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A Black Community in West Virginia Sues the EPA to Spur Action on Toxic Air Pollution

1 year 9 months ago

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This article was produced by Mountain State Spotlight, a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network.

A citizens’ group in West Virginia is suing the Environmental Protection Agency, alleging that federal regulators have failed to protect a majority-Black community in the state and residents of parts of Louisiana and Texas from cancer-causing chemicals.

A 2021 Mountain State Spotlight and ProPublica story detailed how largely Black communities across the country, like Institute in West Virginia, were saddled with a disproportionate health burden from industrial pollution. ProPublica’s analysis of emissions data found that on average, the level of cancer risk from industrial air pollution in majority-Black census tracts was more than double that for majority-white areas.

Earlier this year, the EPA proposed tougher air pollution rules for chemical plants and other industrial facilities, including placing stricter limits on ethylene oxide — the same chemical released by the plant in Institute. But the proposed rules wouldn’t cover the main ethylene oxide polluters in West Virginia because those plants fall under a different industry category in EPA regulation.

Pam Nixon, a former Institute resident and member of the Charleston, West Virginia-based People Concerned About Chemical Safety, which filed the lawsuit, said her community was often neglected by the EPA.

“There is no justice yet until all communities are treated the same and until people everywhere are breathing clean air and it doesn’t impact the health of their families,” said Nixon. While it can be difficult to link specific cases of disease to pollution exposure, she said she suffered from blisters and autoimmune problems after being exposed to a leak from the Institute plant in 1985.

The lawsuit filed Monday notes that the EPA missed a legally required deadline to update federal emissions standards for facilities that produce polyether polyols, a type of chemical that leads to the emission of carcinogens including ethylene oxide.

These facilities are major sources of pollution that disproportionately affect communities of color and lower-income areas, which are often already burdened by industrial development.

Institute, which is in one of West Virginia’s only two majority-Black census tracts, faces an excess cancer risk from industrial air pollution that is 36 times the level the EPA considers acceptable from the nearby Union Carbide plant — a facility that has helped define West Virginia’s “Chemical Valley.”

That Union Carbide facility makes ethylene oxide, which is used in various products, including antifreeze, pesticides and sterilizing agents for medical tools.

A 2021 ProPublica analysis found that of over 7,600 facilities across the country that increase the estimated cancer risk in nearby communities, the Institute plant ranked 17th.

Dow Chemical, which owns Union Carbide, did not respond to an emailed request for comment, or to multiple requests sent during research for the 2021 story.

Elevated cancer risks also affect an area known as “Cancer Alley” along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and New Orleans, as well as around Houston, Texas. Both of those regions also have clusters of polyether polyol production facilities, according to the lawsuit.

The Louisiana Environmental Action Network and the Sierra Club joined the West Virginia organization in its lawsuit against the EPA. Environmental groups commonly pursue legal action when the agency misses deadlines.

The EPA is required by the Clean Air Act to review and update emission standards for hazardous air pollutants every eight years, but the agency hasn’t made any substantive revisions to the emission standards for this source category since 1999, according to Adam Kron, an attorney for Earthjustice representing the environmental groups.

In 2014, the EPA made minor changes to how polyether polyol is monitored and measured but decided not to make any revisions to emissions rates after a review that looked at whether the current standards adequately protect communities against health risks.

In the lawsuit, the environmental groups argue that the EPA has failed to perform its required duties by missing its 2022 deadline.

Because regulators missed the deadline, the lawsuit is asking the court to find the EPA in violation of the Clean Air Act and to compel the agency to update the emissions standards by a swift deadline set by the court itself.

The EPA declined to comment because of the pending litigation.

The groups argue in the lawsuit that in addition to missing deadlines, EPA’s regulation has failed to keep up with science. In 2016 — two years after the EPA reviewed the standards — the agency determined that ethylene oxide’s cancer risk was nearly 60 times greater than previously thought.

But even after that finding, the agency didn’t update its standards. In 2021, the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General urged the agency to review polyether polyol production before its 2022 deadline after a report on ethylene oxide-emitting source categories found that the EPA was failing to meet required deadlines for conducting reviews.

The inspector general’s report also noted that the EPA couldn’t guarantee that the current emissions standards were adequately protecting public health because it had fallen behind on reviewing them, according to the lawsuit.

In response to the report, EPA regulators said they planned to complete a review of emissions standards for facilities like the one in Institute by late 2024 — more than two years after the deadline.

by Sarah Elbeshbishi, Mountain State Spotlight

5 Documents That Helped Us Understand How Columbia Protected a Predator

1 year 9 months ago

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story was originally published in Dispatches, a weekly newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country and journalism from our newsroom.

Recently, my co-reporter Laura Beil and I published an investigation into the way in which Columbia University allowed a sexual predator to operate within its walls for more than 20 years. We examined the case of Robert Hadden, a former OB-GYN, and found that Columbia had allowed him to continue practicing, despite multiple patient complaints. The university also undermined the criminal investigation into Hadden.

Hadden’s crimes were first covered in the local New York press in 2013 and made national headlines as the criminal and civil cases against him made their way through the courts. But Columbia’s role was never thoroughly examined. Laura and I wanted to understand what the university knew about his behavior, when, and whether it had missed opportunities to protect patients.

Following publication of our story, the new university president, Minouche Shafik, and the CEO of the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, Katrina Armstrong, issued an apology to the survivors. But so far, the university has not formally notified Hadden’s patients about the reason for his departure or his criminal convictions. Columbia has still not commissioned an independent investigation into what happened under its roof.

As with much investigative reporting, documents proved crucial in helping us understand what went wrong. Police and prosecutors’ reports informed us about patients’ experiences, and they helped us establish timelines. Letters filed in court created a record of communication between Columbia and Hadden, as well as the university and its patients. Some of these documents are public (if you know where to look) and some of them we obtained from sources. Together with dozens of interviews and nearly two years of research, they helped us reconstruct decades of abuse and ignored warnings.

I want to tell you more about the documents themselves and how we got them:

1. The Police Report

One of the patients Hadden assaulted was Laurie Kanyok. In interviews, she told us what had happened to her in late June 2012, including the fact that she reported Hadden to the police immediately after the assault. The police arrested him that afternoon.

We were able to get an unredacted copy of the report made after her complaint by submitting a public records request to the New York City Police Department, along with a notarized affidavit she provided giving permission for it to give the records to us.

This document was important because it confirmed what Kanyok had told us about the timeline of events. But it also revealed that there were administrators within the OB/GYN department who immediately knew of Hadden’s arrest. One showed up to the office once she learned the police were present. We reached out to those administrators to see if they would talk to us. (They either declined or never answered our requests.)

2. The “Dear Bob” Letter

We were aware that Hadden had been allowed to continue practicing following his arrest because several women said he had assaulted them after that date. What we didn’t know is how quickly he had been allowed back.

Hadden was indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2020, but the criminal case against him didn’t go to trial until January of this year. Before and throughout the trial, Laura and I religiously checked Pacer, an online database that provides public access to documents filed in federal court cases. Late one Sunday night, I got a call from Laura who had just spotted something important: an excerpt from what we now call “The ‘Dear Bob’ Letter.”

A document filed by prosecutors referenced the letter, which was addressed to Hadden and sent on July 2, 2012. It said that, despite the allegations against him that were being investigated by the police, if Hadden complied with university and hospital policies — specifically that a chaperone be in the room — he was allowed to “resume clinical activities.”

We realized that he had been allowed to go back to work almost immediately. We discussed whether we might be able to get the full letter via a public records request, but before we submitted one, we got lucky: Prosecutors shared it in another filing. And this time, we learned, it had been signed by Hadden’s supervisor and three high-level administrators had been cc’d. This was evidence that even more people knew of the arrest.

In a statement, Columbia said, “we are profoundly sorry for the pain that Robert Hadden’s patients suffered as a result of his abhorrent misconduct. We also deeply regret, based on what we know today, that Hadden saw patients for several weeks following his voided arrest in 2012.”

3. The “Dear Valued Patient” Letter

Hadden stopped practicing in August 2012. In April 2013, Columbia sent a letter to Hadden’s former patients to inform them that he had left the practice. Conspicuously absent in the letter? The reason. We got a copy early on from the attorney who has filed many of the civil cases against the university.

The letter is significant because this was an opportunity for Columbia to inform patients why Hadden had left. More than 10 years after his arrest, Columbia has yet to notify Hadden’s former patients that he has been convicted of sexual abuse.

Some of those patients have called on legislators to push for the passage of the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law that opened a temporary window for victims of abuse to file civil suits against their abusers, even when a statute of limitations has expired. The window will close on Nov. 23.

According to federal prosecutors, 245 patients have alleged abuse, but we estimate that Hadden likely saw tens of thousands of patients during his career, so the number could be much higher. Because Columbia refuses to notify them, those patients remain unaware that he has been convicted of the abuse charges he faced.

4. The Post-It Note (Courtesy of Sandy Abramowicz)

In 2014, patient Sandy Abramowicz told another Columbia OB-GYN that Hadden had abused her. The doctor left the room and returned with a Post-it note that had the name and phone number of Patricia Catapano, who at the time was deputy general counsel of the university.

We later learned that Columbia had failed to alert the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office to new patients who had come forward while the DA’s office was investigating. The Post-it note served as tangible proof that the university was referring patients to its own general counsel’s office and not the DA during that time.

We were surprised — and relieved — to know that Abramowicz had kept the note for all these years. It was evidence of the way Columbia was responding to patients who were coming forward.

Abramowicz never called the number. During an interview, she told us: “The fact that she said, ‘This is where they’re referring former patients of Dr. Hadden’ told me I’m not the only one. And Columbia knows that I’m not the only one. And then the thing that hits me is — if she represents Columbia and I’m Sandy, whose interests is she representing here?”

We reached out to Catapano, but she said she had no interest in responding to the inquiry.

5. The DA Report

We knew that the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office had opened a criminal investigation into Columbia in 2020. We repeatedly asked the DA’s office about the status of the investigation, but we got no answers, only that the investigation was ongoing.

Eventually, we got hold of documents that were directly related to the criminal investigation. It was like finding the Holy Grail.

The documents proved invaluable: They listed patient complaints that we didn’t know about, said that Columbia had failed to share those complaints during the DA’s investigation into Hadden, despite subpoenas, and said that Columbia had failed to place record-retention holds. Administrators had also failed to establish guidelines for documenting additional patient complaints.

These documents were our clearest record that Columbia had undermined prosecutors in the Hadden case. In an interview, Cy Vance, who was the district attorney at the time, told us that if Columbia had fully cooperated with the investigation, it could have made a difference in his office’s decision to accept a plea deal for Hadden in 2016. In a statement, Columbia told us that it continues to cooperate fully with the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and the Manhattan district attorney.

Do you have information about Columbia that we should know? Visit propublica.org/tips to get in touch securely.

by Bianca Fortis

Do You Have Experience in or With the Plastics Industry? Tell Us About It.

1 year 9 months ago

The plastics industry has long pushed for recycling as a way to clean up its image. But large-scale, effective plastic recycling remains a myth. In 2021, the United Nations Environment Program reported there were 75 million to 199 million tons of plastic waste in the oceans. Plastic continues to drive climate change and threaten human health, biodiversity and the environment — sometimes in ways the public can’t even see.

ProPublica wants to better understand everything about the plastics industry, from how supply chains work to the health impacts of its products to the unwanted plastic wealthy nations export to lower-income countries. We want to hear from people working in growing fields of the industry, like chemical/advanced recycling and plastic credits. We’re particularly interested in talking to experts and residents outside of North America and Europe.

Keep in mind: ProPublica is a nonprofit, investigative newsroom, and our stories are always about holding the powerful to account. That means we focus on systemic issues and widespread injustices. We can’t respond to everyone, but we do read everything you submit and your responses help guide our reporting.

We appreciate you sharing and we take your privacy seriously. We are gathering these responses for the purposes of our reporting, and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of them. We will not use your name without your permission.

If your tip is especially sensitive, check out our list of secure contact tools, including Signal and postal mail. If not, filling out this form is the easiest, most efficient way to get in touch with us. We are the only ones who read what you submit.

by Lisa Song and Maya Miller

United Nations Seems to Boost Plastics Industry Interests, Critics Say

1 year 9 months ago

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The plastic crisis has grown exponentially. Despite marketing claims, less than 10% of the plastic waste from recent decades has been recycled. The rest gets incinerated, is buried in landfills or piles up as litter on land and in the water.

Today, it is widely acknowledged that everything about plastic — from extracting fossil fuels to make it, to manufacturing products that use it, to disposing of it — can seriously harm public health and the environment. Plastics are a growing driver of climate change. As growth in renewable energy threatens the rule of fossil fuels, that industry is clinging to the creation of new plastics as its Plan B.

Now, the plastics industry faces a new threat. World officials will gather at a United Nations meeting in November to start negotiating the text of the first legally binding treaty on plastics. A final version is expected next year. If the agreement limits plastic production or use, the implications for the businesses that rely on it could be enormous.

So it wasn’t a surprise when those businesses sought to influence the discussion. But what has been jarring to environmental advocates and scientific researchers is who has been there to boost the Big Plastic platform: the United Nations itself, along with other globally respected groups.

This dynamic is evident right now in New York City, as global leaders, business executives and climate activists convene for Climate Week, an annual gathering organized by the nonprofit Climate Group in partnership with the United Nations.

Event organizers granted an opening ceremony speaking slot to a senior partner at McKinsey & Company, the powerhouse consulting firm that has advised fossil fuel companies. Top event sponsors include major brands that rely on plastic packaging and associate members of the American Chemistry Council, a leading plastics lobby.

“Our position on climate change and the urgent need to reach net zero is unequivocal, and we have been backing up those words with action for decades,” a McKinsey spokesperson said in an email. The American Chemistry Council didn’t return requests for comment.

A Climate Group spokesperson defended the inclusion of McKinsey and major plastics brands. “We won’t tackle climate change by only speaking with businesses or governments who are top performers. We need to engage with those who have further to go still.”

To those hoping for a strong plastics treaty, one of the most disappointing developments came from a report published by the United Nations Environment Program this May.

Co-written with Systemiq, a consulting firm that has advised the fossil fuel and plastics industries, the report generated a flurry of media attention for the main takeaway: that the interventions it listed would reduce global plastic pollution 80% by 2040 compared with what otherwise would have happened.

But its authors did not consider feedback from a large group of independent scientists and suggested several solutions that are favored by industry.

The report was “written from a certain worldview” that reflects business interests, said Ewoud Lauwerier, plastics policy expert at the advocacy group OceanCare. He called the report “highly problematic” in a 33-point thread on Twitter (now X).

Critics say the United Nations report emphasized waste management over the most important intervention — limiting the creation of new plastic. It’s a tactic that oil-rich nations like the United States have used in efforts to weaken the plastics treaty.

Putting the focus on managing waste risks getting locked into a cycle where people have to keep producing plastic to feed those waste management systems, said Jane Patton, campaigns manager on the U.S. fossil economy at the Center for International Environmental Law. Some environmentalists have called for phasing out single-use plastics by 2040.

The report is “not a reflection of industry talking points and it did not involve industry players while formulating the narrative,” Llorenç Milà i Canals, the lead report author from the United Nations Environment Program, said in an email on behalf of his institution and Systemiq. Milà i Canals is an expert on assessing the environmental impacts of products from creation to disposal.

The report did not predict how total plastics production would change. It focused on “short-lived” plastic products like packaging, which make up about two-thirds of all plastic waste. The report said the listed interventions would decrease production of these plastics 9% by 2040 compared with 2020.

Much of the reduction would come through eliminating single-use plastic or using replacement materials like paper. But the report’s inclusion of other controversial solutions alarmed many advocates and scientists.

Chief among them is chemical recycling, which transforms plastic on a molecular level. Research has shown that the process sometimes requires more energy than making brand-new plastic. A Reuters investigation found the industry has struggled to make it work on a large scale. Baked into the report’s estimated reduction in plastic pollution is what it projected to be a massive expansion of the practice: a more-than eightfold increase over 20 years. That growth rate is based on work Systemiq did with The Pew Charitable Trusts that resulted in a peer-reviewed paper.

“There’s no evidence anywhere showing that chemical recycling is sustainable from an environmental perspective or an economic perspective,” said Bethanie Carney Almroth, an ecotoxicology professor at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. She fears the report will encourage governments to invest in chemical recycling, locking them into a harmful practice.

Chemical recycling is “included only as a last resort” for situations where plastic waste can’t be eliminated or processed via traditional recycling, Milà i Canals said. Chemical recycling “may have a role to play,” but “of course reducing the size of the problem is the top priority.”

The Pew Charitable Trusts, in a statement, said that its study set out to analyze “all existing and emerging technologies” to “assess their maximum feasible growth over the next 20 years” The analysis acknowledged that chemical recycling is “controversial” and could only tackle 6% of the plastic waste by 2040, so it “certainly cannot solve the crisis on its own.”

Incineration is another point of contention. Some “sub-optimal solutions will be needed” for certain non-recyclable plastics, the United Nations report stated. One option is to continue the practice of burning plastic as fuel for cement kilns. Since many countries already have cement kilns, the authors wrote, it wouldn’t require new investment and could reduce reliance on fossil fuels.

“Plastic itself is a fossil fuel,” said Sedat Gündoğdu, a professor in the Faculty of Fisheries at Çukurova University in Turkey. He said the report didn’t pay enough attention to the toxic footprint of incineration, as there’s “no proper solution” for the dioxins and other carcinogens emitted by burning plastic.

Many countries will turn to this report as a basis for future policy, he said. If the United Nations Environment Program lists incineration as an option, the least it could do is describe minimum health and environmental standards, he added.

Milà i Canals said the report stated this method is “strongly discouraged” and the authors did not recommend building new kilns. “We accept that we could have been more explicit about the limits of this solution.”

The report also suggested some of the costs of incineration could be covered by plastic credits — programs where corporations can claim to neutralize some of their plastic use by paying people elsewhere to recycle, incinerate or otherwise clean up existing plastic pollution.

Experts accused United Nations officials of being naive for their endorsement of plastic credits, saying that such programs will only justify more production of plastic while at the same time harming residents near incinerators. They have “no idea what’s going on on the ground,” said Yuyun Ismawati, senior adviser of the Nexus3 Foundation, an environmental group in Indonesia.

Her organization worked with a community in Bali near a polluting plastic waste recovery facility. Waste processed by the plant was linked to plastic credits pursued by a subsidiary of Danone, the French yogurt brand. The advocates sent Danone letters in June describing “filthy acidic smells” from the plant and residents’ complaints of nausea and severe headaches. The letter also denounced Verra, an American nonprofit that registered the plastic crediting project. Verra has been repeatedly criticized for selling worthless carbon credits. ProPublica reported in 2019 on a Verra-managed carbon offset project where half of the forested area that was supposed to be preserved was cut down after a decade.

Representatives from Verra and Danone told ProPublica the Bali project never produced actual plastic credits, and they were working to address concerns on the ground. The Verra spokesperson said the nonprofit is updating its carbon offset rules in response to recent criticism.

The Danone spokesperson said more research is needed “to test the effectiveness of plastic credits, and we continue to explore various solutions for plastic recycling.”

Milà i Canals said his report “does not provide a blanket recommendation” for plastic credits and cited references that warned of risks.

The United Nations Environment Program received notes on all of these concerns before publishing. It invited comments.

Since last year, the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty — a group of 280 scientists from 55 countries — has volunteered its time to provide technical assistance on the treaty. In early March, the United Nations Environment Program sent out a draft of the report to representatives of the group, giving them a week to review the 80-page document. Thirty scientists from different countries dove in. Carney Almroth, the professor from Sweden, spent the weekend typing at her kitchen table on a shared document.

Their final submission contained more than 300 comments about the report’s general framing and critiques of specific paragraphs. “Many solutions that have been presented (e.g. different forms of recycling) have failed, or are not scalable, or were pure greenwashing campaigns from the start,” she wrote in one comment.

Their feedback fell into a virtual black hole. The final report didn’t alleviate their main concerns, Carney Almroth said, even though it was published two months after the comments’ submission.

Milà i Canals said the email was filtered to a spam folder. Everyone was so busy that “nobody noticed” the “unfortunate mistake” until the report was published, he said.

They did take other people’s comments into account, Milà i Canals explained. In total, the authors received more than 1,000 comments from 75 external experts working for civil society groups, academia, industry and government, he said.

Our comments had the potential to “reshape the whole report,” and that’s “not something the industry wants,” Gündoğdu said. He and others said the United Nations program should have done more to vet Systemiq before hiring them.

Milà i Canals said Systemiq is a “mission-driven” company that was founded to help achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris climate agreement, “and it does this by transforming markets and business models.” He cited Systemiq’s “excellent track record” analyzing plastic, including the firm’s prior work with his institution, academic researchers and Pew.

According to its website, Systemiq is “a collaborative system designer, developer and disruptor” striving for “a thriving planet where sustainable economic systems drive prosperity for all.” It was founded in 2016 by consultants with decades of experience working for McKinsey.

Like McKinsey, Systemiq has advised the fossil fuel sector. Yoni Shiran, the lead Systemiq author of the United Nations report, said the firm has done so “very rarely” and only to “help them move away from fossil fuels.” A 2022 Systemiq report written for Plastics Europe, an industry trade group, described how to reduce the environmental footprint of the most commonly used types of plastic, which make up 75% of all plastic. Aggressive policy changes could keep the amount produced from rising between 2020 to 2050 in Europe, the report predicted. (A spokesperson for Plastics Europe said it was an “independent report” advised by a steering committee of experts working in the public sector, civil society and industry.)

The United Nations report lists 17 lead authors: eight from the United Nations program, five from Systemiq, and four from a university and another consulting firm. Two of the Systemiq authors previously worked for McKinsey.

On Tuesday, Systemiq will release a new report, titled “Towards Ending Plastic Pollution by 2040.” It was commissioned by the Nordic Council, a regional parliament. Many of these countries are part of a “High Ambition Coalition” that seeks aggressive terms on the plastics treaty.

A spokesperson for the Nordic Council said the group was “very aware” of the criticism received by the United Nations report, adding that “many of those concerns” were taken into account and “addressed more directly” in the new report.

An early copy provided to reporters shows that the report predicts total plastic production will increase by 9% in 2040 compared with 2019. Without the suggested interventions, the report said, production in 2040 would balloon by 66%. Shiran, one of the lead authors, said 9% “actually represents a pretty ambitious reduction” since the United Nations predicts world population will grow by 2 billion in 2040, with rising plastic consumption per capita.

The report didn’t mention plastic credits and presented scenarios with and without large growth in chemical recycling. Shiran was also a lead author on the Pew and Plastics Europe reports.

Experts said these repeat publications create a loop in which reports cite and legitimize one another.

If you have one consultancy that’s constantly self-referencing its own work, it doesn’t expand our knowledge or prove their case, said Patton, the Center for International Environmental Law advocate. If an environmental group had this much influence, she added, “I would absolutely have the same concerns.”

Shiran said the models underlying each report took years of work and took feedback from expert panels made up of academics, government officials and civil society groups. The reports are “intentionally linked to build on previous knowledge,” he said. “This is a strength of the work, not a weakness.”

Do You Have Experience in or With the Plastics Industry? Tell Us About It.

Kirsten Berg and Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

by Lisa Song

Massachusetts Has a Huge Waitlist for State-Funded Housing. So Why Are 2,300 Units Vacant?

1 year 9 months ago

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

Deb Libby is running out of time to find a place to live.

Libby, 56, moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, four years ago, in part to be closer to the doctors treating her for pancreatic cancer. She rented an apartment — a converted garage — and spruced it up, patching the walls and repainting all the rooms.

But Libby’s landlord, who has been trying to get her to leave, now wants her out by the end of the month. She can’t find anything else she can afford. Libby earns only a little more than minimum wage working at a hardware store and often has to take unpaid time off when she doesn’t feel well.

She thought she found a potential solution nearly a year ago: She applied for state public housing, a type of subsidized housing that’s almost unique to Massachusetts. But she’s heard nothing since.

“It’s frightening,” she said. “I seriously don’t know what to do. It’s like the system’s broken.”

In a state with some of the country’s most expensive real estate, Libby is among the 184,000 people — including thousands who are homeless, at risk of losing their homes or living in unsafe conditions — on a waitlist for the state’s 41,500 subsidized apartments.

As they wait, a WBUR and ProPublica investigation found that nobody is living in nearly 2,300 state-funded apartments, with most sitting empty for months or years. The state pays local housing authorities to maintain and operate the units whether they’re occupied or not. So the vacant apartments translate into millions of Massachusetts taxpayer dollars wasted due to delays and disorder fostered by state and local mismanagement.

As of the end of July, almost 1,800 of the vacant units, including some with at least three bedrooms, had been empty for more than 60 days. That’s the amount of time the state allows local housing authorities to take to fill a vacancy. About 730 of those have not been rented for at least a year.

The vacancies are aggravating a statewide housing crisis. Massachusetts is spending $45 million a month to house people temporarily at hotels, shelters, college dorms and a military base. Gov. Maura Healey declared a state of emergency in August to deal with the wave of homelessness. Massachusetts reports that the number of families with children staying in emergency shelters has almost doubled in the past year to 6,386.

Our investigation found that one cause of the prolonged vacancies is the flawed online waitlist system the state rolled out four years ago. Massachusetts replaced town-by-town waitlists with a single pool of applicants that 230 local housing agencies draw from. But the state failed to implement an efficient system for selecting potential tenants. Understaffed and underfunded local agencies have to screen applicants for income, criminal background and other eligibility criteria. Apartments are left in limbo as some candidates turn out not to qualify. Applicants often indicate they would accept housing in many towns, but then reject offers from communities that are far away from their current location.

Deb Libby, a Worcester grandmother with pancreatic cancer, has been on the waitlist for state-funded housing for almost a year. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)

“I think it’s the most horrible, horrible, inefficient program,” said David Hedison, executive director at the housing authority in Chelmsford, a town 30 miles northwest of Boston. He said the agency spent six months contacting 500 people who were on the waitlist for a three-bedroom apartment, before it finally found one who responded and qualified for the unit. “The whole sense of helping residents in your community is gone,” he said.

Since the centralized waitlist went into effect, local housing agencies have increasingly told the state that they need extra time to fill vacancies, requesting more and more waivers to extend the usual 60-day deadline. The number of waiver requests has tripled since 2018, state data shows.

Massachusetts Public Housing Agencies Are Filing More and More Waivers to Keep Units Empty

In 2019, Massachusetts replaced local waitlists with a statewide system. Since then, the number of waivers that local housing authorities have filed because they couldn’t fill a vacancy in the 60-day time limit has more than tripled.

Source: Massachusetts Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities (Data analysis by Todd Wallack/WBUR, chart by Jason Kao/ProPublica)

The state’s new secretary of housing, Ed Augustus, acknowledged that there’s no justification for having so many vacancies.

“I think it’s unacceptable,” said Augustus, who was sworn in less than four months ago. “I think that we need to do everything we can to make sure that every single one of our precious public housing units is filled and the amount of time between tenants is as short as is humanly possible.”

Zagaran, a small software developer in Boston, created the program that runs the state’s central waitlist system. Co-founder Josh Zagorsky put the responsibility on state officials, saying that complaints were about “matters of policy, not Zagaran’s software.”

In most states, low-income residents seeking affordable housing must rely on federal housing, vouchers for private housing and other assistance. But Massachusetts is one of four states — alongside New York, Connecticut and Hawaii — with state-funded housing. Massachusetts has more than twice as much state-subsidized housing as the other three states combined.

With tens of thousands of units, Massachusetts public housing is a linchpin of the social safety net for seniors, people with disabilities and families with limited resources. Adding in 31,000 federally funded units, Massachusetts has more public housing per capita than any other state, according to a WBUR analysis. But so many people are in dire need of housing that both the state and federal systems have lengthy waitlists.

The Massachusetts public housing system was originally established to accommodate low-income veterans after World War II. The state typically spends more than $200 million a year on operating expenses and renovations to keep rent affordable for low-income tenants. When units are empty, the local authorities miss out on rental income, but they generally continue to receive the state money.

Massachusetts ranks as the third-most-expensive state for private housing. But tenants in state-funded units typically pay less than a third of their household income in rent. That means a family earning $30,000 per year would pay a maximum of $800 a month for a two-bedroom, far below the state median of about $3,000 a month. And when families in state-funded housing don’t have any income, they only pay the $5 monthly minimum.

But actually landing one of those apartments is extremely difficult. Doris Romero, a housing coordinator at the Women’s Lunch Place day shelter in Boston, has helped dozens of women sign up for state-funded housing. But, she said, only one has actually moved into a state unit in the past year. She was stunned to hear about all the vacant apartments.

“Honestly, that’s a travesty,” Romero said. “The commonwealth should be ashamed.”

Brady Village, a state-funded family housing complex in the western Massachusetts town of Agawam, is a microcosm of a statewide problem. Barbecue grills and children’s bikes stand outside some of the units where families live. But Agawam Housing Authority Executive Director Maureen Cayer points out one vacancy after another. Ten of the 44 units were empty in July, including seven that had been unoccupied for more than a year.

“They’re clean. They’re bright. And they’re empty,” said Cayer, who is responsible for overseeing the buildings and filling the vacancies. “It’s not the way it’s supposed to be.”

Cayer blames the statewide waitlist for the vacancies in Brady Village. Historically, local agencies with state-funded housing each managed their own small waitlists for homes. But critics complained that some local housing authorities played favorites, and that the process was cumbersome for prospective tenants, who had to file separate applications, often in person, for every community where they were interested in living.

Maureen Cayer, executive director of the Agawam Housing Authority, discovers that birds have been nesting in the exhaust vent of a long-unoccupied unit in Brady Village. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)

To address the concerns, the Legislature ordered the state in 2014 to create a statewide online system, called the Common Housing Application for Massachusetts Programs, or CHAMP. The system was supposed to make it easier for people to find housing by allowing them to apply anywhere in the state with a single form. Each housing agency receives a state-generated list of people who indicated an interest in that area.

The system, which has cost the state $6.8 million, ran into problems as soon as local housing authorities began using it internally in the fall of 2018. In January 2019, a state housing official sent a memo to all local agencies alerting them that they might need additional staff to screen applicants. The memo said that the new system created an “acute administrative challenge” to determining who qualifies for priority placements. The state gives priority to people whom it considers homeless through no fault of their own, due to reasons like a natural disaster or domestic violence. As a practical matter, it’s almost impossible for families to obtain state housing without priority status.

When the new system launched for the public that April, more than three years behind schedule, housing authorities immediately complained it made it harder to sift through the flood of applications and find tenants who qualified for the units. “The system is not working,” the housing authority in Warren, a town in central Massachusetts, told the state in November 2019.

Despite these shortcomings, Massachusetts officials hailed the new statewide waitlist as a success. At a formal celebration at the Statehouse in December 2019, complete with a reception and appetizers in the marbled Great Hall, then-Gov. Charlie Baker honored the development team with an award for “excellence in public service.”

In the four years since, complaints from local housing officials have only grown louder. Under the old system, it would take the Agawam Housing Authority a couple months to find a new tenant, Cayer said. Now, it takes years. Baker did not respond to a request for comment.

The first problem is that the application is lengthy and complicated. Agawam’s old form was eight pages long. The new statewide form is 26 pages. There is no initial screening or check to see if applicants have the paperwork they need, so housing agencies generally can’t identify problems until late in the process — when an apartment is available and someone’s name comes to the top of the list.

Cayer recalls a two-bedroom unit in Brady Village that was empty for two and a half years before finally getting a tenant this past February. Agawam housing officials went through roughly 600 names, grabbing a batch from the waitlist almost every week and mailing out letters with a 15-page supplemental form to determine eligibility. Applicants had 10 business days to reply.

Most never responded. Or it turned out they weren’t eligible for public housing. Or they had to be moved down the list because they didn’t qualify for priority status as they contended they did. Or, when they were finally offered a home, they turned it down because they had competing offers or they decided Agawam was too far away from their work or family. The typical applicant seeks housing in 20 communities, according to the state.

“It’s an exercise in futility,” Cayer said. “We have people calling or applying from the Cape or from Boston. They can’t reasonably live here.” (The largest town on Cape Cod, Barnstable, is 150 miles from Agawam.)

The state revamped the applicant form in December, adding a map of the 14 counties in Massachusetts in hopes of dissuading people from signing up for housing in communities they have no intention of living in. So far, Cayer said, the map has not been effective in deterring far-flung people from applying to Agawam.

And since people often apply to multiple towns, it’s common for them to be contacted by many housing authorities at once. As a result, multiple agencies simultaneously hold units open for the same applicant, who can choose only one place. Meanwhile, Cayer said, some waitlisted families are stuck in shelters or sleeping in their cars.

“I think it’s criminal,” Cayer said. “Criminal.”

Public records show that local housing authorities have regularly told the state they need more time to fill vacancies because of problems with the CHAMP waitlist, as well as a lack of staff to comb through applications.

A page from the application for state public housing in Massachusetts. The state’s online system for selecting tenants has been plagued by problems. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)

The state has received so many complaints about the CHAMP system that it has hired a Boston marketing firm, Archipelago Strategies Group, to take over some of the screening of public housing applicants, starting this month. Archipelago referred questions to state officials.

