Jan. 6 rioters and the Biden administration’s purported use of executive powers to shut down conservative viewpoints on social media.

Now, universities and their researchers are coming under the spotlight of the committee, which the Republicans have labeled the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. The letters, signed by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who is chair of both the House Judiciary Committee and the subcommittee, were sent in early March.

They cover an investigation into how “certain third parties, including organizations like yours, may have played a role in this censorship regime by advising on so-called ‘misinformation,’” according to a copy of one of the letters obtained by ProPublica.

The committee requested documents and information dating back to January 2015 between any “employee, contractor, or agent of your organization” and the federal government or social media organizations pertaining to the moderation of social media content. ProPublica confirmed the requests went to Stanford University, the University of Washington, Clemson University and the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

The letters have prompted a wave of alarm among those in the field that the congressional inquiry itself, no matter what it finds, will lead universities to pull back on this research just as the 2024 election gets underway. “Recent efforts definitely have a chilling effect on the community of experts across academia, civil society and government built up to understand broader online harms like harassment, foreign influence and — yes — disinformation,” Graham Brookie, who leads studies in this area at the Atlantic Council, told ProPublica.

“The ‘weaponization’ committee is being weaponized against us,” another researcher told ProPublica. Like half a dozen others interviewed for this story, this person asked not to be identified because of the ongoing congressional probe.

Democrats have called the committee a modern-day House Un-American Activities Committee, akin to the congressional committee that pursued alleged communists during the McCarthy era.

Since Rep. Jordan took over the gavel of the judiciary committee in January, he has issued more than 80 subpoenas and requests for documents. Recipients have included the CEOs of social media companies, intelligence officials who signed on to a statement about Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 campaign and members of the National School Boards Association who asked the Justice Department to investigate threats of violence against school board officials. Jordan himself refused a subpoena to testify before the Democratic-led House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, prompting that committee to refer the matter to the House Ethics Committee.

Jordan’s missives were sent a day after a committee hearing on the “Twitter files,” leaked internal communications from the company that purported to show how right-wing accounts were sidelined and silenced. In written testimony, a panelist accused a broad swath of organizations and individuals of being members of the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” including, he implied, the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, CIA, Department of Defense and universities. The witness wrote disinformation researchers, working with the government, are “creating blacklists of disfavored people and then pressuring, cajoling, and demanding that social media platforms censor, deamplify, and even ban the people on these blacklists.”

A New York University study concluded in 2021 that social media had not silenced those on the right. “The claim of anti-conservative animus” by social media companies, the study said, “is itself a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it."

A spokesperson for Rep. Jordan did not respond to requests for comment.

Since the 2016 elections, Stanford, UW, Clemson and others have engaged in research, sometimes in partnership with social media platforms, government officials and each other, into ways that disinformation can pose threats to democracy and how such efforts can be meaningfully countered. The role of lies and disinformation leading to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol gave increased prominence to their work.

As ProPublica has previously reported, sustained accusations by congressional Republicans and right-wing influencers that the Biden administration is stifling dissent have caused the administration to back away from its efforts countering disinformation, including canceling research contracts and sending messages inside the administration that disinformation work is too hot to handle.

Those moves followed a bungled rollout of a clumsily named “Disinformation Governance Board” to coordinate efforts to counter what the administration had called “dangerous conspiracy theories that can provide a gateway to terrorist violence.” Following criticism, the administration disbanded the board and accepted the resignation of its executive director, Nina Jankowicz.

Jordan has subpoenaed Jankowicz, too. She is scheduled to testify April 10 and said she will happily testify under oath.

“This sort of inquiry isn’t something that belongs in the United States Congress,” said Jankowicz. “But given that this method of bullying has caused other institutions to fold to Republican pressure in the past, I fear we may see the blunt force of congressional committees continue to be used in ways that are in direct opposition to the safety, security and free expression of the American people.”

Stanford did not answer a question about whether it stood by its research or make its researchers, the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Alex Stamos or Renee DiResta, available for comment. The university referred ProPublica to an online fact sheet addressing “inaccurate and misleading claims” made in the congressional testimony about Stanford’s “projects to analyze rumors and narratives on social media relating to U.S. elections and the coronavirus.” The German Marshall fund said it was working to address the request and Clemson University’s media relations department did not respond to requests for comment.

The University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public issued a statement that said “We’re incredibly proud of our work,” adding that “some of the projects CIP researchers have contributed to have become the subject of false claims and criticism that mischaracterizes our work, a tactic that peer researchers in this space are also experiencing.” The statement did not specifically address the House requests.

A university spokesperson, Victor Balta, said in an email, “The UW stands behind this important research aiming to resist strategic misinformation and strengthen our discourse. We have received a request for documents and information, and a response is in progress.”

Correction

March 22, 2023: A headline on this story originally incorrectly described Rep. Jim Jordan’s letters to universities. They are requests for information, not subpoenas.

by Andrea Bernstein

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

House Republicans have sent letters to at least three universities and a think tank requesting a broad range of documents related to what it says are the institutions' contributions to the Biden administration’s “censorship regime.”

The letters are the latest effort by a House subcommittee set up in January to investigate how the federal government, working with social media companies, has allegedly been “weaponized” to silence conservative and right-wing voices. So far, the committee’s investigations have amplified a variety of dubious, outright false and highly misleading Republican grievances with law enforcement, many of them espoused by former President Donald Trump. Committee members have cited supposed abuses that include the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago, its investigations of Jan. 6 rioters and the Biden administration’s purported use of executive powers to shut down conservative viewpoints on social media.

Now, universities and their researchers are coming under the spotlight of the committee, which the Republicans have labeled the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. The letters, signed by Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who is chair of both the House Judiciary Committee and the subcommittee, were sent in early March.

They cover an investigation into how “certain third parties, including organizations like yours, may have played a role in this censorship regime by advising on so-called ‘misinformation,’” according to a copy of one of the letters obtained by ProPublica.

The committee requested documents and information dating back to January 2015 between any “employee, contractor, or agent of your organization” and the federal government or social media organizations pertaining to the moderation of social media content. ProPublica confirmed the requests went to Stanford University, the University of Washington, Clemson University and the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

The letters have prompted a wave of alarm among those in the field that the congressional inquiry itself, no matter what it finds, will lead universities to pull back on this research just as the 2024 election gets underway. “Recent efforts definitely have a chilling effect on the community of experts across academia, civil society and government built up to understand broader online harms like harassment, foreign influence and — yes — disinformation,” Graham Brookie, who leads studies in this area at the Atlantic Council, told ProPublica.

“The ‘weaponization’ committee is being weaponized against us,” another researcher told ProPublica. Like half a dozen others interviewed for this story, this person asked not to be identified because of the ongoing congressional probe.

Democrats have called the committee a modern-day House Un-American Activities Committee, akin to the congressional committee that pursued alleged communists during the McCarthy era.

Since Rep. Jordan took over the gavel of the judiciary committee in January, he has issued more than 80 subpoenas and requests for documents. Recipients have included the CEOs of social media companies, intelligence officials who signed on to a statement about Hunter Biden’s laptop during the 2020 campaign and members of the National School Boards Association who asked the Justice Department to investigate threats of violence against school board officials. Jordan himself refused a subpoena to testify before the Democratic-led House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, prompting that committee to refer the matter to the House Ethics Committee.

Jordan’s missives were sent a day after a committee hearing on the “Twitter files,” leaked internal communications from the company that purported to show how right-wing accounts were sidelined and silenced. In written testimony, a panelist accused a broad swath of organizations and individuals of being members of the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” including, he implied, the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, CIA, Department of Defense and universities. The witness wrote disinformation researchers, working with the government, are “creating blacklists of disfavored people and then pressuring, cajoling, and demanding that social media platforms censor, deamplify, and even ban the people on these blacklists.”

A New York University study concluded in 2021 that social media had not silenced those on the right. “The claim of anti-conservative animus” by social media companies, the study said, “is itself a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it."

A spokesperson for Rep. Jordan did not respond to requests for comment.

Since the 2016 elections, Stanford, UW, Clemson and others have engaged in research, sometimes in partnership with social media platforms, government officials and each other, into ways that disinformation can pose threats to democracy and how such efforts can be meaningfully countered. The role of lies and disinformation leading to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol gave increased prominence to their work.

As ProPublica has previously reported, sustained accusations by congressional Republicans and right-wing influencers that the Biden administration is stifling dissent have caused the administration to back away from its efforts countering disinformation, including canceling research contracts and sending messages inside the administration that disinformation work is too hot to handle.

Those moves followed a bungled rollout of a clumsily named “Disinformation Governance Board” to coordinate efforts to counter what the administration had called “dangerous conspiracy theories that can provide a gateway to terrorist violence.” Following criticism, the administration disbanded the board and accepted the resignation of its executive director, Nina Jankowicz.

Jordan has subpoenaed Jankowicz, too. She is scheduled to testify April 10 and said she will happily testify under oath.

“This sort of inquiry isn’t something that belongs in the United States Congress,” said Jankowicz. “But given that this method of bullying has caused other institutions to fold to Republican pressure in the past, I fear we may see the blunt force of congressional committees continue to be used in ways that are in direct opposition to the safety, security and free expression of the American people.”

Stanford did not answer a question about whether it stood by its research or make its researchers, the Stanford Internet Observatory’s Alex Stamos or Renee DiResta, available for comment. The university referred ProPublica to an online fact sheet addressing “inaccurate and misleading claims” made in the congressional testimony about Stanford’s “projects to analyze rumors and narratives on social media relating to U.S. elections and the coronavirus.” The German Marshall fund said it was working to address the request and Clemson University’s media relations department did not respond to requests for comment.

The University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public issued a statement that said “We’re incredibly proud of our work,” adding that “some of the projects CIP researchers have contributed to have become the subject of false claims and criticism that mischaracterizes our work, a tactic that peer researchers in this space are also experiencing.” The statement did not specifically address the House requests.

A university spokesperson, Victor Balta, said in an email, “The UW stands behind this important research aiming to resist strategic misinformation and strengthen our discourse. We have received a request for documents and information, and a response is in progress.”

by Andy Kroll, ProPublica, and Nick Surgey, Documented

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

Florida governor Ron DeSantis has frequently railed against “Big Tech.” He has accused Google, Facebook and Twitter of silencing conservative voices.

But in private, DeSantis has gone even further.

In previously unreported comments made in 2021, DeSantis said technology companies like Google “should be broken up” by the U.S. government.

DeSantis, widely considered a presidential hopeful, made the remarks at an invite-only retreat for the Teneo Network, a “private and confidential” group for elite conservatives. ProPublica and Documented obtained video of the event.

“They’re just too big, they have too much power,” DeSantis said. “I think they’re exercising a more negative influence on our society than the trusts that got broken up at the early 20th century.” He added that large tech companies “are ruining our country. They’re a very negative influence. And so I think you need to be strong about it.”

DeSantis’ call to break up large tech companies occurred at the Teneo Network’s annual retreat in 2021. As ProPublica and Documented recently reported, the Teneo Network aims to “crush liberal dominance” across many areas of American society, according to its chairman Leonard Leo, the influential legal activist and longtime leader of the Federalist Society.

DeSantis’ office did not respond to requests seeking comment. Teneo declined to comment.

In recent years, “Big Tech” has emerged as a favored target for Republican lawmakers and activists, even as prominent conservatives have amassed huge followings on Twitter, Facebook and other platforms. Pointing to such high-profile examples as Donald Trump’s suspension from Facebook and Twitter’s decision to briefly block a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, Republicans claim that U.S. tech companies have systematically suppressed conservative viewpoints and interfered with elections in ways that have helped Democrats.

A 2021 study issued by New York University researchers concluded those assertions were baseless. “The claim of anti-conservative animus on the part of social media companies is itself a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it," the researchers for the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights wrote.

Liberal lawmakers and policy experts have also called for stronger antitrust enforcement of major tech companies. During the 2020 presidential race, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., campaigned on a platform of breaking up Amazon, Facebook and Google, saying they had “too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy.” In 2021, Democrats in Congress introduced legislation to split up tech firms, but the bills never became law.

Matt Stoller, an antitrust expert who works at the American Economic Liberties Project, said it’s hard to tell if DeSantis’ private comments indicate genuine concern about corporate concentration of power or just anger at large firms perceived to be hostile to conservatives.

“There’s a war on the right about antitrust,” Stoller said. “I’m skeptical but open-minded that DeSantis wants to do something serious about economic power.”

Stoller added that he was more intrigued by DeSantis’ decision to call for breaking up tech at an event so closely associated with Leonard Leo. “If Leo buys that argument,” Stoller said, “then it means that a lot of federal judges might tip in that direction, too.”

A spokesperson for Leo declined to comment.

Teneo’s retreats are invite-only affairs limited to its members, their spouses and special guests. ProPublica and Documented obtained a video of DeSantis’ remarks about big tech, which took place during a longer conversation between DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur who is now running for president as a Republican.

Watch Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis Talk About Breaking Up Big Tech (Teneo)

Watch video ➜

As governor, DeSantis has repeatedly singled out tech and social-media companies, saying their actions “may be one of the most pervasive threats to American self-government in the 21st century.” Legislation he signed in May 2021 not only seeks to give Floridians the ability to sue tech companies and win monetary damages, it also empowers the state’s attorney general to bring cases against tech companies under the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act. (Tech companies are challenging the law, and its fate remains unclear.)

In February of this year, DeSantis introduced a plan to create what he called a Digital Bill of Rights for Florida citizens. The proposal, billed as a way to protect privacy and eliminate “unfair censorship,” would ban TikTok on state government devices and block local and state employees “from coordinating with Big Tech companies to censor protected speech.”

But unlike some of his fellow conservatives, DeSantis’ barbed public remarks about big tech have stopped short of urging the U.S. government to break up those tech companies. In his new book, “The Courage to Be Free,” he makes only a passing reference to “enforcing antitrust laws” against “large corporations that are wielding what is effectively public power.”

In his remarks at the Teneo Network retreat, DeSantis described tech companies as “monopolies” that “have more power over our lives than the monopolies of the early 20th century ever had. And it’s not even close.” He listed tech companies’ extensive data collection practices and their ability to shape “core political speech” as evidence of big tech’s monopolistic powers.

(Teneo)

Watch video ➜

He went on to say that tech platforms “enforce their terms unevenly,” adding that “if you have a conservative viewpoint, you’re much more likely to get censored, you’re much more likely to get deplatformed.”

And in response to critics who might say it’s not the role of government at any level to insert itself into the workings of a private business, DeSantis offered a sharp rebuttal. “Protecting the rights of folks to participate in political speech, I think, is an absolutely appropriate role of government,” he said. “And I think that we should do all that we can.”

When pressed by Ramaswamy onstage about using government power to shrink big tech companies, DeSantis stood by his position. “Those big companies are basically an arm of the ruling regime,” he said. “Yeah, that should be something that should be done.” And when asked if he feared that breaking up U.S. companies would strengthen China’s position in global markets, DeSantis appeared unbothered, saying that he believed antitrust action was still the correct course.

“These tech companies are ruining our country,” he said. “They’re a very negative influence. You need to be strong about it. And so that would not be the biggest concern I would have. My concern would be not having massive concentrations of power that are capable of silencing dissent, enforcing an orthodoxy and obviously interfering in elections, which we saw they did in 2020.”

Do you have information about Leonard Leo or the Teneo Network that we should know? Reporter Andy Kroll can be reached via email at andy.kroll@propublica.org or via Signal at 202-215-6203.

by Heather Vogell

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

After a ProPublica investigation last year, a group of senators demanded answers from a real estate tech company that helps landlords set rents across the country.

The investigation revealed how some of the nation’s biggest landlords share proprietary information with RealPage, a Texas company whose software uses the data to recommend rent prices for available units. Legal experts say the arrangement may facilitate cartel-like behavior among landlords, who could use the software to coordinate pricing.

Now, RealPage has responded to questions from Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Tina Smith and Ed Markey. The company’s answers, the lawmakers said, revealed “alarming” new details.

In a letter to the Department of Justice, the senators said RealPage did not provide all the information they had asked for last November, but the answers the company did give raise concerns that its YieldStar software may play a role in driving rent inflation in some of the country’s biggest markets.

“YieldStar has been most prevalent in some of the regions most heavily targeted by corporate buyers and with the highest rent increases,” the senators wrote.

The legislators said that publicly available information shows the software is used in pricing more than 4 million units, representing about 8% of all rental units nationwide. RealPage has so many clients it has access to “transactional apartment data from the rent rolls of 13+ million units,” according to the company’s website.

“Given YieldStar’s market share, even the widespread use of its anonymized and aggregated proprietary rental data by the country’s largest landlords could result in de-facto price-setting by those companies, driving up prices and hurting renters,” the senators’ letter said.

The senators wrote that “the DOJ should act to protect American families and closely review rent-setting algorithms like YieldStar to determine if they are having anti-competitive effects on local housing markets that have seen increased institutional investor activity.”

In a response to questions from ProPublica about the lawmakers’ letter, a RealPage spokesperson said that the firm “appreciates the opportunity to work with the senators’ offices.” The company is “always willing to engage policy stakeholders to ensure an informed and comprehensive understanding of the benefits we contribute to the rental ecosystem,” the spokesperson said.

After ProPublica’s story ran, more than two dozen federal lawsuits were filed by renters alleging antitrust violations by RealPage and more than 40 landlords in multiple states. When the first complaint was filed, a RealPage representative told ProPublica that the company “strongly denies the allegations and will vigorously defend against the lawsuit.” She declined to comment further, saying the company does not comment on pending litigation.

In November, sources confirmed that the DOJ’s antitrust division had opened an investigation. At the time, RealPage did not respond to a request for comment .

In its 14-page response to the senators, RealPage said recent news stories, including ProPublica’s, “do not accurately describe how these products work, in particular with regard to the role that data about other properties plays in generating rent price recommendations for RealPage’s customers and the effect that the use of these products has had on rents and apartment occupancy rates.” The company said a shortage of supply in rental housing is responsible for driving rents higher, not its software. The letter was redacted in places to protect confidential business information.

The company said that the purpose of YieldStar is not to raise rents at every opportunity, but to “manage revenues” so they are in line with the owner’s needs and management strategy. Data “does not support the assertion that YieldStar uniformly pushes rents higher,” the company said, and the software will often recommend reducing rents to minimize vacancies.

ProPublica’s story did not assert that the software always pushes rents higher. But our data analysis found that five of RealPage’s largest clients controlled more apartments in cities where rents rose rapidly and fewer apartments in metro areas where rents increased more slowly. All five property managers used RealPage’s pricing software in at least some of their buildings, and together they control thousands of apartments in metro areas where rents for a typical two-bedroom apartment rose 30% or more between 2014 and 2019.

RealPage clients may gravitate toward high-rent-growth markets simply because the companies expect those areas to offer more opportunities to make money. But RealPage says pricing suggested by its software helps landlords beat their market.

In its letter to senators, RealPage said the software itself “never” recommends removing apartments from a landlord’s inventory — a move that reduces the supply of housing and could make it easier to command higher rents — though property managers can do so if a unit needs repairs or renovations, for example.

The company said that increased use of its software has not reduced the number of apartments available for rent overall. The company said the metro areas where YieldStar has the highest penetration “have not seen inflated vacancy rates.”

“While it is difficult to differentiate the impact of revenue management tools like YieldStar from other market forces that affect occupancy rates, the fact that apartment providers now have commercial revenue management products available to them has not resulted in a national increase in vacancy rates,” the company said. RealPage said vacancy rates have dropped over the decade — a trend that housing experts say is part of a crisis in housing availability and cost.

But we found examples where company officials had urged property managers to consider whether they could make more money from rentals by raising prices and not rushing to fill all vacant units.

RealPage’s former CEO, Steve Winn, boasted on an earnings call in 2017 that one large property company found it could make greater profits by operating at a lower occupancy rate that “would have made management uncomfortable before.”

“Initially, it was very hard for executives to accept that they could operate at 94% or 96% and achieve a higher NOI by increasing rents,” Winn said on the call, referring to net operating income. The company “began utilizing RealPage to operate at 95%, while seeing revenue increases of 3% to 4%.”

A RealPage blog in 2018 also warned student housing landlords that if they weren’t using revenue management software, they could be “leaving money on the table” by being too quick to decrease rents.

“Many of the beds renting earlier in the season were arbitrarily set at a lower tier price — and may have been rentable at a higher price,” the blog said. “Worse, in fear of empty beds, some properties offer concessions or discounts for early rental decisions when they might have been able to fill all the beds at a top tier price.”

Another page on RealPage’s website said: “By focusing on the right information — not just occupancy — capabilities like revenue management empower operators to assure that pricing is right and there’s no money left on the table.”

The company also told the senators that the final decision on what to charge rests with the property manager. “YieldStar customers are under no obligation — contractually or otherwise — to follow the pricing recommendations generated by YieldStar software,” the company said.

But former RealPage employees told ProPublica that landlords follow as much as 90% of the software’s suggestions.

The letter said that news reports “badly distort and overstate the role that non-public data about other properties plays.” RealPage said its software prioritizes a landlord’s internal rent data over external factors such as what competitors charge.

But it acknowledged that it draws information from “executed leases,” which are typically not public.

Even with RealPage’s explanation, Warren and the other senators expressed concerns about the use of such data.

“Notably, RealPage provided important information about the extent to which the company facilitates information sharing by and among large institutional landlords — a particular concern given the market share of the product,” the senators’ letter to the DOJ said.

The company said its software helps landlords offer prospective renters more options for the length and cost of a lease. It said that the algorithm removes human biases that can result in violations of laws barring discrimination in housing.