A state housing official said Archipelago will be paid $3.3 million to go through the backlog of applicants requesting priority status for housing assistance. But local housing authorities will still be responsible for some of the vetting, such as background checks. The secretary of housing said he expects improvements soon but doesn’t know when the problems will be fully resolved.

“This is an iterative process,” Augustus said. “We’ll continue to make changes as necessary.”

The state also significantly reduced the size of the waitlist for state-funded public housing this spring — but not by placing people in apartments. Instead, it dropped tens of thousands of people who did not respond to a letter in the mail asking them to confirm that they were still interested in housing.

The waitlist is a mystery to people who are desperate for housing. They don’t know where they stand in the line of applicants or when they will find an apartment.

After applying for state-subsidized housing in January, Konstantinia Gountana, 41, of Arlington, and her family are living with these unknowns.

During the pandemic, Gountana’s husband lost his job as a barber in Harvard Square and three of her family members died, including her only relative in Massachusetts.

“Anything that could go wrong went wrong,” she said. “It was a disaster.”

To make ends meet, she and her husband started to drive for Uber on alternating shifts, with Gountana looking after their infant and 5-year-old during the day, and her husband handling child care in the evening. But their Toyota Prius broke down and they had to quit.

The Gountanas are facing steep odds. They limited their application to one town: Arlington, where more than 25,000 families are on the waitlist. They didn’t want to uproot their older son, who has symptoms of autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. His therapist had recommended against changing his school and schedule. The family also applied for housing vouchers, but there’s a long wait for those, too.

The Gountanas were evicted in June. They were forced to toss most of their belongings and squeeze into a friend’s spare room with their two kids. But they aren’t sure how long they can stay.

“Everything got destroyed,” Gountana said, bouncing her now 21-month-old son on her knee to keep him quiet. “I’m embarrassed. I’m sad. All these feelings.”

The executive director of the Arlington Housing Authority, Jack Nagle, said that filling vacancies is a challenge because of the state’s online waitlist system. Twenty of Arlington’s 700 state-funded units sat empty as of the end of July.

Gountana is still hoping to move into a state-funded apartment. “Honestly, I did not expect it to be so, so long,” she said.

The waitlist woes are one of several reasons for the glut of vacancies. Hundreds of apartments across Massachusetts can’t be filled because they’re undergoing renovation, or because local housing authorities lack the staff or funding for vital repairs.

Why State Public Housing Units Sit Vacant in Massachusetts

Local housing authorities submit a waiver and an explanation to the state if they expect that a unit will need to be vacant for longer than 60 days. For apartments that were vacant as of July 31, 2023, the following reasons were given.

Note: This data excludes any units that stand vacant but that housing authorities had not requested a waiver for. To simplify this chart, similar reasons were combined into a few groups. Source: Massachusetts Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities (Data analysis by Todd Wallack/WBUR, chart by Jason Kao/ProPublica)

Units in the town of Adams, in the Berkshires near the New York state border, have been condemned as the problems piled up. And housing officials have razed other dilapidated apartments in cities such as Lowell, northwest of Boston, and Fall River, near the Rhode Island line. About 70 apartments across Massachusetts have been demolished or sold in the last dozen years, according to the state housing agency.

“We need a long-term plan,” said Rachel Heller, of the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association. “We can’t lose these homes.”

For decades, advocates have warned that the state public housing system needs billions of dollars in funding for additional staff and renovations, including new roofs, plumbing and heating systems. A 2006 audit called the situation a “state of emergency.”

But those alarms weren’t heeded. In 2018, the Legislature allocated $600 million over five years for capital expenditures for public housing — not enough to catch up with all needed repairs. Today, local authorities have a $3.2 billion backlog for renovations, by the state’s estimate. Augustus, the state housing secretary, said the state is working on a new bond bill, but it was too early to provide details.

Advocates pushed for $184 million this year for operating and maintaining the units day to day, but Healey’s proposed budget allowed for only half that amount.The Legislature ultimately allocated$107 million, an increase of 16% from last year. Healey, House Speaker Ron Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka declined to be interviewed.

In the meantime, the state public housing stock is suffering. Take the housing authority in Watertown, a Boston suburb, which has six maintenance workers. Patrick Breen, the maintenance supervisor, said that’s not enough to care for the agency’s 589 units, many of which were built 60 to 70 years ago.

Breen said his crew must focus on emergencies, like broken cast-iron pipes and electrical outages. Often, no one is available to prep empty units for new families. Some longtime tenants just abandon the apartments, forcing the maintenance crew to haul out their belongings and repair walls, floors and counters. The units sit for months before they are ready to lease.

“It’s a nightmare,” Breen said. “There’s not much more you can do really, when you don’t have enough staff.”

The kitchen of a unit that needs renovation in the Lexington Gardens public housing complex in Watertown. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)

Some apartments across the state stay in limbo even longer while housing authorities plan major renovations or redevelopment projects. That’s what happened in the city of Somerville, where units in the Clarendon Hill complex sat empty for as long as six and a half years before work began in March on a new $200 million private development of affordable and market-rate housing at the site. During that time, the state continued to pay Somerville to manage the vacant units.

Somerville Housing Authority interim director Joe Macaluso explained that the agency hadn’t wanted to spend money maintaining aging buildings that it planned to demolish, even though they were still livable. “We would have had to inject capital — good money after bad money — just to get them ready,” he said.

The state’s executive housing office rarely questions these long vacancies, approving 92% of requests to keep units empty past the 60-day deadline. But advocates for homeless people say they wish agencies would let someone live in the empty apartments — even if it’s only temporary.

“If you were to ask me or ask our clients, they would say, that’s four or five years I’m not in a shelter or out in the street,” said Mike Libby, executive director of the Somerville Homeless Coalition. He’s not related to Deb Libby, who’s seeking housing.

Across the state, housing authorities have also converted at least 121 state-subsidized apartments for uses including office spaces, storage areas and laundry rooms — further shrinking the pool of units available for families and seniors.

The Boston Housing Authority converted 11 units to offices for employees and tenant organizations and set aside another for a children’s program. Nearby, the Somerville Housing Authority repurposed 10 apartments, including a two-bedroom unit that was turned into office space for the agency’s police department.

A public housing unit at the Green Acres development in Fitchburg (first image) is used for an after-school program, while another in Somerville (second image) provides space for the local housing authority’s police department. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)

Beverly, Fall River and Quincy turned units into laundry rooms. And the housing authority in Salem took four apartments in a downtown tower for seniors and converted them into offices, including a break room and space for file storage. After the president of the tenants’ association stumbled onto two of the repurposed units last year in the building he lives in, the housing authority launched eviction proceedings against him. The agency said he was trespassing. He said there was no indication that the offices were off limits. The case is pending.

One social services executive was astonished to hear about all the apartments converted to offices and storage.

Housing “seems like a bigger priority than a break room or storage facility,” said Laura Meisenhelter, executive director of North Shore Community Action Programs, which runs a family shelter. “You know, you can get sheds at Home Depot.”

Augustus, the state housing secretary, said there are often good reasons to repurpose units, such as to provide a library or a laundry room in a complex for seniors. He said the state has to sign off on the conversions, but it generally defers to local officials. “There’s always going to be unique circumstances,” Augustus said.

At least one agency hopes to switch its converted units back soon. The Fitchburg Housing Authority plans to build a $12 million community center with plenty of office space, enabling it to convert seven offices back to their original purpose: housing.

Fitchburg Housing Authority Executive Director Doug Bushman in an office that was converted from an apartment. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)

Deb Libby, the Worcester woman facing eviction at the end of the month, never worried about becoming homeless. She’s worked at Lowe’s for two years, doing everything from fielding questions to moving supplies in the garden section. But it’s been harder to work a full schedule since she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer five years ago. Her job is physically demanding — she walks six to eight miles a day — and the disease has weakened her immune system, forcing her to take frequent days off without pay.

She said surgery removed the cancerous tissue in November 2018 and after that she’d been in remission. But an MRI recently found the cancer has spread to the liver. “We’re still trying to figure out what to do with that.”

Libby has struggled to keep up with the $1,450 monthly rent for her one-bedroom apartment near the College of the Holy Cross.

For a while, pandemic relief funds helped her pay the rent. Then a friend pitched in. But the building was sold, and she didn’t have a long-term lease.

Last October, after her landlord began the formal eviction process, Libby signed up for state public housing in Worcester. Libby managed to stave off the eviction in housing court for a year with help from an attorney from a legal aid nonprofit. As part of an agreement to settle the case, the landlord acknowledged Libby was not at fault, promised to provide a good recommendation, and cited “economic reasons” for the eviction. The building’s owner did not respond to an email asking for more specificity.

Libby prefers to remain in central Massachusetts, close to her mother, three children and three grandchildren. Her family doesn’t have room for her, she said, and she’s willing to move anywhere in the state to find an affordable apartment. Early this year, she expanded her search for public housing to 30 additional communities — from Chicopee in western Massachusetts to Provincetown on the tip of Cape Cod.

In June, she applied for priority status for state housing on the grounds that she is losing her housing through no fault of her own. But Libby said she hasn’t received any response. When she called some housing authorities, she said, they wouldn’t tell her where she stands on the waitlist.

“I just really need something,” she said. “I really need help.”

Libby said she has no idea where she will live — maybe in her truck or a friend’s garage. She was surprised to hear about all the units sitting vacant across the state.

“It’s frustrating,” she said. “It’s maddening.”

Beth Healy and Paula Moura of WBUR contributed reporting.

by Todd Wallack and Christine Willmsen, WBUR

ProPublica Opens Application for Five Two-Year Partnerships Through Our Local Reporting Network

1 year 9 months ago

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

Looking to deepen relationships with local newsrooms, ProPublica has opened up applications for five new two-year partnerships that would focus on abuses of power in their communities.

Since 2018, ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network has supported individual projects over the course of a year. We’ve worked on 90 projects with more than 70 newsrooms.

This new group of partnerships will be different. We are seeking to build sustained relationships with reporters and newsrooms that have a proven track record of investigative reporting and impact.

Successful applications will demonstrate past ability to execute investigative stories, strong reporting ties to the community and a range of story ideas that the reporter might take on over the two-year partnership. The new partnerships are supported by a grant from the Abrams Foundation and will begin on Jan. 2, 2024.

The Local Reporting Network is part of ProPublica’s local initiative, which includes offices in the Midwest, South, Southwest and Northwest, plus an investigative unit in partnership with The Texas Tribune.

As part of the program, ProPublica will pay each full-time reporter’s salary (up to $80,000), plus an allowance for benefits. We will also provide extensive support and editorial guidance, including collaboration with a senior editor and access to ProPublica’s expertise with data, research, engagement, video and design. Local reporters will work from and report to their home newsrooms; their work will be published or broadcast by your newsroom and simultaneously by ProPublica.

Applications are due Nov. 1, 2023, at 9 a.m. Eastern time.

Since its founding, several reporters have partnered with the Local Reporting Network for multiple years. Those sustained relationships have allowed us to deliver high-impact reporting to communities that urgently needed journalistic attention.

Since 2019, Kyle Hopkins at the Anchorage Daily News has delivered a stunning range of stories: His stories on the lack of law enforcement in rural parts of Alaska prompted a national emergency declaration from the U.S. attorney general; his reporting on the actions of two state attorneys general prompted their resignations; and his coverage of the work environment at the Anchorage library system was followed by the resignation of the library’s deputy director. Hopkins’ law enforcement coverage was recognized with the Pulitzer Prize for public service and other major journalism awards.

Molly Parker, reporting in southern Illinois, joined the program in 2018; her most recent project looked at deplorable conditions at a remote state facility for people with developmental disorders and mental illnesses. Documenting abuse and neglect of residents, the reporting also showed how staff had covered up their actions and continued to work with relative impunity. Since the reporting began, the state announced its intention to remove half of the residents from the facility, passed a new law increasing penalties for staff who cover up abuse and replaced the facility’s director. The project, done in collaboration with Lee Enterprises Midwest and Capitol News Illinois, received a Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award in 2023.

Applications should be submitted by newsroom leaders and will ask for the following information:

  • The reporter whom you envision spearheading the work and the annual salary you would need to pay them. (Please provide an exact figure, not including benefits.) This could be someone on staff or a freelancer with whom you hope to work. (Freelancers must submit a joint application with an eligible news organization willing to publish their work.) The person must have an investigative track record to be considered for this position.
  • A personal statement by the reporter explaining their interest in and history with investigative reporting.
  • Three clips and an accompanying explanation of the backstory: particular challenges or successes; the role the reporter played; any impact; and journalistic lessons learned.
  • A resume.
  • A memo of stories you’d like to pursue during two years of intensive partnership with ProPublica. These should be stories that would benefit from a collaboration, potentially including data, research and engagement reporting resources we can provide. These may include big stories, an ongoing series of shorter stories, text, audio, video or something else. All of them should have the potential to resonate with both local and national audiences. We recognize these may shift over the two-year program: The point is to get to know your reporter, their interests and how they approach their work. But we would like to know at least one story that seems like a solid starting point for the partnership.

ProPublica editors are available to answer questions or to give you feedback on your application before you submit it. Please reach us at Local.Reporting@propublica.org.

Please submit your proposal by Nov. 1, 2023, at 9 a.m. Eastern time. Entries will be judged principally by ProPublica editors. Selected proposals will be announced by early December.

by ProPublica

Mississippi Courts Won’t Say How They Provide Lawyers for Poor Clients

1 year 9 months ago

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal and The Marshall Project. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

In 2017, the Mississippi Supreme Court’s then-Chief Justice William Waller Jr. helped mandate that judges throughout the state explain in writing how they deliver on their duty to provide poor criminal defendants with a lawyer.

He hoped the rule would spur improvements in Mississippi’s patched-together public defense system, regarded by many legal experts as among the worst in the country.

Now, six years after the rule went into effect, only one of the 23 circuit court districts in the state has responded. The 22nd Circuit Court in southwest Mississippi became the first to comply this summer, according to the Supreme Court’s docket.

The requirement was part of a push to move “toward a statewide system,” said Waller, who retired a couple of years after it went into effect. He said he’s partly responsible for not enforcing it. “We should have started going court by court and asking them to show us their plans.”

Public defense systems across the country are overburdened and underfunded, but Mississippi stands out. Nationally, it ranks last in how much money it spends per capita on public defense, according to the Sixth Amendment Center, a nonprofit that advocates for a robust defense for the indigent — those who can’t afford their own lawyer. Mississippi is one of only eight states that rely on local officials to fund and deliver almost all public defense for people facing trial, according to the center.

Mississippi has long failed to monitor or evaluate local courts to see whether they’re delivering that defense, which is guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Without such oversight, no one knows whether all the state’s courts, especially smaller ones in the vast rural stretches of the state, are doing the job that’s required of them.

The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, ProPublica and The Marshall Project have identified courts that aren’t following the state Supreme Court’s rules on public defense, including judges who fail to appoint lawyers as early as required, or who deny counsel to defendants for inappropriate reasons. Even once appointed, some lawyers say they do little for defendants and that local judges know this.

Such problems show why it’s important for courts to explain how they provide public defense, said André de Gruy, who runs Mississippi’s Office of State Public Defender and has written a model plan for local courts that they could adapt to meet their needs. Without these plans, he said, “we can’t say whether we are in compliance with the Constitution.”

André de Gruy, head of Mississippi’s Office of State Public Defender, says that unless judges file indigent defense plans with the state, it’s hard to know whether courts are meeting constitutional standards. (Imani Khayyam for ProPublica) “Not Much Lawyering Going On”

In the last three decades, there have been repeated efforts to overhaul Mississippi’s public defense system, including four state committees or commissions, two major reports by outside legal experts and numerous pieces of legislation. They’ve been largely unsuccessful.

There’s widespread agreement about the systemic problems: Defendants can sit in jail for months at a time without a lawyer. The way that many lawyers are paid gives them an incentive to cut corners. There are few full-time public defenders in the state.

“There is not much lawyering going on. I get them through the system and get them out of here,” an unidentified, part-time public defender bluntly told consultants for the Mississippi Bar Association as part of a state government effort to reform the public defense system in the 1990s.

Shortcomings in Mississippi’s Public Defense Persist Over 20 Years
  • 1995: “There is no statewide oversight of indigent defense in Mississippi, which leads to a hodge podge, county-by-county approach to providing defense services,” wrote the Spangenberg Group, a consulting firm hired by several legal groups to evaluate the state’s public defense system.

  • 2003: The right to counsel is “functionally meaningless in Mississippi, a state which provides almost no regulation, oversight, or funding for indigent defense,” said the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

  • 2018: “The state of Mississippi has no method to ensure that its local governments are fulfilling the state’s constitutional obligation to provide effective assistance of counsel to the indigent accused in felony cases in its trial courts,” according to the Sixth Amendment Center.

In a 2003 study, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund reported that a lawyer on the Gulf Coast said that he never tried to locate or interview witnesses because by the time he’s been appointed, nine months to a year have typically passed since the crime.

“By then,” researchers wrote, recounting what the lawyer told them, “crime scenes have changed, witnesses have moved, and memories have faded.”

That study highlighted the case of a man arrested in the northeast Mississippi city of Tupelo for possession of crack cocaine. The court appointed three different lawyers in succession. The first two never spoke with the defendant and did not respond to his phone calls or letters. On the day before the trial, the third lawyer told the court that he had not prepared for his client’s case. The evidence against the man was so weak that he was acquitted by a jury after less than 15 minutes of deliberation. He’d spent eight months in jail.

From 2000 to 2011, several task forces successfully pressed for a series of reforms, including the creation of a state office to handle death penalty defense and indigent criminal appeals. That’s the office de Gruy now runs.

But reforms to public defense in local courtrooms remained out of reach. “I remember being very frustrated,” said Waller, who was part of those efforts after joining the state Supreme Court in 1998.

The sheer number of courts across the state, and the lack of coordination among them, is a factor in why it’s so hard to reform the system.

“In other states, any discussion of policy change takes place at one or two systems,” said David Carroll, director of the Sixth Amendment Center. “There are nearly 500 indigent defense systems in Mississippi.”

New Rules for Public Defense

In 2009, Waller became chief justice and went on to play a key role in an ambitious effort to create rules of criminal procedure that would be shared by all courts in the state.

Eight years later, those statewide rules went into effect. For the first time, judges were required to write down exactly how they delivered on their obligation to provide lawyers for defendants who couldn’t afford one. The courts were then required to send those plans to the Mississippi Supreme Court for approval.

“The intent of the rule was, as much as possible, to have consistency across the state,” Waller said. “A lawyer would be able to look at the rules and know what the practice is, and it would be fairly consistent, and he wouldn’t be memorizing the Magna Carta every time he went into a new court.”

Former Mississippi Supreme Court Chief Justice William Waller Jr. said he’s partly responsible for not ensuring that courts around the state followed through on a requirement to develop public defense plans. (Bruce Newman for Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal)

Waller knew it was a limited effort. But in the absence of legislation to create a statewide system for public defense or a movement by counties to hire full-time lawyers, the Supreme Court could at least encourage uniformity among courts and reject inadequate plans.

In combination with other new rules, including measures to make bonds less onerous and give defendants more opportunities to argue their case before a judge, he hoped counties would move to create full-time public defender offices.

That didn’t happen. To date, just seven counties have full-time public defender offices, and only the 22nd Circuit Court has filed the required paperwork laying out its indigent defense system. The Mississippi Supreme Court approved the plan last month.

The plan is not lengthy, but it shows that the 22nd Circuit’s lone judge knows what’s required by the Sixth Amendment and that she has developed a process for how she fulfills that duty. It says when appointed counsel should be provided to poor defendants, it directs judges to monitor attorneys’ performance, and it outlines a procedure to ensure that defendants don’t lose representation as their case moves from one court to another.

The Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, The Marshall Project and ProPublica asked the court administrators in all 23 circuit court districts, as well as the county-level clerks in all 82 counties, if they have a written plan for indigent defense. Many would not comment, but clerks in nearly 20 counties said they don’t.

Waller called on the current justices to remedy the failure to enforce the public defense rule. Chief Justice Michael Randolph and Justice Jim Kitchens, who heads the court’s criminal rules committee, declined to comment.

“I’m Not Too Quick to Pull the Trigger on a Public Defender”

At least a few judges aren’t only ignoring the requirement to write down how they provide lawyers for poor criminal defendants. They’re not following state rules on providing those lawyers in the first place.

The Daily Journal, ProPublica and The Marshall Project identified two courts that aren’t properly appointing lawyers for indigent defendants, according to Waller, legal experts and the rules of criminal procedure.

A lawyer who acts as a part-time judge in the small northeast Mississippi city of Guntown told a reporter that he usually handles defendants’ first appearances over the phone and doesn’t ask if they can afford a lawyer. This contravenes Mississippi’s criminal rules, which require that during a defendant’s initial court appearance, a judge should find out if that defendant can afford a lawyer and appoint one if not.

“They hear their charges and get a bond if they deserve one,”said Harry Sumner, the part-time judge. “I do not appoint a public defender at the initial [appearance] at that time.”

Told that this practice doesn’t meet the state standard for an initial appearance, Sumner said he believes that defendants waive those requirements when they agree to appear before a judge by phone. If someone wants a lawyer, he said, one could be appointed at a preliminary hearing, although he acknowledged that those hearings are rarely requested.

The state’s rules, however, are clear that while defendants held in jail may agree to appear before a judge by audiovisual means, the requirements of an initial appearance still apply.

In nearby Yalobusha County, a judge said he doesn’t move quickly to appoint a lawyer if a defendant posts bond and is released from jail.

“If they’re arrested on a felony and they’ve made bond, I’m not too quick to pull the trigger on a public defender, particularly if they’ve made a high bond,” said Yalobusha Justice Court Judge Trent Howell.

The rules, however, instruct judges not to base their decision about whether to appoint a lawyer on the ability of defendants or their friends or family to pay money to get them out of jail. Pressed on why he doesn’t abide by that instruction, Howell defended his approach. “It’s just human nature” to consider whether someone has been able to raise money for a bond, he said.

Even as courts have ignored the requirement to file their public defense plans, the Mississippi Supreme Court recently issued another rule to improve public defense. It’s supposed to eliminate what critics call the “dead zone” — the practice of withdrawing legal counsel from poor defendants after their initial appearance, leaving them without a lawyer as they wait to be indicted.

The Daily Journal, The Marshall Project and ProPublica found that many courts are not prepared to implement that rule either. That suggests that poor defendants will remain deprived of meaningful legal assistance as they wait months or years, often in jail, for prosecutors to decide whether to pursue felony charges.

De Gruy said the recent mandate to eliminate the dead zone offers courts an opportunity to grapple with much larger problems with public defense in Mississippi. “I was hoping,” he said, “this would be a reminder to the courts that they’ve got unfinished business.”

by Caleb Bedillion, Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal

Concerned About Your OB-GYN Visit? A Guide to What Should Happen — and What Shouldn’t.

1 year 9 months ago

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

As journalists, we often talk to people about difficult things. We listen for themes and systemic issues that tie their stories together. Both of us have spent years hearing from those who say they were sexually assaulted — most recently dozens of women who told us about alleged misconduct by their Utah OB-GYN. These are not easy conversations to have, but they are important. They also teach us a lot about what women knew at the time of their appointments and what they wish they had known.

“I wish I would have known that I could speak up, say that I am uncomfortable or just ask him to stop,” said Ashton Sorenson, who is one of more than 100 women who have come forward in various lawsuits to accuse the OB-GYN of sexual assault. “I wish I knew that I could ask for a nurse to be present. I wish I could have known that I could challenge and question a doctor even though he was in an authority position.” The doctor’s lawyer has declined an interview request but has said they believe the allegations “are without merit.” Next month, the Utah Supreme Court is set to hear an appeal in a civil case brought by his patients.

Some told us they knew right away that the way their OB-GYN had touched them during their exam felt wrong — but they pushed off that gut feeling because he was a doctor or they were new to pelvic exams. Others thought the pain they felt during and following those exams was normal. Many women only started to characterize their experience as sexual assault after reading and hearing stories from other women who made similar claims.

In another recent story, women who saw an OB-GYN in New York City over decades related a similar pattern of disbelief and reckoning after he sexually assaulted them during exams — and a sense, as one victim said, that “I’m alone here.” When one survivor, Evelyn Yang, began to realize she was not the only one, she turned to Google to search for the doctor. “The next thing she put into the search bar,” ProPublica fellow Bianca Fortis and co-reporter Laura Beil wrote, “was ‘What to do if you’re assaulted by your doctor.’” (The doctor is now serving 20 years in prison for his actions.)

We want to help fill this information gap. We went to experts including an OB-GYN, a medical ethics professor and researcher, plus several of the patients in Utah who sued their doctor for sexual assault. We asked them to answer key questions that could help others interpret what is normal, and what’s not, during a visit to the OB-GYN.

To be clear, a victim is never at fault for sexual abuse. This guide does not provide medical or legal advice, and we encourage you to seek out other reliable resources and consult with people you trust.

What to Expect at Your Gynecologist’s Office

Your first meeting with your doctor should be about getting to know each other and building trust, according to Dr. Kavita Arora, an OB-GYN with the University of North Carolina’s Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the former chair of the national ethics committee for American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. You may talk about your overall physical and mental well-being and any history of women’s health issues in your family.

Typically, you will meet with a nurse or medical assistant before the gynecologist enters the room. The nurse will likely check your weight and blood pressure and ask general questions.

“The important thing is that everyone be on the same page before the exam,” Arora said.

At an OB-GYN visit, Arora said, you should always:

  • Know who is going to be doing the exam.
  • Know who else will be in the room.
  • Know what parts of your body they plan to examine.

She said that information can help you decide what you are and are not comfortable with, and give you an opportunity to speak up. You can continue to ask questions throughout the visit and exam.

You can ask:

  • What are the goals for today’s visit?
  • Which exams are we going to do and why?
  • What is the best way to let you know if I’m uncomfortable?
  • Can I have a friend or family member in the room for an exam?
  • How should I contact you with follow up questions? Do you prefer calls, texts, email or a patient portal?

What You Can Do if You Feel Uncomfortable During an OB-GYN Visit

If you have a question or something feels off, the medical experts and patients we talked to said it’s OK to ask the OB-GYN to stop no matter where you are in the process of the exam or the visit.

When in doubt, trust what you feel, said James M. DuBois, the director of the Bioethics Research Center at Washington University in St. Louis. “People are much better at recognizing what’s odd [or] what makes them feel uncomfortable than recognizing, ‘Oh, this meets the definition of sexual abuse.’”

If you are uncomfortable, in pain or confused about what is happening, Arora suggested saying:

  • “Can you please stop?”
  • “Let’s talk about this.”
  • “Can you explain why we’re doing this?”

“It’s better to simply ask to stop and then give the OB-GYN the ability to answer that question,” Arora said. “At the end of the day, if the patient says stop, the clinician needs to stop.”

The experts and patients we’ve talked to said: If you are uncomfortable, take it seriously.

“If you feel something isn’t quite right, then go with your gut!” said Jackie Colton, who is among the 94 women who sued an OB-GYN in Utah.

How often does sexual misconduct happen in medicine?

DuBois says no one knows how often sexual misconduct happens in medicine. Official records only include cases people report, and research shows there are many reasons patients and providers choose not to tell officials.

To learn more about a specific physician, DuBois and his team put together a set of resources patients can use to look up their doctors and see if there have been complaints in the past.

What ethics codes are in place for doctors?

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The medical profession follows a range of ethics codes established in part by medical schools, membership associations and hospital systems. The Hippocratic oath is a commonly known pledge that defines the core values for the profession. Among the many values the oath inspires, a doctor vows to respect the anatomy and dignity of their patients.

Every state has a law called a Medical Practice Act laying out what is and isn’t considered professional.

What is considered sexual misconduct by an OB-GYN?

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists is the lead professional organization for OB-GYNs in the U.S. It provides guidance and recommendations for care and patient interaction. ACOG’s Committee on Ethics defines sexual misconduct as “an abuse of power and a violation of patients’ trust.”

The Federation of State Medical Boards put out guidelines to define what counts as inappropriate behavior. Some examples include:

  • Making inappropriate comments about a patient’s body.
  • Joking about a patient’s sexual orientation.
  • Flirting.
  • Watching a patient undress.
  • Performing an intimate exam without a valid medical reason.
  • Inviting medical students into the room during an exam without asking the patient for permission.
  • Bringing up the physician’s own sexual likes or dislikes.
  • Unwanted touching or fondling.
  • Asking the patient to masturbate.

Physicians may not participate in any kind of romantic or sexual relationship with a current patient, even if the patient appears to initiate or agree to it. The Federation of State Medical Boards says this is because physician misconduct often begins with manipulation tactics called “grooming” behaviors. Even if comments may not meet the definition of misconduct at first, anything that eventually escalates to sexual contact is considered unethical.

ACOG’s Committee on Ethics explains: “Such interactions may exploit patients’ vulnerability, compromise physicians’ ability to make objective judgments about patients’ health care, and ultimately be detrimental to patients’ long-term health.”

What to Do if You Think Your OB-GYN Has Acted Inappropriately Talk with someone you trust.

Adhis Boucha, who is among the 94 women who sued their former OB-GYN in Utah, suggested talking with someone as soon as possible. “You don’t need to be embarrassed by something that was someone else’s fault,” she said.

If you’re not sure where to start, you can speak with someone who is trained to help at the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-HOPE (4673) or chat online at online.rainn.org.

Many hospitals work with patient advocates who can guide you through their institution’s code of ethics and suggest practical next steps. If your hospital or health care facility does not work with patient advocates, the Patient Advocate Foundation may be able to connect you with support.

Take notes and save records.

If you suspect that something went wrong during your visit, DuBois suggests telling someone else, such as a family member or spouse. He also recommends keeping notes.

Though it can be difficult for some patients, DuBois said, “courts trust memories more when they are documented soon after the event with names and dates.”

Keeping other records, such as medical documents, bills and emails may also help in making a report.

You have options when reporting sexual misconduct by an OB-GYN.

If you decide to take further action, there are a few options to report sexual misconduct by a doctor.

  • State medical boards give doctors a license to practice and punish physicians who break the rules. According to the Federation of State Medical Boards, the committees are usually made up of volunteer doctors, other health care providers and members of the public appointed by the governor. You can find your local medical board’s contact information here. If the board finds that a doctor has behaved inappropriately, it can take away a physician’s license to practice, impose fines or put them on administrative probation. In many states, a medical board is not required to forward a complaint to law enforcement, meaning police won’t automatically be involved. You may want to ask your state’s medical board about whether it is a mandatory reporter to the police.
  • Law enforcement can investigate allegations of sexual abuse. This is typically done by local police. A police detective may ask you to describe what happened more than once. If they find enough evidence, there may be a trial and you may be asked to testify. If the physician is found guilty in a criminal court, they could be ordered to pay fines or sent to jail or prison.

What if I Want to Report an Incident That Happened Long Ago?

Some states have a limited amount of time to bring charges and prosecute a physician. These are called the statute of limitations. RAINN, a national anti-sexual-violence organization, put together a guide to help people understand the rules. As the guide puts it: “You can think of a statute of limitations like a timer: the clock typically starts when the crime occurs; after time runs out, a perpetrator cannot be charged for the crime.”

You can use RAINN’s state law database to find out what the statute of limitations are in your state.

If the statute of limitations has passed in your case, RAINN says you may still file a police report. According to the organization, for some survivors making a report is an important step in regaining control over their lives. Your report could also be informational for police or prosecutors if other people come forward with similar allegations.

OB-GYN Glossary

Undressing

Undressing from the waist down or fully is common for general exams. The doctor’s office should provide you with a gown or sheet to wear. Staffers should give you time to change before and after the exam. The doctor should only ask that you expose the area relevant to the exam. They should also ask for your consent when draping or lifting your gown or sheet during the exam.

Chaperones

Chaperones are health care professionals who have been trained to be in the exam room as observers during a patient’s gynecological exam. They are there to take notes about the meeting, to enforce boundaries between the doctor and the patient and to make sure body parts are appropriately covered. If they witness misconduct, they know how to report it.

A chaperone’s role is to act as a witness in case of wrongdoing for both the patient and the health professional during a procedure. Generally, partners, family members and friends of patients should not serve as chaperones, but they can stay in the room during the visit if the doctor and the patient agree.

ACOG recommends having a chaperone in the room for sensitive procedures such as breast, pelvic or rectal exams.

Gloves

A gynecologist is expected to wear gloves anytime they will be in contact with blood, bodily fluids, bodily tissues or mucus. Not all clinicians use gloves for breast exams or abdominal exams, though many do.

Gynecologists are expected to wear gloves for all genital and rectal exams. Arora said patients can always ask a doctor to put on gloves. “The physician should respect that request,” she said.

Pelvic Exam

A pelvic exam is a routine procedure used to check for signs of disease in female organs. The provider will check the vagina, uterus, ovaries, fallopian tubes and cervix. The exam happens while you lie down on the exam table with your legs raised in footrests or stirrups.

According to the Cleveland Clinic, pelvic exams typically only take a few minutes. Doctors say you can expect to feel a little discomfort, but you should not experience severe pain.

Pap Smear

Pap smears are a screening tool for cervical cancer, potential cervix cancer and human papillomavirus, a common sexually transmitted infection. According to the Cleveland Clinic, the screening involves “a gentle scrape” of the cervix for cell samples, which are then sent to a lab for examination. Doctors say Pap smears should not hurt.

Breast Exam

Breast exams can be part of a routine gynecological check up. Doctors use their fingers to check the breasts and under arms for changes in lumps, dimples or redness of the skin. They will look for changes in size and shape.

Rectal Exam

Rectal exams are no longer recommended for routine gynecological appointments. Arora shared a few exceptions.

Rectal exams “can help with examining the uterus or the ovaries depending on that patient’s anatomy,” she said. “If I’m worried about endometriosis, it can be relevant.”

To do this exam, a doctor inserts a finger into a person’s anus. Their hands should be gloved and their finger should be lubricated for this exam. According to the Cleveland Clinic, the process may feel uncomfortable but should not hurt or last for very long.

by Adriana Gallardo, ProPublica, and Jessica Miller, The Salt Lake Tribune

“Where Is There to Go?” He Needs Gender-Affirming Surgery, but His State Is Fighting to Deny Coverage.

1 year 9 months ago

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In the spring of 2022, Hann Henson accepted a job as a communications specialist for a North Carolina school district. Not long after his insurance kicked in, he pored over the hundred-page booklet outlining the state health plan for district employees.

When he came to the list of services that aren’t covered, he paused at a tiny footnote: North Carolina’s plan did currently pay for gender-affirming care — but only because of a temporary federal court order.

Henson’s heart rate rose as he considered his options. Since he was a child, he’d been burdened by a sense of deep distress about the mismatch between the gender he was assigned at birth and the gender he knew himself to be.

Henson had grown accustomed to state leaders and insurance plans playing political tug of war with his rights. In 2016, early in his transition, a Republican governor signed into law the country’s first statewide ban on transgender people using the bathroom aligned with their gender — forcing Henson to worry about violence from strangers when entering public restrooms. A Democratic governor largely scrapped it a year later. Henson spent the next several years jumping through every hoop his insurance company required before it would cover one of his transition-related surgeries, with a representative at one point telling him the company didn’t cover “tranny health care.”

Now, yet again, he faced obstacles to health care access because of his gender identity. As Henson found out after he started his new job, North Carolina had been fighting a legal battle since 2019 against transgender people on the state’s health plan, some of whom had sued the state for coverage of transition-related care. In 2022, a judge ordered the state to cover the care while the fight dragged on. But any moment, another court ruling could whisk it away.

Henson relaxes with his dog, JoJo, before leaving for work. (Annie Flanagan, special to ProPublica)

As Henson had become more confident as a transgender man, the world around him seemed to grow increasingly hostile, with conservative rhetoric against transgender people accelerating an avalanche of restrictive laws. In the last year, state lawmakers across the country have considered nearly 500 proposals targeting transgender rights, and more than 80 became law — both unprecedented numbers. This legislative session, North Carolina passed laws banning gender-affirming care for youth, limiting instruction in elementary schools about gender and sexuality, and preventing transgender girls from playing on girls’ sports teams. A Republican supermajority in the legislature overrode the Democratic governor’s vetoes on all three.

In May, Dale Folwell, North Carolina’s state treasurer, sat for an interview with a far-right activist to explain his decision to keep fighting the lawsuit filed by transgender people over the state health plan. North Carolina is one of more than a dozen states with a health plan that explicitly denies coverage for gender-affirming care, and this lawsuit — one of several arguing that states cannot block access to the coverage — is the first to make it to a federal appeals court. Folwell, who is running for governor, argued that the state health plan’s board of trustees should have the authority to determine the scope of employee benefits — echoing the argument North Carolina makes in court documents that covering gender-affirming care would be a financial burden.

“When you have a plan this large,” Folwell said in the interview, “you have to focus on doing the most good for the most number of people. That’s how you set benefits.” He did not respond to ProPublica’s questions or interview requests.

Lawyers and experts for the transgender plaintiffs have pointed to evidence showing that covering the care would likely cost the state very little — and have argued that withholding it is discriminatory.

For several weeks this spring, Henson repeatedly checked the federal court website for an update on the lawsuit, gripped by a feeling of panic, “like somebody has got their hands around my neck.” One more major surgery separated him from the relief of his body fully matching his gender, and he wasn’t sure when the court would make a decision.

A few days after Folwell’s interview, Henson learned that the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Virginia, would hear arguments on the case in late September. It was far from the ideal time: His surgery was scheduled for late November, and he’d need a follow-up surgery about six months later.

The tight legal timeline has made the waiting period for the surgery almost unbearable for Henson: “You’re on the highway in the car and you’re driving and you’re like, ‘I’m gonna make it, I’m gonna make it.’ And then your gas starts running out.”

A 28-year-old self-described nerd with a youthful face and quiet voice, Henson distracts himself with his hobbies: playing video games with friends and attending anime conventions in costume. He regularly visits his parents in rural North Carolina and talks on the phone daily with his fiancee, who lives a few hours away. He has a calm demeanor, except for the nervous giggles that punctuate his speech, especially when he describes his darkest moments.

Henson and his fiancee, Aly Young (Annie Flanagan, special to ProPublica)

As the last academic school year came to a close, Henson stayed late to take photos at a school board meeting, sporting a blue suit jacket and hefty camera as he herded together groups of students and teachers who had won awards. He headed down the hall to his office to upload the photos. The live video of the board meeting played on the computer in the background.

Several minutes into the public comment period, a man approached the podium, introducing himself as a clergy member and a parent. His voice grew louder as he questioned whether board members were “perverts” and “child molesters.” He listed children’s books featuring transgender or gender-nonconforming characters and insisted they would be used to groom children, “push down their throat puberty blockers or move them towards mutilation.” As he began to read a passage from the Bible, his mic turned off. His time had run out. The audience applauded him.

Henson watched the screen, horrified. He felt like the man was speaking specifically about him. Few of his co-workers attending the board meeting knew he was transgender. He had cautiously told only his boss and closest colleagues, nervous about gossip or uncomfortable questions. Alone in the room, the office door ajar, he began to cry.

In recent months, Henson had often considered where he would be if the attacks on transgender people had been as aggressive when he first came out a decade ago as they are now. “I probably would be dead,” he said.

During Henson’s senior year of college, North Carolina passed House Bill 2, a prototype for the state bathroom bills that conservatives across the country stamped into law this year. HB 2 prohibited transgender people from using the public bathroom aligning with their gender and stripped the ability from cities and counties to pass local nondiscrimination policies. On the floor of the state House in late March of 2016, Republican lawmakers emphasized that the bill would help people travel more freely across the state, knowing each business would have the same policy.

Henson had moved cautiously through his college experience. Years earlier, as a freshman, he came out as transgender to his new group of friends. It was the first time he had been so widely open about his gender identity, and he hoped they would understand. Instead, they told him he was just looking for attention.

Already burdened by feelings of shame and low self-worth, Henson tried to kill himself. His resident assistant rushed him to the emergency room, where he told a doctor that he’d been stressed about chemistry class and a recent medication change, and had fought with a friend about “some kind of gender identity issues,” according to his medical notes.

Henson never spoke with those friends again, but their comments looped in his mind after he returned to school and continued to move forward in his gender transition.

In his senior year, after several months on testosterone, his beard had begun to grow in, and though it was patchy, he wore it like armor to shield himself from strangers’ scrutiny. It didn’t always work.

He remembers walking into one of the men’s bathrooms on campus the first week after the law passed. A man standing at the urinal turned and asked, “Are you allowed to come in here anymore?”

Henson frequently experienced panic attacks, fearful of potential assault and furious at public policies that restricted his rights. He recalls standing in the middle stall at school and sending an angry email from his phone to then-Gov. Pat McCrory: I’m a transgender man in a public men’s room. Come and get me.

Henson is counting down the days until his final set of surgical procedures. (Annie Flanagan, special to ProPublica)

In the months after the law passed, when he and his sister, Ashlee Park, ran errands at the suburban Walmart near her home, she stood outside the men’s bathroom protectively while he was inside. Park knew her brother was struggling. He had recently seen a therapist who waved away his gender dysphoria as a “pathological need to be different,” Park recalled. Since then, he had stopped mental health treatment and continued to spiral.

“He would say things that were just like: ‘I shouldn’t be alive. I’m an abomination,’” Park said. She would respond, “There’s nothing wrong with you. There’s something wrong with the world. You need to get out of your head.”

Henson couldn’t absorb her words. “It just felt like my state had said: ‘I don’t want you. You don’t deserve to be here,’” he said. “And when you’re told you don’t deserve to be here, you sort of feel like, ‘Where is there to go?’”

One day in the spring of 2016, Henson was visiting Park at her home. Park and her mother were about to leave the house, when Park suddenly felt uneasy. She went back inside to look for her brother and found him in her husband’s closet, looking at the collection of firearms in his gun case.

Henson immediately grew ashamed and pleaded with them not to tell anyone that he’d considered killing himself. “He was begging. I remember him standing on the landing in the studio and looking at me with these incredibly brown eyes,” his mother, Kim Crenshaw, recalled. “And telling me how hard it was for him to be in his body and to feel like such a freak.”

He asked his mother and sister not to take him to the emergency room. They agreed, under the condition that he find a good therapist, and they began calling him every week to ensure he was searching for one. Crenshaw thinks back on the effort it took to bring her son back up from his lowest point. “That scares me so badly for all the kids out there that are going through this now,” she said.

With his family’s encouragement and support, Henson began regular therapy after graduating from college and started to feel more comfortable in his identity. He decided to move forward in his medical transition, wanting chest reconstruction surgery so he could stop binding his chest flat every day. But the prospect of engaging with the health care system was daunting.

His medical records from past emergency room visits provide some insight into his experiences: Several times, doctors incorrectly referred to him as “female” (or, in especially erroneous language, as a “transgendered female”), at times using his previous name and alternating between pronouns.

In 2016, the Obama administration prohibited medical facilities and insurance companies from categorically refusing to cover all health services related to gender transition. But despite the new federal rule, his insurance company at the time, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, threw up barrier after barrier.

Henson recalled that on one occasion, while on the phone with the claims department, the person on the call threw out a transphobic slur: “We don’t do tranny health care.” He hung up the phone and burst into tears.

At the time, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina required transgender patients seeking gender-affirming surgery to provide a supportive letter from a doctoral-level mental health professional — an incredibly high hurdle given the shortage of those providers across the country. After an exhaustive search, Henson found one in 2018 and later that year was able to get chest surgery. He remembers the surgery practice’s billing department filing an appeal with his insurance to get the procedure covered. Doctors there told him he was one of their first patients who received insurance approval for chest surgery related to a gender transition.

Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina broadened its policy in 2020 to allow any licensed mental health professional to provide letters for transgender patients seeking gender-affirming care. In response to questions from ProPublica, spokesperson Jami Sanchez said the company provides training on gender identity to its customer service team to “ensure members are treated with dignity and respect.”

As the years passed, Henson found that more and more doctors understood how to treat transgender patients. After he took the job at the school district, he spoke with his general practitioner, Sydney Hendry, about getting a hysterectomy to treat the severe uterine spasms and cramps that can sometimes accompany testosterone therapy.

Henson visits with his doctor, Sydney Hendry. (Annie Flanagan, special to ProPublica)

Hendry had to write a letter to the University of North Carolina Health surgical team verifying that Henson met the criteria for a gender dysphoria diagnosis and that a total hysterectomy would improve his quality of life. It was the first letter she had ever written for gender-affirming surgery. UNC Health provided a template that eased the process, avoiding the frustrating series of appeals and revisions that plagued Henson’s previous surgery.

Because of the federal court order, his state employee insurance agreed that it would cover the procedure. Henson had the surgery this March. But Hendry’s other transgender patients have told her that they’re scared about North Carolina limiting gender-affirming care for adults in the next year. “I tell them that they are my priority and that I will advocate for them,” she said.

“It feels like through my transition, there was this shift, where people became more educated about it and more knowledgeable,” Henson said. “And then in the past year or two, it’s starting to go back rapidly at a pace that is kind of scary.”

Henson feels that most people walking by him on the street see his full beard and stocky frame and don’t assume he is transgender. His fiancee, Aly Young, appreciates the sense of safety that comes with Henson “passing” but hates feeling like they’re hiding their true selves. “I don’t have thoughts in the back of my head like: ‘Should I be kissing him in public? Should I be holding his hand in public? Are people looking at us? Are we in danger?’” she said. “But at the same time, it makes me really sad. Because I don’t feel authentic. I don’t think Hann feels authentic.”

Henson and Young at a record store (Annie Flanagan, special to ProPublica) Henson and Young at Henson’s home. The two live several hours apart and visit each other when they can. (Annie Flanagan, special to ProPublica)

The two met when Henson began attending her small charter school in 11th grade, after years of home-schooling. One day, Young was hanging out in the hallway, when a math teacher called her over and asked her to comfort the new student crying in the bathroom. Young slowly coaxed Henson out and started to pursue a friendship. When Young moved away the following year, she kept in touch, writing letters that Henson now keeps in a box under his bed.

The pair talk often about moving away from North Carolina, even leaving the South altogether.

The South goes back generations in both their family lines, but this home feels increasingly hostile. Henson’s parents live in Sanford, where the Proud Boys showed up to a local brewery to protest a drag brunch. On the drive to Sanford, he passes by a supersized Confederate flag, which the Sons of Confederate Veterans erected in 2020 to protest the removal of Confederate memorials.

Looking forward, Henson counts down the days until his final set of surgical procedures, a genital reconstruction process commonly called bottom surgery. He had used up all his paid sick leave recovering from the hysterectomy, so he scheduled this next surgery for November, letting him use winter break to recover. Even if he is able to get the surgery before a ruling in North Carolina’s favor, the procedure requires a revision surgery about six months later, and Henson worries about being stuck with it incomplete.

On the morning of Sept. 21, all the active judges on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will preside over a second-floor courtroom in Richmond, Virginia, and listen to arguments from lawyers on both sides.

They will hear North Carolina’s case on the same day that they hear a similar one out of West Virginia that will determine whether that state’s Medicaid program must cover gender-affirming surgery. In both cases, federal judges in lower courts have already found the states’ policies discriminatory.

Recently, more than 20 conservative states filed an amicus brief in support of North Carolina, calling gender-affirming care “at best experimental and at worst deeply harmful” — a characterization that contradicts the consensus of major medical associations. More than 15 Democratic-led states wrote a brief in favor of the transgender plaintiffs, citing their own regulations that prevent insurance companies from “discriminating against medically necessary, transition-related care.”

In late August, Henson learned that the pastor who had railed against the school board back in June would soon be meeting privately with district leaders. He realized the man would be coming into the administration building where he works, meaning he could run into him face-to-face.

He thought about the benefits and drawbacks of not being immediately recognized as transgender: feeling safer but also forced underground, in a way, having to hear the vitriol against his community but powerless to stand up to it. He thought about how tired he was of feeling helpless and invisible.

That morning, he got dressed deliberately. Dress pants. A short-sleeved button-down shirt. And on the collar, a heart-shaped symbol of defiance — a pin in the colors of the transgender flag.

Henson’s trangender pride pin (Annie Flanagan, special to ProPublica)
by Aliyya Swaby

Wall Street Bet Big on Used-Car Loans for Years. Now a Crisis May Be Looming.

1 year 9 months ago

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. We plan to continue investigating the used-car-lending industry. If you have insights or tips, please be in touch through this brief questionnaire.

Wall Street could always bank on used cars. In fact, for years, investors bought bonds backed by auto loans because they reliably produced handsome returns, even amid rocky markets and downturns in the economy.

But now, for the first time in decades, that winning streak appears to be coming to an end, with a half dozen prominent used-auto lenders facing either an avalanche of failed loans — or growing regulatory scrutiny. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is currently suing two of those lenders over potentially predatory practices.

Together, experts say, the woes could signal a significant blow to a key pillar of the U.S. economy.

The first warning sign came in late February, when a company called American Car Center, which offered loans to customers with troubled credit histories, abruptly closed its 40 dealerships across the South and filed for bankruptcy protection. Then in April, another lender called U.S. Auto Sales also collapsed, shuttering dozens of dealerships in several states.

Before long, S&P Global Ratings put American Car Center and two other major subprime auto lenders — Exeter Finance and United Auto Credit — on watch for potential ratings downgrades.

Driving much of the concern are delinquencies. Today, the number of subprime borrowers who are behind on their auto-loan payments by 60 days or more is the highest it’s been since at least 2017, according to reports from multiple ratings agencies. Defaults are climbing too.

American Car Center executives did not respond to ProPublica’s interview requests. A representative for York Capital Management, the private-equity firm that has controlled the company since 2016, declined to answer questions about the subprime lender. Neither Milestone Partners, the private-equity firm that owns U.S. Auto Sales, nor Adam Curtin, the executive who oversaw it, responded to requests for comment.

The companies’ closures, as well as Wall Street’s souring financial forecasts, represent what appears to be the end of a hot three-year run in the used-auto sector, a rally driven partly by supply chain problems. With a shortage of new cars, consumers turned to used ones. Spending was fueled by pandemic-era federal aid, which helped American households cover their bills, including monthly car payments.

Lenders then used that steady revenue to fund a massive increase in new loans, particularly to people with low or even nonexistent credit scores. As a result, since 2020, the nation’s auto-loan balance jumped 28% and now totals more than $1.5 trillion, making it the fastest-growing type of consumer debt in the U.S., according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Auto bonds increased in kind, as lenders packaged those loans together and sold them as securities on Wall Street, where ratings agencies labeled them as largely safe investments. According to Bloomberg News, lenders sold bonds containing $76 billion in subprime loans in 2021 and 2022. All of this was predicated on the belief that the vast majority of borrowers would continue to make their monthly payments. “Investors are always thinking they’re protected,” said Joseph Cioffi, a partner at Davis+Gilbert in New York who specializes in finance and corporate insolvency. “And the lenders didn’t seem like there was any concern either.”

Economic conditions, however, changed. Pandemic aid ended, and the Federal Reserve aggressively increased interest rates to combat inflation, meaning more and more people are struggling to pay their expensive loans.

Regulators have also begun looking at the business practices of some subprime lenders, including USASF Servicing, an affiliate of U.S. Auto Sales. In a federal lawsuit, the Consumer Protection Financial Bureau accuses the company of “a host of illegal practices,” like double billing for insurance products and misapplying other payments, costing borrowers millions of dollars. The agency says USASF also wrongly disabled borrowers’ vehicles more than 7,000 times using “kill switches,” devices that prevent the engine from starting.

According to court records, USASF has not filed a formal response in the case, which is ongoing.

Regulators are also taking legal action against a company known as the Credit Acceptance Corporation, which “aggressively markets itself as an alternative for consumers with limited credit options and touts its loans as a way for consumers to build their credit and gain financial freedom,” according to a complaint filed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the New York attorney general.

“But CAC,” authorities allege, “is often setting up consumers to fail.”

Unlike a traditional lender, which assesses whether a borrower can repay a loan, CAC assumes from the outset that many of its customers will, in fact, default. Authorities accuse the company of charging interest rates so high that they violate New York law, as well as inducing dealers to inflate prices. As a result, “the median selling price for CAC consumers nationwide is over 77% greater” than the wholesale value of the vehicle, according to the complaint. Those prices also dramatically exceed standard retail prices, which include dealer markups.

Profit relies on collecting a certain amount from monthly payments and then selling repossessed cars when people can’t keep up, regulators contend. The lawsuit argues that borrowers and bond investors, who considered the loans safe investments, are both victims of the alleged scheme.

In court filings, CAC has denied the regulators’ allegations, arguing that it is not directly involved in the transactions between dealers and car buyers, and that it works exclusively with sellers to fund loans.

“Credit Acceptance operates with integrity and believes it has complied with applicable laws and regulations,” Douglas Busk, the company’s chief treasury officer, said in a written statement. “We believe the complaint is without merit and intend to vigorously defend ourselves in this matter.”

Depending on the outcome, Cioffi said, the CAC litigation could alter the ways used-auto lenders operate — or reinforce business as usual.

“That case is going to foretell how concerned lenders, sponsors, servicers and investors will be about their practices,” he said. “A lot of folks are watching.”

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by Ryan Gabrielson

How Columbia Ignored Women, Undermined Prosecutors and Protected a Predator For More Than 20 Years

1 year 9 months ago

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This story includes detailed descriptions of sexual assaults.

Laurie Kanyok was 38, a professional dancer on the cusp of retirement, when she learned she was pregnant. She had already suffered one miscarriage and had recently undergone a spinal treatment that she feared would increase the risk of birth defects. Kanyok booked an appointment with an obstetrician, Robert Hadden of Columbia University. She felt grateful to be in the care of someone who had spent his entire career at such a distinguished institution.

At first, Kanyok liked Hadden, who had a soft-spoken, fatherly way. With his prim, grayish beard and wire-rimmed glasses, he reminded her of “a skinny Santa Claus,” as she later put it. But there was one time when, heels in the stirrups, she thought she felt a flicker of something moist on her vagina. During another appointment, Hadden palpated Kanyok’s cervix with such force that his fingers lifted her from the exam table. She heard him moan.

If you need help, call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800-656-4673 or chat online at online.rainn.org.

Kanyok dismissed Hadden’s strange behavior, focusing on her baby. “You put yourself aside at that point, right?” she says. “You want to see a heartbeat. You want to know that the umbilical cord isn’t wrapped around the neck. And then you want to know that you’re going to get to the finish line, deliver and go home. That’s it.”

Six weeks after giving birth to a daughter, on a Friday in late June 2012, Kanyok returned to Columbia’s suite of offices on East 60th Street for a checkup. She looked idly at her phone as Hadden examined her. He assured her that all looked good, and the nurse chaperoning the exam left the room. Hadden started to follow her out. Then he paused, turned, and told Kanyok that he’d forgotten to check her stitches. He instructed her to lie down again.

Beneath the paper blanket covering her knees, between her legs, the assault this time was unmistakable. Kanyok jolted back and saw Hadden’s face surface, bright red. She froze as he chattered nervously and performed what he told her was a breast exam. She texted her boyfriend. “Dr Hadden just licked my vagina,” she typed. “I’m shaking And freaked out.”

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Kanyok’s boyfriend ran to the street and handed $50 to a black-car driver for the short ride to Hadden’s office. He collected Kanyok and called 911 twice, first on the drive back to their apartment and again once they got inside. He struggled to articulate what had just happened. “How do you even verbalize this horrendous act of an OB-GYN from a super-renowned place like Columbia?” he recalls. He told the 911 operator that his girlfriend’s doctor had “touched her orally.”

Soon, Kanyok and her boyfriend buzzed up two NYPD officers. As the police took their statements, Kanyok’s phone rang. It was Hadden. He left a voicemail, which Kanyok played for the group on speaker.

“Hi Laurie, it’s Dr. Hadden calling,” he said. “It’s like 4:30 on Friday. You know, I just got word that you called the office and you’re upset and you’re calling the police. What — what the heck happened? What’s going on? Please, can we talk? Um. If you can, please just give the office a call and, you know — or come back and talk face-to-face. I, I, I don’t — I don’t understand. I just know that — I just got word from the — first, from the secretary, and then from our office manager and the nurse. So I’m very upset. I don’t know what’s going on. So please, please call me back. All right. Take care.”

Listen to the voice message Hadden left Kanyok while she was giving her statement to the police.

The officers glanced at one another and then at Kanyok. “Fuck him,” she remembers them saying. “Let’s go get this pig.”

Hadden was arrested at his office later on Friday. Mary D’Alton, the head of Columbia’s OB-GYN department, went to the clinic when she heard police were on the scene. Meanwhile, a squad car took Kanyok to St. Luke’s Hospital for a rape-kit examination, then to meet with a prosecutor. She returned home around 11 p.m. After a long shower, she peeked in at her baby. “My daughter’s asleep,” she recalls thinking, “and I am safe. Everybody is safe.

Kanyok didn’t know that Hadden had already been released from custody. On Saturday, police spoke with the department’s administrator, Jeanne Dellicarri. On Monday, Hadden received a hand-delivered letter from Columbia. “Dear Bob,” it began. “I write to inform you of the position of the University and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital with respect to the allegations against you currently being investigated by the New York City Police Department.” The letter said that if Hadden had a chaperone with him while examining patients, and if he complied with all university and hospital policies, he was free “to resume clinical activities.”

The document was signed by Hadden’s immediate supervisor, John Evanko. He CC’d D’Alton; Robert Kelly, then the president of NewYork-Presbyterian, the Columbia-affiliated hospital system in which Hadden was an attending doctor; and Lee Goldman, then the dean of Columbia’s medical school, where Hadden was a member of the faculty.

On Tuesday, Hadden was back in the exam room. Columbia let him continue practicing for another five weeks. Eight patients say he assaulted them in that time.

Columbia University — where Robert Hadden spent his entire medical career — has never fully accounted for its role in allowing a predator to operate unchecked for decades. To date, more than 245 patients have alleged that Hadden abused them, which by itself could make him one of the most prolific sexual assailants in New York history. But the total number of victims may be far higher. On any given day during his two decades of practice at Columbia, Hadden saw 25 to 40 patients. Tens of thousands came under his care. A baby girl he delivered grew up to be a teenager he allegedly assaulted.

Hadden, 65, was sentenced in July to 20 years in federal prison — the result of a long, arduous process that Columbia often undermined. One of the country’s most acclaimed private universities was deeply involved in containing, deflecting and distancing itself from the scandal at every step.

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In agreeing to pay $236.5 million to resolve lawsuits brought by 226 of Hadden’s victims, Columbia admitted no fault, which is in keeping with public statements over the years placing the blame for what happened solely on Hadden. But the university’s own records show that women repeatedly tried to warn Columbia doctors and staff about Hadden. At least twice, the fact that Hadden’s bosses in the OB-GYN department knew of the women’s concerns was acknowledged in writing. They allowed him to continue practicing.

Once Hadden’s crimes became clear, Columbia worked to tamp down the crisis. It waited months to tell his patients that he was no longer working, and then sent matter-of-fact letters that omitted the reason. After police and local prosecutors began to investigate Hadden in 2012, Columbia failed to hand over evidence in its possession, despite subpoenas that compelled it to do so. The university also did not tell the district attorney when more patients came forward — witnesses who could have strengthened the case prosecutors were trying to build. The DA found Columbia’s conduct so concerning that the office launched a criminal investigation into the university itself, along with the affiliated hospital where Hadden had admitting privileges. The inquiry found that Columbia had, by neglecting to place document-retention holds, “intended to destroy” emails written by Hadden and his former colleagues who had left the university. The DA found the records because they were “inadvertently left on an old server.” (Columbia disputes this.)

The local investigation of Hadden ended in a 2016 deal that allowed him to avoid serving a single day in jail. Cyrus Vance Jr., who was DA at the time, says that if Columbia had fully cooperated, it might have made a difference in his office’s decision to accept a plea. “Obviously that did not happen,” Vance says. His former deputy, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, is more direct. Columbia, she says, “didn’t have clean hands here. If they didn’t know, it’s because they chose not to know.” Hadden remained free until his victims began to go public in such numbers that federal investigators took up the case in 2020 and secured his conviction.

The mug shot from Hadden’s 2020 arrest (Courtesy of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York)

In recent decades, several university medical systems have provided cover for abusive doctors whose victim counts run well into the hundreds. Columbia’s failures stand out even in this grim company. Unlike at Michigan State — where Larry Nassar sexually assaulted young gymnasts under the guise of medical care — no Columbia administrators are known to have lost their jobs. Unlike at the University of Michigan — where an athletics department doctor abused mostly male students — Columbia never commissioned an independent investigation into what happened under its roof. Unlike at the University of Southern California — where a staff gynecologist’s abuse led to a billion dollar settlement— Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, did not resign when the enormity of Hadden’s crimes came to light.

Instead, Bollinger retired in June, celebrated by a university that continues to uphold itself as a place where eternal virtues are taught and practiced. The announcement of Bollinger’s successor, Minouche Shafik, noted that her most recent book is “What We Owe Each Other,” “in which she calls for a better social contract to underpin our economic system and challenges institutions and individuals to rethink how we can better support each other to thrive.” Meanwhile, in the Hadden case, Columbia’s pattern of defensive behavior is ongoing. The university still hasn’t informed patients that their former doctor is a convicted sex offender. And Columbia is aggressively fighting new lawsuits from victims, arguing in one case this year that it should not be held liable because Hadden’s actions were “outside the scope of his employment.”

Columbia has long been one of the most powerful and respected institutions in New York. It has a $13 billion endowment, it is one of the city’s largest private landowners and its board of trustees is stacked with titans of finance and government. But the university declined to make any of its leaders available for interviews. In emailed statements, an unnamed spokesperson wrote that Columbia was “profoundly sorry for the pain that Robert Hadden’s patients suffered as a result of his abhorrent misconduct,” before reemphasizing that he “purposely worked to evade oversight and engineer situations in which he would abuse his patients.” The statement continued, “We also deeply regret, based on what we know today, that Hadden saw patients for several weeks following his voided arrest in 2012.”

The disconnect between Columbia’s approach and its stated commitment to “the highest standards of ethical conduct” remains inexplicable to many people involved in the Hadden affair, including Agnifilo.

“I’m struggling for words because it’s actually head-scratching,” she says. “They are the best of the best. How could they put someone back the next day after she went to the police? It makes no sense to me. It would be one thing if they just said, ‘You know what, we talked to her — we didn’t believe her.’ But they didn’t even do that.” She is referring to the fact that Columbia’s internal investigation of Kanyok’s allegations failed to interview Kanyok herself.

We attempted to contact more than 100 of Hadden’s former colleagues. Only one doctor, Jennifer Tam, would speak openly. She is no longer practicing medicine. “I would like to think if I was still at Columbia, I would go on the record, but I could see how the threat of repercussions would keep people from speaking,” she says. She recalls being surprised to learn that Hadden had been arrested — and then thinking about how easily any concerns about him could have been rationalized in the workplace she had known. She says there was an ethos at Columbia of keeping quiet about anything that could reflect poorly on the university. “If there was something that wasn’t perfect, you better not talk about it,” she says. “We don’t want to ruin the reputation.”

“Strolling around Midtown, where I lived then — every time I saw a middle-aged man on the street with a gray beard and gray hair and glasses, I froze. And I still do.” —Laurie Kanyok, patient from 2011 to 2012

There was nothing particularly special about Robert Hadden that would make Columbia want to protect him. He wasn’t a prominent physician with a roster of elite clients. He wasn’t attracting millions of research dollars or in demand on the academic lecture circuit. He was one of dozens of OB-GYNs employed by the university, outwardly unremarkable.

Hadden grew up in Garden City, a suburb on Long Island, in an environment that a federal judge later described as traumatic. His family, the judge said, included a mother who had alcoholism, an absentee father and three siblings with whom Robert “shared a sexual dynamic.” At Skidmore College, in the class of 1980, he tended to shrink into the background. “Somewhat of a phantom,” recalls one of his classmates. Another says it were as if he had a Romulan Cloaking Device from “Star Trek” that allowed him to suddenly appear out of nowhere.

Hadden completed a graduate program in Florida before applying to medical school. Failing to get in anywhere in the U.S., he enrolled instead at St. George’s University in Grenada. He transferred to New York Medical College and, after graduating in 1987, continued his training as a resident physician in obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia.

Then, as now, the university played a leading role in a health care network that was vast and interconnected, from its medical school to Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital (the hospital was later renamed after a merger) to a system of clinics across the city, where doctors in a range of specialties treated thousands of patients. Hadden rose to chief resident of the OB-GYN department at Columbia’s main hospital campus in 1990 and became a member of the medical school faculty. Tam, his former colleague, recalls him as someone who was generally quiet, if slightly awkward. Still, she says, he seemed popular with patients, some of whom traveled from other states because he seemed to offer unusually personal and thorough attention. Hadden’s friendliness also endeared him to his staff. “There was not one person who didn’t love Dr. Hadden,” says Willie Terry, who was then working with Hadden as a medical assistant at Columbia’s clinic in Washington Heights.

One morning, Terry later testified in federal court, she realized she’d forgotten her stethoscope in a room where she had been assisting Hadden. She knocked softly and opened the door. The patient was on the examination table with a sheet over her legs. Terry saw Hadden at the end of the table, one foot on the floor and the other on a step stool. His left hand pressed against the patient’s knee, holding her leg open, while the other hand moved under the sheet in a way Terry knew was not medical. Hadden’s eyes were shut tight. His face was red and turned toward the ceiling. Terry jumped back and shut the door.

“The man that I saw sent shock waves all over my body,” Terry says. “I said, ‘Dear God, what was that?’” She never reported what she saw. She was certain that her word would have little weight against a doctor’s, and she wasn’t the only person who felt that way. A labor and delivery nurse who began working for Columbia in the early 1990s later testified that she saw Hadden move his fingers sexually around the labia of women in labor every time he checked for cervical dilation. “I’ve watched porn and I’ve had sex and it seemed sexual to me,” she said. An attorney pressed her on why she had not blown the whistle. “Historically, there has always been a hierarchy between physicians and nurses, and I felt that I didn’t have a voice,” she said.