The letter said revenue management software is not unique to RealPage, or even to the housing market.

But ProPublica found that the company became the dominant provider of such services for apartment rentals in 2017, when it bought its biggest competitor.

Haru Coryne of ProPublica and Ryan Little contributed data analysis.

by Asia Fields

We wrote this story in plain language. Plain language means it is easier to read for some people.

This is a guide to school discipline in New Mexico and Gallup-McKinley County Schools. You can print and share a short copy of this guide.

This guide is part of a project by ProPublica and New Mexico In Depth.

We are reporters. We are not lawyers or advocates. We want to give you information.

School discipline means how schools punish students for breaking rules. For example, schools can:

• Give students detention.
• Suspend students. Suspend means students are kicked out of school for a limited time.
• Expel students. Expel means students are kicked out of school for a long time.

New Mexico public schools expel Native American students more often than white students. Gallup-McKinley County Schools is the reason for most of this difference. Gallup-McKinley County Schools is in western New Mexico.

We wrote a story about how Gallup-McKinley County Schools expels students more often than in the rest of the state. Gallup-McKinley County Schools calls the police on students more than the rest of the state.

Mike Hyatt is the superintendent of the Gallup-McKinley County Schools. He did not respond to our questions. He called our story “completely false.” He said Gallup-McKinley County Schools expelled 15 students in the last 7 years.

But we found data that said Gallup-McKinley County Schools expelled students at least 211 times between fall 2016 and spring 2020.

We talked to many families in Gallup-McKinley County Schools. Many said they thought the district was harsh. Families also said school discipline is confusing.

Roxanne Arthur was a social worker. She worked with Gallup-McKinley County Schools.

Roxanne works for the Native American Disability Law Center. She said families do not understand the school discipline process. Some families do not speak English. That makes school discipline hard to understand.

Roxanne said, “I don't think the time is taken to really explain the situation to a parent.”

This guide explains how school discipline works in Gallup-McKinley County Schools and other New Mexico public schools.

• Some rules come from the national government. All schools must follow these rules.
• Some rules come from the state. All New Mexico schools must follow these rules.
• Some rules come from the Gallup-McKinley County Schools handbook. Gallup-McKinley County Schools must follow these rules.

You can visit this website to learn about rules in other states. You can also ask school officials about the rules in your state.

This guide answers these questions about discipline in New Mexico schools:

• Do New Mexico schools tell parents when they discipline students?
• Can New Mexico schools call the police on students?
• How do New Mexico schools decide how to discipline students?
• Do New Mexico schools have to hold disciplinary hearings for students?
• Can New Mexico schools search students or their things?
• What rights do students with disabilities have?
• How does Gallup-McKinley County Schools decide how to discipline students?
• Does discipline mean Gallup-McKinley students cannot play sports?
• How can I complain about schools in New Mexico?

You can ask us questions at NMSchools@propublica.org.

Do New Mexico schools tell parents when they discipline students?

Schools in New Mexico have to tell parents when they discipline students. Schools must:

• Call parents.
• Meet parents in person.
• Or send a written note to parents.

If a school is kicking a student out, it has to tell parents why.

The student can say that the school is wrong. The school has to show how it knows the student broke a rule. The school has to let the student share their side of what happened.

Can New Mexico schools call the police on students?

All schools in the United States have to call the police if a student has a gun at school.

Gallup-McKinley County Schools says it will call the police if a student:

• Sexually assaults someone (hurts someone sexually).
• Commits aggravated assault (hurts someone badly).
• Breaks into the school.
• Sells or gives out drugs or alcohol.

Gallup-McKinley County Schools can call police if a student:

• Fights.
• Does graffiti.
• Brings drugs or alcohol to school.
• Breaks other serious rules.

How do New Mexico schools decide how to discipline students?

Each school district makes its own rules for how to discipline students.

Schools in New Mexico cannot hurt students.

The U.S. government has a rule that says schools need to expel students for 1 year if they bring a gun to school. But schools don’t have to follow the rule all the time.

Do New Mexico schools have to hold disciplinary hearings for students?

Students can’t be kicked out of school for more than 10 days without a disciplinary hearing.

Disciplinary hearings are meetings. The meeting usually includes:

• The student.
• Their parent or caregiver.
• People who work for the school district.

The school district needs to tell parents there is going to be a hearing. The district can send a letter in the mail or give it to parents in person. In New Mexico, this letter has to:

• Be sent 5 or more days before the hearing.
• Explain what rules the student broke.
• Explain what discipline the student could get.
• Tell you when and where the hearing is.
• Tell you they can discipline the student even if you do not go to the hearing.
• Tell you how to reschedule.
  • Families in Gallup-McKinley can call 505-721-1074

At hearings in New Mexico, you can:

• Ask to have someone translate for you. You do not have to pay money for a translator.
• Tell your side of the story.
• Bring evidence and witnesses.
• Bring a lawyer.
  • You have to tell the school 3 days before the hearing if you want to bring a lawyer.
• Ask for a recording or notes from the meeting.

The person in charge of discipline makes a decision after the hearing. They should only use evidence from the hearing to decide. The school district needs to prove the student broke the rules.

They write the family a letter within 10 days of the hearing. The letter tells the family what discipline the student will get.

Can New Mexico schools search students or their things?

Courts in the United States have said that students should not be searched without “reasonable suspicion.” Reasonable suspicion means the school has a valid reason to think the student broke a rule.

New Mexico rules say school officials need a witness when they search a student. A witness is an extra person who watches what happens. The witness and the school official must be the same gender as the student.

What rights do students with disabilities have?

Some students with disabilities have individualized education programs, or IEPs. An IEP says what special education services the student gets.

Schools in the United States cannot suspend or expel students with IEPs for more than 10 days if:

• The student broke a rule because of their disability.
• The student broke a rule because the school did not follow their IEP.

The school has a meeting to decide if the student broke a rule for one of these reasons.

Schools can suspend students with IEPs for 45 days if the student brings a gun or drugs to school. The school would need to have a special meeting first.

The school needs to keep teaching suspended students who have disabilities. For example, the school can provide schoolwork to take home.

How does Gallup-McKinley County Schools decide how to discipline students?

Gallup-McKinley decides how to discipline students based on:

• The student’s age.
• What rule the student broke.
• If the student has been in trouble before.

Gallup-McKinley can change its rules. The district puts the rules on gmcs.org. You can ask your student’s teacher about the rules.

There are four levels of discipline:

• Level 1: Warnings and conversations with students or parents.
  • Level 1 is for students who break small rules like:
    • Missing school a few times.
    • Not wearing the right clothes.
    • Interrupting class.
    • Cheating.
    • Using their cellphone.
    • Gambling.
    • Having energy drinks.
• Level 2: Suspension from clubs, sports and other after-school activities.
  • Level 2 is for any of the rules in Level 1 or for things like:
    • Bringing tobacco or cigarettes to school.
    • Bringing a small knife to school.
    • Acting out or causing a disruption.
    • Hurting someone.
    • Showing affection publicly.
  • At Level 2, students can also:
    • Get detention.
    • Get in-school or overnight suspension.
    • Have to pay for anything they break or destroy.
• Level 3: Short suspension from school and activities.
  • Level 3 is for when a student breaks rules many times or breaks serious rules. Serious issues include:
    • Fighting.
    • Threatening to hurt someone with a weapon.
    • Bringing or using drugs or alcohol at school.
  • At Level 3, the student is either:
    • Suspended for 3 to 5 days from school and activities.
    • Taken out of school immediately for 1 day.
• Level 4: Suspension from school and activities.
  • Level 4 is for when a student breaks rules many times or breaks very serious rules. Very serious issues include:
    • Hurting someone sexually.
    • Bringing weapons to school.
    • Breaking into the school.
    • Setting something on fire.
    • Selling or giving out drugs or alcohol.
  • At Level 4, the student is:
    • Suspended from school for 5 to 10 days.
    • Not allowed to do clubs, sports or other activities for 1 year.

The school needs to have a disciplinary hearing if it wants to:

• Suspend a student for more than 10 days.
• Expel a student. Being expelled from Gallup-McKinley County Schools used to mean being removed from school for at least 90 days. Now being expelled means a student cannot ever come back to school.

The school district can decide to discipline the student at any level they want.

Does discipline mean Gallup-McKinley students cannot play sports?

Suspended or expelled students cannot play sports.

The school can suspend students from sports, clubs and other after-school activities without a hearing.

• Level 2 Discipline:
  • The student cannot play sports for however long the school district says.
• Level 3 Discipline:
  • First time the student gets in trouble: The student cannot play sports for 30 days.
  • Second time the student gets in trouble: The student cannot play sports for 45 days or until the end of the season.
  • If the student uses or brings drugs or alcohol to school: The student cannot play sports for 45 days or until the end of the season.

Gallup-McKinley can change its rules. The district puts the rules on gmcs.org. You can also ask your student’s teacher about the rules.

How can I complain about schools in New Mexico?

You can disagree with how the school wants to discipline your child. You can ask for an appeal. Appeal means you ask the district to look again at your child’s case.

You must tell the district you want to appeal. You have 10 school days to do this after getting the decision.

Your district does not have to review all cases. Reviews should be done in 15 days.

The 2022-2023 handbook for Gallup-McKinley County Schools does not tell families how to appeal.

You have the right to complain if you are not happy with discipline at your school.

It is against the law for the school to punish you or your student for complaining.

• The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights makes sure schools treat all students fairly. You can contact it by:
  • Emailing OCR@ed.gov.
  • Calling 800-421-3481.
• If your student has a disability, you can complain to the state. You can contact it by emailing dispute.resolution@ped.nm.gov.
• The state says these are groups that support families with children with disabilities:
  • Parents Reaching Out: 505-247-0192 or 800-524-5176.
  • EPICS (for parents of Native American children with disabilities): 505-767-6630 or 888-499-2070.
  • Disability Rights New Mexico: 505-256-3100.
  • Native American Disability Law Center: 505-566-5880 or 800-862-7271.
  • Pegasus Legal Services for Children: 505-244-1101.

Bryant Furlow of New Mexico In Depth and Maya Miller of ProPublica contributed reporting. Rebecca Monteleone translated this story into plain language.

by Jake Pearson

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

Nearly two decades ago, the New York Police Department drew national headlines for its violent response to protests outside the 2004 Republican National Convention. Officers wrapped demonstrators in orange mesh netting and shipped them off to a dirty Manhattan pier, where they were fingerprinted and held, some for more than 24 hours.

The protesters sued, and after years of tense litigation, the city settled what the New York Civil Liberties Union then called the “largest protest settlement in history” — an $18 million payout to resolve claims that the police had violated the civil rights of about 1,800 people.

“While no amount of money can undo the damage inflicted by the NYPD’s actions during the Convention, we hope and expect that this enormous settlement will help assure that what happened in 2004 will not happen again,” Christopher Dunn, lead counsel in the NYCLU cases, said at the time.