Early on, Hadden seemed to target patients who had little context for a normal exam, including women who had never seen an OB-GYN or who were pregnant for the first time. Those who did not realize that a breast exam is not required during every prenatal visit and is properly performed one breast at a time, swiftly, using only the pads of the fingers. Those who did not know that a “scoliosis check” or “mole check” while completely undressed is not standard care.

One such patient, a 16-year-old girl from the Bronx, went to see Hadden in 1992. She was five weeks pregnant and had never seen an OB-GYN. She remembers Hadden conducting a prolonged exam that was “very rough,” and he did not stop even when she told him he was hurting her, according to federal court filings. A week later, her boyfriend’s mother brought her back to the clinic to file a complaint. A receptionist gave her a sticky note with a phone number. After calling several times, the girl finally reached a live voice and said that a doctor in the clinic had made her uncomfortable. She was transferred around and left a few voicemails. “No one seemed to care,” she says. She could never get anyone at Columbia in a position of authority to speak to her directly.

“Even looking at pregnant people was so hard for me. Because I was robbed of all of that joy.” —Adina, patient from 2006 to 2011

Columbia ignored older women with better resources, too. In 1993, Dian Saderup Monson was living in New York, pursuing her doctorate in American literature, when she became pregnant for the second time. She was looking for an obstetrician closer to her home, and a friend recommended “this newish doctor,” she recalls. “People think he’s very personable. He’s very warm.”

On an October morning, Monson went to her first appointment with Hadden, and they proceeded from a get-to-know-you chat in his office to an exam room. Monson knew immediately that the breast check, prolonged and whole-handed, was not normal; she asked Hadden if he’d felt something concerning. She remembers that during both the breast and pelvic exams, the medical assistant turned her back to face the counter as if she had something to do there. But the counter was empty. As soon as Hadden left the room, Monson felt the assistant’s eyes boring into her. “I felt like she was telling me, ‘Don’t come back,’” Monson says. She did not fully process that she had been sexually assaulted until hours later, sitting alone on her sofa. “It was like a revelation,” she says. “I just suddenly knew. I was just sobbing. I understood what had happened.”

Monson and her husband ruled out calling the police. It would be her word against Hadden’s, and he could discredit her simply by saying that a chaperone had been in the room. But Monson realized that there was one thing she could do. She was a writer. If she created a document for Hadden’s personnel file at Columbia, she thought, more evidence would surely follow. “What is their threshold for acting on a complaint against a physician?” she remembers thinking. “Maybe it’s three people, maybe it’s four, but they’ll reach that threshold pretty quickly. And they will get rid of this doctor.”

Still, she dreaded the task and put it off for months. Just a week before her daughter was born, Monson dragged her bulky Hewlett-Packard laptop into her son’s room, sat at his student desk, and typed a letter. She chose impassive clinical language so she would not be dismissed as emotional. “I have never, until being examined by Dr. Hadden, been disturbed by the way a breast or pelvic exam was conducted,” she wrote. She described the sexual ways he touched her in detail. “It is not a pleasant prospect to describe on paper an incident that left me ultimately feeling violated. Despite my long delay in making this complaint, however, I continue to feel that Dr. Hadden’s conduct was improper, indeed, grossly so. I have tried to imagine any of my past or current physicians giving the exam he gave me, and I simply cannot.”

Monson’s husband put two envelopes in the mail. One was addressed to the risk-management department at Columbia, and the second was sent to Harold Fox, the acting head of the OB-GYN department at Columbia-Presbyterian. The risk office never responded. But Monson received a prompt reply from Fox, who said he would investigate and follow up in two weeks. “I was gratified,” she says. “I was like, ‘Hey, get a load of this!’ to my husband. ‘Can you believe this? They’re actually taking it really seriously.’”

This is the extent of the investigation Fox conducted: He asked the medical assistant whether she had seen anything inappropriate. The assistant said no, and Fox let the matter drop. Fox later testified to a grand jury that Sterling Williams, who was then the vice chairman of the OB-GYN department, had agreed that this effort was adequate. Monson never heard anything from Fox again.

Hadden’s assaults continued. A medical assistant who worked with him at the time recalls questioning, along with her colleagues, why Hadden would often direct them to move on to the next patient before he had completed the exam in progress. Even so, after leaving her position, she returned in 1996 to see Hadden as a patient. She says that as she was lying on the examination table, Hadden rubbed his erect penis on her arm. Stunned and shaken, she told a receptionist that Hadden was a pervert. She recalls that the receptionist replied, “I know” and “I’m sorry.”

By 2000, Hadden’s personnel file included a formal write-up for what was vaguely described as “inappropriate use” of a computer. It was signed by Rogerio Lobo, who was then the head of the OB-GYN department. Within Columbia’s bureaucracy, warning signs both subtle and glaring failed to have any effect. In 2004 or 2005, Katia Herman, a 27-year-old yoga instructor, received a referral to see Hadden from her Columbia obstetrician, Katarina Eisinger. At their first appointment, Hadden assaulted her, she says. Herman returned to Eisinger for her care and eventually decided to tell her what had happened.

“I said, ‘You know, Dr. Hadden was really inappropriate with me and made me extremely uncomfortable,’” Herman says. “She looked at me. She kind of waved her hand. And she was like, ‘That’s just Dr. Hadden.’” Herman left the appointment feeling like her concerns had been shut down. “I just remember being like, Wait, what the fuck?” After giving birth, she stopped going to Eisinger and Columbia.

Patients at the Washington Heights hospital where Hadden delivered babies, the Columbia University Irving Medical Center, also tried to complain. Eva Santos Veloz was 18 when Hadden assisted her emergency delivery in 2008. During her 18-hour labor, she recalls, Hadden touched her in ways that made her uncomfortable, sometimes while not wearing gloves. Santos Veloz and her mother complained, but they spoke limited English and couldn’t find anyone who spoke Spanish. After the delivery, they informed a bilingual social worker, who took notes and offered information about postpartum depression. No one ever followed up, Santos Veloz says.

Her mother encouraged her to file another complaint about Hadden with the hospital, but Santos Veloz says she was too scared. Both women were undocumented, and she thought no one would believe them. “For years, honestly, I thought that I was making this up in my head,” she says. “Because at the time that I did try to speak up about it, in the hospital, it was just like, ‘Nothing really happened,’ and I was just overreacting because I was in pain.”

Complaints fell on deaf ears in a myriad of ways. Another former patient, Christina Arethas, tried to tell two of Hadden’s colleagues about him. One was Jennifer Tam, the sole doctor who agreed to an interview. Arethas recalls saying to her that Hadden was “creepy” and that she did not want him to deliver her baby if he was on call when she went into labor. Tam doesn’t remember the conversation; she is devastated that she could have missed warning signs about the doctor. “I feel absolutely terrible knowing what we know now,” she says, beginning to cry. She says she might have assumed Arethas simply didn’t care for Hadden’s personality. “I could never imagine that somebody that I practiced with could be doing this behind closed doors.”

Records show that at the time, Columbia had no clear policy for documenting patient complaints or guidance for faculty about how to handle them. In 2007, Columbia circulated a policy requiring chaperones during exams, but several physicians later told the district attorney that they did not recall ever seeing it. In October 2008, another patient made a complaint against Hadden. An administrator named Brenda Cruz sent multiple emails about it and spoke with John Evanko. (None of the Columbia personnel mentioned here responded to detailed questions.) He was still Hadden’s boss four years later, when he signed the letter authorizing him to immediately return to work after the incident with Laurie Kanyok.

“I kept thinking, I’m not going to mention anything to anybody. Who are they going to believe — a doctor from Columbia or me?” —Rosa Miolan, patient from 1993 to 2012 “A lot of my experience with OB-GYNs was at local clinics in Brooklyn, whereas he was a Columbia doctor. So I felt safe, I felt protected.” —Tsahia Hobson, patient from 2003 to 2012

When the NYPD arrested Hadden in June 2012, Columbia acted swiftly to find him a lawyer. That weekend, Helen Cantwell, an attorney representing the university, called Isabelle Kirshner, a prominent defense counselor who had developed what she calls a “niche practice of men behaving badly.” She agreed to represent him. But even Kirshner was puzzled by Columbia’s stance toward Hadden. “I was a little surprised that they let him go back,” she recalls, letting out a chuckle of disbelief. “I have no idea how that came about.”

On Tuesday, Hadden’s first day back at work, he saw a patient who is identified in court as Victim 53. “I was sexually assaulted by a known sexual offender, known by his peers and all levels of hospital management as a sexual predator, literally just 4 days after he was arrested in his medical office and escorted by police out of the building,” she later wrote in a victim-impact statement. “Robert Hadden was actually permitted to RETURN to his medical office and sexually assault me just FOUR days after being arrested for LICKING a patient’s genitals.”

Over the next several weeks, Kanyok asked friends to call Columbia to check if Hadden was still seeing patients. “I used the words ‘prank call,’ for lack of a better term,” she says. “They told me, ‘I can make an appointment.’ And we would go, ‘Motherfucker …’” In addition to her outrage, she was mystified by Columbia’s passivity — the way it didn’t seem to worry about reputational risk. “Wouldn’t you want to cover your ass?”

Columbia suspended Hadden five weeks after his arrest, when he would not cooperate with an internal investigation. He took a leave of absence in September, and at the end of the year, the university chose not to renew his appointment. Hadden essentially retired, living at home in New Jersey with his wife, Carol, and their son, who has disabilities. He maintained access to his Columbia email address and used it for years.

The university notified patients that Hadden was gone in a mass mailing in April 2013. “Dear Valued Patient,” the letter began. “We regret to inform you that Dr. Robert Hadden has closed his private practice at Columbia University Medical Center.” The letter offered no explanation. It was signed by Katarina Eisinger — the doctor who Katia Herman says dismissed her concerns eight years before. She was now the chief of Columbia’s General Obstetrics and Gynecology division.

Meanwhile, the Manhattan district attorney opened an investigation into Hadden. Laura Millendorf, a prosecutor who had grown up in a family of doctors, volunteered to take the case, appalled by Hadden’s profound breaches of trust. “This was horrific enough that it was worth pushing forward as aggressively as possible,” Millendorf says. She suspected that if Kanyok’s story checked out, there would be more victims. “It didn’t make sense to me that somebody would graduate immediately to licking the vagina of a patient — in that position of power, at that age — from never having done it before,” she says.

The key evidence in the case would be Kanyok’s testimony. “She struck me as somebody who would make an excellent witness,” Millendorf says. “She was poised, smart, well spoken, confident, tough. An incredible memory for detail.” But there was a problem. Police records show that while analysis of Kanyok’s rape kit found genetic material from two males — one of whom, naturally, was her boyfriend — the lab could not determine whether the second sample belonged to Hadden. The DA’s office decided to shelve the case. Millendorf called Kanyok to break the news in early 2013. “The main thing I remember is saying I was sorry,” Millendorf says. “That stands out because it was not the culture at that time to say that kind of thing. The expectation was to be ‘Just the facts, ma’am’ — very stiff and almost cold towards your victims.”

Kanyok replied, “Well, what do we do? He can’t practice medicine.” She thought a civil suit might achieve some measure of justice and serve as a warning for other women. One day, pushing her daughter in a stroller through the Columbus Circle mall, she took a call from an attorney she knew. “He goes, ‘You definitely have a case, but you can’t fight Columbia. You can’t. Just be realistic about what you’re doing.’”

Kanyok, along with a friend who had also been a patient and realized she’d been assaulted, sued the university and Hadden anyway in April 2013. A couple of months later, the New York Daily News published a short item about their lawsuit on the bottom corner of page 10. Some of Hadden’s former patients spotted it and came forward. In July, a longer story appeared, this time with a large photo of Hadden and the headline GYNO IS SICKO.

That morning, a doctoral candidate named Laurie Maldonado boarded a crowded subway car and saw the tabloid. Overcome by panic, she was still fighting to breathe when she left the train. She had been a Hadden patient for nine years, according to civil filings. She recalls that during a dilation check two days before her son was born, in 2011, Hadden had examined her cervix with such force she cried out in agony. “The pain that he inflicted on me was more severe than delivering birth,” she says. “And I gave birth naturally.”

Other women saw the Daily News articles and began to approach the DA’s office. Millendorf phoned Kanyok to say the case was being reopened. “There were numbers now,” Kanyok says. “It wasn’t just me.”

Evelyn Yang was among the new witnesses. She had been seven months pregnant with her first child when, she says, Hadden assaulted her in July 2012, in the window when Columbia allowed him to see patients after his arrest. Yang did not report what happened or even tell her husband, Andrew. She thought that it must have been a onetime incident that had something to do with her. But she immediately found another doctor to deliver her baby.

Yang did not see Columbia’s “Dear Valued Patient” form letter until she was going through a stack of unopened mail months later. “As soon as I read that, I got goose bumps all over my body,” Yang says. “I could feel all the little hairs stand up. The room started to spin. I remember thinking very clearly, Oh my gosh, could it be that he did this to someone else?” She Googled Hadden and found the Daily News articles. The next thing she put into the search bar was “What to do if you’re assaulted by your doctor.”

Among the results was a legal forum. Most of the responses from attorneys were in legalese, but one struck Yang as compassionate. His name was Anthony T. DiPietro, a malpractice lawyer who operated a one-person firm in a shared office. Yang, not even sure what she wanted, called and told him her story.

DiPietro believed her instantly. “What woman would go to an OB-GYN for seven months when she was pregnant with her first child and then just have to leave?” he says. Yang wanted to force more information about Hadden into the open. DiPietro arranged for her to give a statement to the DA and filed a civil suit on her behalf, identifying her only as a Jane Doe. He held a mini press conference in his office and posted about the case on his blog in August 2013, writing, “Columbia and NYP Hospital nurses and staff members have information about Hadden which has been kept secret for decades.”

Lawyers for NewYork-Presbyterian objected vigorously, sending a cease-and-desist letter to take down the blog post and issue a retraction. They threatened to sue for libel and to approach the state bar for professional discipline. In court documents, Hadden’s attorneys characterized DiPietro as overzealous, “engaging in hyperbole and distortion,” and said his “true agenda is publicity for himself.” They also accused him of trying to “single-handedly destroy Dr. Hadden and strip him of any of his rights.” Lawyers representing Columbia professed outrage that DiPietro was “using his unknown client to look for ‘victims’ and ‘witnesses.’”

Columbia also embarked on a campaign to force Yang to reveal her identity. In one filing, university lawyers argued that they were in a worse position than she was: “If the alleged offense is so stigmatizing that plaintiff can be allowed to sue anonymously, does it not follow that merely being accused of having committed the act is as stigmatizing or worse? The accusations alone will cause indelible harm to the hospital and university’s reputation.”

As Millendorf pressed the criminal case, she became convinced that Hadden had abused far more patients than the handful that had come forward. “I slowly came to realize that I was dealing with a sexual abuser of epic proportions,” she says. “I was talking to victims and learning of victims and witnesses that went back to the ’90s. I was just doing the math in my head. And I remember thinking, These are only the ones I know about. I was trying to do calculations in my head like, How many patients does someone see in a day? Even if he only abused 10% of them, what are the sheer numbers of victims here? There were victims of all ages and backgrounds — in clinics for people who had no insurance and also fancy offices on the Upper East Side. They were in every office, every age bracket, every ethnic bracket. I remember just being blown away by the numbers. I distinctly remember that when I started to say those numbers out loud, people looked at me like I was crazy.”

The strongest evidence in the case would be the victims’ testimony. “Most of them had some sort of hook, some sort of specific detail that made their story ring true,” Millendorf says. “The way that they knew that he had just put his mouth on their vagina, the way that they knew that it was a tongue they were feeling. These were awkward things to discuss, difficult things to discuss. But they were all really good at it.” By June 2014, Millendorf had gathered enough evidence to indict. Kanyok, Yang and several others testified to a grand jury. Hadden was charged with five felonies and four misdemeanors involving six women.

“I was a freshman. It was my first exam. It wasn’t till much later that I realized that what he was doing was not normal.” —Crystal Rose, patient in 1994 “Nobody’s going to believe me. They’re going to say, ‘Oh, you’re pregnant, you’re having hormone changes, you have stitches down there.’ I always blamed it on my body.” —Luisa Soler, patient from 1996 to 2007

A successful prosecution would rely in part on Columbia’s cooperation, including complying with demands for documents and alerting the government to important new witnesses. Instead, the university’s conduct helped the case against Hadden to collapse.

Not long after the indictment, in August 2014, a former Hadden patient named Sandra Abramowicz had a panic attack. She was at work in a cardiac research lab — at Columbia, coincidentally. She entered an equipment closet and thought of an exam with Hadden, a memory she had grappled with and tried to put aside: The sense of being frozen while on the exam table, unable to move. She suddenly began gasping for breath. “An incredible feeling that something horrible is going to happen,” she says. “I can’t stop crying. I felt trapped. Very, very trapped.”

Abramowicz began to reevaluate other memories. She had started going to Hadden in 2011, and at her first visit, he offered to perform a full-body mole check, which she declined. During another exam, Hadden offered graphic, unsolicited advice about sex, gesturing at different positions. “I remember looking at the nurse that was there like, ‘How do we stop this going on?’” Abramowicz recalls. “And she just looked down and sort of to the side. And I just felt then like, OK, I’m alone here.” Abramowicz also remembered getting the “Dear Valued Patient” letter about Hadden’s departure and asking another Columbia gynecologist about it. “She very abruptly looked down, avoided my eyes, looked at something on her desk, and said, ‘I don’t know anything about that,’” Abramowicz says. “I thought, That’s weird. Because he was working in the same department. How could you not know why he left?”

After her panic attack, Abramowicz met with a different Columbia doctor and asked if there was any medical explanation for the way Hadden had touched her and spoken to her. It was by now clear to Abramowicz that she had been assaulted. The doctor left the room briefly and returned, saying that physicians in the practice had been instructed where to refer patients with complaints about Hadden. The doctor handed Abramowicz a yellow Post-it note with a name and number.

Columbia knew that the district attorney had an open investigation. But the name on the Post-it was not Laura Millendorf, and the number was not the public hotline that the DA had set up for patients looking to report sexual assaults. It was Patricia Catapano, Columbia’s deputy general counsel, and her direct line.

When Sandy Abramowicz told her doctor that Hadden had assaulted her, she was given the phone number for Patricia Catapano — who was then the deputy general counsel at Columbia — rather than getting contact information for the district attorney’s office that was investigating Hadden. (Courtesy of Sandy Abramowicz) “He was such an expert groomer. I trusted him more than I’ve trusted almost anybody.” —Robyn Bass Lavender, patient from c. 1992 to 2005

Abramowicz tucked the Post-it inside her wallet. “The fact that she said, ‘This is where they’re referring former patients of Dr. Hadden’ told me I’m not the only one. And Columbia knows that I’m not the only one. And then the thing that hits me is — if she represents Columbia and I’m Sandy, whose interests is she representing here?” Abramowicz carried the Post-it for years but never called the number. (Reached by email, Catapano wrote, “I am retired from Columbia and have no interest in responding to this inquiry.”)

Columbia also didn’t alert prosecutors to the existence of other survivors who might have strengthened the criminal case. And it neglected to make a report to the Office of Professional Medical Conduct, the state medical board, as required.

For almost two years after Hadden’s indictment, Millendorf built her case, taking witness testimony and poring over thousands of medical records. But inside the DA’s office, she felt there was an aversion to the case, which was complicated and challenging. Prosecutions of sexual violence were often chosen on the basis of how easy they would be to win. In 2015, Vance passed on prosecuting Harvey Weinstein.

In February 2016, Hadden’s attorney, Kirshner, came to the DA’s office at 1 Hogan Place to put the case to bed. Kirshner knew the department well. She had previously worked as a prosecutor there and was so close to Vance that she’d asked him to preside at her wedding. Meeting with his deputy, Agnifilo, Kirshner agreed to a deal: Hadden would plead guilty to one felony and one misdemeanor, be added to a sex crimes registry, and surrender his medical license. He would serve no time behind bars or even perform community service. The agreement also stipulated that he could not be prosecuted in the future for any similar crimes then known to the DA’s office.

Millendorf, who had not been at the meeting, was directed to tell Hadden’s victims that the deal was a “win.” Devastated by the weakness of the plea, she wrote up talking points for herself — a list she called “Reasons Why Plea Good” — to keep herself on-message as she dialed.

Kanyok was in the middle of holding a ballet audition when she got the call. “I was numb. I was absolutely numb,” she says. “That’s all? That’s all you get?”

Agnifilo thought at the time that the plea was a good one and that the survivors would be happy to be spared the agonies of a trial that might not have turned out the way they wanted. Today she feels differently. “It was just a wrong decision,” she says. “I can’t even make excuses for it. And I don’t even want to try.”

Two years after the plea, in February 2018, Kanyok was tired of fighting. After a grueling day of mediation with Columbia’s lawyers, she agreed to a settlement in her civil suit. She received $475,000 and signed a confidentiality agreement. After the settlement, Kanyok went out for a halfhearted celebratory martini, went home and wept. The next morning, she broke down again, standing in her kitchen.

She pulled herself together, walked her daughter to school and hugged her goodbye. Outside, alone and spent, she collapsed on the sidewalk of Fulton Street. “I can make myself strong when I need to be strong. I can buck up to the best of things,” Kanyok says. “This was a breakdown like I have never in my life experienced. This was worse than Hadden.” When a friend tried to help her up, Kanyok — thinking of the agreement she’d signed — could not say what was wrong.

When Evelyn Yang’s husband, Andrew, announced his presidential campaign in 2017, she was so private she didn’t have any active social media accounts. She remembers the internet trying to figure out her identity. “They would be posting these pictures of him with random women, captioned with my name, and I would laugh, like, ‘Ooh, another decoy!’” One day in 2019, as the campaign was attracting national attention, Yang received a disconcerting piece of mail from Columbia: a subpoena for a deposition by her husband. She thought it must be a mistake. Legally, she was still a Jane Doe; Columbia wasn’t supposed to know her identity yet. “And then I thought, ‘Oh. They’re trying to send me a message — that they know who I am and that they know who my husband is,” Yang says. “It felt like a threat. Like, ‘We know who you are, and be careful, because we can out you.’”

On the campaign trail, Yang had been sharing candid stories about her son’s autism. Voters responded by revealing their own trials. “There’s one letter I got in particular about a woman who stood up to sexual harassment at her job,” Yang says. “I was really moved by her bravery, and I started to reflect on my own #MeToo story.” She began to wrestle with whether to go public about Hadden in hopes that it might help others coping with similar trauma. (Looking back, it isn’t lost on her that the move would also rob Columbia of the power to expose her. “They would never expect that I would do this,” she says, “and that was satisfying.”)

After months of agonizing, Yang contacted Dana Bash, a CNN anchor she’d met on the campaign trail, and gave an interview that aired on the evening of Jan. 16, 2020. More than 2,000 miles away, in Provo, Utah, Dian Monson was propped up in bed, working. Her husband brought up some dinner and suggested they watch the news. He switched on CNN. After a few minutes of watching Yang’s interview, he said that the doctor she was describing sounded a lot like the OB-GYN Monson had seen. She immediately searched the internet to learn more. “I had seen him in 1993, and she was assaulted by him in 2012,” she says. “Where was Columbia during all of that time?”

After Yang aired her story, dozens more Hadden victims began to speak out, and the scale of his crimes caught the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice. Monson’s letters helped to provide evidence of his crimes going back decades. A promising path to conviction lay in charging Hadden with enticement — persuading women to cross state lines to engage in illegal sexual activity. In September 2020, acting U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss announced his indictment at a press conference, calling him a “predator in a white coat.”

Millendorf had quit the Manhattan DA’s office by then. On the day of Hadden’s arraignment, chatting by phone with a former colleague, she learned that the DA had opened a criminal investigation into Columbia’s conduct. The official reason was the volume of new victims coming forward. But, of course, the politics of sexual abuse had undergone a sea change. Prosecuting it was more popular, and enabling it was considered more villainous.

Millendorf was infuriated to discover how much evidence Columbia had failed to turn over — or possibly even lost — during her investigation. The DA found that the university “expended little or no effort to preserve documents” and put in place no record-retention holds until April 2020 — an elementary step when an organization is involved in litigation. The university did not give prosecutors emails from Brenda Cruz documenting the patient complaint in October 2008 and noting that it had been discussed with John Evanko, nor an email exchange in October 2013 about another incident. Columbia also did not turn over critical pieces of Hadden’s personnel file, including his censure for inappropriate computer use and the letter from Harold Fox to Dian Monson.

In a letter to investigators, Helen Cantwell, an attorney for Columbia, acknowledged that they should have produced certain documents in response to subpoenas. But she argued a technicality about the Fox-Monson letter and the computer-use note. Cantwell wrote, “On their face, neither document describes a complaint of patient abuse: one is an internal memo related to alleged inappropriate use of a computer which does not involve a patient in any matter and the other is a letter acknowledging receipt of a patient’s concern, but the nature of the concern is not discernible.”

Cantwell’s letter also outlined steps the university has taken to improve patient safety, including updating its chaperone policy, adding signs in exam rooms, and establishing a hotline and database to track complaints. She also claimed, contrary to evidence, “the University’s overwhelming record of cooperation throughout both investigations.”

No one at Columbia was ever charged with a crime. “I think there was the sense that we could not demonstrate that the conduct was intentionally purposeful,” says Vance, who left office at the end of 2021. He offers an apology for his office’s handling of the original investigation. “I am very sorry for the way our office managed this case and how the survivors felt they were not listened to,” Vance said. “That was unacceptable.”

In December 2021, Columbia agreed to a $71.5 million settlement with 79 patients who had filed civil suits; a second settlement, for $165 million with 147 other victims, came the next October. The university did not accept responsibility or apologize for any dereliction of duty. More litigation could be coming: DiPietro says he plans to file cases on behalf of another 250 patients.

After abusive doctors were discovered at UCLA, USC, Michigan and Michigan State, those universities underwent reviews of systemic failures that allowed the misconduct to persist. Michigan State issued a formal statement of apology for its failures in the Larry Nassar case. Two university administrators faced criminal charges: The case against former president Lou Anna Simon was dismissed, but she resigned her position, and the dean of the school of osteopathic medicine was convicted of a misconduct charge. At Columbia, no administrator above Hadden at the time he was arrested has been fired or disciplined in any way that is known.

In January 2023, Laurie Kanyok sat in the witness box at the Southern District of New York courthouse to testify at Hadden’s trial. A prosecutor asked her what navigating the justice system had been like. “It’s been a long time,” Kanyok said through tears, raking her thick blond hair behind one ear. “My daughter is 10 years old. I called the police when she was 6 weeks old.”

Over the course of the two-week trial, witness after witness told stories of grooming and abuse as Hadden sat next to his state-appointed attorneys. One survivor, an Orthodox Jewish woman using the pseudonym Sara Stein, testified while wearing a headscarf, according to the tradition of married women. A prosecutor asked why she covered her hair that day, even though she was now divorced. “It was a part of my body that he had never seen, my hair,” she said. “And I wanted to keep it that way.”

On Jan. 24, the day of the verdict, a dozen women filed into two wooden benches and gripped each other’s hands. The judge asked the foreperson for the jury’s verdict on the first charge. “Guilty,” she said. The women audibly gasped. After the second “guilty” many began softly crying. Hadden was convicted on all four counts he faced.

There was one more affront to endure. The judge announced that Hadden would be permitted to go home with his wife and son, both of whom have chronic medical conditions, pending another hearing. From the back of the courtroom, one of his former patients, a woman named Adina, rose to her feet: “Could I just say one more thing? He’s a sexual predator and we’re allowing him to go home to two disabled people and care for them? That doesn’t really make sense to me.” Hadden’s wife, Carol, who had attended every day of the trial, turned to face her. “Excuse me,” she said. “I am his wife, and there is no problem.” (Robert and Carol Hadden did not respond to requests for interviews.)

A week later, after hearing statements from survivors, the judge ordered Hadden detained. Eyes wide, he turned to face his wife as U.S. Marshals approached him with handcuffs. Three decades after his assaults began, he spent his first night behind bars on Feb. 1. On July 25, Hadden returned to court for sentencing and received the statutory maximum sentence of 20 years for each of the charges against him, to be served concurrently. Standing at the defense table, facing the judge, between sobs, he said, “I’m very sorry for all of the pain I have caused.”

Some of Hadden’s former patients, including Yang, called legislators to push for the passage of the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law that opened a temporary window for victims of abuse to file civil suits against their abusers, even when a statute of limitations has expired. The window will close on Nov. 23. Because Columbia refuses to notify them, an untold number of Hadden’s patients remain unaware that he has been convicted.

One of them might have been Belkis Hull, a former Hadden patient, if she hadn’t happened to see his mug shot while scrolling Instagram last winter. For more than a decade, she had dismissed her own experiences with Hadden, believing them to be in her head. Learning the truth felt validating, she said. “It’s pathetic and it’s so infuriating,” she said. “How can you trust an institution anymore? An institution that is as prestigious as they were. The only reason I went there was because it was Columbia.”

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“I think his gynecological practice was basically a front for being able to have access to women’s bodies in a medical setting.” —Dian Monson, patient in 1993 “He spent a lot of time with each patient, pretending like he cared. He asked us about our families, which eventually translated into more personal questions.” —Dawn W., patient from 1997 to 2011 “I don’t take care of myself as a woman because it’s just so traumatic for me to go to the doctor.” —Eva Santos Veloz, patient in 2008 “Having worked at Columbia, I knew that they were a powerhouse and that they were going to stand behind their physician.” —Amy, patient from 1999 to 2012 “When Hadden said the things he said to me and did what he did, a part of me was shocked. And another part of me accepted it as normal — what women had to endure from powerful men.” —Christina Arethas, patient from 2003 to 2004 “It’s this weird feeling — like I was sexually assaulted in my sleep — because I was that unaware that it was happening. It is incredibly violating.” —Dayna Solomon, patient from c. 2002 to 2012 “I feel like I was targeted because of my situation — him knowing it was my first visit and that I was queer.” —Elliot Maffei, patient in 2009 “It’s emotional abuse, as well as sexual abuse, when your predator is not scary or seemingly dangerous because your guard is down. You squash your instincts.” —Tobi Pilavin-Weinstein, patient from 1992 to 1994 “I told him it was my first OB-GYN visit. And he says, ‘Oh, that’s great. I’ll make you comfortable.’” —Laurie Maldonado, patient from 2003 to 2012 “The abuse happened at every appointment.” —Wendy Josefsberg, patient from c. 2000 to 2004 “There’s no way Columbia can claim that they didn’t have a hand in him assaulting me.” —Evelyn Yang, patient in 2012 “He is the first person in the whole world who got to touch my children.” —Marissa Hoechstetter, patient from 2009 to 2012 “I immediately started rationalizing it. Something must be wrong with me for being uncomfortable because he’s a doctor.” —Sandy Abramowicz, patient from 2011 to 2012 “I remember staring at him. I’ll never forget — I wanted to say the words, make them come out of my mouth. And I literally couldn’t speak. I couldn’t speak.” —Liz Hall, patient from c. 2002 to 2012 “He did it to me and to my body, but really he did it to us. My husband held my hand while Hadden molested me.” —Belkis Hull, patient from 2005 to 2010 “You have the men in their tower up there saying, ‘We’re just going to let him go back.’ And, ‘Those women are crazy.’ They’re just as guilty.” —Lindsey Powell, patient from 2011 to 2012

Laura Beil is a journalist in Texas who covers health care, and she is a recipient of the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting. She also writes and hosts the podcast “Exposed” about this story.

Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

Design and development by Anna Donlan.

New York Magazine blurred some of the photographs held by Hadden’s former patients to emphasize the survivors.

by Bianca Fortis, ProPublica, and Laura Beil, photography by Hannah Whitaker for New York Magazine

Regulators Blast Union Pacific for Running Unsafe Trains

1 year 9 months ago

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Update, Sept. 12, 2023: Read Union Pacific’s full response to the Federal Railroad Administration, which was released after this story was published.

On Friday, Union Pacific, the nation’s largest freight railroad carrier, received a blistering letter from federal regulators who criticized the company for poorly maintaining its fleet, furloughing workers who perform train maintenance and allowing its managers to pressure inspectors to stop their efforts in order to keep freight moving.

The letter, signed by Federal Railroad Administration head Amit Bose, came after the agency inspected the company’s East Departure Yard in North Platte, Nebraska, this summer and found that more than 70% of the train engines had safety defects, as did 20% of the cars — defect ratios twice the national average. Conditions didn’t improve when inspectors returned and found locomotives with defects still in use. “We haven’t been able to get to them yet,” a Union Pacific director said, according to the letter.

The company “has not displayed a sense of urgency to improve locomotive and car conditions,” the letter said.