But in June 2020, just six years after that settlement, history repeated. Facing mass demonstrations, this time in the wake of the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, the NYPD again became the focus of intense media scrutiny for its bellicose approach to protests, perhaps most notably for boxing in, or “kettling,” about 300 protesters in the Bronx before violently arresting them. Those protesters also sued, and earlier this month their lawyers announced yet another “historic” settlement, in which each protester would get $21,500. The total payout could cost taxpayers between $4 million and $6 million.

Now, the durability of that narrative is prompting some lawmakers to question not just the NYPD’s actions but whether the city effectively enables expensive payouts by aggressively defending against charges of police misconduct instead of leveraging its legal might to pressure the NYPD to change its behaviors and practices. Indeed, while the city charter requires the Law Department to represent “the city and every agency thereof,” it also says the department should “maintain, defend and establish” the interests of “the people.”

In the Floyd and RNC cases, city lawyers fought tooth and nail in court against misconduct charges, employing a litigation strategy that challenged disclosures and claims at every turn — an approach that critics say can prolong cases and actually drive up costs.

“It’s a bad practice,” said Councilmember Gale Brewer, a Manhattan Democrat, who plans on questioning Law Department officials when they appear before the City Council’s Committee on Governmental Operations for a budget hearing on March 22.

“The public may not care about the person getting arrested or the cops, but they do care about the money,” she said of settlements to civil rights lawsuits. “It’s millions and millions of dollars. And there’s always a push — ‘How can you push those settlements to be less?’ Well, that doesn’t answer the question: Why do they keep happening?”

It is a line of inquiry backed by the Council’s speaker, Adrienne Adams, whose spokesperson said in a statement that “city attorneys can play a constructive role in preventing future violations of constitutional rights, and they should.”

“It is a disservice to our city and its taxpayers when an agency tasked with protecting them not only violates their rights, but also passes on the cost back to them,” said Mandela Jones, the spokesperson for the Queens Democrat. “It’s equally bad when that agency is enabled to continue engaging in this problematic conduct that repeats this cycle.”

Spokespeople for the mayor’s office, the NYPD and the Law Department did not respond to requests for comment about the hearing. The NYPD said in a statement earlier this month that the department had “re-envisioned” much of its training and policies around “large-scale demonstrations” after the Floyd protests based on the recommendations of “three outside agencies who carefully investigated that period.” The Law Department has previously told ProPublica it takes its ethical responsibilities seriously and litigates each case with an open mind. “While we work to vigorously protect the interests of the city in every case, we are always mindful that opposing parties are also citizens who should be treated with respect and whose claims should be evaluated fairly,” a department spokesperson said last year.

The public scrutiny follows a December report from ProPublica and New York Magazine that examined the city’s Special Federal Litigation Division, the little-known unit within the Law Department that exclusively handles federal civil rights lawsuits alleging abuses by police officers, jail guards and prosecutors. Former attorneys described a culture within Special Fed that prizes winning, even if it means drawing out cases with merit and negotiating them down to the smallest possible payout. The hard-line approach has sometimes drawn rebukes from the bench. Last year, for example, in the Floyd protest case, a judge dressed down a senior Special Fed lawyer for failing to obey court orders. The city has also been sanctioned multiple times for not turning over records in a timely manner. (That lawyer has since been fired, though she denied any wrongdoing.)

Many within the Law Department see themselves as guardians of the city’s treasury, and argue that aggressively defending police cases weeds out frivolous claims, preventing undeserving plaintiffs from obtaining public monies that could otherwise fund city services. But plaintiffs’ attorneys and advocates for police reform counter that Special Fed actually wastes money and public trust by aggressively, and sometimes expensively, defending cases involving clear police misconduct. The NYPD has previously said that any allegation it has “undue influence” over Special Fed and its defense of officers is “outrageous and inaccurate.”

The purpose of damages in federal civil-rights litigation is “to incentivize the government to change policy so it doesn’t face the same exposure for similar kinds of violations in the future,” said Gideon Oliver, a civil rights attorney who represents protesters. “It doesn’t work if the city and the Law Department view cutting those checks as just the cost of doing business.”

Settlements and payouts for police misconduct cases totaled $121 million last year, up from about $85 million the year before, according to an analysis of city data by the Legal Aid Society, the city’s primary provider of indigent legal services. (The sharp increase was largely attributable to six payouts of $10 million or more stemming from decades-old wrongful conviction cases.) A Washington Post analysis of settlement data last year showed that, between 2010 and 2020, more than 5,000 NYPD officers were named in two or more claims, accounting for 45% of New York City taxpayer dollars spent on misconduct cases.

Meanwhile, the full price tag for lawsuits related to the Floyd protests will likely grow well beyond this month’s multimillion-dollar settlement. As of last July, 565 claims had been filed over the NYPD’s policing of the demonstrations, according to records maintained by the city’s chief financial officer, with 220 of them having cumulatively settled, many pre-litigation, for nearly $7 million. A consolidation of lawsuits that seeks widespread reform of how the police handle protests is also still active in Manhattan federal court.

An effort in the early years of then-Mayor Bill de Blasio’s first term sought to change the culture within the Law Department, pushing attorneys to think of their primary client as the broader public, not just the named officer in any given lawsuit. But that effort largely withered as the mayor’s relationship with the NYPD and its unions deteriorated. Brewer, citing the story by ProPublica and New York Magazine, said the role of the Law Department and how it represents the city should be subject to public debate. Lawyers for protesters agreed.

“The Council has an important opportunity when it’s approving its budget to demand that the city take a different approach to widespread NYPD legal violations,” said the NYCLU’s Dunn, who is also working on Floyd protest litigation. “When they’re there asking for large sums of public funds, the City Council should be demanding the Law Department be more responsible in the way it's addressing litigation like this.”

by Zach Despart, The Texas Tribune

This article was originally published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

This story includes graphic descriptions of injuries, and one graphic image taken from inside a classroom. We are not publishing images of injured or deceased victims.

UVALDE, Texas — Once they saw a torrent of bullets tear through a classroom wall and metal door, the first police officers in the hallway of Robb Elementary School concluded they were outgunned. And that they could die.

The gunman had an AR-15, a rifle design used by U.S. soldiers in every conflict since Vietnam. Its bullets flew toward the officers at three times the speed of sound and could have pierced their body armor like a hole punch through paper. They grazed two officers in the head, and the group retreated.

Uvalde Police Department Sgt. Daniel Coronado stepped outside, breathing heavily, and got on his radio to warn the others.

“I have a male subject with an AR,” Coronado said.

The dispatch crackled on the radio of another officer on the opposite side of the building.

“Fuck,” that officer said.

“AR,” another exclaimed, alerting others nearby.

Almost a year after Texas’ deadliest school shooting killed 19 children and two teachers, there is still confusion among investigators, law enforcement leaders and politicians over how nearly 400 law enforcement officers could have performed so poorly. People have blamed cowardice or poor leadership or a lack of sufficient training for why police waited more than an hour to breach the classroom and subdue an amateur 18-year-old adversary.

But in their own words, during and after their botched response, the officers pointed to another reason: They were unwilling to confront the rifle on the other side of the door.

A Texas Tribune investigation, based on police body cameras, emergency communications and interviews with investigators that have not been made public, found officers had concluded that immediately confronting the gunman would be too dangerous. Even though some officers were armed with the same rifle, they opted to wait for the arrival of a Border Patrol SWAT team, with more protective body armor, stronger shields and more tactical training — even though the unit was based more than 60 miles away.

“You knew that it was definitely an AR,” Uvalde Police Department Sgt. Donald Page said in an interview with investigators after the school shooting. “There was no way of going in. … We had no choice but to wait and try to get something that had better coverage where we could actually stand up to him.”

“We weren’t equipped to make entry into that room without several casualties,” Uvalde Police Department Detective Louis Landry said in a separate investigative interview. He added, “Once we found out it was a rifle he was using, it was a different game plan we would have had to come up with. It wasn’t just going in guns blazing, the Old West style, and take him out.”

Uvalde school district Police Chief Pete Arredondo, who was fired in August after state officials cast him as the incident commander and blamed him for the delay in confronting the gunman, told investigators the day after the shooting he chose to focus on evacuating the school over breaching the classroom because of the type of firearm the gunman used.

“We’re gonna get scrutinized (for) why we didn’t go in there,” Arredondo said. “I know the firepower he had, based on what shells I saw, the holes in the wall in the room next to his. … The preservation of life, everything around (the gunman), was a priority.”

None of the officers quoted in this story agreed to be interviewed by the Tribune.

The gunman’s AR-15-style rifle lays in a supply closet of Room 111 at Robb Elementary School. (Law enforcement photo obtained by The Texas Tribune)

That hesitation to confront the gun allowed the gunman to terrorize students and teachers in two classrooms for more than an hour without interference from police. It delayed medical care for more than two dozen gunshot victims, including three who were still alive when the Border Patrol team finally ended the shooting but who later died.

Mass shooting protocols adopted by law enforcement nationwide call on officers to stop the attacker as soon as possible. But police in other mass shootings — including at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida — also hesitated to confront gunmen armed with AR-15-style rifles.

Even if the law enforcement response had been flawless and police had immediately stopped the gunman, the death toll in Uvalde still would have been significant. Investigators concluded most victims were killed in the minutes before police arrived.

But in the aftermath of the shooting, there has been little grappling with the role the gun played. Texas Republicans, who control every lever of state government, have talked about school safety, mental health and police training — but not gun control.

A comprehensive and scathing report of law enforcement’s response to the shooting, released by a Texas House investigative committee chaired by Republican Rep. Dustin Burrows in July, made no mention of the comments by law enforcement officers in interviews that illustrated trepidation about the AR-15.

Other lawmakers have taken the position that the kind of weapon used in the attack made no difference.

“This man had enough time to do it with his hands or a baseball bat, and so it’s not the gun. It’s the person,” Sen. Bob Hall, R-Edgewood, said in a hearing a month after the shooting.

Republican state and legislative leaders, who are in the midst of the first legislative session since the shooting, are resisting calls for gun restrictions, like raising the age to purchase semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has suggested such a law would be unconstitutional, while House Speaker Dade Phelan said he doubts his chamber would support it.

Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and four Republican members of the Legislature — Phelan, Hall, Burrows and Rep. Ryan Guillen, chairman of the House committee that will hear all gun-related proposals, declined to discuss the findings of this story or did not respond. Two gun advocacy groups, Texas Gun Rights and the Texas State Rifle Association, also did not respond.

Limiting access to these kinds of rifles may not decrease the frequency of mass shootings, which plagued the country before the rifle became popular among gun owners. During the decade that the federal assault weapons ban was in place, beginning in 1994, the number of mass shootings was roughly the same as in the decade prior, according to a mass shooting database maintained by Mother Jones. It also would not address the root causes that motivate mass shooters, merely limit the lethality of the tools at their disposal.

Relatives of Uvalde victims, like Jesse Rizo, whose 9-year-old niece Jackie Cazares was killed in the shooting, say the comments by police who responded in Uvalde are undeniable proof that rifles like the AR-15 should be strictly regulated.

“(Police) knew the monster behind the door was not the kid. It’s the rifle the kid is holding,” said Rizo, referring to the 18-year-old gunman. “It’s the freaking AR that they’re afraid of. … Their training doesn’t say sit back and wait.”

Jesse Rizo, the uncle of Robb Elementary victim Jackie Cazares, 9, said that the police “knew the monster behind the door was not the kid. It’s the rifle the kid is holding.” (Evan L’Roy/The Texas Tribune) A Weapon of War

Officers arriving at Robb Elementary on May 24 had similar reactions as they realized that the gunman had an AR-15.

“You know what kind of gun?” state Trooper Richard Bogdanski asked in a conversation captured on his body-camera footage outside of the school.

“AR. He has a battle rifle,” a voice responded.

“Does he really?” another asked.

“What’s the safest way to do this? I’m not trying to get clapped out,” Bogdanski said.

They had good reason to worry: The AR-15 was designed to efficiently kill humans.

ArmaLite, a small gunmaker in California, designed the AR-15 in the late 1950s as a next-generation military rifle. Compared with the U.S. Army’s infantry rifle at the time, the AR-15 was less heavy, had a shorter barrel and used lighter ammunition, allowing soldiers to carry more on the battlefield. It also fired a smaller-caliber bullet but compensated for it by increasing the speed at which it is propelled from the barrel.

A declassified 1962 Department of Defense report from the Vietnam War found the AR-15 would be ideal for use by South Vietnamese soldiers, who were smaller in stature and had less training than their American counterparts, for five reasons: its easy maintenance, accuracy, rapid rate of fire, light weight and “excellent killing or stopping power.”

“The lethality of the AR-15 and its reliability record were particularly impressive,” the authors reported.

Its bullets could also penetrate the body armor worn by the initial responding officers to Robb Elementary, an added level of danger they were aware of. While most departments, including the city of Uvalde’s, have rifle-rated body armor, it is not typically worn by officers on patrol because of its added weight.

“Had anybody gone through that door, he would have killed whoever it was,” Uvalde Police Department Lt. Javier Martinez told investigators the day after the shooting. You “can only carry so many ballistic vests on you. That .223 (caliber) round would have gone right through you.”

A rifle cartridge identical to the ammunition used in the Robb Elementary shooting. (Photo illustration by Evan L’Roy/The Texas Tribune)

Coronado echoed the concern in his own interviews with investigators about the moment he realized the gunman had a battle rifle.

“I knew too it wasn’t a pistol. ... I was like, ‘Shit, it’s a rifle,’” he said. He added, “The way he was shooting, he was probably going to take all of us out.”

The AR-15 is less powerful than many rifles, such as those used to hunt deer or other large game. But it has significantly more power than handguns, firing a bullet that has nearly three times the energy of the larger round common in police pistols.

The AR-15 also causes more damage to the human body. Handgun bullets typically travel through the body in a straight line, according to a 2016 study published by The Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery. High-energy bullets become unstable as they decelerate in flesh, twisting and turning as they damage a wider swath of tissue. This creates “not only a permanent cavity the size of the caliber of the bullet, but also a … second cavity often many times larger than the bullet itself.”

The Defense Department report detailed this effect in plainer language, describing the AR-15’s performance in a firefight with Viet Cong at a range of 50 meters: “One man was shot in the head; it looked like it exploded. A second man was hit in the chest; his back was one big hole.”

The Defense Department placed its first mass order for the rifle in 1963, calling its version the M16, and based each of its service rifles until 2022 on this design. The only significant difference between the military and civilian versions of the AR-15 is that the military rifle can fire automatically, meaning the user can depress the trigger to shoot multiple rounds. The civilian AR-15 is semi-automatic, requiring a trigger pull for each round.

In the context of mass shootings, it is a distinction without a meaningful difference: Both rates of fire can kill a roomful of people in seconds.

That’s what happened in Uvalde.

In two and a half minutes, before any police officer set foot inside the school, the gunman fired more than 100 rounds at students and teachers from point-blank range. Several victims lost large portions of their heads, photos taken by investigators show. Bullets tore gashes in flesh as long as a foot. They shattered a child’s shin, nearly severed another’s arm at the elbow, ripped open another’s neck, blasted a hole the size of a baseball in another’s hip. Other rounds penetrated the wall of Room 111, passed through the empty Room 110, punctured another wall and wounded a student and teacher in Room 109, who survived.

When medics finally reached the victims, there was nothing they could do for most, they said in interviews with investigators. Eighteen of the 21 were pronounced dead at the school. Police assigned each a letter of the alphabet and took DNA samples so they could be identified by family.

Rifle Popularity Surges

Ruben Torres, who saw what the rifle can do in combat while serving as a Marine infantryman in Iraq and Afghanistan, never imagined someone would use it to try and kill his daughter, Khloie, who was wounded by bullet fragments at Robb Elementary.

The Corps spends so much time drilling firearm safety into Marines that Torres can recite the rules from memory. Even now, he has no objection to civilians owning AR-15s, but he thinks they should be required to complete training like soldiers because too many who buy one treat it like a toy.

Ruben Torres, whose daughter, Khloie, was wounded in the Robb Elementary shooting, served as a Marine infantryman in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has no objection to civilians owning AR-15s but thinks they should be required to complete training like soldiers do. (Evan L’Roy/The Texas Tribune)

“You get people that never served in the military or law enforcement, and yet they’re wannabes,” Torres said. “They purchase this weapons system, not having a clue how to use it, the type of power and the level of maturity needed to even operate it.”

It was customers seeking a military experience who helped spur the rifle’s surge in popularity over the past 15 years, gun industry researchers say. Civilians have been able to buy an AR-15 since the mid-1960s, but for decades it was a niche product whose largest customer segment included police SWAT units.

A federal assault weapons ban expired in 2004, creating a new opportunity to market rifles like the AR-15 to the general public, said Timothy Lytton, a professor at the Georgia State University College of Law who researches the gun industry.

Since 1990, More Military-Style Rifles Became Available

The number of military-style rifles, including AR-15 and AK-style, produced or imported in the U.S. went from about 74,000 in 1990 to a national high of almost 2.8 million in 2020. Since 1990, an estimated 24.4 million of these rifles have been in circulation.

(Source: National Shooting Sports Foundation. Credit: Drew An-Pham/Texas Tribune.)

“In the 2000s, there was a shift in the industry’s marketing to people who are not just looking for self-defense, but people who are also looking for some sort of tactical experience,” Lytton said. He said this new consumer wanted to “simulate military combat situations.”

Sales of the rifle exploded. The National Shooting Sports Foundation, a prominent trade group, estimates American gunmakers produced 1.4 million semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15 in 2015, excluding exports — a figure 10 times higher than a decade earlier. This group of semi-automatic rifles accounted for 89% of the rifles made by domestic manufacturers in 2020, according to government and industry data.

As it grew more popular with the public, the rifle also became more popular with mass shooters. AR-15-style rifles weren’t used in any mass shootings until 2007, according to the mass shooting database maintained by Mother Jones, which includes indiscriminate killings of at least three people in public places, excluding crimes that stem from robbery, gang activity or other conventionally explained motives.

Gunmen used the rifle in 5% of attacks that decade and 27% in the 2010s. 2022 cemented the AR-15 as the weapon of choice for mass shooters. They wielded the rifle in 67% of the 12 massacres that year, including a parade in Illinois where seven were slain and a supermarket shooting in New York that killed 10.

The death toll in Uvalde exceeded them both.

The Gunman’s Purchase

Little is known about what motivated the shooter in Uvalde or why he targeted the elementary school he once attended. But signs of planning, and a fixation on guns, stretched back months.

Beginning in late 2021, he began buying accessories: an electronic gun sight, rifle straps, shin guards, a vest with pockets to hold body armor and a hellfire trigger, which can be snapped onto semi-automatic weapons to allow near-automatic fire.

He faced a single significant obstacle to assembling an arsenal: Under Texas law, the minimum age to purchase long guns like rifles is 18. That hindrance vanished on May 16, 2022, his 18th birthday. He ordered an AR-15-style rifle from the website of Daniel Defense, a gunmaker that has pioneered marketing firearms via social media.

Its sleek Instagram videos often feature young men rapidly firing the company’s rifles, wearing outfits that resemble combat uniforms. Other posts feature members of the U.S. military. A lawsuit filed by Uvalde victims’ families against Daniel Defense alleges the gunmaker’s marketing intentionally targets vulnerable young men driven by military fantasies.

The company rejected these claims and cast the lawsuit as an attempt to bankrupt the gun industry.

“To imply that images portraying the heroic work of our soldiers risking their lives in combat inspires young men back home to shoot children is inexcusable,” then-CEO Marty Daniel said last year. The case is ongoing.

Federal law requires weapons purchased online to be picked up at a licensed dealer, which also performs a background check. The Uvalde gunman had no criminal history and had never been arrested, ensuring he would pass. He had the Daniel Defense rifle shipped to Oasis Outback, a gun store in town.

The gunman visited the store alone three times between May 17 and May 20. First, he purchased a Smith & Wesson AR-15-style rifle, then returned to buy 375 rounds of ammunition, then came back again to pick up the Daniel Defense rifle. Surveillance footage from the shop shows an employee placing the case on the counter and opening it. The gunman picked up the rifle, peered down the barrel and placed his finger on the trigger — a breach of a cardinal rule of gun safety, to never do so until you are ready to fire.

This video shows the person who was the shooter at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. (Surveillance footage from Oasis Outback)

The gun store’s owner told investigators he was an average customer with no “red flags,” though patrons told FBI agents he was “very nervous looking” and “appeared odd and looked like one of those school shooters.”

An online order he’d placed for 1,740 rifle cartridges arrived at 6:09 p.m. on May 23. In the eight days after he became eligible to purchase firearms, he bought two AR-15-style rifles and 2,115 rounds of ammunition.

He had broken no laws. He had aroused no suspicion with authorities. And, like many mass shooters, he had given no public warning about his plan.

May 24, the day of the Uvalde shooting, was most likely the first time he had ever fired a gun, investigators concluded. To do so with an AR-15 is simple: Insert a loaded magazine, cock the rifle to force a cartridge into the firing chamber, slide the safety switch off and pull the trigger. Still, he initially struggled to attach the magazine correctly in the previous days, a relative recalled to investigators, and it kept falling to the floor.

He figured it out by the time he pointed one of the rifles at his grandmother and shot her in the face, amid a dispute about his cellphone plan. The bullet tore a gash in the right side of her face; she required a lengthy hospitalization but survived. He took only the Daniel Defense rifle to the school, leaving the Smith & Wesson at his grandmother’s truck, which he had stolen, driven three blocks and crashed on the west edge of the elementary campus.