The revelation comes as the safety record of the country’s railroad industry is under deep scrutiny. All eyes have been on Norfolk Southern, whose train notoriously derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, in February, releasing toxic pollution and forcing a mass evacuation. But just one month later, Union Pacific had its own accident. A runaway train carrying iron ore reached a reported 118 mph before it derailed in Kelso, California. No one was injured.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has been trying to get the nation’s largest freight rail companies, the so-called Class 1s, to participate in a voluntary safety program in which workers can confidentially report “close calls” like runaway trains and misaligned switches without fear of retribution; NASA would process submissions, as it does for a similar program that governs the aviation industry.

The rail industry has resisted, saying employees could use the system to avoid punishment for their own safety violations. In a slight departure from the other big companies, a spokesperson with Union Pacific said it is more concerned that the system could delay how quickly the company addresses safety problems.

The company, which is the largest railroad in the world, said in a statement that safety is its first priority and that it wouldn’t compromise the safety of its staff. “There is no correlation between recent furloughs and Union Pacific’s ability to address mechanical repairs,” the statement said, adding that the company has appropriate staffing. The statement went on to say that Union Pacific will address the concerns raised in the letter and that it respects the federal inspectors. The company will be sending a formal response.

Labor union leaders said the safety problems flagged at Union Pacific are the natural byproduct of a business model adopted by the train companies called precision scheduled railroading. As ProPublica reported earlier this year, it places an emphasis on efficiency, running heavier, longer trains with leaner staffs and keeping them in constant motion.

“Until these railroads say they are done with PSR, this is what we're going to get,” said Randy Fannon, a national vice president for the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen. “There's no community safe from these defects and dangerous situations. UP will have their East Palestine soon unless they correct these issues and return to a normal maintenance program.”

According to the letter, federal inspectors got numerous calls from Union Pacific managers, including high-ranking company officials, requesting that they leave the yard because they were slowing down business. Under the Trump administration, inspectors might have complied, said Jared Cassity, the alternate national legislative director at the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers, known as SMART. He called the federal letter “absolutely terrifying.”

“It just speaks to the fact that [company-based] inspections are not being done in a meaningful way. And the fact that Union Pacific is furloughing is only doubling down on the status of our equipment and just how dangerous it really is,” Cassity said. “They’re spitting in the face of railroad safety.”

Help ProPublica Report on Railroad Worker Safety

by Topher Sanders

New Mexico AG to Investigate Gallup-McKinley School District for Harsh Discipline of Native American Students

1 year 9 months ago

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

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez is opening an investigation into disproportionately harsh punishment of Native American children by Gallup-McKinley County Schools.

New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica reported in December that Native students are expelled from the state’s public schools at a much higher rate than other children, and that Gallup-McKinley, with the largest Native student population of any public school district in the U.S., is largely responsible.

The district, which includes large swaths of the Navajo Nation in northwestern New Mexico, enrolls a quarter of the state’s Native students but was responsible for at least three-quarters of Native expulsions in the 2016-17 to 2019-20 school years, according to student discipline data. The district’s annual expulsion rate was 4.6 per 1,000 students, at least 10 times as high as the rest of the state during those four school years.

Native Students Face Harsher Punishment Across New Mexico

Native students in New Mexico experience higher annual rates of expulsions and incidents involving police than white students. In Gallup-McKinley, students across the board are punished more harshly than those in the rest of the state, but the large Native student body is still disciplined at higher rates than white students.

ProPublica analysis of New Mexico Public Education Department STARS data. (Joel Jacobs/ProPublica)

After the news outlets published their investigation, superintendent Mike Hyatt disputed those findings, claiming that the district had made an error in how it classified discipline, which drove up expulsion rates. (He said his district had misreported suspensions to the state Public Education Department as expulsions.) But Gallup-McKinley’s rate of student removals from school for 90 days or longer, regardless of what those removals were called, remained far higher than in the rest of the state, the news outlets found.

Gallup-McKinley officials did not respond to questions about Torrez’s intention to investigate the district’s discipline disparities.

The attorney general’s office has traditionally defended public agencies accused of wrongdoing rather than investigating them. Torrez, who took office in January, told New Mexico In Depth he’s dismayed that it’s taken this long for the attorney general’s office to investigate agencies and school districts suspected of violating New Mexicans’ civil rights.

“It’s embarrassing, frankly, when I speak with colleagues from other states who have been doing this work since the 1970s,” Torrez said.

In March, state lawmakers passed a bill that would have enshrined a new Civil Rights Division in the attorney general’s office. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham didn’t sign the bill into law, noting that the agency already had the authority to pursue civil rights cases and that executive agencies can police themselves.

The legislation would have granted the attorney general authority to demand records from public bodies suspected of civil rights violations, which the agency does not have now. Without that authority, his investigators must get public bodies to cooperate and, if they refuse, sue them in court to obtain records — a much longer process.

The governor’s office did not respond to questions about the attorney general’s investigation into school discipline at Gallup-McKinley.

Torrez said that investigation will not be limited to expulsion and suspension rates. It will look at how often the district refers students to law enforcement, among other things.

His office is seeking updated student discipline data from the Public Education Department, but for now it’s examining a dataset the news organizations obtained from the department and published online, along with a detailed description of their data analysis. Martha Pincoffs, the acting communications director for the department, said that it plans to share updated data with Torrez’s office.

Torrez did not say when his office would formally notify Gallup-McKinley of its investigation, and it’s unclear how long the probe will take.

“Our hope is that they will voluntarily change these practices,” he said.

Torrez also wants to take control of the state’s response to a decade-old lawsuit in which a judge ruled that the state had violated the educational rights of Native Americans, English-language learners and disabled and low-income children.

Caroline Sweeney, spokesperson for Lujan Grisham, defended her administration’s work to resolve that suit, known as Yazzie-Martinez, and suggested that Torrez focus on holding local school districts accountable.

The grandmother of one Navajo middle school student whose removals from a Gallup-McKinley school were described in New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica’s story said the investigation was welcome news. (New Mexico In Depth and ProPublica agreed not to name her or use her grandson’s full name due to her fear that he would face retribution in school.)

“I’m not too sure Gallup-McKinley will be honest with them, though,” she said.

Joel Jacobs contributed reporting.

by Bryant Furlow, New Mexico In Depth

Virginia’s Public Universities Have a Long History of Displacing Black Residents

1 year 9 months ago

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

At their annual reunion last month, Deborah Taylor Mapp and her former neighbors shared memories of growing up in the Norfolk, Virginia, neighborhood of Lamberts Point when it was a thriving middle-class Black community.

Over dinner at the Sunset Grill, a local bar that was called Nell’s back in their day, they bragged about how the Lamberts Point teams dominated youth sports in Norfolk. They swapped stories of dancing around the maypole at a school festival and fishing and crabbing in the Elizabeth River.

But memories are all Taylor Mapp has. Houses, schools, grocery stores and churches that she knew are long gone, leveled in the 1960s and ’70s to make room for an expanding college, now the main campus of Old Dominion University. The Lamberts Point community remains, but it’s much diminished. To build the campus, the city of Norfolk took as many as a dozen properties from Taylor Mapp’s extended family, which had been rooted in Lamberts Point since the 1890s. Elderly relatives moved in with family members or went into nursing homes.

”It did break my heart,” said Taylor Mapp, 75, a retired analyst of behavioral health policy for the state of Virginia, who lives in another Norfolk neighborhood. “I would never forget Lamberts Point — ever.”

Last week, the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO and ProPublica documented how a college expansion into a similarly established Black community had happened less than an hour away, in Newport News. There, in the early 1960s, officials chose another Black neighborhood for the site of Christopher Newport College, even though other locations were available, wiping out a growing middle-class community. A Christopher Newport spokesperson acknowledged that “residents of a valuable and well-established neighborhood were displaced,” but maintained that the university has revived the city's economy.

New reporting shows that Christopher Newport College was not alone. In the second half of the 20th century, the establishment and expansion of public universities across Virginia uprooted hundreds of Black families, hindering them from accumulating wealth in the most American way — homeownership. Old Dominion and the University of Virginia — the system’s flagship, founded by Thomas Jefferson — dislodged Black communities, according to contemporary news accounts, the universities’ official histories and former residents. They either acquired properties through legal takings, or families sold them because they faced the prospect of an eminent domain seizure.

A February 1963 notice for a public hearing on a plan to build a college campus in the Lamberts Point neighborhood. (ODU Special Collections & University Archives)

Virginia’s legal and political climate made it easy for local officials to raze and redevelop Black neighborhoods. Federal eminent domain law and U.S. Supreme Court decisions allowed government agencies to forcibly purchase private property for almost any project defined as a public benefit. The federal government increased contributions to local redevelopment projects during the 1960s. Black people lacked the political clout to fight back, as they faced Jim Crow restrictions on voting until 1965, and few were elected or appointed to local governing boards until the 1970s. It wasn’t until 2012 that Virginia voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment reining in the government’s power to take private property.

Displaced Black families often struggled to find housing of equal value, and were pushed into lower-income neighborhoods, said Robert Nelson, American studies professor at the University of Richmond. As a result, along with discriminatory banking practices and zoning policies, eminent domain fostered continuing inequality in homeownership.

Today, white home buyers are more than twice as likely as Black buyers to use the proceeds from another home sale to make a down payment, according to the National Association of Realtors. Black purchasers are three times more apt to dip into retirement savings to buy their home.

“These universities … are doing great things for our communities, for our country,” said Davarian Baldwin, American studies professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut and author of “In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities” (2021). “They are the center of the political economy today. We need to understand that.

“But that prosperity and greatness has come with a profound cost for the host communities where they sit. And we must account for that. We must repair that.”

UVA, the state’s premier institution, set an early example for alienating Black communities.

Designed and founded by Jefferson — U.S. president, slaveholder and author of the Declaration of Independence — the university in the 1890s was unhappy about a section south of campus grounds known as “Canada,” originally settled before the Civil War by free people of color.

Many residents worked for UVA as laborers, custodians and cooks. But university administrators felt the area was filled with “unsightly houses,” according to a 2021 article in a UVA publication about the university and race relations. The university separated itself from the community by erecting a performance hall between them. In the ensuing decades, developers built housing in the neighborhood, with contracts containing racial covenants banning the sale of property to non-white residents.

A June 1962 consultant’s map showing the proposed redevelopment of Vinegar Hill, the Black commercial hub of Charlottesville, Virginia. The neighborhood between the expanding University of Virginia campus and the downtown was razed and now is home to upscale restaurants, theaters and a hotel. (Charlottesville Housing Authority/UVA Special Collections)

In the 1960s, while UVA was doubling its student population and expanding its footprint, the city of Charlottesville used eminent domain to wipe out Vinegar Hill, a hub of Black commerce that sat between the university and the downtown commercial district. Vinegar Hill businesses produced about $1.6 million in income from goods and services annually, according to a 1960 survey.

A view of Vinegar Hill in the early 1960s — before Charlottesville city leaders uprooted the thriving Black community —looking north at the intersection of Main and Ridge streets. (Charlottesville Housing Authority)

Despite the busy cluster of Black businesses, city leaders declared the community neglected and run-down. Before taking a property through eminent domain, cities and housing authorities had to prove part of a neighborhood was blighted — but their evidence could be as scant as a neglected home or business.

Proving blight “wasn't very hard in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s,” said Jonathan Apgar, a retired state circuit court judge and editor of an encyclopedia of major eminent domain cases in the commonwealth. For example, he said, “little mom-and-pop stores that had gone out of business and were vacant” could give a city legal cause to seize a property.

The Charlottesville housing authority didn’t give Black business owners in Vinegar Hill a chance to renovate their shops before declaring the area blighted, a longtime resident was quoted as saying in a 1998 book by two Purdue University professors, “Urban Renewal and the End of Black Culture in Charlottesville, Virginia.”

An undated photo of Vinegar Hill (center) after the city cleared businesses and homes in the 1960s (Charlottesville Housing Authority)

“Some were willing to sell, some were not,” Walter Jones told the book’s authors. “Some fought it in the courts for more money, and then some of them had to go anyway.” Today, what was once Vinegar Hill is a largely white commercial district with an upscale hotel, restaurants and antiques shops.

In the 1970s, UVA’s University Health System acquired properties from Black owners in the Gospel Hill neighborhood to build Jordan Hall, named after the former medical school dean and prominent eugenicist Harvey E. Jordan. The university board of visitors voted to rename it in 2016 for Black medical school alumna Vivian Pinn.

“As the university footprint grows,” said Andrew Kahrl, professor of history at UVA, “the city’s Black population shrinks.”

A UVA spokesperson said the university has launched several initiatives in recent years to address its role in slavery, segregation and the displacement of Black residents.

Former president Teresa Sullivan established two presidential committees, in 2013 and 2018, to research and publish histories of the university's role in slavery and segregation. The first commission focused on the pre-1865 period, while the second has examined “the American academy’s history of both benefitting from and perpetuating” the legacies of slavery, including redlining and racially restrictive zoning.

In 2020, current president Jim Ryan announced a goal of developing up to 1,500 affordable housing units on property owned by the university or its foundation by 2030. UVA will offer low-cost land leases to developers to help subsidize the residential projects, which will be open to residents unaffiliated with the university.

“These important conversations and resources have been in the works for years, and are helping us best serve all who live, work and learn in and around the University,” said university spokesperson Bethanie Glover.

At a Lamberts Point reunion on Aug. 11, 2023, in Norfolk, Virginia, Gale Wright points to a picture of a storefront in her old neighborhood. The annual reunions draw hundreds of former residents from as far away as California. (Louis Hansen/VCIJ at WHRO)

More than 160 miles southeast of Charlottesville, Lamberts Point stretches along the Elizabeth River, sitting just six miles from Norfolk Naval Station, the world’s largest naval base. The neighborhood was a working-class, mostly white neighborhood in the early 20th century. It slowly gained Black residents, and by the late 1950s, it was almost entirely a middle-class Black community with single-family homes, apartment buildings, shops and schools.

Like the city and college officials in Newport News, Norfolk leaders chose to set a college in a vibrant Black community. Old Dominion, which started in 1930 as a branch campus of William and Mary, became independent in 1962.

One February afternoon in 1963, the all-white Norfolk City Council and other city officials met with Lamberts Point residents in a conference room downtown.

They explained that Lamberts Point was about to have a new college dropped into its center. The city and the college planned to raze 21 acres of homes and redevelop another 16 acres of commercial properties and streets, acquiring them through both eminent domain and traditional sales.

Lamberts Point neighborhood on the Elizabeth River in 1964, during the initial expansion of Old Dominion College (ODU Special Collections & University Archives)

Katherine “Tiny” Carter of West 47th Street, close to the heart of the targeted land, approached the microphone. She and her husband, Clyde, owned a three-bedroom home in Lamberts Point.

“I am in the area where you are going to build a building real soon,” Carter began. “I would like to know, just about how much time do I have?”

Housing authority director Lawrence Cox answered: “You don’t have a lot of time.”

“That’s what I want to know,” Carter said.

“Based on the present schedule,” Cox said, according to a transcript, “it would appear as though you only have about three months.”

The Carters and dozens of other families were forced out within a year.

The Carters “loved it out there,” said their nephew Billy Farmer, who used to visit them in the summer and go for rides in Clyde’s Thunderbird convertible.

Inside five years, the city and the college had displaced 156 families and demolished 140 buildings in a 40-acre swath.

By 1967, the U.S. government had spent $1.2 million on the Old Dominion campus, with Norfolk contributing another $600,000.

The Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority distributed pamphlets like this one to Lamberts Point residents being displaced for the expansion of Old Dominion College during the 1960s and 1970s. (ODU Special Collections & University Archives)

At the time, Norfolk officials said in public meetings with property owners that they paid market rate for homes. Today, Taylor Mapp and other former residents dispute this, saying their families did not receive a fair price. The city also gave families $200 — worth about $2,000 today — for relocation costs. Businesses received up to $20,000, equivalent to $200,000 today.

After the first phase of campus construction drove out the Carters and their neighbors, the university continued expanding into Lamberts Point. Residents fought back, sometimes contending that the adjacent affluent white neighborhoods, Larchmont and Edgewater, would make better sites for new development.

Even as the college was expanding, Black families continued to see Lamberts Point as a desirable location. In the mid-1960s, Jennifer Douglas-Pegues moved there with her family into a new, one-story clapboard house with three bedrooms and one bathroom. Her father worked at the naval base and her mother was a homemaker; they had paid $10,200, equivalent to $100,000 today. The yard was big enough for her father to grow beds of roses, tomatoes and greens. Her mother was delighted. “They had accomplished the American dream,” said Douglas-Pegues, a retired airline employee and educator, who is Black.

Old Dominion and the city began eyeing their home in the early 1970s. Threatened with an eminent domain taking, her father accepted a buyout rather than go through a forced eviction, she said.

He bought another home in a predominantly Black neighborhood, Berkley. It later plummeted into one of the poorest sections of Norfolk.

“Eminent domain,” Douglas-Pegues said in a recent interview, “is just a white man’s way of saying, ‘We’re going to take your land.’”

A map from the archives of Lawrence Cox, the former executive director of the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, showing the redevelopment area and deadlines for the expansion of Old Dominion College in Norfolk, Virginia (ODU Special Collections & University Archives)

Today, her old street, West 45th, is the heart of the ODU campus, near academic buildings named after wealthy Virginia donors, as well as the Mills Godwin Life Sciences Building, named after a former governor not known for his sympathy to displaced community residents. When Lamberts Point residents complained to Godwin in 1969 about being pushed out by Old Dominion, Godwin was quoted as responding, “Progress has problems connected with it, and those caught in the path of progress have to suffer for it.” Godwin died in 1999.

Douglas-Pegues said Old Dominion should do more to recognize the sacrifices made by the Black families of Lamberts Point.

“Collateral damage,” she said. “That’s what we were.”

ODU officials said they have long recognized the need to improve relationships with their neighbors in Lamberts Point. In 1991, then-president James V. Koch hired Cecelia Tucker, who is Black, as the university’s first community relations executive.

“ODU had the reputation of being racist — I knew that — but he [Koch] wanted to change all of that,” Tucker told a university publication when she retired in 2022. “And I thought, ‘This is something I could help do.’ I bought into his vision to bring the community together.”

In the past three decades, through community outreach and shifting admissions policies, students of color have increased from 21% to 54% of ODU’s enrollment. The school has also published research documenting the disruption it caused in Lamberts Point, and established an annual scholarship in the name of a former Lamberts Point civic league leader. It posted a plaque on the site of a former elementary school.

The neighborhood association “is included in campus-wide activities and sporting events,” an ODU spokeswoman said.

Last month, hundreds of people came from as far away as California for the three-day Lamberts Point reunion. T-shirts capturing images of bygone churches, schools and grocery stores sold for $25. ODU donated the tables and chairs for the Saturday picnic.

As the party at the Sunset Grill wound down, Taylor Mapp chatted with old Lamberts Point friends and neighbors. She told them she lives several miles away in Broad Creek, an upscale development that is home to some of the city’s Black leaders.

It’s nice, she said. Then she asked them if they remembered how easy it was to pluck the crabs out of the river.

Reach Louis Hansen at louis.hansen@vcij.org or (757) 681-2946.

Gabriel Sandoval contributed research.

by Louis Hansen, Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO

“I Want the Anger to Be Your Anger”: Bringing a ProPublica Investigation From Page to Screen

1 year 9 months ago

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In 2019, I wrote a story for ProPublica, co-published with The New Yorker, about the dispossession of Black landowners in the South. The story looked at the legal obstacles that families face when they pass their land down without a will, a form of ownership known as heirs’ property. Laws and loopholes allow speculators and developers, among others, to acquire the property out from under families, often at below-market rates. Black Americans lost 90% of their farmland between 1910 and 1997, and the heirs’ property system is one of the primary causes.

I focused on the Reels family of North Carolina, chronicling how they had lost their land to developers but refused to leave it. This land was their home, their freedom, their livelihood, their history and their legacy. They believed so deeply in their moral claim to the land that they would not accept a ruling that it no longer belonged to them. Their story of losing heirs’ property is common in the South, but their determination to protest was unlike anything I had seen. Two of the brothers, Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels, ended up spending eight years in a county jail for refusing to obey a court order to stay off the land. Their sister, Mamie Reels, and their niece, Kim Duhon, dedicated their lives to protecting the property and freeing Melvin and Licurtis.

While I was reporting, my editor, Alexandra Zayas, suggested that ProPublica send a videographer to capture the story. For two months, Mayeta Clark filmed while I was investigating. Katie Campbell joined on a few shoots as well. By the time the story was published in July 2019, we had almost 90 hours of footage. We reached out to documentary filmmaker Raoul Peck to see if he might be interested in collaborating on the project. Born in Haiti, Peck has directed documentaries and features about subjects that include Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Republic of Congo, who was murdered with U.S. and Belgian support (“Lumumba: Death of a Prophet”), the rebuilding efforts in post-earthquake Haiti (“Fatal Assistance”) and James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript on race in America (Oscar-nominated “I Am Not Your Negro”). I spent several months working with Peck, and then he went off to shoot and write. When he completed a script, ProPublica reviewed it to ensure its accuracy. The resulting film is “Silver Dollar Road,” co-produced by Velvet Film, ProPublica, JuVee Productions and Amazon MGM Studios. It will premiere this evening at the Toronto International Film Festival and will be released on Prime Video on Oct. 20. I spoke with Peck last week about the film and his process. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Watch the Trailer for “Silver Dollar Road” “Silver Dollar Road” will be released on Prime Video on Oct. 20. (via YouTube) Your most recent films centered around historical figures, like Karl Marx and James Baldwin, and historical forces, like the presumption of white supremacy, and I was curious what it’s like for you to transition to an intimate family story.

The filmmaker I always wanted to be was one who never had a plan. My way of approaching issues or subjects of film is always what, in this moment of my life, seems important, and where can I contribute. I dig into my personal history. Baldwin, Marx, remember, those are stations of my real life. So usually my projects come in a very organic way, and this one did as well.

I was familiar with the topic and, of course, my blood would always boil. But I thought, “OK, there are American filmmakers who are capable of doing this film, I don’t need to immerse myself in it.” Then this came through ProPublica, asking if I would executive produce, and I said, “Of course,” because I thought it was a great story. We had also found a great filmmaker, a young filmmaker, and I thought we could bring him in and allow him to make his second film. Then this filmmaker had to make another project, but by that time, I was deeply involved in it. So I said, “You know what? I need to meet the family.” Once I did, I decided I would direct it. I didn’t look for it, I had many other offers, but I decided to do this one because there was a connection.

When you say there’s a connection, can you talk about that?

Well, some of the cornerstones of what I do are power and abuse of power, history or “denied history,” and injustice. I had this feeling while reading about this family and then seeing the footage that you guys had shot that these were people I knew — that these were situations that I knew, whether through my studies, or in films or history, but also through my own experience in Haiti and Congo.

Initially, you thought you would maybe make a sweeping film about Black land loss and weave the Reels family story in as one element, but then you changed your mind. What drove you to keep this as a family story in the end?

At one point, we had conversations about whether I should bring you into the film. I watched you talking to the family and I felt you were like the daughter of the house, and I didn’t want to lose that — until, you know, I got to a point where I did. There was also your resistance. As a journalist, you wanted to stay a journalist, which I totally respect. You didn’t want to become the subject of your own work. But I’m a filmmaker. My process is to observe, and I try to tell the narrative of my observation.

But then, when I was with the family, the effect of Mamie and Kim, these two women, was clear to me. They were the ones running the show. They were the pivotal people. They were the most courageous. They were the most clear-eyed. They were the most philosophical. Not only is Mamie all those things, but she’s also funny. You could see how much she took on to be the leader. She knew she had to be the joker because she had to take everybody with her. The main characters would be Mamie and Kim, and it was great to have two different generations, two women with different educations and different ways of seeing life. They had to tell the story themselves.

Very often, the studios or networks want a nice, closed-off story, where you tell the story but the subjects still stay on the other side of the fence. Where we are voyeurs, looking at the misery or the happiness or whatever it is of other people, but we don’t feel that they are like us or we are like them. There was no way I was going to go there — take all these moments from this family and sell them. No. My duty as an engaged filmmaker is to make sure that I’m a vehicle bringing these voices to a loudspeaker.

I was thinking back on the first time you and I met — it was before you had met the family — and we talked a lot about private land ownership and the accumulation of wealth and the roots of capitalism. How did those intellectual interests of yours layer into this film, and did they evolve while you were making the film?

In terms of my personal journey, the only one that counts is my journey of making new friends. Kim, Mamie, everybody — I feel they are my family, I feel they are friends. So I would answer your question by saying, the film I try to make is the film that uses my experience and knowledge the way I understand society today, mostly a capitalistic society, and how that society expresses itself in multiple stories. By the way, the story is the same as the one from “I Am Not Your Negro.” It’s the same story about capitalism, racism, colonialism, exploitation, injustice. It’s the same themes again and again. So I felt at home in the sense that this is a continuation of what I’ve been doing.

You say the Reels are your friends. I get asked this question all the time as a journalist when other people see how close I get to subjects. They say, “Well, how do you draw that line between being a journalist and being a friend? Does intimacy ever get in the way of objectivity?” I wonder how you think about those questions.

I’m going to be blunt about this. I grew up with journalists. My first job when I was in university in Berlin was to take photos and do interviews and sell them to newspapers. I’ve seen how the profession has evolved. This desire to be “objective” is a trap. I claim my subjectivity in the sense that I base my films on objective matter, on solid research, empirical material, theory, etc. But then as an artist, I use my subjectivity, and I say what I have to say. That’s the only way to evade the trap. At this point in the debate over truth, I must talk about what I feel and think and be transparent about it.

I wanted to talk a little bit about the style of the film. The film starts quietly. We’re on the land, we’re with the Reels, we’re living in their memories and then the pressure and the drama in their story build gradually. Could you talk me through why you made that choice?

One of my main concerns with this film was how do I avoid the cliches — the cliches of the job as a filmmaker but also the cliches about Black people in the South. How do I give these people power? Because of the algorithms now, the streaming platforms want documentary filmmakers to tell the whole story in the first one to three minutes. But once you do that, you’re basically making a product — you’re not telling a very specific story that can change your mind about even the way you watch films. So if I had gone that way for an opening, it would have been just another terrible story about a Black family in the South. You would maybe see it once and then forget about it.

But I wanted to make a film where you first establish real people, people you want to watch and listen to, people you will remember. So it’s a different type of construction, and I knew that it was the only way to tell the story instead of saying up front that two brothers were in jail for eight years for nothing. If you don’t understand the price, the real toll on the whole family — if you can’t identify with the people — you will just have pity. But I want you to have a connection, and I want the anger to be your anger about the injustice, so it’s felt as an injustice to you too.

I’m curious about your writing process. You went through all our footage, and then you went on shoots of your own. Were you using our footage almost as archival and then building around it?

Exactly that. I think we made the best use of your work, Mayeta’s work and my work. In this case, it was a collective. It’s different, but it’s still my signature.

What makes it your signature?

It’s the themes, but another part of it is the subjectivity. You know, there are things that Mamie says that I would probably analyze differently, because I researched “the other side,” but this is what she thinks and she has the right to say it, because that’s her life, that’s what her experience tells her. So, somehow, I gave her my own personal subjectivity. She is the one taking my place. Usually, my films are more conceptual, and there is a voice-over that I write. But here, it was mostly their interviews that I used as the material of the dramatic narration. It’s not unlike what I did in “I Am Not Your Negro.” I had to come to the same humbled attitude — to say, “No, it’s Baldwin’s film. He is the one talking and I’m just helping.” I’m a maker-translator, but I have to be in the background.

I once heard you say that you’re not an optimist and you’re not a pessimist —

I said I’m a realist.

I wonder how this film fits into that framework for you?

In the film, Mamie says, “What are you going to do with us, poor people?” I can use that phrase in France, in Germany, in the United States, in Congo. That’s a central question. I don’t feel like the film is about the past or what happened over the past eight years. It’s really a confrontation with today.

Actually, Mamie first says, “What are you going to do with Black people?” Then she corrects herself and says, “What are you going to do with us, poor people?” And that’s a class analysis. Those, for me, are great moments, where Mamie is more than Mamie. Those are the moments that will stick. The moments that are provocative. Mamie isn’t reciting. She’s in it. It comes from her.

by Lizzie Presser

He Fled a Traffic Stop in Louisiana. Now He’s in Prison for Life.

1 year 9 months ago

UPDATE, Sept. 8, 2023: The Louisiana Supreme Court ruled in favor of Attorney General Jeff Landry on Friday, declaring unconstitutional a recently passed Louisiana law that empowers district attorneys to revisit and reduce excessive sentences. The ruling reverses that of a district court that had rejected Landry’s challenge and reinstates the life sentence of William Lee, who was convicted of second-degree murder. It was not immediately clear how the ruling would affect Markus Lanieux’s case.

This article was produced for Verite News by Richard A. Webster, who covered Jefferson Parish as part of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in 2021-22. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Markus Lanieux thought his prayers had been answered when, in the summer of 2021, his attorney informed him that she had struck a tentative deal with the Jefferson Parish District Attorney’s Office that would secure his freedom after 12 years in prison.

The 46-year-old son of a sugarcane farmer had been dreaming of this day since he stood in court in stunned silence as the judge sentenced him to life without parole for a crime that ordinarily carried a maximum sentence of two years.

Lanieux, who had been arrested for aggravated flight from an officer, was prosecuted under Louisiana's controversial habitual offender law, sometimes known as a “three strikes and you're out” rule. The statute allows district attorneys to significantly enhance sentences, often by decades, for people with previous felony convictions.

The goal is to protect the public from unrepentant, violent criminals, but critics contend prosecutors have abused the law by targeting Black men. Louisiana’s population is 33% Black, but 79% of those convicted in the state as habitual offenders are Black, according to a report last year from the Public Welfare Foundation, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C.

Lanieux, who is Black, didn’t fit the profile of a violent repeat offender. He had been convicted for two drug possession felonies in the late 1990s, for which he received probation. But those, combined with the flight charge, were enough for prosecutors to apply the habitual offender statute.

"I ain’t never thought a two-year sentence would turn into life,” said Lanieux, who sat for 10 Zoom interviews with Verite News and ProPublica over six months from the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center in St. Gabriel. “They just throw you away for any little thing.”

“They just throw you away for any little thing.”

—Markus Lanieux

As Lanieux started to serve his sentence in 2009, the world outside was beginning to change. Swayed by evidence that mass incarceration was costly and failed to improve public safety, Louisiana passed a series of laws in 2017 designed to reform its criminal justice system.

Four years later, the state Legislature approved another reform bill, one that empowers prosecutors to revisit and reduce sentences that are considered excessive by today’s standards. After it passed, an attorney for Lanieux entered into negotiations with the DA’s office to reduce his sentence and allow him, one day, to walk out of prison.

Lanieux thought his nightmare was finally over. The first thing he wanted to do when he got out, he said, was visit the grave of his mother, who died of COVID-19 at the height of the pandemic.

Lanieux talks about his mother, and about the decision to flee. (Obtained by Verite News)

Watch video ➜

That’s when Louisiana’s attorney general, Jeff Landry, who is considered the front-runner in this fall's gubernatorial election, stepped in, filing a legal challenge to the law.

It is seen as part of a growing backlash across the country against prosecutors who have pushed for an end to mass incarceration. Former President Donald Trump, who has endorsed Landry, vowed to go after “Marxist” district attorneys who he said have allowed U.S. cities to be turned into “hellholes.” Florida governor and presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis echoed his political rival, boasting in August of his efforts to remove local prosecutors he accused of failing to uphold the law.

Landry, a former police officer and sheriff's deputy and an Army veteran who served in Operation Desert Storm, has blasted the 2017 reforms as a “disaster.”

“We have incompetent mayors, and these woke district attorneys want to play a dangerous game of catch and release with criminals,” Landry said last year. “As governor we are just not going to put up with that.”

Landry’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Landry’s case is now before the Louisiana Supreme Court, with a decision expected in the coming months. Even if he loses, defense attorneys fear that his very public opposition to the law, and the likelihood he will win the governorship, will have a chilling effect on resentencing efforts going forward. Many prosecutors across the state have already dropped discussions with defense attorneys and their clients to reduce excessive sentences while Landry’s case is pending, said attorney Nick Trenticosta, who defended the resentencing law before the Supreme Court.

This includes the Jefferson Parish District Attorney’s Office. Shortly after Landry filed his challenge, the DA abandoned all plea deal negotiations, leaving Lanieux, once again, facing a life behind bars.

Learning to Be a “Ghost Child”

Lanieux always loved to drive. His dream, he said, was to one day become a cross-country truck driver.

“To get on the road and go,” he said during a recent video interview from prison.

On the night of Nov. 11, 2008, Lanieux took three hits of ecstasy as he got behind the wheel of his maroon Buick Regal. He was 31 and had spent the majority of his life surrounded by drugs, both using and dealing.

As he cruised through the neighborhoods of Kenner, the largest city in Jefferson Parish, at about 12:30 a.m., he rolled through a stop sign at an intersection in a thinly populated stretch of warehouses that dead-ends at a railroad track. That happened to be where Officer Gregory Smith was positioned. Smith turned on his lights and sirens and pulled up behind the Buick, but Lanieux refused to stop, according to the police report.

Instead, he took off his seat belt and hit the gas.

The intersection in Kenner, Louisiana, where Markus Lanieux ran a stop sign and fled from police (Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica and Verite News)

He weaved through the streets of the residential community, exceeding 95 mph at times as he attempted to lose Smith over the course of the 1.5-mile chase. In his trial testimony, Smith said he became nervous as Lanieux approached an apartment complex where people were known to gather outside late into the night. But Lanieux slowed down as he passed the building, took a right, then hit a dead end.

At that point, he jumped out of the car and tried to escape on foot, but he tripped and Smith arrested him. Lanieux was booked into the Jefferson Parish jail and charged with, among other offenses, aggravated flight from an officer in which human life is endangered, which is a felony and considered a crime of violence in Louisiana. This would prove significant: Given Lanieux’s prior convictions, a crime of violence on his rap sheet allowed prosecutors to secure a life sentence against him as a third-time habitual offender.

Lanieux has repeatedly expressed remorse for his actions that night. “I’m so glad I didn’t hurt nobody running from the police,” he said in one interview earlier this year. “I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if I killed somebody.”

Despite allegations by the district attorney’s office that Lanieux is a violent person, he insisted he is not, a claim his family and friends supported in 10 affidavits provided for the court. They described Lanieux as a kind, quiet person, the glue that held a troubled family together despite his struggles with a significant learning disability.

“He was the one calming us down when we were fighting, telling us to remember that we are a family,” said his sister Cherlyn Lanieux. “Markus took on a lot of responsibility as a young kid.”

When Lanieux was small, the family lived on the former site of the Myrtle Grove Plantation in Plaquemine, a rural town of fewer than 6,000 people just south of Baton Rouge. Their father, Gordon, worked in the sugarcane fields while their mother, Mary, raised the 12 children, six boys and six girls.

Myrtle Grove Plantation, where Lanieux lived with his family growing up (Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica and Verite News)

Lanieux doesn’t remember much about that period, but his older siblings have painted a dark portrait of their family life.

His brother Marvin said it wasn’t uncommon to come home from school to find the electricity and water shut off and their furniture tossed on the sidewalk for failure to pay rent. Their father, he said, would often spend whatever money he made on alcohol and drugs. And when he was high or drunk, he’d turn mean, Marvin said. Gordon, who has passed away, would discipline the children using extension cords and beat their mother nearly every day, leaving her face battered and bones broken. (Multiple family members and friends shared similar accounts.)

Marvin draws a straight line from the trauma of those early years to the siblings’ struggles with mental health and addiction issues, and subsequent stints in prison.

“A lot of us aren’t doing too good in our heads,” Marvin said from his home on the west bank of the Mississippi River, just across from central New Orleans.

Markus’ brother Marvin Lanieux and his wife, Jeanine Domino, have been advocating for his release. (Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica and Verite News)

To survive, Marvin, like the other children, learned how to be a “ghost child,” he said, so quiet and unassuming he wouldn’t draw the attention of their father. Eventually, the abuse became so extreme that their mother left, packing up the children and moving to the Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans.

The peace and stability she long sought, however, never came. One by one, her children were sucked into the streets of their new home. At 12, Markus Lanieux dropped out of school. By 14 he was smoking marijuana, and by 16 he was using and selling cocaine to help support their family.

“I know I was doing wrong selling drugs … but I was trying to make it the best way I know how,” he said. “If I can take that back, man, I’d love to stay in school. But it was hard growing up.”

In September of 1996, Lanieux was arrested for the first time as an adult, at the age of 19. He pleaded guilty to possession with intent to distribute crack cocaine in New Orleans and was given three years’ probation.

Four months later, he was arrested again on the same charge in Jefferson Parish. This time, the police didn’t find him either in possession of drugs or attempting to sell them, according to a report from the Kenner Police Department. Instead, his cousin was found selling crack out of a trailer rented by Lanieux, who wasn’t home at the time.

But since Lanieux’s name was on the lease, he was charged with possession with intent to distribute 16.2 grams of crack cocaine. Lanieux said he pleaded guilty only because he couldn’t afford bail or a lawyer and wanted to get out of jail. And since he was again given three years’ probation, he thought everything was going to be OK.

Eleven years later, those two charges would set the table for a life sentence.

An Impossible Offer

As Lanieux sat in the Jefferson Parish jail awaiting trial, he called his family to let them know he had been arrested. The family had gotten calls like this from him and his siblings before. He told them not to worry or try to bail him out. All he did was run from the cops, he said. He’d serve a few years and be home before they knew it.

The district attorney’s office, however, had other ideas. Prosecutors intended to use his two prior drug possession convictions as leverage to secure a guilty plea, said Lanieux’s attorney Amy Myers, who took him on as a client in 2021. This was not unusual, as Jefferson Parish was known for its strict and unyielding approach to public safety.

Just a few years prior to Lanieux’s arrest, the district attorney’s office attracted national attention when several of its prosecutors wore ties to court emblazoned with images of nooses and the Grim Reaper, and for putting more people on death row than any other parish. To celebrate each lethal injection, assistant district attorneys handed out “plaques decorated with hypodermic needles,” according to a New York TImes story.

The use of the habitual offender statute has also been common practice in Jefferson Parish. As of 2021, Jefferson Parish represented 9.4% of the state population but accounted for 23% of Louisiana prisoners serving sentences as habitual offenders, second only to New Orleans, according to the Public Welfare Foundation report from last year.

The DA’s case file on Lanieux, which might have provided insight into the office’s thinking and strategy at the time, has been destroyed in accordance with its records retention policy. But the district attorney’s office did provide a statement in which it explained that prosecutors approached Lanieux’s court-appointed trial attorney, Calvin Fleming, with an offer: If his client pleaded guilty, they would try him as a two-time habitual offender and seek between 10 and 15 years. Myers said that offer also came with an implied threat: If he rejected the offer, they could charge him as a third-time offender, which came with a mandatory sentence of life without parole.

Lanieux’s lawyer Amy Myers (Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica and Verite News)

Lanieux said he didn’t know any of this at the time.

“I ain’t know nothing about the law,” Lanieux said. “The lawyer wouldn’t really guide me the right way.” (In a motion he later filed seeking to have his sentence vacated, he claimed Fleming failed to effectively communicate the DA’s plea offer during the critical stages of the proceedings, and then allowed it to expire. Lanieux failed to meet a filing deadline for the motion, which was then denied by a district court judge.)

All Lanieux understood, he said, was that the DA wanted him to plead guilty and serve 15 years for a crime that carried a maximum sentence of two. Not only didn’t the proposal make sense, Lanieux said, it was an offer he couldn’t accept. His mother was severely ill, struggling with cancer, among other diseases. He feared if he took the 15 years, she would die before his release. That wasn’t a risk he was willing to take.

Unlike the vast majority of defendants who are offered similar deals, Lanieux rejected the DA’s offer and took his chances at trial.

Efforts to contact Fleming by phone and email and through social media were unsuccessful.

At first, the gamble appeared to pay off. A jury found Lanieux guilty, after which the court sentenced him to two years. He was satisfied with the sentence and prepared to serve his time. But that third conviction allowed prosecutors to apply the habitual offender rule, and they immediately announced their intention to do so. Two months into his sentence, Lanieux said, he was taken from his cell at the Lasalle Correctional Center, four hours away in northern Louisiana, and shipped back to the 24th Judicial District Court in Jefferson Parish where he was originally sentenced.

The July 10 hearing took no more than 30 minutes, Lanieux said. His attorney didn’t call any of his family members to speak to his character, the impact of his troubled childhood or his struggles with addiction, which might have persuaded the judge to lessen his sentence.

Before Lanieux could grasp what was happening, the court tossed out the original two-year sentence and gave him life without parole.

The district attorney’s office, in its emailed statement, contradicted the family’s assertion that Lanieux was not violent. In fact, the statement said, it was his “violent criminal history” that factored into its decision to “file a triple bill that resulted in his receiving life in prison.”

The same year Lanieux was arrested for running from the police, he was picked up on an aggravated-battery charge after being accused of beating a man with a baseball bat. Lanieux denied any involvement and described the victim, who has since passed away, as a close friend. The DA did not pursue that case, a decision prosecutors said they made because they had already secured a life sentence against Lanieux.

The other offenses alluded to by the DA included two misdemeanor simple-battery citations in 2000, one of which was dismissed and the other Lanieux pleaded guilty to, and an arrest three years later for aggravated battery and second-degree kidnapping. The alleged victim in each case was Sheletha LeBranch, the mother of Lanieux’s two children.

LeBranch said she doesn’t remember either simple-battery incident. As for the third, in which prosecutors claim Lanieux hit her with a car and then drove off with their child and “a child she had with another man,” she said it never happened, that Lanieux didn’t hit her or attempt to kidnap the children. Further, she told the DA she didn’t want to press charges.

The district attorney didn’t charge Lanieux with kidnapping and eventually dropped the aggravated-battery charge.

In November 2021, LeBranch provided an affidavit to Lanieux’s attorney, which was also given to the DA, in which she described Lanieux as a “good man and a good father. Markus helped everybody. He is the heart of the family.”

When asked in a recent interview if she wants Lanieux released from prison, LeBranch said, “Most definitely.”

“It Felt Like a Done Deal”

Lanieux spent most of the next 13 years at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, otherwise known as Angola, where the vast majority of lifers serve their time. He worked in the fields of the old slave plantation, picking tomatoes and okra and shucking corn as guards on horseback watched over him. The first time he was thrown into segregation, he said, was for eating a strawberry without permission.

The Department of Corrections said its records indicate that Lanieux was written up for disciplinary infractions on 10 occasions during his 14 years of incarceration, but none that refer to “eating a strawberry without permission.”

The prison, infamous for its wanton violence, lived up to that reputation, Lanieux said. He said he saw stabbings nearly every week, and drugs, including methamphetamine, were everywhere. All it would take was one look at the wrong guy on the wrong drug, and your life could be over, Lanieux said.

Lanieux said he tried to keep to himself as much as possible, like he and his siblings did as children. Slowly, he recalled, he adapted to the rhythm of life within the facility. The years crawled by until, eventually, time came to a standstill.

But during the first decade of his incarceration, the tough-on-crime approach of the 1980s and ’90s that resulted in his life sentence was falling out of favor.

In 2017, the Louisiana Legislature passed a package of 10 prison reform bills. In part it hoped to rein in costs: Incarcerating a person in Louisiana under the age of 50, for example, costs at least $24,615 per year, according to the Department of Corrections. For people over 50, the annual cost triples.

And in part those reforms were addressing the general consensus that the state’s approach to incarceration was not working. Along with Massachusetts, Louisiana has the highest percentage of people in its prisons serving life without the possibility of parole: 14%, according to a 2021 report by the Sentencing Project. Of those, 73% in Louisiana are Black, compared with the national average of 57%.

Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, said at the time that he was signing the bills “because a broken justice system leads to more crime, not less. Today we begin building the system we want rather than continue to settle for the system we have."

If Lanieux had been convicted under the new rules, the most he could be sentenced to is four years, Myers said. None of these reforms, however, were made retroactive. So he continued to languish in prison.

Lanieux’s sister in-law Jeanine Domino was feeling desperate. With nowhere to turn, she wrote to Edwards, pleading with him to grant Lanieux a pardon. She told the governor she was worried about Lanieux’s daughter Markesha and son Markus Jr. growing up without a father, and also about his mother, whose health was declining.

Lanieux’s family worried about his two kids, including Markesha (above), growing up without a father. Markesha believes she was 8 years old when she last saw her father as a free man. “I lost hope as the years went on,” she said. (Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica and Verite News)

“Even though no one but GOD can determine her life span, my desire is that he is released to spend some quality time with her,” Domino wrote.

It was a futile effort. Under state law, under most circumstances, prisoners sentenced to life have to serve at least 15 years before they can be considered for a reduction of their sentence. Lanieux had only been in prison for 11 years.

Edwards didn’t respond to the letter. About two months later, Lanieux’s mother died from COVID-19. Her death, he said, was the lowest point of his time in prison.

First image: A photograph of Lanieux, center, with his daughter Markesha and his mother, Mary, during a prison visit at the start of the pandemic. This was the last time Lanieux saw his mother before she died of COVID. Second image: The grave of Mary Lanieux is just across the road from Myrtle Grove Plantation. (Kathleen Flynn, special to ProPublica and Verite News)

“I still break down from losing my moma,” Lanieux wrote to Myers recently. “I have never thought about sucide before. But it has been tImes when I have ask my father to take me away from the world and all the struggle I have been thru.”

Around the country, though, new reforms have targeted habitual offender statutes — reforms that could help people like Lanieux. California passed the first of these prosecutor-initiated resentencing laws in 2019, followed by Washington, Oregon, Illinois and Minnesota.

According to For the People, an Oakland, California-based criminal justice reform group that has led the charge in promoting these laws, some 800 people across the country have had their sentences reduced since states began adopting them.

In Louisiana, the Innocence Project New Orleans and the Jefferson Parish District Attorney’s Office also proposed a resentencing law for the state. Jee Park, executive director of the Innocence Project New Orleans, said the group worked hand in hand with Steve Wimberly, who at the time headed the DA’s conviction integrity unit. She recalled him saying that mistakes might have been made in some of these old cases by judges, prosecutors or witnesses, and it was up to them to rectify those mistakes when appropriate.

Wimberly, who has since retired, declined to comment on Lanieux’s case or the resentencing law, which lawmakers unanimously passed in May 2021. The reform even had the support of the Louisiana District Attorneys Association, a powerful lobbying group that typically pushes back against any legislation seen as soft on crime. It too declined to comment.

Less than a month after the law was enacted, Myers called Wimberly, asking if the district attorney might consider a reduction in Lanieux’s sentence. They met on Aug. 26, 2021, and talked for almost two hours, discussing Lanieux’s troubled upbringing and the fact that when he rejected the plea offer, he hadn’t understood the consequences of a guilty verdict at trial.

Myers also put his continued confinement in stark financial terms.

“If Mr. Lanieux lives to be just 60 years old, releasing him now could save the state more than $393,849.60,” she remembered saying. Lanieux was 44 at the time.

But mostly, she focused on the extreme nature of his sentence given the crimes for which he was convicted.

Myers said she came out of the meeting thinking there was a real possibility that Lanieux’s sentence would be reduced. Over the course of their negotiations, which lasted 10 months, Myers said Wimberly told her Lanieux’s case was at the “top of their list.”

“He thought the outcome was a harsh one and he saw Markus’ life sentence as deserving of reconsideration,” Myers said.

On Jan. 19, 2022, Myers drafted a proposed plea deal and sent it to Wimberly, who said he would take it to DA Paul Connick to discuss the possibility of a new sentence.

“I was absolutely hopeful, and at that time, it didn’t even feel like hope, it felt like a done deal,” she said.

Facing a “Really Dark Period”

It wasn’t. Lanieux’s deal would soon fall apart due to an eight-page legal filing in a different case in another parish, where Louisiana’s attorney general, preparing to run for governor on a public safety platform, saw an opportunity to push back against the state’s new sentencing reforms.

In October 2021, prosecutors in St. Tammany Parish — about an hour away from the Jefferson Parish courthouse — had worked out an agreement under the resentencing law with William Lee, who was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life for the 2003 death of Audra Bland. At trial, Lee claimed that Bland died from a fall while drunk. By 2022, he had new evidence that could bolster that claim: An analysis of her brain showed evidence that Bland had multiple sclerosis.

St. Tammany prosecutors were ready to give Lee a deal. Warren Montgomery, the district attorney for St. Tammany and Washington parishes, agreed to reduce Lee’s conviction to manslaughter and his life sentence to 35 years. Montgomery cited the new law.

But in March 2022, Landry intervened in the case. In his motion to vacate, Landry claimed the resentencing law encroached on and subverted the clemency powers of the governor.

As a result, Landry contends, the new law is unconstitutional and must be struck down.

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry has intervened in a case that empowers prosecutors to revisit and reduce sentences. (Tom Williams, CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images)

And with that, the Jefferson Parish DA dropped negotiations to reduce Lanieux’s sentence, telling Myers that the office wouldn’t take any further action as long as the attorney general’s challenge was pending.

“I think a lot of people would look at this and think he has certainly paid his debt,” said John Maki, director of the Task Force on Long Sentences for the Council on Criminal Justice, a bipartisan working group based in Washington, D.C. “A case like this is precisely what is leading states across the country to rethink these long sentences.”

In an emailed statement, the district attorney’s office said that “no decisions were made” regarding a potential reduction in Lanieux’s sentence and that it would continue to review such requests on a case-by-case basis if Landry’s challenge is rejected.

Emily Maw, chief of the Civil Rights Division with the Orleans Parish District Attorney, said the fate of people such as Lanieux should not be intertwined with the fate of Louisiana’s new resentencing law. For generations, prosecutors throughout Louisiana have revisited and reduced sentences with the knowledge of the victims and approval of the courts. Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams has done so in more than 300 cases by, in part, having the defendant plead to a lesser offense or removing the habitual offender enhancement altogether.

The new law simply formalized an age-old practice, she said, which should continue regardless of the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Landry’s challenge to the resentencing law was rejected last year by a district judge, who found that it did not violate the separation of powers. Landry appealed his decision to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in May and is expected to issue a ruling this fall.

There were others serving long sentences also affected by Landry’s challenge. Colin Reingold and Erica Navalance with the Promise of Justice Initiative were also in preliminary negotiations with Wimberly to reduce the sentence of their client, a diagnosed schizophrenic who had been arrested in 2005 for stealing an empty wallet and a watch. The man, Marvin Robinson, was found guilty of simple burglary and sentenced to 11 years. Because he had two priors — armed robbery in 1985 and first-degree robbery in 1996 — he was resentenced as a third-time habitual offender and given life without parole.

“A case like this is precisely what is leading states across the country to rethink these long sentences.”

—John Maki, director of the Task Force on Long Sentences for the Council on Criminal Justice

Like Lanieux, Robinson was represented at trial by Fleming, whom he also accused of providing ineffective assistance of counsel. Lower courts denied the claim, which is now being appealed to the Louisiana Supreme Court.

Five years into Robinson’s sentence, his only son died. He was allowed to attend the funeral in handcuffs and shackles. Since Robinson was unable to lift his hands, Navalance said, family members had to wipe the tears from his eyes.

Upon Landry’s challenge, the Jefferson Parish District Attorney’s Office ended discussions to reduce Robinson’s sentence as well, his attorneys said. The DA said those discussions “concluded independent of the AG’s challenge.”

“I've been lulled into this idea that Louisiana is turning the corner on second chances,” said Marcus Kondkar, associate professor and chair of the department of sociology at Loyola University, who has produced extensive studies on those serving life terms. “But I think we may be about to enter a really dark period with the departure of Gov. Edwards from office.”

“I’ve Lost a Lot”

After the Jefferson Parish District Attorney’s Office dropped negotiations to reduce Lanieux’s sentence in the summer of 2022, his life began to unravel even more.

In September of that same year, his sister Lakeisha died at the age of 39 from unknown causes. Two months later, his brother Reginald, who is serving a 10-year sentence, was placed on suicide watch at Elayn Hunt Correctional Center, just a few miles from Plaquemine, where he grew up.

Terrified of losing yet another sibling, Lanieux requested and was granted a transfer from Angola to Hunt. “He’s the baby boy. I’m trying to help him get by,” he said of his brother.

Lanieux discussing dangers inside the prison (Obtained by Verite News)

Watch video ➜

Lanieux learned in February that Reginald had attempted to kill himself. Another inmate told him he had “cut himself all up.” It was all too much to take. The death of his mother more than two years earlier, followed by his sister, and now his brother’s attempted suicide, on top of a life sentence that seemed unlikely to change.

In a moment of weakness, Lanieux said, he grabbed for the only escape he could find, ending years of sobriety. A prison guard found him in his cell “rocking back and forth, and falling out of his bed not able to speak,” according to his disciplinary report. When the guards attempted to restrain Lanieux, they said, he kicked and hit them.

Lanieux was sentenced to 90 days in segregation. The conditions he described were harsh. He said he went without a blanket, bath towel or deodorant for weeks. He also said he was only allowed out of his cell for a few minutes a day to take a shower and had access to the phone sporadically. At one point, he said, his toilet clogged and raw sewage filled his cell. The prison staff didn’t give him bleach or anything to clean it up.

Lanieux talks about being confined to his cell, losing phone call privileges and other conditions in the prison. (Obtained by Verite News)

Watch video ➜

Worse, he said, was that the other inmates had figured out how to get out of their handcuffs, increasing the threat of violence.

“I ain’t never thought this place would be like this,” he said in an interview. “If anything happened to me, I want y’all to know.”

The Department of Corrections said there is “nothing in his disciplinary report” that indicates that staff removed blankets, towels or deodorant. It also said the report doesn’t indicate “any issue with plumbing. However, if a toilet malfunctions and overflows, it is immediately cleaned up.”

Throughout the 10 interviews with Verite News and ProPublica, Lanieux was courteous and calm, never raising his voice or becoming outwardly angry when discussing his case. He smiled and laughed often.

There were times, though — such as when he flashed back to that moment in court when the judge announced his life sentence — that despair took over. During these moments, his voice fell to just above a whisper, his speech slowed to a drawl, and he would often trail off before finishing his thought.

“I’ve lost a lot,” he said. “Not being able to see my kids growing up. I missed their whole life.”

After serving 76 days in the prison’s disciplinary wing, including 58 in segregation, Lanieux was placed back into the general population. When he sat for the last interview on Aug. 17, he appeared tired and depressed.

“Something gotta be done,” he said. “Something gotta be done.”

After about an hour, a prison guard knocked on the door to let Lanieux know it was time to go back to his cell.

“Time go by fast,” he said softly. “Time to go.”

He stood up, said thank you, and then the feed went dark.

by Richard A. Webster, Verite News

Eight Things You Need to Know About the Navy’s Failed Multibillion-Dollar Littoral Combat Ship Program

1 year 9 months ago

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Get a behind-the-scenes look at the investigation in an Instagram Live conversation on September 12. Follow us at @propublica for updates.

Here are eight takeaways from ProPublica’s report on the Navy’s littoral combat ship program, which has cost taxpayers billions but failed to deliver on its promise.

1. Navy officials vastly underestimated the costs to build the ship in estimates provided to Congress. The original price tag more than doubled.

Contractors were supposed to build the ships fast, in large numbers and at an original cost of $220 million each — cheap for a Navy vessel. The ships were based in part on designs for commercial car or passenger ferries. As the Navy began to apply tougher standards, costs soared.

2. The ships were supposed to be equipped with interchangeable weapons systems to allow them to fight, hunt submarines and detect mines. The Navy failed to make this happen.

Former officers said that the Navy’s haste to deliver the ships took precedence over the vessels’ combat abilities. After spending hundreds of millions, the Navy abandoned its plan to outfit the ships to find and destroy submarines; the system to hunt undersea mines is still under development. Without functioning weapons systems, one former officer said, the ship was only a “box floating in the ocean.” In response to questions, the Navy acknowledged the LCS was not suitable for fighting peer competitors such as China. The LCS “does not provide the lethality or survivability needed in a high-end fight.”

3. Scores of sailors and officers spent more time trying to fix the ships than sailing them.

Because the crews were so small, only the most elite officers and sailors were meant to sail the ships. But breakdowns meant that the ships often spent more time in port than at sea. Some sailors sought mental health assistance because of the challenges. The LCS program became known as a place where naval careers went to die. Over time, the Navy increased crew sizes on the LCS.

4. The Navy relied so heavily on contractors for maintenance and repair that sailors and officers were unable to fix their own ships.

Sailors and officers were not allowed to touch certain pieces of equipment because of complicated arrangements with Navy contractors. Cumbersome negotiations meant it could sometimes take weeks to get contractors on board. “An average week would consist of 90 to 100 hours in port doing, honestly, nothing,” one former officer said of his time. The Navy has recently increased the amount of maintenance performed by sailors.

5. A string of high-profile breakdowns at sea beginning in late 2015 laid bare the limits of the ships and their crews.

In late 2015, the USS Milwaukee broke down en route to its home port, the equivalent of a brand new car stalling on its way out of the dealership. In January 2016, the USS Fort Worth broke down when a crew of exhausted sailors failed to execute a routine procedure, costing the Navy millions in repairs. Months later, the USS Freedom saw its engine destroyed by a seawater leak. Then the USS Coronado had trouble with its water jets, followed by the USS Montgomery, which collided with a tugboat, then cracked its hull after striking a lock in the Panama Canal. Each incident added fresh embarrassment to a program meant to propel the Navy into a more technologically advanced future.

6. Top Navy commanders pressured subordinates to sail even when the crews and ships were not fully prepared to go to sea.

On the Freedom, sailors and officers understood that they had a “no fail mission” with “‘no appetite’ to remain in port.” Even though one engine was contaminated, the ship’s commander took it to sea. Afterward, the ship needed repairs that took two years to complete and cost millions. On the Fort Worth, one sailor complained that there was “no break, no reprieve, just increasing daily tasking.”

7. One Navy secretary and his allies in Congress fought to build more of the ships even as they broke down at sea and their weapons systems failed. The Navy wound up with more ships than it wanted, at an estimated lifetime cost of $100 billion.

Time and again, senior officers voiced their concerns about the ineffectiveness of the ships, yet members of Congress, the Pentagon and Navy leaders advocated for them anyway. In some cases, officers assigned to review the ships’ performance saw their careers derailed after sharing their unvarnished, critical findings.

Former Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said the Navy took the breakdowns seriously, “but it did not seem, from what we were looking at, that it was a systemic problem.”

8. Lawmakers with shipyards in their districts played a key role in expanding the program and protecting it from scrutiny.

When the Navy decided to issue contracts to build 20 littoral combat ships in two states in 2010, it encountered stiff resistance from the then-ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, John McCain, a Republican. But Sen. Richard Shelby, a Republican representing Alabama, where some of the ships were being built, slipped in an amendment that would allow the Navy to do so in a last-minute budget bill. “He made sure it happened,” a Shelby spokesman said at the time. Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, who was initially skeptical of the ships, supported the proposal. He said the plan to build 10 vessels at a shipyard in neighboring Wisconsin would provide “a major boost for the region’s economy.” Even after the Navy finally determined that it only needed 32 of the ships, Congress managed to fund three more.

Kristen Berg, Mollie Simon and Joshua Kaplan contributed research.

by Joaquin Sapien

The Inside Story of How the Navy Spent Billions on the “Little Crappy Ship”

1 year 9 months ago

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

Get a behind-the-scenes look at the investigation in an Instagram Live conversation on September 12. Follow us at @propublica for updates.

Key Takeaways

  • One Navy secretary and his allies in Congress fought to build more littoral combat ships even as they broke down at sea and their weapons systems failed. The Navy wound up with more ships than it wanted, at an estimated lifetime cost that could reach $100 billion or more.

  • The Navy’s haste to deliver ships took precedence over combat ability. Without functioning weapons systems the vessels are like a “box floating in the ocean,” one former officer said.

  • Sailors and officers complained they spent more time fixing the ships than sailing them. The stress led many to seek mental health care.

  • Top Navy commanders placed pressure on subordinates to sail the ships even when the crews and vessels were not fully prepared to go to sea.

  • Several major breakdowns in 2016 exposed the limits of the ships and their crews, each adding fresh embarrassment to a program meant to propel the Navy into a more technologically advanced future.

In July 2016, warships from more than two dozen nations gathered off the coasts of Hawaii and Southern California to join the United States in the world’s largest naval exercise. The United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea and others sent hundreds of destroyers, aircraft carriers and warplanes. They streamed in long lines across the ocean, symbols of power and prestige.

The USS Freedom had its own special place within the armada. It was one of a new class of vessels known as littoral combat ships. The U.S. Navy had billed them as technical marvels — small, fast and light, able to combat enemies at sea, hunt mines and sink submarines.

In reality, the LCS was well on the way to becoming one of the worst boondoggles in the military’s long history of buying overpriced and underperforming weapons systems. Two of the $500 million ships had suffered embarrassing breakdowns in previous months. The Freedom’s performance during the exercise, showing off its ability to destroy underwater mines, was meant to rejuvenate the ships’ record on the world stage. The ship was historically important too; it was the first LCS built, the first in the water, commissioned just eight years prior.

But like the LCS program’s reputation, the Freedom was in bad shape. Dozens of pieces of equipment on board were undergoing repairs. Training crews for the new class of ships had proven more difficult than anticipated. The sailors aboard the Freedom had not passed an exam demonstrating their ability to operate some of the ship’s most important systems.

As the day to launch approached, the pressure mounted. Top officers visited the ship repeatedly. The Freedom’s sailors understood that theirs was a “no fail mission” with “‘no appetite’ to remain in port,” according to Navy documents obtained by ProPublica.

The Freedom’s Capt. Michael Wohnhaas consulted with his officers. Despite crippling problems that had left one of the ship’s engines inoperable, he and his superiors decided the vessel could rely on its three others for the exercise.

Michael Wohnhaas was captain of the USS Freedom. Crew members understood that theirs was a “no fail mission” with “‘no appetite’ to remain in port,” according to Navy documents obtained by ProPublica. (Zachary Bell/U.S. Navy)

The Freedom completed its mission, but the accomplishment proved hollow. Five days after the ship returned to port, a maintenance check revealed that the faltering engine had suffered “galloping corrosion” from saltwater during the exercise. A sailor described the engine room as “a horror show” with rust eating away at the machinery. One of the Navy’s newest ships would spend the next two years undergoing repairs at a cost of millions.

It took investigators months to unravel the mystery of the engine’s breakdown. But this much was clear at the outset: The Freedom’s collapse was another unmistakable sign that the Navy had spent billions of dollars and more than a decade on warships with rampant and crippling flaws.

The ongoing problems with the LCS have been well documented for years, in news articles, government reports and congressional hearings. Each ship ultimately cost more than twice the original estimate. Worse, they were hobbled by an array of mechanical failures and were never able to carry out the missions envisaged by their champions.

ProPublica set out to trace how ships with such obvious shortcomings received support from Navy leadership for nearly two decades. We reviewed thousands of pages of public records and tracked down naval and shipbuilding insiders involved at every stage of construction.

Our examination revealed new details on why the LCS never delivered on its promises. Top Navy leaders repeatedly dismissed or ignored warnings about the ships’ flaws. One Navy secretary and his allies in Congress fought to build more of the ships even as they broke down at sea and their weapons systems failed. Staunch advocates in the Navy circumvented checks meant to ensure that ships that cost billions can do what they are supposed to do.

Contractors who stood to profit spent millions lobbying Congress, whose members, in turn, fought to build more ships in their home districts than the Navy wanted. Scores of frustrated sailors recall spending more time fixing the ships than sailing them.

Our findings echo the conclusions of a half-century of internal and external critiques of America’s process for building new weapons systems. The saga of the LCS is a vivid illustration of how Congress, the Pentagon and defense contractors can work in concert — and often against the good of the taxpayers and America’s security — to spawn what President Dwight D. Eisenhower described in his farewell address as the “military industrial complex.”

“There is a lot of money flowing through this vast ecosystem, and somehow the only thing all these people can agree on is more, more, more,” said Lyle Goldstein, a former professor at the U.S. Naval War College who is now investigating the costs of war at Brown University. “Unfortunately, I just think it might be in the nature of our system.”

This year, the Defense Department asked Congress to approve a staggering $842 billion — nearly half of the federal government’s discretionary spending — to keep America safe in what the Pentagon says is an ever more perilous world. As House and Senate leaders negotiate the final number, it is unlikely they will spend much time discussing ways to prevent future debacles like the LCS.

Such a conversation would cover hundreds of billions of misspent taxpayer money on projects from nearly every branch of the military: The F-35 fighter jet, deployed by the Navy, Marines and Air Force, is more than a decade late and $183 billion over budget. The Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, the Gerald R. Ford, cost $13 billion and has yet to prove it can reliably launch planes. And the Army’s Future Combat System was largely abandoned in 2009 after the military had dedicated more than $200 billion on a battlefield intelligence network meant to link troops, tanks and robots.

The LCS program offers another clear lesson, one seen in almost every infamous procurement disaster. Once a massive project gains momentum and defense contractors begin hiring, it is politically easier to throw good money after bad.

Stopping a weapons program in its tracks means people losing work and admitting publicly that enormous sums of taxpayer money have been wasted. In the case of the LCS, it took an array of naval leaders and two consecutive defense secretaries to finally stop the program. Yet even after the Navy said it only needed 32 littoral combat ships, far fewer than the more than 50 originally planned, members of Congress forced the Pentagon to buy three more.

Former Lt. Renaldo Rodgers remembered laboring in San Diego from sunrise to sunset for months to ready the Freedom for a 2012 trial mission to San Francisco, only to have the ship break down during pretrial tests. Rodgers initially thought the futuristic ship looked like something out of “Star Trek.” But he soon learned it was no Starship Enterprise. It became the laughingstock of the waterfront, with other sailors deriding it as “Dry Dock One,” because it so rarely left port.

“It sucks,” he said. The LCS was “a missed opportunity.”

The Navy has tried to retire many of the littoral combat ships years before they reach their expected lifespan. Ships designed to last 25 years are being mothballed after seeing less than a decade of service.