When Other Officers Hesitated

The 77-minute delay in breaching the fourth grade classroom was an “abject failure” that set the law enforcement profession back a decade, the Texas state police director said in June. Police had failed to follow protocol developed after the 1999 Columbine school shooting that states the first priority is to confront shooters and stop the killing. Yet even beyond Uvalde, the performance of police against active shooters with AR-15-style rifles — which were rarely used in mass shootings when the standards were developed — is inconsistent.

AR-15-Style Rifles Are Now More Common in Mass Shootings

Since 1982, AR-15-style rifles have been used in 30 mass shootings — their use significantly rising after the federal assault weapons ban expired in 2004. In 2022, 67% of mass shootings involved at least one AR-15-style weapon.

Note: Mass shootings are defined as the indiscriminate killing of at least three people in a public place, excluding crimes related to domestic violence, robbery and gang activity. (Source: Mother Jones and Texas Tribune analysis. Credit: Drew An-Pham/Texas Tribune.)

When a gunman began firing an AR-15-style rifle in 2016 at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, an officer providing security waited six minutes for backup before pursuing the suspect into the club; he later said his handgun was “no match” for the shooter’s rifle.

Two years later, a sheriff’s deputy at Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida did not confront the AR-15-wielding shooter there, either. Investigators said he instead retreated for four and a half minutes, during which the gunman shot 10 students and teachers, six fatally.

In some instances, police have confronted the rifle without hesitation. Officers killed a gunman who had fatally shot seven people in a 2019 shooting spree in the Texas cities of Midland and Odessa. During the 2021 supermarket shooting in Boulder, Colorado, one of the 10 victims the gunman killed with his AR-15 was one of the first responding officers.

The extreme stress the body experiences in a gunfight slows critical thinking and motor skills, said Massad Ayoob, a police firearms trainer since the 1970s. Officers can overcome this with repeated training that is as realistic as possible, he said. Without it, they are more likely to freeze or retreat.

“Have you ever been in a firefight? Have you ever been in a situation where you were about to die?” said Kevin Lawrence, a law enforcement officer for 40 years and the executive director of the Texas Municipal Police Association. “None of us knows how we’re going to react to that circumstance until we’re in it.”

Improved training that reinforces the expectation that police immediately confront active shooters would improve the likelihood that they do so, said Jimmy Perdue, president of the Texas Police Chiefs Association. But because they attack at random locations and times, he said it is unrealistic to expect that all 800,000 law enforcement officers in the United States would be prepared. That rifles like the AR-15 are especially lethal, he acknowledged, adds an additional mental obstacle for officers.

“All we can do is play the averages … and hope that the training will take place and they’ll be able to understand the gravity of the situation and respond accordingly,” Perdue said. “But there is no guarantee that the one officer that happens to be on duty when this next shooting occurs is going to respond correctly.”

In many cases, whether officers follow active-shooter training is irrelevant. Most mass shootings end in less than five minutes, research from the FBI concluded, often before officers arrive.

This was the case in Newtown, Connecticut, where a gunman killed 26 people at an elementary school in 2012, and in Aurora, Colorado, where another killed 12 people at a movie theater the same year. Both used AR-15-style rifles.

Family members of the Robb Elementary shooting victims and their supporters wait to meet with an aide of a state senator to ask the lawmaker to consider supporting gun reform legislation. (Evan L’Roy/The Texas Tribune) Resistance to Gun Control

Texas has a long, proud and increasingly less-regulated history of gun ownership. It is rooted in a belief in personal responsibility, that average citizens can sensibly own guns to protect themselves and their families and intervene to stop armed criminals in the absence of police.

“Ultimately, as we all know, what stops armed bad guys is armed good guys,” said U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz at the National Rifle Association convention in Houston three days after the Uvalde shooting.

He cited two examples: the Border Patrol team who finally breached the classroom at Robb Elementary and the firearms instructor who shot the gunman who in 2017 attacked a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, with an AR-15-style rifle. Both actions potentially saved lives. But they failed to prevent the murders of 47 people.

This year a group of Uvalde families has been regularly visiting the Capitol to push for stricter gun laws, including to raise the age someone can legally purchase AR-15-style rifles to 21.

The mass shootings since 2016 in Dallas, Sutherland Springs, Santa Fe, El Paso and Midland-Odessa — all but one committed with a semi-automatic rifle — did not persuade the Legislature to restrict access to guns. Instead, lawmakers relaxed regulations, including allowing the open carry of handguns without a license or training. And Democrats who have proposed a number of new restrictions this session admit that their bills face nearly insurmountable odds.

The AR-15s carried by state troopers at the Capitol give Sandra Torres flashbacks. Her daughter, 10-year-old Eliahna, a promising softball player, died at Robb Elementary. Sandra never got to tell her she’d made the all-star team. Mack Segovia, Eliahna’s stepfather, didn’t grow up around guns, but he’s seen enough pictures of 200-pound wild hogs his friends tore up with AR-15s while hunting to understand what the rifle did to his daughter.

The couple has made the six-hour round trip to Austin five times already, squeezing with other families into tiny offices for meetings with lawmakers to ask for what they think are commonsense regulations. Most legislators are cordial, but sometimes the families can tell they are being rebuffed, Torres said. Her partner recalled how the House speaker drove 360 miles from his home in Beaumont to Uvalde to tell families he did not support new gun laws, which struck him as a hell of a long way for a man to travel to say: Sorry, I can’t help you.

The experience is frustrating. Torres and Segovia said they did not have a strong opinion about guns until their daughter was taken from them by a young man who bought one designed for combat, no questions asked. They said they feel compelled, if Eliahna’s death served any purpose, to make it harder for other people to do the same.

“Those were babies,” Segovia said. “I promise you, if it happened to those people in the Senate, or the governor, it would be different.”

Sandra Torres and her partner, Mack Segovia, dedicated a room in their new house to Eliahna Torres, 10, who was killed at Robb Elementary. (Evan L’Roy/The Texas Tribune)

Lomi Kriel contributed reporting.

by Elyssa Cherney, Crain’s Chicago Business, and Steve Mills, ProPublica

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.

Crain’s Chicago Business and ProPublica have identified at least nine objects once owned by James and Marilynn Alsdorf that have been sent back to their countries of origin since the late 1980s. Nepali activists — and government officials, in one case — are pressing for the return of more Alsdorf objects donated to the Art Institute of Chicago, saying they have evidence the pieces may have been looted and sold on the art market. (Marilynn Alsdorf’s son and an attorney for her trust declined to comment for this story.)

Returned Objects

Brooke Herbert for Crain’s Chicago Business and ProPublica

Sculpture of Tara: The Yale University Art Gallery in May returned to Nepal a stone sculpture of a goddess that had once belonged to the Alsdorfs. The Alsdorfs had sold the piece in a 2002 Sotheby’s auction; it was later donated to the gallery.

Brooke Herbert for Crain’s Chicago Business and ProPublica

Stone stele of Nagaraja: This 12th century piece was one of three objects sent back to Nepal by the Marilynn B. Alsdorf Trust in 2022, according to records obtained by Crain’s and ProPublica.

(Brooke Herbert for Crain’s Chicago Business and ProPublica)

Figure of Buddha: Estimated to be from the 14th or 15th century, this was one of three objects sent back to Nepal by the Marilynn B. Alsdorf Trust in 2022, records show.

(Brooke Herbert for Crain’s Chicago Business and ProPublica)

Stone stele of Padmapani: Estimated to be from the 10th or 11th century, this was one of three objects sent back to Nepal by the Marilynn B. Alsdorf Trust in 2022, records show.

(Brooke Herbert for Crain’s Chicago Business and ProPublica)

Linga with four faces: The Art Institute helped facilitate the return of this object, which Marilynn Alsdorf loaned to the museum, in April 2021. The object, a sixth-century sculpture depicting Shiva, was stolen from a shrine in Nepal in 1984, according to Nepali news reports and records obtained by ProPublica and Crain’s.

(Courtesy of Christie's June 2020 online ancient art catalog)

Marble hare: Christie’s pulled this second to third century Roman piece from a 2020 Alsdorf estate sale after receiving information that it had been linked to a convicted antiquities smuggler. Christie’s helped return the piece to Italy, according to a spokesperson.

(Courtesy of Christie's June 2020 online ancient art catalog)

Bronze eagle: Christie’s pulled this second to third century Roman piece from a 2020 Alsdorf estate sale after receiving information that it had been linked to a convicted antiquities smuggler. Christie’s helped return the piece to Italy, according to a spokesperson.

Lakulisa sculpture (not pictured): Marilynn Alsdorf returned a sculpture of Lakulisa, a figure associated with Shiva, to India in 2000 after researching the piece for a 1997 exhibit at the Art Institute and finding issues with its provenance, according to research by an academic.

Vishnu carving (not pictured): The Art Institute agreed to return to Thailand a decorative stone beam of the god Vishnu, which the Alsdorfs had bought through a New York art dealer in 1967, according to news articles at the time. The Thai government said the carving, which the Alsdorfs’ foundation donated to the museum in 1983, disappeared from a temple in the 1960s.

Contested Objects

(Courtesy of Art Institute of Chicago)

Taleju necklace: The Nepali government asked the Art Institute in August 2021 to repatriate the gilt-copper necklace made for a Hindu goddess. Negotiations over the piece, which was commissioned by a Nepali king in the 17th century, are ongoing.

(Courtesy of Art Institute of Chicago)

Bhairava sculpture: The Alsdorfs loaned this sculpture of a form of Shiva to the Art Institute in 1997, and the museum acquired it in 2014, according to a museum spokesperson. Nepali activists say they’ve located a photo of the piece that shows it was in Nepal during the 1980s and allege it could have only left the country through illicit means. The photo is on a memory card that came with a book about Nepali stone sculptures. Activists don’t know the exact date or location of where the photo was taken. The Art Institute has seen the photo and is reviewing the object’s provenance, the spokesperson said.

(Courtesy of Art Institute of Chicago)

“Buddha Sheltered by the Serpent King Muchalinda”: The Alsdorfs loaned this sculpture to the Art Institute in 1997, and the museum acquired it in 2014, according to a museum spokesperson. Nepali activists have located a photo that they say shows the piece in Nepal in 1970 and say it may have been looted from that site. A spokesperson for the Art Institute said the museum has seen the photo, which is published in an archive created by art history professors, and is reviewing the object’s provenance.

(Courtesy of Art Institute of Chicago)

Wooden Tara: The Alsdorfs loaned this piece to the Art Institute in 1997, and the museum acquired it in 2014, according to a museum spokesperson. Nepali activists have located a photo, published in a 1974 article by a scholar, that they say shows the piece in a temple and is evidence the object may have been illicitly removed from Nepal after that time. The Art Institute has seen the photo but hasn’t concluded the piece is the same, the spokesperson said.

by Elyssa Cherney, Crain’s Chicago Business, and Steve Mills, ProPublica

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.