In response to questions, the Navy acknowledged the LCS was not suitable for fighting peer competitors such as China. The LCS “does not provide the lethality or survivability needed in a high-end fight.”

“The Navy needs a more ready, capable, and lethal fleet more than a bigger fleet that’s less ready, less capable, and less lethal,” the statement read, saying the money would be better spent on higher-priority alternatives.

The cost of the program has gnawed at John Pendleton, who for years was a top military analyst at the Government Accountability Office and has studied the rise and fall of the LCS as closely as anyone in Washington.

Now retired, but unable to shake what he views as one of the most wasteful projects he’d encountered in his nearly 35-year career, Pendleton reviewed budgetary documents and GAO reports for ProPublica going back decades. His conclusion: The lifetime cost of the LCS class may reach $100 billion or more.

“In the end,” he said, “the taxpayers get fewer than 30 limited-survivability, single-mission ships.”

Pendleton is hardly alone in his assessment. Many regard the tortured path of the LCS as evidence of a damaging strain of hubris that runs rampant in the world of military innovation.

“It’s this zombie program phenomenon where everybody knows deep down we are going in the wrong direction,” said Dan Grazier, a former Marine Corps captain, who now works on Pentagon reform for the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight. “But because so much money is involved and so much political capital is invested, you can’t stop the train until the problems are so overwhelming that no one can feign support for it.”

The two narratives of the ship — unstoppable in Congress, imperiled at sea — intertwined alarmingly during one 10-month stretch beginning in December 2015. During that period, five of the vessels broke down across the globe, each illuminating a new set of problems and effectively proving the critics right.

The Freedom was the third ship to fail. Captured in a Navy investigation more than 600 pages long, the incident stands out as a particularly devastating and detailed example of the Navy’s plight.

The Problems With the Littoral Combat Ship ((Photo illustration of a Freedom-class littoral combat ship by Justin Metz for ProPublica)) Minehunting Failures

Littoral combat ships were supposed to help find and destroy underwater mines, but the remote minehunting system often returned false alarms during testing, was unreliable, frequently broke down and was difficult for sailors to control. The Navy turned to a new form of minehunting technology, which is still under development.

Survivability

Because of the emphasis on speed, the ships were originally built in part on designs used for commercial ferries. The designs did not contain protections that could prevent the flooding of critical systems when under attack. The Pentagon weapons testing department found that the design requirements “accept the risk that the crew would have to abandon ship” in circumstances where service members on other vessels would not.

Combining Gear

The Navy traced many high-profile breakdowns of the Freedom-class littoral combat ships to a design flaw in what’s known as the combining gear, a complex mechanism that connects gas turbines and diesel engines to the propulsion shafts in order to help the vessels reach top speed.

The Anti-Submarine Warfare Package

Littoral combat ships were supposed to be equipped to hunt and destroy submarines with an interlinked package of sonar devices, helicopters and torpedoes. But the systems didn’t effectively communicate with one another, the towed sonar couldn’t function properly in the vessels’ wake and the Freedom class is considered too loud to hunt submarines. The Navy canceled that function in 2022.

Limited Endurance

The Freedom is considered a “gas hog” among Navy officers, meaning it can’t go very fast for very long without running out of fuel. This creates a logistical problem for the Navy because the ship can’t stray too far from its gas supply.

1. INSIDE THE PENTAGON: An Admiral’s Vision

In 2002, Adm. Vernon Clark stared down from the deck of a Danish warship at a pier in Denmark and watched a demonstration that would shape the future of the U.S. Navy.

A large deck gun sat below. On the orders of a Danish navy official, a crane hoisted it off the pier and installed it on the ship. Within 40 minutes, sailors were rotating the weapon to prepare it for operation.

No American ship could swap weapons on and off deck like that. But the Danes made reconfiguring a vessel to carry out different missions look easy. Clark, the head of the U.S. Navy at the time, marveled at the technology.

“This is it. Of course, this is it,” Clark remembered telling himself. “I didn’t know that they could do that.”

For Clark, the Danish demonstration crystalized his idea for a new ship that would be different from anything the Navy had done before. It would be small, relatively lightly armed and operated by about 40 sailors — far less than the average warship crew size. The weapons systems would not be permanently installed.

Instead, he envisioned a sort of Swiss army knife for the Navy. Armed with one set of weaponry, it could hunt and destroy submarines. But if the threat shifted, it could be quickly outfitted to detect and clear underwater mines or to fight other warships.

As Clark envisaged it, the new ships could be deployed in coastal, or littoral, waters, where the Navy needed to expand its presence around the world: in the Persian Gulf to participate in the war in Iraq, in the Caribbean to track down gunrunners and in Southeast Asia to help smaller allied navies. They would be one of the fastest warships in the world — able to fight near shore, outrun larger vessels or hunt down the small ones increasingly popular with foes like Iran. The ships would be built quickly, in large numbers and at low cost.

Adm. Vernon Clark gained confidence that the LCS could work after seeing a demonstration of a Danish warship swapping weapons. (Johnny Bivera/U.S. Navy)

The first red flags emerged here, at the conception of the LCS. As Clark began sharing his vision, concerns began to brew among Navy shipbuilding experts, who feared it was overly ambitious and technologically infeasible. Clark was unbowed.

He was an unlikely candidate to begin a revolution in shipbuilding. With an undergraduate degree from Evangel College, a small Christian school in Missouri, and an MBA from the University of Arkansas, he hardly fit the mold of a prototypical chief of naval operations who was groomed for leadership from his earliest days at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

A self-professed “radical,” at times irreverent and impassioned, he wanted to run the Navy like a business, streamlining training, rooting out misspent dollars, retaining sailors who shined and getting rid of those who did not.

He believed the Navy needed a more cost-effective and technologically advanced fleet. Many of the Navy’s ships had been built during the Cold War. Massive carriers, destroyers, battleships and cruisers were facing retirement, in part because updating them with modern technology was prohibitively expensive, Clark said.

In keeping with his business background, Clark wanted as few people on the new ships as possible. “What I really want is an unmanned ship that’s got R2-D2 in it,” he said, recalling his thinking at the time.

Doubt dogged Clark’s dream from the start. Congress agreed to begin developing the ship in 2003 — despite a House Appropriations Committee report that warned that there was “no ‘road map’ of how the Navy will achieve the system required.”

One former admiral who worked on plans for the ship said Clark’s insistence on speed — up to 45 knots, or about 50 miles per hour — created immediate problems. A ship cannot go that fast for very long without running out of gas, which meant it could never stray far from its fuel supply. Its small size — many in the Navy joked that LCS stood for Little Crappy Ship — limited the weapons it could carry.

The former admiral said he raised concerns with his superiors but wished he had been more vocal. “As a subordinate naval officer, when your boss tells you, ‘Here’s a shovel, go dig the hole,’ you go dig the hole.”

The Navy pushed ahead. In May 2004, it awarded contracts to two teams of defense contractors to build up to two prototypes, each of their own design.

Both teams had lobbied heavily to win the contracts. Lockheed Martin, which partnered with the Marinette Marine shipyard in Wisconsin, plastered the Washington, D.C., Metro system with advertisements extolling the ability of its proposed ship.

The other team, a joint venture between General Dynamics and Australian shipbuilder Austal, planned to build its version at a shipyard in Alabama.

In response to the Navy’s goals, the contractors both based their original ship designs partly on high-speed ferries for cars or passengers, an unusual choice for a vessel meant for war not transportation.

With an emphasis on speed and dexterity, the ships were not designed to withstand much damage. Clark saw them fighting under the protection of larger, more lethal ships. To him, investing too much in protecting the ship with extensive armor would make it too heavy to operate near shore.

“Show me a ship that can take a direct hit with today’s modern weaponry and survive,” he said. “Why spend all this money pretending?”

This argument disquieted lawmakers. Toward the end of Clark’s tenure, members of Congress began to ask whether this meant the Navy had deemed LCS sailors expendable.

After Clark left the Navy in July 2005, the Navy responded to the concerns, redrawing the blueprints for the ships as they were being built to better protect sailors.

Costs began to rise dramatically. The ships were originally supposed to cost no more than $220 million dollars each, which had helped sell them to Congress in the first place. But the final price tag rose to about $500 million each.

Robert Work, a former deputy defense secretary who became a key proponent of the ship, said many in the Navy thought the initial estimate was unrealistic. “The Navy never believed it, at least the people who had to build the ship,” he said.

Despite the rising costs, the LCS soon gained a new champion so devoted to its construction that he led a yearslong campaign to resist efforts by two secretaries of defense to scale back the program.

2. OUT AT SEA: A “Foreseeable” Disaster

On the morning of Nov. 23, 2015, the USS Milwaukee set out across the frigid waters of the Great Lakes for its maiden voyage. The cost overruns had made headlines, but with the fifth ship in the water, Navy officials were hoping the vessel’s performance would lessen the growing doubts about the project.

The Navy planned to sail the Milwaukee from the shipyard on the shores of Lake Michigan in Marinette, Wisconsin, to its new home port of San Diego. From there, it would eventually join its sister ship, the USS Fort Worth, in helping to counter the Chinese navy’s expanding presence in the Western Pacific.

In a press tour days before the launch, Cmdr. Kendall Bridgewater evinced confidence, proclaiming that the enemy “would be hard pressed to find a vessel that could come up against us.”

But the ship wouldn’t need a fight to suffer its first defeat. Its worst enemy would be its own engine.

On Dec. 11, about three weeks into the two-month journey, a software failure severely damaged the Milwaukee’s combining gear — a complex mechanism that connects the ship’s diesel engines and its gas turbines to the propulsion shafts, producing the power necessary for it to reach top speeds.

A Navy salvage ship had to tow it some 40 miles for repairs at a base near Norfolk, Virginia. The ship hadn’t made it halfway down the East Coast — let alone to the South China Sea — before breaking down. If the Milwaukee were a brand new car, this would be the equivalent of stalling on its way out of the dealership.

Some former officers look back on the breakdown and those that followed as a clear violation of a cardinal principle in Navy shipbuilding: to “buy a few and test a lot.” But with the LCS, the Navy was doing the opposite. Commanders were learning about the flaws of the ships as they were being deployed.

“This is a totally foreseeable outcome,” said Jay Bynum, a former rear admiral who served as an assistant to the vice chief of naval operations as the ships were entering the fleet. “Just think about it, Toyota checks out all of this before the car hits the showroom floor. What if the engineering guys there said, ‘Well, we think this is how the engine will work, but let’s just start selling them.’”

3. INSIDE THE PENTAGON: “Do We Want This Ship to Survive?”

On a breezy Friday in March 2011, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus addressed a crowd of sharp-dressed politicians and begrimed workers gathered at a shipyard in Mobile, Alabama.

Mabus, tall and dapper, announced the names for two of the Navy’s newest littoral combat ships. One would be called the USS Jackson — a reference to the capital of his home state, Mississippi.

As he looked out at the waters of Mobile Bay, Mabus lauded the new class of ships that had emerged from Clark’s vision a decade before.

“It’s a drug runner’s worst nightmare, it’s a submarine’s worst nightmare,” he declared, speaking in his soft Southern drawl. “It’s anybody who wants to do harm to the United States of America or the United States Navy, it’s their worst nightmare.”

In fact, the LCS was on its way to becoming one of the Navy’s worst nightmares — and Mabus was its biggest cheerleader.

Better known for his political acumen than his military experience, Mabus served three years in the Navy in the early ’70s, including time at sea as a lieutenant junior grade on board the USS Little Rock.

Afterward, he rose through Democratic ranks to become governor of Mississippi, an ambassador to Saudi Arabia and eventually the longest-serving Navy secretary since World War I.

During his tenure as the Navy’s civilian leader, he put his stamp on the service by pursuing a range of progressive policies including gender integration and the use of renewable fuels. He also took advantage of a unique perk: tossing out the ceremonial first pitch at major league stadiums across the country.

His most transformative view on U.S. military strategy was his belief in the need for more ships.

The fleet had shrunk to less than half the 600 it wielded toward the end of the Cold War. China was rapidly expanding its navy and Russia was investing heavily in new submarines.

Mabus, who became secretary in 2009, pursued a plan that would make him one of the Navy’s most prodigious shipbuilders.

In an interview with ProPublica, he reiterated the “sheer importance of numbers” for the fleet. He backed the LCS, he said, because it would help meet an array of the Navy’s needs as fast as possible.

Even as a growing number of senior officers began to criticize the ships, Mabus expanded the program, drawing on his political connections and savvy dealmaking to defend the LCS against powerful opponents on the Hill and in the Pentagon.

Navy Secretary Ray Mabus continued to expand the LCS program even as a growing number of senior officers began to criticize the ships. (Jason Lee/Reuters)

Mabus acknowledged that his support of the LCS project put him at odds with some of the Navy’s top officers and the nation’s civilian military leadership. He recalled resistance from what he dubbed the “Alumni Association,” powerful former Navy officers who he said reflexively and unfairly disliked the ship because it was so different from anything else the Navy had built. For Mabus, his key role as civilian leader of a tradition-bound military service was overcoming its hostility to change and innovation.

Chief among the old-school critics, he said, was Sen. John McCain, a Republican from Arizona and decorated Navy veteran whose father and paternal grandfather had both been Navy admirals. He, along with Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, had emerged as skeptics of the LCS as leaders of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Both were alarmed by the costs, which had soared to more than $750 million apiece for the initial ships.

In response to such concerns, the Navy lowered the price by pitting the two teams of contractors against each other in a bidding war. Austal and Lockheed Martin turned in two different ship designs with similar price tags. Navy leaders dithered over which to select.

In the fall of 2010, Work, the Navy undersecretary at the time, said Mabus gathered senior naval leaders together to ask a blunt question: “Do we want this ship to survive?”

When the group answered yes, Mabus proposed a politically adroit solution: The Navy would select both companies to build the new ships in two shipyards, one in Alabama and one in Wisconsin.

Mabus calculated that he would win the support of congressional delegations from both places by delivering thousands of jobs and millions in spending to each, Work recalled. Spreading the wealth would increase the ships’ chances of survival. But it would also make the program harder to kill when problems arose.

“He was looking at the problem in a different way than we were looking at it because he was a professional politician,” Work said.

Mabus’ plan concerned some Navy leaders. The Austal ship, which was the basis for the Independence class, would be an aluminum trimaran — a ship with three hulls. The Lockheed Martin ship, which formed the basis for the Freedom class, would be a more conventional monohull forged of steel. The radically different designs meant that the ships could not trade parts or sailors, making them more expensive to maintain and crew. In addition, the contracts called for the contractors to build a total of 20 vessels, a large commitment for a relatively unproven warship.

But Mabus and his team argued that those additional costs would be dwarfed by the savings the Navy would enjoy in the long run — one top official found that the Navy would save $2.9 billion by awarding long-term contracts to both companies.

To Mabus, it was a win-win for all involved: each ship had its own benefits, taxpayers would get a better price, the Navy would get more ships faster and the shipyards would get more jobs.

He told ProPublica that keeping the shipyards active was always a “consideration, but it wasn’t the main driver” behind the decision. The real incentive, he said, was price, not politics.

But the political payoff soon became evident.

McCain held a hearing, where he excoriated the Navy. “The story of this ship is one that makes me ashamed and embarrassed as a former Navy person and as a person who’s responsible to the taxpayers of my state,” he said. (McCain died in 2018.)

But in a last-minute budget bill to keep the government open in late December, Sen. Richard Shelby, the Alabama Republican, inserted language to buy ships from both shipyards.

He made sure it happened,” a Shelby spokesman said at the time.

And Levin, the Michigan Democrat once critical of the ships, now supported them. The Marinette shipyard is just over the Michigan border in Wisconsin. Levin called the plan to build 10 ships there “a major boost for the region’s economy” and applauded the Navy in its efforts to bring costs down. (Levin died in 2021).

As one former vice admiral put it, “politics is king in the shipbuilding business.”

4. OUT AT SEA: “We Ask for Help, but There Isn’t Enough” Work aboard the USS Fort Worth. There was “no break, no reprieve, just increasing daily tasking,” one sailor said of their time on board. (Antonio Turretto Ramos/U.S. Navy)

Just a month after the USS Milwaukee stalled in Virginia, the ship it was supposed to join in the South China Sea suffered its own embarrassing breakdown.

The USS Fort Worth was nearing the end of an otherwise successful deployment. It had helped with a search-and-rescue operation following an Indonesian commercial plane crash and participated in joint exercises with several allied navies.

But the Navy had decided to frequently rotate the small LCS crews in order to reduce burnout and, in November 2015, a new, inexperienced crew took over.

Even the commanding officer, Michael Atwell, had “few opportunities to gain valuable at sea experience” before his deployment, according to a later Navy investigation.

On Jan. 5, hundreds of gallons of fuel spilled into the ship’s main machinery room. The sailors had to spray chemical foam on the fuel to prevent it from catching fire. Then, in grueling, filthy shifts, they took turns crawling into the tight compartment to clean it up with rags and pumps.

The day after the spill, the Fort Worth pulled into a port in Singapore for a week of scheduled maintenance.

There it became clear that the ship had been “ridden hard,” according to officers interviewed in the Navy investigation. Leaks had sprung out of various parts, the engines were in bad shape, the electric generators needed work and the crew was exhausted. There was “no break, no reprieve, just increasing daily tasking,” one sailor said of their time on board.

The ship’s executive officer, the second in command, complained of a lack of support from superiors.

“We ask for help, but there isn’t enough,” he said, adding that he was told “they don’t have the bodies.”

The ship was originally supposed to leave by Jan. 12 for a “high visibility” port visit in Hong Kong. Atwell and his executive officer described a “tremendous amount of pressure” to make it happen, according to the Navy investigation.

The crew took shortcuts as it scrambled to test the engine. One of the sailors in charge of starting it skipped a routine step, failing to properly lubricate the combining gears.

“I messed up everything because I was going too fast,” the sailor later explained.

The mistake damaged the ship’s combining gear, forcing it to sit for seven months while waiting on replacement parts.

Navy leaders deemed Atwell unfit for command and removed him from his position.

Reached by phone, Atwell declined to comment.

The breakdowns on the Milwaukee and Fort Worth formed the beginning of a pattern that came to punctuate the life of the LCS program:

Ships were rushed to sea with faltering equipment. Shorthanded crews and captains without sufficient training or support tried to make them work. Breakdowns ensued. Then, the pressure to perform and restore the reputation of the program intensified anew and the cycle repeated itself.

Soon it would be the USS Freedom’s turn.

5. INSIDE THE PENTAGON: “We Were Essentially Telling a Lie” The Pentagon (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)

In early 2012, sitting beneath the fluorescent glow of a Pentagon briefing room, Rear Adm. Sam Perez received a stern warning.

Weeks earlier, Chief of Naval Operations Jonathan Greenert had asked Perez to produce a report that would help him figure out how best to use the dozens of littoral combat ships that would be delivered to the Navy in the coming years.

The results were grim.

Discussing the details around a conference table, one fellow officer raised a finger to his own temple and mimicked a gun going off: Perez, he signaled, was about to risk career suicide.

It was a pattern with the LCS. Officers who criticized the ships faced consequences. An assignment to an undesirable post. Even dismissal.

Perez had found that the crews were too small. Some were stretched so thin that commanding officers had to spend time sweeping the decks, when they could have been studying intelligence reports and focusing on navigating the ship.

Contrary to what Clark observed in Denmark, the various weapons systems would not be easy to swap out. The Navy hadn’t factored in the weeks it could take for all the contractors, sailors and others who were needed to fly in from around the world to help outfit the vessels for different missions.

The two versions of the LCS complicated the problems. The designs were vastly different: They could exchange neither parts nor sailors. Perez and his staff worried that the ships would wind up sidelined because they lacked either equipment or trained crew members.

Comparing the LCS to the fleets of potential adversaries, Perez concluded that the vessels were only capable of fighting against lightly armed small, fast attack boats.

A fellow officer warned him that painting this kind of damning portrait for the highest ranking officer in the Navy, the chief naval officer, could hurt his career. At that point, the Navy had already committed to buying at least 20 more ships worth billions of dollars.

Perez had already shared some of his findings with Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mark Ferguson, the second highest ranking official in the Navy.

According to a former senior officer familiar with the events, Ferguson told Perez that he was looking at the vessels the wrong way. The small ship’s performance should be compared to a patrol boat.

Perez objected. Patrol boats aren’t supposed to clear mines, fight submarines or attack surface warships. They are far smaller, designed primarily for surveillance and interdiction.

The staffers worked on the comparison for about two weeks before they began “tearing each other up because we were essentially telling a lie,” according to the former officer who worked on the project. After a vote, they decided to stop comparing the LCS to a patrol boat.

Immediately after Perez delivered the report, he received a call from Bynum, a former rear admiral who at the time worked for Ferguson. Bynum told Perez to classify the report secret.

“That was absolutely my recommendation,” Bynum said in an interview with ProPublica. The report, he said, included a “host of vulnerabilities that didn’t need to be shared in the open press.”

At a PowerPoint presentation of his findings, Ferguson was curt. The former officer said Ferguson only allowed Perez about two words per slide, instructing him to flip to the next image before he could finish the last one.

In an interview with ProPublica, Ferguson did not recall asking Perez to compare the LCS to a patrol boat, but he acknowledged he was disappointed by key aspects of the report. Known to have a brusque style, he said he may well have sped through his presentation.

“I didn’t dispute any of the critique,” Ferguson said. “LCS had serious issues. But I wanted more in the way of recommendations on how to go forward; how to integrate them into the fleet.”

Soon after, Perez was assigned to the international relations department of the Navy. About a year after that, he became liaison to the State Department. Neither are regarded as ideal assignments for an admiral who had spent a career carrying out missions at sea.

Perez declined to comment.

For his part, Greenert said the idea that Perez was punished for speaking up was “nonsense.” On the contrary, he said it helped prompt him to increase the staffing and budget for LCS.

Around the same time, Greenert asked another senior officer, three-star Adm. Tom Copeman, to evaluate the LCS as part of a larger report on the surface fleet.

Copeman, then in charge of the fitness of the Navy’s vessels for combat, echoed concerns about the ship’s combat abilities. He thought the LCS was not lethal enough. The Navy’s contract called for 24 ships, with plans to build more than 50. Copeman recommended that the Navy halt building the ships after fulfilling the contract.

In March 2013, the memo was leaked to the trade press. Copeman immediately received calls from one of Mabus’ top staffers. He told Copeman that Mabus was extremely disappointed that Copeman had publicly disagreed with him. Copeman told him that the memo was never intended for public consumption and that he didn’t know how it got out.

As ProPublica previously reported, Greenert asked Copeman to retire early in mid-2013 after he had publicly expressed concerns over the fitness of the Navy’s ships for combat.

Greenert said Copeman was not asked to retire early. He said Copeman helped to convince him to ask for more weapons on the LCS.

Copeman declined to comment.

The Navy needed a lot more ships, and the LCS program was going to help provide them.

6. OUT AT SEA: Freedom’s Troubles Sailors board the USS Freedom in August 2013 in Singapore. Back in San Diego, the ship had been nicknamed “Dry Dock One” because it so rarely left port, according to one former lieutenant. (Jay C. Pugh/U.S. Navy)

About six months after two of its sister ships were docked for repairs, it was the Freedom’s turn in the spotlight.

But on July 7, 2016, the day before the ship was supposed to begin its part in the global Navy exercise, a string of equipment failures forced its captain into a bad spot: Wohnhaas had to submit a “fail to sail” message to his superiors — an embarrassing signal that the ship was not ready to go.

Working through the night, engineers on the Freedom eventually realized a part called a cannon plug used in the ship’s complicated propulsion system needed to be replaced. Without it, the ship couldn’t go anywhere.

They discovered one in Port Hueneme, about an hour north of Los Angeles. The engineer battled through five hours of Southern California traffic to pick it up and bring it back. The ship departed its port in San Diego a day late, then suffered another setback.

Three miles outside Mexican territorial waters, a loud metallic noise clanged out, startling the crew. Wohnhaas slowed the ship down but it began to drift. The crew dropped anchor to stop the ship and then steamed back to port.

He was sent back out to sea and senior officers later criticized him for holding up the mission.

Then on the evening of July 11, a leak erupted inside the main machinery room, the mechanical heart of the ship, spraying the electrical system with seawater. An inch or two pooled on the floor. If the leak wasn’t stopped immediately, it could cause short-circuiting or even a fire.

One sailor searched for the source of the leak by hand, burning his arm on a hot pipe before finding a hole seeping water. The sailors plugged the hole, but the repair backfired. It forced water to burst through a rubber seal that kept seawater out of the ship’s lubrication oil system. The water mixed with the oil, pumping a kind of emulsified goo through one of the ship’s four engines.

Two days later, the crew, again, had to return the ship to dock in San Diego. The engineer responsible for the ship while in port determined that a full repair of the engine could take as long as two weeks. Wohnhaas’ superiors rejected the idea. Time was running out for the ship to participate in the Rim of the Pacific exercise, or RIMPAC.

A Navy diesel engine expert proposed a procedure to block further corrosion of the engine with a special rinse.

A Navy expert in Philadelphia, referred to as “the guru” in the Navy investigation, approved that approach, which would allow the ship to get back to sea more quickly and complete the mission by using the ship’s three remaining engines.

Throughout the exercise, a parade of high-ranking Navy officials — including two rear admirals, a Marine Corps general, and a commodore — visited the vessel to turn up the heat on the crew and its captain.

They made clear that the Freedom’s participation in RIMPAC was “crucially important” to the entire LCS program and that there was “no appetite” for the Freedom to delay its departure. Freedom’s performance, they believed, would “perhaps modulate some of the program’s critics,” the investigation said.

The Freedom left San Diego to take part in the Rim of the Pacific naval exercise in 2016. (Stacy M. Atkins Ricks/U.S. Navy)

Given what happened on the Fort Worth and the Milwaukee months earlier, top Navy leaders “felt pressure to deliver a ‘win’ for the program,” according to the investigation, which called the pressure on Wohnhaas “severe.”

One senior officer invoked the commander of the Pacific Fleet, Adm. Scott Swift, as wanting to use the region as a “testing grounds” for the Navy.

Reached by phone, Swift said he was a “believer in the LCS” and acknowledged that he had encouraged the Navy to test new weapons systems in the Pacific. But he emphasized that it was not an order to deploy ships at any cost.

“We made it clear if you want to take them off line, take them off line, but I am not surprised that people further down the chain didn’t feel they had that option,” he said. “The offer could have been perceived as an order, or taken advantage of by those that wanted to push harder to get a win out of LCS.”

“As a four star, if you ask for something too often people think of it as a requirement,” he said.

On the morning of July 17, 2016, the ship finally seemed ready to go.

The contractors completed the rinse and were packing up to leave. But when the chief engineer looked at samples taken from inside the engine, he was deeply worried.

“Holy shit,” he thought, according to an interview in a Navy investigation. “There’s still water in the engine.”

He sent a message to Wohnhaas that he later acknowledged was misleading because it suggested the ship was ready to go. He blamed the mistake on “not proof-reading” the text prior to sending it.

“Sir, the flush is done,” he wrote at 9:50 a.m. “I [assess] that we are still on track for tomorrow.”

Wohnhaas took this as good news and passed it on to his superiors:

“Everything is tracking toward an on-time departure,” he said in an email sent to his commodore, Warren Buller, at 11:36 a.m.

In fact, the procedure approved by the Philadelphia guru hadn’t solved the problem. Investigators would later determine the procedure could not have worked — it was meant to remove grit, not seawater, from engine oil.

The following morning, as the Freedom was preparing to depart, a senior enlisted engineer ran into a contractor he knew as Joe.

Joe told him that the engine was still contaminated.

Alarmed, the engineer discussed the situation with his supervisor, the chief engineer, who was smoking a cigarette on the front deck of the ship.

If they went to sea, the engine would rust, the engineer said. The chief engineer told him he knew it and he was on his way to tell Wohnhaas.

In an interview with investigators, the chief engineer said he told Wohnhaas something to the effect of “we can’t get underway like this, we gotta do something.”

Wohnhaas declined to comment for this story. In his interview with investigators, he said that when he learned of the contaminated samples from the chief engineer, he understood the engine was inoperable. But he was confident he could avoid further damage and complete the mission by relying on the ship’s other engines.

“There was a strong sense that we couldn’t have another LCS not meet mission,” Wohnhaas said. He did not tell his superior officers the uncomfortable fact that the engine was still contaminated because of the pressure to get underway, the investigation said.

The Freedom sailed out and detected mines in the water. The mission was a success — at least so everyone thought.

But on Aug. 3, five days after Wohnhaas returned the ship, a routine inspection revealed major damage to the engine, corrosion so extensive that the ship was docked in repairs for two years. The engine needed to be replaced.

The Navy investigation found that one failure led to another on the Freedom: The inexperienced crew used the wrong procedure to stop the leak; the Navy’s “technical community” then recommended another incorrect procedure to flush the engine; contractors executed it, providing “false hope” that it would prevent the corrosion.

Wohnhaas’ key error, according to the investigation: He failed to tell his superiors that the engine was still contaminated by seawater.

Wohnhaas was removed from command over the incident. Others, whose names and titles are redacted from the Navy report, were also recommended for discipline.

7. OUT AT SEA: “It Just Felt Like a Big Joke” Sailors take part in a ribbon-cutting for a littoral combat ship facility in 2015. Some ships of this class are being retired after less than a decade of service, despite being designed to last 25 years. (Timothy Schumaker/U.S. Navy)

By early 2017, Lt. Jett Watson was beginning to wonder whether he had signed up to squander his naval career.

He was in the middle of training to serve as an LCS officer, spending hours inside virtual reality simulators set up in San Diego to make participants feel as if they were driving the ship.

The digital experience was impressive, but getting a real LCS out to sea was more complicated.

“I’m sure it was funny to watch us get underway just to have a big cloud of smoke go out because an engine went down and then have the tugboats pull us right back into the pier, which happened very often,” he said in an interview with ProPublica. “I mean, it was almost a game just to watch.”

Becoming a full-fledged surface warfare officer in the Navy requires hundreds of hours at sea. In interviews with current and former officers, the LCS program was described as a place where careers go to die. The ships broke down so frequently that officers spent key years in which they were supposed to gain experience at sea sitting around waiting for repairs to be completed.

Watson felt deceived.

A couple of years earlier, he had come under the spell of the LCS as a student at the Naval Academy.

There, recruiters for the program spread the gospel of its small crew size and purportedly aggressive deployment schedule, convincing him that the ship suited only the most elite sailors and officers.

Watson was so taken by the promise of the ship that he became a kind of “LCS evangelist,” convincing his friends at the academy to join the program with him.

He remembered sweltering beneath the Maryland sun during his graduation ceremony, where Mabus delivered a kind of a final exhortation to the newly sworn in officers.

“We are America’s away team,” Mabus said. “You didn’t come to Annapolis to sit at home when you leave here, and you won’t be sitting at home. Sailors and Marines, equally in times of peace and at war, are deployed around the world.”

Hailing from Lubbock, Texas, Watson thought the LCS would be his ticket to a meaningful and exciting career in the Navy.

He went on to serve on three littoral combat ships, each belonging to the less problematic Independence class.

“I would hesitate to say we ever did a mission,” he said.

Instead, he and others had to stomach what one current senior noncommissioned officer described as “a big shit sandwich” when they first came on board.

General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin considered much of the data and equipment on the LCS proprietary — a problem that the GAO has identified throughout the military. As a result, only their employees were allowed to do certain repairs, former officers said. This sometimes meant that contractors would go overseas to help, adding millions in travel costs and often delaying missions. The Navy recently purchased some of the data. A Navy spokesperson would not disclose the price “due to proprietary reasons.”

Watson and others spent much of their time escorting contractors while on board because so many areas on the ship were considered classified, reducing their ability to do their own jobs, according to interviews with multiple officers who had served on the LCS.

Cumbersome negotiations meant it could sometimes take weeks to get contractors on board. The delays were especially frustrating when trying to fix the computer network that connected everything from the radars, to the weapons systems, to the ship’s canteen. That system, another former lieutenant said, frequently shut down because of software glitches.

“You can’t ask for help from your superior commands” on shore, said the former lieutenant, who worked as a communications officer on Independence-class ships. “And you can’t even go buy yourself a soda.”

The ships needed constant repairs. But technical manuals were sometimes written only in the native language of the contractor that built the equipment. One former officer said that a manual for a davit, a type of crane used to lower a search-and-rescue boat, was written in Norwegian. He said the Navy had to spend thousands of dollars to fly in a contractor from Norway to change two fuses.

The Navy has recently increased the amount of maintenance performed by sailors.

“It just felt like a big joke,” said Watson, who left the Navy in 2021. He said many of the highly qualified sailors he worked with sought mental health assistance because they felt that their time on an LCS was a waste, affording them little opportunity to apply their skills or learn new ones.

“An average week would consist of 90 to 100 hours in port doing, honestly, nothing,” Watson said. “It felt ridiculous. Many times we were there just because we had to be there.”

At one point, a senior Navy official addressed a group of more than 50 LCS sailors assembled in an auditorium and asked how many would volunteer to come back. Two former officers familiar with the presentation said only a handful said yes.