Eying a rare collection of Asian artifacts, the Art Institute of Chicago turned on the charm to woo a local benefactor.

It arranged a major exhibit to showcase the South and Southeast Asian art that Marilynn Alsdorf had accumulated over decades and published an elegant catalog to commemorate the event. The museum even hired a longtime Alsdorf friend as a curator.

It was “like a card game, or a minuet … a little dancing,” Alsdorf said at the time.

That effort paid off. In 1997, Alsdorf announced at a party of the museum’s Woman’s Board that she would leave approximately 500 objects from Nepal, India and other countries to the Art Institute, saving it the millions of dollars it would have had to spend to build such a collection. And in 2008, the Art Institute opened the Alsdorf Galleries, a tribute to Marilynn and her late husband, James.

But the Alsdorf collection, once so desired, has increasingly become a problem for the Art Institute as it faces questions of ownership history that cast doubt on the museum’s commitment to keeping its galleries free of looted antiquities.

Twenty-four objects from the Alsdorf collection at the Art Institute have incomplete provenance by modern standards, according to a national online registry of museum pieces. No other single collection at the museum that's listed on the registry has as many gaps.

Beyond that, ProPublica and Crain’s Chicago Business have identified at least four Alsdorf pieces at the Art Institute for which there’s evidence that they may have been looted from Nepal and exported illegally.

Among them is an inscribed gilt-copper necklace, embellished with semiprecious stones and intricate designs, which a 17th century Nepali king offered to a Hindu goddess. The Nepali government and activists are pressing for the return of the necklace, which is still on display at the museum.

A necklace said to have been given to the Hindu goddess Taleju by a Nepali king, on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, came from the Alsdorf collection. Nepalis interviewed for this story said they were comfortable with a photo of the necklace being published. (Alyce Henson for Crain’s Chicago Business)

The dispute over the rights to that necklace has dragged on for close to 20 months, raising frustration in Nepal. “I don’t know what else they want,” said Alisha Sijapati, director of the Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign, which seeks to repatriate stolen objects and has called attention to the case. “The more they delay, it’s damaging to their reputation.”

Crain’s and ProPublica also found that at least nine additional pieces once owned by the Alsdorfs have previously been returned to Nepal and other nations — a pattern that some art historians say should trigger a broader and public examination by the museum of the couple’s collection. The Art Institute was involved in returning two of the pieces: a decorative stone beam from a temple in Thailand, which had been donated to the museum, and a sculpture of the Hindu god Shiva from Nepal, which had been on loan.

The other objects were in the Alsdorfs’ personal collection; one piece was in another museum.

While some museums have taken a more expansive approach to weeding out looted artifacts, the Art Institute lags behind, ProPublica and Crain’s found. Other U.S. museums post information online when they find a problem or repatriate an object; the Art Institute does not. Some museums also maintain an online, public record of repatriations that includes the names of collectors who loaned or donated the contested piece; the Art Institute does not.

A spokesperson for the Art Institute said the museum strives to thoroughly research the objects in its collection and follows industrywide best practices for vetting ownership history or provenance.

The Art Institute takes all repatriation requests “extremely seriously,” the spokesperson, Katie Rahn, said. “Repatriation discussions can be exceptionally complex and can take significant time, but every effort is made to resolve these matters as quickly as possible.”

Concerns about the Alsdorf collection are mounting at a time when museums are drawing scrutiny for their failures to return stolen objects, and even the remains of Native Americans, that are still in their possession.

Art historians and other experts say it’s especially difficult for an underdeveloped country like Nepal to negotiate with a large, world-famous museum like the Art Institute. Nepali officials have lamented that the country’s Department of Archaeology, which handles research into looted objects, is severely understaffed and that coordination between government agencies can be slow.

“Legally, the burden of proof is on the victim,” said Melissa Kerin, an associate professor at Washington and Lee University who specializes in South Asian and Tibetan art and architecture. “They’re the ones already living without the object, but they’re the ones who have to pull together a legal team. We’re talking about a developing country.”

Worshippers light diyas, or oil lamps, at the Kaal Bhairav Hindu shrine in Kathmandu Durbar Square in Nepal’s capital. (Brooke Herbert for Crain’s Chicago Business and ProPublica)

Nepal’s history of political unrest has made it particularly susceptible to looting; hundreds of sculptures, paintings and other spiritual objects have been stolen from the country since 1960, after it began opening its borders to tourism. As in much of South Asia, sculptures depicting deities are considered to be inhabited by those gods and not mere inanimate idols. Their absence leaves worshippers reeling.

Activists with the Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign said they have found photos showing three objects in their original locations in the country before the Alsdorfs allegedly bought them and gave them to the Art Institute: a wooden sculpture of the goddess Tara, a stone carving of Buddha and another stone sculpture of a Shiva.

Rahn said that the museum is aware of the photos and is investigating the provenance of those objects, but that it has not determined that all of the photos match its pieces. The Nepali government has not initiated repatriation requests on those objects.

According to Rahn, the Art Institute’s last written communication from Nepal about the necklace was in May 2022, and the museum is waiting for additional information. Nepal’s embassy in Washington said the Archaeology Department is “coordinating” with the Art Institute on questions about the necklace, though activists say the museum has asked for records that may not exist or would be difficult to obtain.

The Art Institute would not say if it has conducted a top-to-bottom review of the Alsdorf collection since Marilynn’s death in 2019. The items donated by the Alsdorfs were vetted by the museum when they were acquired under the standards in place at the time, Rahn said, but those internal policies have evolved — and strengthened — since then. “If new information emerges for any object, we conduct further research,” she said.

The Art Institute created three positions “primarily dedicated” to provenance, including a curator who oversees these efforts across the institution, Rahn said. Two of the positions were created in July 2020 and the third in February 2022, she said, as “research became a bigger priority for the museum.”

Rahn said the museum also had formed a task force last year of “senior curatorial and legal leaders” to help prioritize provenance research, but she would not provide additional details. She said the museum is “considering” posting online information about objects that might be returned in the future.

A sculpture photographed in Nepal in 1970, first image, and a stone carving the Art Institute lists as the “Buddha Sheltered by the Serpent King Muchalinda,” second image, which came from the Alsdorf collection. Activists say the photos show the same object and provide evidence the museum may be in possession of a looted item. (First image: John C. Huntington, courtesy of the John C. and Susan L. Huntington Photographic Archive of Buddhist and Asian Art. Second image: Photo courtesy of Art Institute of Chicago.)

Though the Alsdorfs are both dead, efforts to protect their legacy are ongoing. As part of four recent returns to Nepal, Marilynn Alsdorf’s trust has required the country to agree to not identify the Alsdorfs as the owners in any press releases or other public announcements, according to interviews and records obtained by ProPublica and Crain’s.

Given an opportunity in April 2021 to identify Marilynn Alsdorf as the owner of an object the Art Institute was helping to return to Nepal — the Shiva that had been on loan there — museum officials declined to do so in ArtNews, a major news organization for the arts community.

The Art Institute, however, was not a party to the confidentiality agreement.

“This is all hush hush — very intentionally so,” Kerin said. “It’s protecting the system.”

A Love of Collecting, a Looted Picasso

James and Marilynn Alsdorf supported various museums in their hometown, but perhaps none benefited from a relationship with the couple as much as the Art Institute.

Throughout their lives, the Alsdorfs donated more than $20 million to the Art Institute. James Alsdorf — the son of a Dutch diplomat and a successful owner of a business that produced glass coffee-making equipment — was chair of the museum’s board from 1975 to 1978. Marilynn Alsdorf, who graduated from Northwestern University and worked briefly as a model for commercial and fashion photographers, was a museum trustee and president of its Woman’s Board.

James and Marilynn Alsdorf in 1950. The couple purchased their first South Asian object, a metal sculpture made in Nepal, during a 1955 trip to Paris. (Photo courtesy of christies.com)

The couple purchased their first South Asian object — a metal sculpture made in Nepal — during a 1955 trip to Paris. In the decades that followed, the Alsdorfs grew their acquisitions and their reputation as leading American collectors. And they became especially well known for their holdings from South and Southeast Asia.

While the Alsdorfs enjoyed the thrill of collecting art together, they also seemed to relish their connection with the elite arts world.

“They liked being part of that community of donors to the city, of having a place of success and status,” said David Tunkl, an art dealer who began working with the Alsdorfs in the 1980s.

Whether the Alsdorfs were aware they were purchasing stolen objects or whether they were taken advantage of by unscrupulous dealers may never be known. They acquired much of their collection during their travels in the 1950s and 1960s, an era that many art historians have described as particularly freewheeling.

During those decades, collectors seldom inquired about a piece’s provenance, perhaps loath to learn an object had been illicitly dug out of the ground or taken from a temple, said Erin Thompson, an associate professor of art crime at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

“They would’ve seen objects like this being worshipped,” she said. “They should have known.”

The Alsdorfs purchased art all over the world — in India, France and England. They also visited dealers in New York, including Doris Wiener, whose involvement in the illicit trade came to light after the arrest of her daughter Nancy for trafficking in looted objects from Southeast Asia and India. Nancy Wiener pleaded guilty. Attempts to reach Nancy Wiener for comment were not successful; Doris Wiener died in 2011.

Nearly a decade after James Alsdorf’s death in 1990, Marilynn Alsdorf agreed to exhibit her collection at the Art Institute. In a catalog accompanying the 1997 exhibit, Marilynn Alsdorf explained her attraction to art from South and Southeast Asia, saying she and her husband “looked for objects to delight our eyes and souls rather than objects that embodied particular ritual practices or exemplified specific religious texts.”

The contributions Marilynn Alsdorf made to the Art Institute after her husband’s death created the couple’s namesake galleries, a curator’s position at the museum and a professorship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Today, 110 objects from the Alsdorf collection are on display, the majority in the Asian collection.

Questions about the provenance of some objects began when the Alsdorfs were alive. The first widely known case dates to the mid-1970s, when the Thai Embassy alleged a 1,000-year-old stone carving of the god Vishnu was stolen from a temple and asked the Alsdorfs to return it.

James Alsdorf said at the time that he asked the Thais for evidence to corroborate the claim but never received it, so the piece remained at the Art Institute, where it had been displayed for about 10 years, according to news accounts.

In 1988, Thai officials approached the Art Institute, but the museum defended the Alsdorfs and its right to keep the piece, saying it was bought in good faith — legally through a dealer, according to the news accounts.

The controversy dragged on for months and spurred a protest outside the museum.

Eventually, the Art Institute agreed to return the piece in exchange for receiving an object from the Thais from the same period and of “equal artistic merit.”

Years later, Marilynn Alsdorf returned a sculpture of a Shiva cult figure to India after learning, during research for the 1997 exhibition at the Art Institute, that it was likely stolen from a temple decades earlier.

Her attitude was sharply different in the case of a 1922 painting by Picasso, “Femme en Blanc,” or “Lady in White.” In a lawsuit, a California law school student demanded its return, alleging the painting had been owned by his grandmother before it was stolen by the Nazis during World War II from an art dealer storing it for her in Paris.

Though the German and French governments determined that the Nazis had looted the Picasso, Alsdorf insisted that, because she and her husband had bought it from a reputable dealer, it was hers. She acknowledged, however, that they hadn’t made any inquiries into its provenance, according to a sworn deposition from the case.

Alsdorf said she had no intention of returning the Picasso, valued at roughly $10 million. When a lawyer at the deposition asked why, Alsdorf said: “Because I felt I owned the painting. I still feel I own the painting.”

In the end, Alsdorf admitted no wrongdoing but paid the law student $6.5 million and got to keep the painting. The law student, Tom Bennigson, in an interview recalled Alsdorf as “this supercilious rich person who didn’t want to deal with my claim.”

Alsdorf’s son, Jeffrey Alsdorf of Seattle, declined to comment for this story. He is listed as an executor of his mother’s estate and, with other family members, sits on the board of the Alsdorf Foundation, according to the most recently publicly available tax records. Linda Feinstein, a Chicago lawyer who, according to documents, represents Alsdorf’s trust, did not respond to requests seeking comment.

Following Alsdorf’s death at 94, a flurry of repatriations occurred.

The auction house Christie’s returned two Alsdorf-owned objects to Italy that had been put up for auction during a 2020 estate sale, a Christie’s spokesperson said. After the Art Institute assisted with the return of a sixth century Hindu sculpture to Nepal in 2021, Alsdorf’s estate returned three artifacts to the country the following year, also under the condition that she not be publicly identified as the owner.

The agreements required that Nepal refer to the objects only as coming from a “private collection” and prohibited it from naming the Alsdorfs in any press releases or public statements about the repatriations, according to interviews and records obtained by ProPublica and Crain’s.

Most recently, the Yale University Art Gallery in May returned to Nepal a piece it had acquired that was once owned by the Alsdorfs but had been given to the museum by a later owner, according to a curator at the museum.

“Troublingly Close” Relationships

Though collecting ethics have evolved to acknowledge the prevalence of antiquities trafficking, critics say the standards don’t go far enough.

Ethical guidelines created by the Association of Art Museum Directors, a major professional organization, do not apply to objects acquired before 2008, when the standards were created. The guidelines also don’t apply to objects promised by donors before 2008 but officially given much later.

The AAMD guidelines say “member museums normally should not acquire” ancient art or archaeological material if they cannot be sure the items left their country of origin before 1970 or were legally exported after 1970.

That’s the year UNESCO adopted a sweeping treaty to curb antiquities trafficking, prompting many museums to adopt stricter due diligence protocols. The AAMD guidelines suggest that, before museums acquire new objects, they obtain import and export papers, sale records and other provenance documents.

But Patty Gerstenblith, a distinguished research professor specializing in cultural heritage law at DePaul University, said the guidelines contain “exceptions big enough to drive a truck through.”

She points to a provision that allows museums to keep works with incomplete provenances if a donor signed a promise to give the work as a gift or bequest before 2008 — when the AAMD adopted the so-called 1970 rule. But that standard doesn’t apply if an object was on long-term loan before 2008, the donor had signed a promised gift agreement before 2008 or if the institution had an “expectation” prior to 2008 of receiving it.

Since Marilynn Alsdorf promised to donate much of her collection to the Art Institute in the late 1990s and early 2000s, many of the objects likely fall under these exemptions.

The AAMD also requires museums to post information about ancient art or archaeological material if they acquire an object under an exception. But only objects acquired since 2008 and that meet certain definitions for what is an antiquity must be posted — a small percentage of most museum collections.

The Art Institute of Chicago lists 48 objects on the registry; half are Alsdorf donations.

The AAMD says that its registry helps publicize provenance information that would otherwise not come to light. “This makes possible the kind of provenance research — and possibility for restitution, if appropriate — that is not possible when an object is out of view in a private collection,” an organization spokesperson said in an email.

Worshippers light diyas in the early morning at Ashok Binayak, a Hindu temple, in Kathmandu Durbar Square. (Brooke Herbert for Crain's Chicago Business and ProPublica)

Museums have an incentive not to probe too deeply, according to critics. Conducting rigorous provenance research is time consuming and costly. It also threatens to open the floodgates for repatriation requests and could dissuade potential donors from making contributions.

Robert Linrothe, an associate professor emeritus of art history at Northwestern University who also worked in the education department at the Art Institute in the 1990s, said in an email that the long-term relationship between the museum and donors such as the Alsdorfs has appeared “troublingly close.”

“Many of us have warned of a pattern of turning a blind eye to dishonorable collecting practices that can be traced back to colonial times,” he said. “Western museums are now having to face up to this unfortunate legacy.”

The Art Institute, however, said it has adapted. “There is no question that the generally accepted standards for provenance research have evolved,” Rahn said. “As we engage in the work to learn and publish more about an object’s provenance, it is simply inaccurate to suggest that any current gap in provenance is indicative of illegal or unethical behavior.”

But some museums are more transparent. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston provides the findings of its provenance research online. Last year, it repatriated 13 objects to four different sources, the museum’s senior curator for provenance, Victoria Reed, has said publicly. The museum also lists previous owners and donors.

The San Antonio Museum of Art, meanwhile, allows website users to search its collection for artwork that was repatriated. The website includes information for 16 objects that were returned to Italy in 2021 and 2022, including the names of the private collectors who had donated the items.

Lynley McAlpine, a curatorial fellow at the museum, said in an email that the museum chose to post the information online “because it is the most efficient way for us to provide transparency.”

The Art Institute, by comparison, doesn’t keep an online record of repatriated objects, and it made no returns in 2022, according to Rahn.

An “Overwhelming” Moment

Sweta Baniya stared in disbelief at the copper necklace at the Art Institute. On that summer day in 2021, Baniya, a Nepali academic living in the U.S., had been excited to explore the vast collection of art from her home country, which she’d learned about from a friend.

When Baniya spotted the necklace — a gift from Marilynn Alsdorf — her emotions shifted.

She dropped to her knees, clasped her hands in prayer and wept. Later, as her mind raced with questions, Baniya shared her experience on social media.

“When I saw the necklace, it was just very overwhelming,” Baniya, an assistant professor at Virginia Tech, said in an interview. “It’s so majestic … but it shouldn’t belong” at the Art Institute.

Sweta Baniya, a Nepali academic living in the U.S., found the experience of seeing the Taleju necklace at the Art Institute to be “very overwhelming.” “It’s so majestic,” she said, “but it shouldn’t belong” to the museum (Sam Dean for Crain’s Chicago Business)

The necklace, which was said to have been given to the Hindu goddess Taleju by a Nepali king, contained an inscription in Newari, an ancient language of the Kathmandu Valley.

“Victory to the Mother-Goddess,” the inscription says. It also includes the name of King Pratapamalladeva, who ruled the region from 1641 to 1674, and refers to him as “lord of the kings.”

In Nepal, divine representations of Taleju are hidden from public view. Worshippers are permitted inside her temple just one day a year during a religious festival. Even then, they’re not allowed to see her.

Documents obtained by Crain’s and ProPublica show that the Nepali Embassy in Washington first asked for the necklace to be repatriated in August 2021, after Baniya’s posts stirred interest. The embassy sent the Art Institute an archaeological report saying the necklace disappeared from Taleju’s temple in the 1970s and must have been smuggled out of the country.

Nepali officials don’t know precisely when or how the necklace left the country, key facts to help establish its history. According to museum records, the Alsdorfs bought the necklace from a California dealer in June 1976 and loaned it to the museum about two weeks later. Marilynn Alsdorf donated it to the Art Institute in 2010.

Leslie Darling, the Art Institute’s executive vice president and general counsel, told the Nepali Embassy in a September 2021 letter that the museum took the issue “very seriously” and would look into the provenance of the necklace, according to a copy of the letter obtained by ProPublica and Crain’s.

In May of the following year, Darling asked Nepal for additional records on the necklace. Rahn, the Art Institute spokesperson, said the Nepali government hasn’t responded to that letter. A spokesperson for Nepal’s Archaeology Department said officials are still looking for the evidence they were asked to provide but maintain that the inscription on the necklace is “irrefutable” proof that the necklace belongs to Nepal.

Uddhav Karmacharya, standing in Kathmandu Durbar Square, the high priest of a temple devoted to the Hindu goddess Taleju. He notified the Nepali government about scrolls he found in the temple’s basement that mention a large copper necklace with a description matching the one at the Art Institute. (Brooke Herbert for Crain's Chicago Business and ProPublica)

In addition, Uddhav Karmacharya, the high priest of Nepal’s Taleju temple, has found scrolls in the temple basement showing an inventory of gifts given to the goddess, he said. Karmacharya said he notified his government about the scrolls, which mention a large copper necklace with a description matching the one at the Art Institute and provide evidence of the necklace’s origins.

Karmacharya has never seen the necklace in person but said he still feels a strong connection to it.

“This item is not something to be displayed on the wall and to all these onlookers who don’t have the same belief system,” he said in an interview through an interpreter. “A curator might think it’s very beautiful … but this particular item is priceless.”

There are also some tough questions for the Nepalis about how the necklace left their country, including whether the country’s royal family may have helped sell the necklace in the late 1990s to fund its lavish lifestyle. Much of that family died in a massacre in 2001, and the monarchy has been abolished.

The Art Institute seems to have explored the possibility that the royal family played a role as well. In the May letter to the Nepali Embassy, the museum sought information about “the actions of the Zonal Office and other government or religious officials who may have removed and separated jewelry and ornaments.”

Even if Nepali royals were involved, advocates for repatriation say the museum should return the necklace because it is an item of spiritual significance that is collectively owned by the nation.

Since questions about the necklace have become public, so have details about Bruce Miller, the California dealer who sold the Alsdorfs the necklace. Although he was never charged criminally, Miller was described in a 2014 Indian court case as having worked with an alleged antiquities smuggler in India in 1992.

Miller, through his wife, declined an interview, citing health issues. In an email, he said he was “at a complete loss” as to how the Indian case had anything to do with the Alsdorfs and their collection.

Neither Miller nor his wife addressed his involvement in the case. The smuggler was convicted by a jury for the 1992 offenses but a judge overturned his conviction in 2014, saying the prosecution had not met its burden of proof, according to the ruling and a news article.

Roshan Mishra, standing at the Boudhanath stupa in Kathmandu, is a founding member of the Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign, which seeks to repatriate stolen objects. (Brooke Herbert for Crain’s Chicago Business and ProPublica)

Roshan Mishra, a founding member of the Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign, said he understands why repatriations take time. But he said he thinks the Art Institute is stalling, ignoring the strongest proof that comes from the inscription.

“At the end of the day, the necklace belongs to Taleju,” he said. “All of the evidence is there — on the necklace.”