8. INSIDE THE PENTAGON: A Fight Over the Future

The ships’ mounting problems drew attention from the highest reaches of the Pentagon, eventually prompting two successive defense secretaries to try to halt their construction.

The first, in 2014, was Chuck Hagel, a former Army infantry squad leader and U.S. senator. The military was fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but it also needed to save money. Hagel’s advisers told him he could do that by keeping the LCS fleet to 32 ships, abandoning plans to build 52 of them.

He’d be cutting what was already understood to be a deeply troubled vessel. Studies showed that the ship couldn’t continue to fight after a missile strike and that the interchangeable warfighting packages — an idea originally at the heart of the LCS — were failing to perform.

“Do we want one-fifth of the future Navy fleet to be a ship that can’t take a hit and continue its mission?” one adviser recalled thinking at the time.

In February 2014, Hagel pledged to make the cut to 32 and asked the Navy to come up with a design for a new frigate — a larger, tougher type of warship. But Mabus pushed back. A Navy task force suggested that the LCS could be transformed into a frigate. The Pentagon’s top weapons tester told Hagel that was infeasible. But Hagel agreed with the task force, because the Navy was “going to have to live with it, and justify it. And count on it,” he said in an interview with ProPublica.

In December 2014, in one of his final acts as secretary of defense, Hagel agreed to allow the Navy to build up to 52 smaller ships: a mix of the littoral combat ships and the new frigates, which would be based on the LCS design, but with more weapons.

In response to critics who said he had capitulated, Hagel characterized his decision as a “compromise” based on the advice of the government’s top experts.

“We brought in a lot of different people on both sides of it,” he said. “That’s the only responsible way you can evaluate these big projects as secretary of defense, because you can’t know everything about this. It’s just, no one person is that smart.”

The Navy later awarded a contract to the shipbuilder Fincantieri Marine Group to build a new line of frigates based on a different design.

Defense Secretary Ash Carter, who followed Hagel, also took aim at the LCS.

Defense Secretary Ash Carter in 2016. In a 2015 memo, he said the Navy was guilty of “prioritizing quantity over lethality.” (Alex Brandon/AP)

In a sharply worded December 2015 memo to Mabus, Carter said the Navy was guilty of “prioritizing quantity over lethality.” He told the Navy to limit future purchases to 40 ships, including littoral combat ships and frigates.

Mabus told ProPublica that he was blindsided by the change of course and that it led to “heated discussions” with Carter in private.

In public, he opposed his boss too: first at a naval symposium, then before Congress, then at a Wisconsin shipyard where he assured LCS builders they were working on the best ship in the world. In March 2016, under questioning from Rep. Bradley Byrne, an Alabama Republican who called the LCS his “favorite topic,” Mabus told the House Armed Services Committee that the Navy had a “validated need” for the 52 ships.

Even as Mabus testified, the ships were breaking down at sea with increasing frequency.

Mabus downplayed the severity of the incidents.

“We took it seriously,” he said. “But it did not seem, from what we were looking at, that it was a systemic problem.”

The contractors who built the ships defended their performance.

Eric Dent, a spokesperson for the Italian-based shipbuilder Fincantieri, which also built the Freedom ships in Marinette, said it did so to a design from Lockheed Martin and the Navy, referring questions to both.

Lockheed Martin spokesperson Patrick McNally said the company is proud of its work with the Navy and is focused on delivering “affordable improvements to the platform.”

Australian-based shipbuilder Austal, which constructs the Independence class of ships, and General Dynamics, which built the infrastructure for the ship’s computers, both declined to comment for this story.

The weapons systems were failing as badly as the ship’s engines.

Without them, the LCS was “only a box floating in the ocean,” said former Lt. Cmdr. Mark West, who helped lead the Navy’s development of the warfighting packages for years in uniform and as a civilian.

To help the LCS find mines, an important mission in 21st-century warfare, the Navy built a remotely operated minisubmarine designed to detect underwater explosives. West and others said it turned out to be too difficult to operate. The Navy is now dependent on an aging fleet of minesweepers that often cannot deploy.

“Imagine a 25-year-old sailor trying to remotely control a [minisubmarine] in the water that weighs 20,000 pounds as the ship is going 4 or 5 knots,” one current senior enlisted sailor said. “Then trying to bring it to the surface as a crane lowers a saddle on top of it to get it out of the water. It was damn near impossible.”

After 15 years of development and more than $700 million invested in the remote minehunting system, the Navy canceled it in March 2016.

To hunt submarines, the defense contractors created a sonar device the ship dragged through the water on a long cable from the stern. When the device detected a submarine, it was supposed to send a signal to the ship, which then dispatched a helicopter to hover over the ocean and plunge another sonar device into the water. The helicopter then dropped a torpedo to destroy the sub.

None of these components effectively communicated with one another. And the wake of the LCS made it extremely difficult to launch and recover the sonar, according to one former commodore with direct knowledge of the program.

After pouring hundreds of millions into the module, the Navy shifted the function to its new frigate.

In an interview, West said the Navy never gave the modules the same priority as the ships. They always played “second fiddle,” West said. Those working on them had to “fight and claw” to get the time and money necessary to “ensure their success.”

9. OUT AT SEA: Coronado and Montgomery

About a month after the Freedom’s engine failed, a fourth LCS, the USS Coronado, broke down on its way to Singapore and had to limp back to Hawaii.

The USS Coronado returns to Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii after breaking down on its way to Singapore. (Katarzyna Kobiljak/U.S. Navy)

The breakdowns had become routine by this point. First came the fanfare over a newly christened ship, with all the requisite flag waving, handshaking, speechmaking and celebratory Champagne bottle breaking. Later, a perilous journey: a few days or weeks at sea, followed by another busted part and another tow back to port.

This time, on the Coronado, a part called a coupling would be the culprit. The device, which helped connect the water jets to the engine, had failed, hindering the ship’s complicated propulsion system. The Navy discovered it was a problem on several other littoral combat ships, too.

The GAO, which has produced dozens of reports criticizing the ships, later learned that the Coronado failed to sail six times between 2016 and 2017 because “it did not have correct parts on board to fix simple problems.”

Important items like “circuit card assemblies, washers, bolts, gaskets, and diaphragms for air conditioning units were not on board,” the report found. “The LCS may not have adequate space onboard to stock these items.”

In August 2016, the Navy ordered a 30-day stand down of all littoral combat ships to retrain the engineering crews and improve the fleet’s performance.

A month later, a fifth ship, the USS Montgomery, suffered a series of mishaps. Over a two-month stretch, its engine malfunctioned, it collided with a tugboat and it then cracked its hull after striking a lock in the Panama Canal.

10. INSIDE THE PENTAGON: “The Navy Doesn’t Want Them”

On May 4, 2017, about three months into the administration of President Donald Trump, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget at the time, Mick Mulvaney, sat for an interview with conservative talk radio show host Hugh Hewitt.

They talked about “Game of Thrones,” the repeal of Obamacare and a new hire at the OMB before turning to Trump’s promise to increase the Navy’s fleet to 350 ships. How, Hewitt wanted to know, was the president going to achieve that?

Mulvaney said that the day before he had missed a meeting on the Paris Agreement — the international treaty to avert the catastrophic consequences of climate change — in order to discuss whether to buy more littoral combat ships.

The Navy doesn’t want them,” Mulvaney said.

With the Navy on its way toward building the more powerful frigate, it appeared that the LCS program was on its last legs. The Navy requested funding for only one LCS that year.

But once again, politics intervened.

Tammy Baldwin, the Democratic senator from Wisconsin, fought for more. She wrote to Trump on May 12, casting the LCS as a rare opportunity for her and the president to work together. Both support American workers making American products, she said, but too few of the vessels in the budget would cause her state’s shipyard to lay off hundreds of workers.

On May 24, in a move that shocked the defense community, the Trump administration inserted one more ship into the budget after it had already been sent to Congress.

The Trump administration had suddenly placed a $500 million order for a new ship that the Navy didn’t ask for.

In an email to ProPublica, Baldwin said she takes “great pride in representing Wisconsin’s shipbuilding industry,” adding that she supported the LCS because it “provided new capabilities and capacity to the Navy.”

Over the next year, Congress funded yet more ships, leaving the force with 35, three more than the Navy said it needed. The additions cost taxpayers more than $1.5 billion.

In the years since, both variants of the LCS have continued to grapple with major problems. The Independence version has shown cracks in the hulls of nearly half the class. The Navy determined that a flaw in the combining gear affected the entire Freedom class. The Navy came up with a fix at a reported cost of $8 million to $10 million per ship — an expense split with Lockheed Martin.

Naval experts worry that the failures of the LCS have put the Navy at a greater disadvantage against China, which boasts the largest Navy in the world with some 340 ships and submarines, according to the Pentagon’s most recent report to Congress on the state of the Chinese military. By comparison, the Navy has roughly 294 ships and submarines.

The Navy has begun to mothball littoral combat ships far before the end of their expected lifespans.

In March 2022, the Navy announced plans to retire nine Freedom-class vessels early because of their inability to hunt submarines.

In a predictable pattern, lawmakers representing states where the ships are based fought to keep more of the ships at sea. They allowed the Navy to decommission only four. The first of those, retired last month, is less than five years old. Three other LCS had already been mothballed.

The Navy is now trying to retire two more, including the USS Jackson, the ship named for the capital of Mabus’ home state. It wrapped up its first deployment last October. Meant to have a 25-year lifespan, the ship would last only nine.

Kirsten Berg, Mollie Simon and Joshua Kaplan contributed research.

Design and development by Zisiga Mukulu and Lena V. Groeger.

by Joaquin Sapien

Idaho Created a $25 Million Fund to Fix Unsafe Schools. Why Is Nobody Using It?

1 year 9 months ago

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

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As a member of the school board in the remote Central Idaho town of Salmon, Josh Tolman worried that an earthquake would turn the elementary and middle schools to rubble. The foundations of the schools were crumbling. The floors buckled. The district canceled school whenever a few inches of snow fell for fear the roofs would cave in.

But Tolman and the school district were in a bind: They couldn’t convince enough voters to support a tax increase that would allow the district to build a new facility. The school board ran six bond elections in seven years. But even though 53% of the community supported the bond in one of their first attempts in 2006, it wasn’t enough. Idaho is one of two states that require two-thirds of voters to support a bond for it to pass.

“Unless an existing school actually falls to the ground and becomes unusable, I don’t perceive them ever passing a bond,” Tolman said in a recent interview.

By 2012, the school board and its superintendent had had enough. They decided to turn to a state program that lets school districts borrow money from the state if they have unsafe facilities and can’t pass a bond or figure out another way to fix them. The loan program had been created after the state Supreme Court ruled that Idaho had failed to comply with its constitutional mandate to provide a “safe environment conducive to learning.”

Earlier this year, the Idaho Statesman and ProPublica reported that dozens of school bonds that were supported by a majority of voters had nonetheless failed because of the two-thirds threshold. But, like the bond elections, this state fund also set a high bar and never became a solution to the funding problem schools faced. Since it was created in 2006, the program has been used only twice. And it hasn’t been used in nearly a decade.

Ultimately a state panel decided that Salmon’s problems — though bad enough to pose safety hazards — did not warrant a new school under the law, only new roofs and seismic reinforcements.

The approved funding was only a quarter of the amount the district estimated it would need to build a new K-8 school. And with dwindling enrollment, the school board decided it couldn’t afford to keep both the elementary and middle schools open.

“It was at that point where you’re grasping at straws to try and get something done for the children of this community, and the state basically said, ‘Keep on grasping,’” Tolman said.

The district closed the middle school and added portable buildings — trailers without bathrooms or sinks — to the elementary and high schools.

Today, the abandoned Salmon Middle School sits behind a tall razor-wire fence in a valley said to be the birthplace of Sacagawea, the Shoshone woman famous for her critical work on the Lewis and Clark expedition. The building’s roof is pocked with gaping holes, and insulation hangs down into hallways. Framed accreditation certificates, a crushed globe and pieces of ceiling tiles pepper the ground of eerily quiet classrooms.

Salmon Middle School continues to deteriorate after it was shuttered by the district.

The building is now an eyesore, visible from the nearly 70-year-old elementary school next door. Despite the structural repairs to that building, Salmon — where 43% of students are from low-income families — faces many of the same problems that existed when the district went to the state for help, plus some new ones. About 275 elementary students go to school with failing plumbing and uneven floors, where sewage sometimes backs up into a corner of the kitchen. For years, water from the drinking fountains came out brown.

Students who learn in deteriorating facilities have worse educational outcomes than those in newer, more functional schools, national research shows.

“How long are you going to keep kids in subpar classrooms and subpar situations?” said Russ Chinske, who has been a teacher in Salmon for about 20 years. “How long are you going to force the school district to use stuff that’s used up?”

Cori Allen has two kids in the district. Her oldest, now a sophomore in high school, could have been in the first kindergarten class to attend school in the new K-8 building. Instead, he spent years attending school in portable buildings.

The state constitution talks about “equal education,” and Salmon kids “are in facilities that are, in my opinion, totally inappropriate for a child to be learning in,” Allen said. “It’s just not fair that geographically we have to put up with it.”

Russ Chinske’s third grade class In Salmon’s elementary school, which is still in use, cracks have appeared in the floors and a drain in the kitchen occasionally backs up with sewage. A Fund Designed to be “Difficult to Use”

The majority of districts in Idaho are smaller, rural communities — including many with vast areas of federal land — and are less able to support tax increases. Some have a growing number of retirees who don’t have kids in school; others have shrinking enrollment because of a decline in logging or other industries. Idaho’s limited resources and restrictive policies have left the state with aging schools and left districts without funding to replace them.

For decades, educators have raised the alarm about the condition of school buildings in Idaho. In the 1990s, a group of superintendents, districts and parents sued the state over inadequate funding. A statewide assessment funded by the Legislature shortly after found that 71 facilities, or about 10% of the buildings used for instruction in the state, were dangerous or had serious problems needing immediate attention. As the case progressed, a district court cited an analysis that found an American Falls school, in southeastern Idaho, would likely collapse in a seismic event, a probable threat for that area. In Troy, an inspection found the high school was unsafe to occupy. But with no funds to fix it, the school remained open for years.

After multiple appeals, the Idaho Supreme Court sided with the education stakeholders in 2005. The justices agreed with a lower court that the state’s “reliance on loans alone to pay for major repairs or the replacement of unsafe school buildings was inadequate for the poorer school districts.” They told the Legislature that lawmakers had a responsibility to make sure school facilities were adequately funded. “The list of safety concerns and difficulties in getting funds for repairs or replacements is distressingly long,” the court said.

The next year, legislators tried to address the ruling. A Republican lawmaker introduced a bill to start the process of lowering the two-thirds requirement that made it so difficult to pass bonds, but legislators never gave it a hearing.

Instead, the Legislature took up a bill that several lawmakers said at the time wouldn’t fully solve the problem. One key element would create a $25 million loan program, the Public School Facilities Cooperative Funding Program, intended to help districts that couldn’t pass bonds to repair or replace their unsafe schools.

The proposed program had a high bar: School districts would qualify only if their buildings presented either an “unreasonable risk of death or serious bodily injury” or an “unreasonable health risk.”

The old Salmon Middle School

The program’s money would also come with strings attached. If approved, district officials would have to agree to forgo local control throughout the process and give a state-appointed supervisor the power to make decisions for the schools — even the power to dismiss the superintendent. The state would then impose a tax on the local community to repay the loan, a potentially enormous deterrent, since the community had already voted down a bond.

The issue generated weeks of legislative debate. One concern was that the new measure would undermine the state’s long commitment to local control of school districts. Some legislators went further, arguing that the program would give too much power to the state, with one state senator predicting that the public response would be like “the revolution that started as a result of the Boston Tea Party.” Some also argued that taxpayers who supported bonds to rebuild schools in their communities shouldn’t be forced to pay for schools in other areas.

Other legislators and education stakeholders believed the bill didn’t go far enough. Robert Huntley, the attorney who sued the state back in 1990, said the Supreme Court decision was “not just about safety issues,” but the Legislature appeared to be focusing on only that aspect. Justices also ruled that the environment had to be “conducive to learning.” “There is serious underfunding and new money is needed,” Huntley told lawmakers, according to legislative meeting minutes.

Despite the concerns, many legislators agreed that it was a step in the right direction. The resulting compromise bill passed with a large majority in support.

Now-Lt. Gov. Scott Bedke, who sponsored the legislation, acknowledged in a recent interview that it’s ultimately the state’s responsibility to provide safe facilities. But, he said, the program was also intended to be a last resort, and the conditions on the funding were meant to provide oversight for the spending of taxpayer money.

“It was created to be, frankly, difficult to use,” said Mike Rush, the former executive director of the State Board of Education who served on the state panel that assessed program applications, including Salmon’s.

The program’s requirements were “onerous,” said Shawn Keough, a former Republican state senator who sponsored the bill that created the program, and that only two districts have used it shows it wasn’t the tool districts wanted.

“I supported the incremental step forward as a potential solution,” she said. “One of my regrets from my 22 years of service was not being able to fix that problem of school facility funding.”

Salmon Closes a School

Tolman, who served on the Salmon school board from 2008 to 2013, was hopeful when the district applied to the state program in 2012. He’d grown up in Salmon and heard about a time when the elementary school had outdoor hallways, a layout ill-suited to a town where winter temperatures sometimes fall below zero. The district eventually enclosed the hallways, but turning what was designed to be a sidewalk into a hallway contributed to cracks and buckling floors.

Many floors in the elementary school are uneven and present a tripping hazard.

Less than three years before Salmon applied for the loan, the state agreed to build an entirely new school for the Plummer-Worley School District in North Idaho, where inspection reports had found major structural issues, and the panel determined that the most economical solution was to replace the school. Tolman hoped for a similar outcome in Salmon’s case.

In assessing both districts’ applications, the state panel — which included top officials from the State Board of Education and the divisions of building safety and public works — focused heavily on the funding program’s limitations. According to meeting minutes, panel members said that the remedy had to focus on Salmon’s “safety problem, not the educational environment or the adequacy of the facilities for education.”

They also discussed the law’s language that allowed intervention only in the face of “unreasonable” risks. The term “unreasonable” was not defined in state law, so the panel had to consider what an “unreasonable risk of death” was. Salmon sits in a seismically active area. In 1983, an earthquake killed two children on their way to school in Central Idaho, and in 2020, a 6.5-magnitude earthquake cracked the courthouse in the next county over and spurred avalanches in the Sawtooth mountains. Was the earthquake risk unreasonable?

The panel also struggled with whether repairs alone would be enough to make the schools last another 20 years, which the law also required.

Rush, who voted in favor of repairing the schools in Salmon, said patching up a safety hazard is almost never the best solution. But that was as much as Rush said the panel could offer while still abiding by the law. “By the time the facility gets to the point where it needs to come to this process, they need a new facility,” he said.

Rush said he felt like the program was designed to use the potential for a state takeover to pressure the local community to pass a bond on its own.

In a 2013 bond election, the district had estimated a new K-8 school would cost taxpayers over $14 million. Instead, the panel in 2013 approved $3.6 million to renovate the elementary and middle schools.

Faced with a constrained budget, the district shuttered the middle school. That would leave taxpayers on the hook to repay the state only about $1.7 million for repairing the elementary school and bringing in portable buildings to accommodate middle school students.

The years of debate over how to handle the school conditions created turmoil and sowed distrust in the community, with lots of blame to go around. For some parents, it felt like throwing money at a school that couldn’t be fixed.

“We got a new roof on a turd over there,” said Allen, a Salmon parent. She said it also wouldn’t have gone over well if the state had charged taxpayers for a new school they didn’t vote for. “They could have offered us some resources or some education or opportunities or some sort of a lifeline,” she added. “But they just didn’t.”

The playground outside Salmon’s elementary school

While Rush sees value in the program to abate unsafe situations, he said it’s not the ideal solution for aging and deteriorating schools like the one in Salmon.

“For those of us in the educational environment, we wouldn’t say that’s the kind of facility we’d want to send our kids to for the next 20 years,” Rush said. “Granted, they might not die while they’re going to school. But that’s not the only criteria one might want to have for your kids.”

“Our Children Deserve More”

For parents, teachers and staff in Salmon, the conditions of the schools remain a regular frustration a decade after the repairs.

Becky Harbaugh, the head cook at Salmon’s Pioneer Elementary School, has made do with ovens that don’t cook evenly and kitchen drawers and cabinets without handles that she opens with pieces of string. In the winter, her hands have stuck to door handles in subzero temperatures as she gets food from outside storage rooms. The district hasn’t renovated the kitchen, in part because the cost to bring it into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act would be too high, Superintendent Troy Easterday said.

What really worries Harbaugh, though, is the narrow hallway and staircase that students have to navigate while carrying their trays of food from the kitchen down into the cafeteria.

“It’s just scary sometimes. I mean, I worry about those kids. Hot soup day, you ought to see me,” she said, holding her breath and staring, motionless, in anticipation of disaster.

First image: Head cook Becky Harbaugh and cook Rick Palmer prepare food for lunch. Second image: In the elementary school kitchen, drawers and cabinets have pieces of string in place of handles. Third image: Students have to carry their trays down a narrow staircase and hallway to the cafeteria.

Students who use wheelchairs face a different problem. They can’t even line up to get their meals; there’s no ramp.

Many of the school’s problems today look nearly identical to those featured in the district’s structural evaluations and engineering reports dating back nearly two decades.

Rebar still sticks out of the crumbling foundation on the side of the building, just as it did more than a decade ago. The internet closet — a stack of shelves in the middle of the hallway — has the same tangle of dozens of wires it did long before students regularly used laptops or tablets in their classrooms. The uneven floors, buckled by what administrators believe are frost heaves from when water freezes or thaws in the foundation, pose tripping hazards — just as they did in 2012. The only difference is the school has put down new carpet.

“It’s just a money pit,” said Bobby Lewis, the maintenance director for the district. When he needs to fix a plumbing problem, he’ll sometimes have to crawl through a 3-square-foot tunnel and chisel out part of the concrete foundation to replace a section of the pipe that’s broken. At some point, that won’t be an option anymore, he said, because it would become unsafe to keep cutting out the foundation.

To deal with the brown water, students carried water bottles throughout the day. Shortly after the state stepped in, the district saved enough to replace its water lines. Over the years, district officials also made one of the bathrooms accessible for staff members with disabilities.

The district invested in its schools to make them as functional as possible, but nothing they did could fix the underlying issues.

“I know we lose people. When they move into town, they’re like, ‘Yeah, I’m not gonna send my kids to school in a facility like this and next to something — razor-wire-topped fence, looks like an old prison,’” Easterday said. “Our buildings scare people off.”

Superintendent Troy Easterday points out exposed rebar in the crumbling foundation of the elementary school building — a condition that was also flagged in an engineering report in 2005. Bobby Lewis, maintenance director for the district, displays the tangle of wires in the elementary school’s internet closet, which looks much the same as it did in a 2013 report.

In 2019, the district tried again to pass a bond. It conducted an analysis that showed that despite the state-mandated repairs, the internal issues in the elementary school would be too costly to renovate and would not address the overcrowding, according to documents on the bond effort. The most cost-effective move, the board decided, would be to build a new school.

The district ran a $25 million bond to build a K-8 school — about $10 million more than it had asked for in its previous bond effort in 2013.

The board held meetings and shared information online. But it was still hard to reach the bond threshold. A growing portion of Salmon residents are retired and no longer have kids in school. Some in the community said that if the schools had been good enough for them, they were good enough for current students; others didn’t want higher taxes or felt excluded from the bond process. The district also faced a last-minute push from the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a conservative group that opposes public schools, which it has accused of “indoctrinating students with leftist nonsense.” Disagreements broke out on social media between supporters and opponents.

When the election came around, the bond received the most support that a measure in Salmon had gotten in decades. More than 58% of voters said the district needed a new school and they were willing to pay for it. But once again, it wasn’t enough.

“Our children deserve more than we’re giving them,” said Nancy Fred, who had three sons in the schools, the youngest of whom graduated in 2014.

This summer, a group of parents and community members again held meetings to try to figure out a solution for their schools. Hundreds attended. One parent wrote if they’d had kids before moving to Salmon, they wouldn’t have come, according to documents compiling the feedback from the meetings. Others said the aging buildings make it hard to recruit teachers and professionals to Salmon and that Pioneer Elementary is falling apart “everywhere you look.”

During a tour in May, Jill Patton, Pioneer’s principal, praised teachers for all they have been able to do with what they have. But with a new building, she said, they could do so much more.

“You look at this building, and you can see such heart and such love for kids and such great learning taking place,” Patton said. “And I think, ‘Wow, what it could be if the barriers of the building weren’t there.’”

On the day of the tour, the students in Betsi LaMoure’s first grade class had been working on some addition problems. She was trying out a smartboard that a vendor had lent to Salmon in hopes that the district would buy them. But the WiFi wasn’t strong enough to get it working. Connectivity is poor in the area, and retrofitting such an old building is difficult. After multiple attempts, LaMoure gave up. She pivoted to a much older technology, writing on a piece of paper and using a projector to display it on the chalkboard.

Betsi LaMoure’s first grade class

Idaho: Help Us Show Readers and Officials Issues With Your School Building

by Becca Savransky, Idaho Statesman, photography by Sarah A. Miller, Idaho Statesman

The Texas Attorney General Is Supposed to Represent State Agencies. Ken Paxton Has Repeatedly Refused To.

1 year 10 months ago

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When Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton held a news conference in May decrying state lawmakers’ anticipated vote to impeach him, he framed the decision as not only a threat to his political career but as one that endangered the slew of lawsuits he’d filed against the Biden administration.

Paxton, who has since been suspended from office, faces an impeachment trial that starts today. He has long positioned himself as one of the country’s strongest conservative attorneys general, relentlessly pursuing nearly 50 lawsuits against the federal government on issues that include immigration, health care and the environment. Such messaging raised Paxton’s national profile, appealed to his base of conservative supporters and helped him tamp down political pushback stemming from allegations of wrongdoing that have dogged his eight-year tenure.

But as Paxton has aggressively pursued such lawsuits, he has repeatedly declined to do a critical but less glamorous part of his job: represent state agencies in court.

Despite his role as Texas’ lead attorney, Paxton has denied representation to state agencies at least 75 times in the past two years, according to records obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. The denials forced some of those agencies to assume additional, unanticipated costs as they scrambled to secure legal assistance.

“Every time he backs out of one of these cases – and an agency, a university has to get outside counsel, if they get the funding approved – that's costing the taxpayers a lot of extra money, because that's one of the principal reasons the AG’s office exists, is to provide these basic legal services, basic legal defense,” said Chris Toth, former executive director of the National Association of Attorneys General.

Over the years, some of Paxton’s representation denials have become public. Among those is his longtime refusal to defend the state Ethics Commission against lawsuits filed by the now-disbanded Empower Texans, a political action committee, and the PAC’s then-head Michael Quinn Sullivan. Empower Texans contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to his campaign and loaned him $1 million, according to campaign finance reports. Another has been his choice not to represent the State Commission on Judicial Conduct after it issued a public warning to a justice of the peace who refused to perform same-sex marriages despite a U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized the unions.

But the scope of the denials has not been fully known. Neither have details of other times he has said no to state agencies seeking representation.

In one such instance, Paxton declined to represent the University of Houston–Clear Lake after students filed a lawsuit alleging the university wouldn’t recognize their organization because of the group’s requirement that its officers be Christian. Until then, the attorney general’s office had never before declined to represent the university in a case, said university spokesperson Chris Stipes.

In another instance, Paxton’s office not only held off on a decision to represent the University of Texas System in an affirmative action case, but also withheld a determination on whether the university could hire outside legal counsel, forcing multiple delays. That choice stands in contrast to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision to represent the University of Texas at Austin in a similar case 15 years earlier when he was the state’s attorney general.

Texas lawmakers in 2021 required the attorney general’s office to begin reporting each time it declined to represent a state agency. It’s unclear what prompted the mandate.

ProPublica and the Tribune obtained records documenting dozens of denials through a Public Information Act request, but the vast majority do not include a clear reason for the decisions. The attorney general’s office declined to provide specifics about its communications with state agencies, including those that occurred before the reporting requirement went into effect, citing attorney-client privilege. The office also did not respond to a question about whether the agency tracked these denials prior to 2021.

Lawmakers took additional action this year, requiring the attorney general to start giving reasons for the denials beginning Sept. 1.

Paxton’s office has claimed that the bulk of those denials were because agencies preferred to hire their own attorneys or because the office was statutorily prevented from representing them. Other requests, Paxton has said, were turned down because they would have required his office to take a position opposite of what it had previously argued or because he believed they would run contrary to the state’s constitution.

An office spokesperson said the attorney general approves the vast majority of solicitations for help, but neither the office nor Paxton responded to requests for interviews or to detailed questions about specific denials.

Such transparency is necessary, according to former attorneys general and legal experts, who say that Paxton’s denials reflect a broader polarization among attorneys general across the country, threatening the claim that they represent the rule of law.

“He certainly was one of those people that was leading the way of this idea that they don't have to enforce or defend anything they don't like,” Toth said. “And that's not what AGs are elected to do. And it's not the courageous thing to do either because AGs have to do the right thing by the law, even when it's not popular.”

In 2014, Colorado’s then-Attorney General John Suthers, a Republican, penned an opinion piece in the Washington Post that warned against such politicization of the office. In the piece, Suthers criticized three Democratic attorneys general at the time, including California’s Kamala Harris, now U.S. vice president, for refusing to defend their state’s ban on gay marriage ahead of the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision legalizing the unions. “I fear that refusing to defend unpopular or politically distasteful laws will ultimately weaken the legal and moral authority that attorneys general have earned and depend on,” he wrote.

Suthers reiterated the same concern about Paxton’s refusal to defend state agencies in an interview with ProPublica and the Tribune.

“If you decide for yourself what laws ought to be defended, what agencies ought to be defended on other than dictates of the courts, then you come across as nothing but a wholly political entity,” Suthers said. “That's not the role that you're supposed to play in the system. Let the legislature and the governor be political. You're supposed to be adhering to the rule of law."

Growing Costs

During a legislative committee hearing in February, Mary González, a state representative from the El Paso area, grilled Paxton about his decisions to not represent state agencies. She and other lawmakers had just finished asking Paxton about his office’s agreement more than a week earlier to pay $3.3 million to settle a whistleblower lawsuit with former employees who had accused him of bribery and retaliation.

González, a Democrat, asked Paxton if he had made an active decision to have the attorney general’s office take on the lawsuit filed against him. She noted that Paxton’s office could have declined to represent him in court the same way it had denied representation to state agencies.

“Ultimately, the attorney general isn't doing his job,” González said in an interview with the news organizations. “We should care if any elected official is not doing their job.”

Paxton and his staff did not directly answer González’s question but raised the various reasons the office would not take on a case, including instances when it thinks an agency’s argument violates the constitution.

“If we’re given a case that appears to us clearly to be unconstitutional, they want us to take a position against the constitution. That’s a real problem for me given my oath,” Paxton said.

Two days later, Jacqueline Habersham, executive director of the State Commission on Judicial Conduct, appeared before the same legislators to request $150,000 to help cover legal fees over the next two years. Paxton has refused to defend the commission in two ongoing lawsuits.

In late 2019, a justice of the peace in Waco, Texas, less than two hours south of Dallas, sued the judicial commission in district court after it issued her a public warning because of statements she made to the media about disagreeing with and refusing to perform same-sex marriages after they’d been legalized, casting “doubt on her capacity to act impartially.” The lawsuit argued that the commission’s public punishment of the justice of the peace constituted “a substantial burden” on her “free exercise of religion,” according to court records.

A few months later, the county judge of Jack County, northwest of Fort Worth, sued the judicial commission in federal court, arguing that he also was at risk of being sanctioned because he did not perform same-sex marriages. An attorney for the county judge declined to comment.

The cases, and the costs, are ongoing.

Even before Habersham went to lawmakers for help, the judicial commission had already spent $120,000 for outside counsel because Paxton had declined to provide representation. She said the small agency had previously not budgeted for such expenses. With the commission having no way to know if the attorney general will deny legal help again, “we’re just hoping that no other lawsuits are filed against us, where the AG will also decline (to represent us) again,” Habersham said in an interview with ProPublica and the Tribune.

In 2015, after the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage, Paxton issued an opinion that said judges should not have to perform these ceremonies if they have religious objections. Asked in 2020 about not representing the commission, an attorney general spokesman told the Houston Chronicle, “We believe judges retain their right to religious liberty when they take the bench.”

The statement and Paxton’s decision against defending the judicial commission “certainly has the appearance that he's refusing to do it because he disagrees with the Supreme Court decision, and therefore he's making a political decision and not a legal decision,” said Suthers, the former Colorado attorney general.

The plaintiffs in both lawsuits filed against the commission have at some point been represented by First Liberty Institute, a Plano-based conservative Christian law firm. The firm’s president and chief executive, Kelly Shackelford, is a longtime friend of Paxton and has contributed $1,000 to a legal defense fund Paxton has used to fight an ongoing criminal indictment for securities fraud. First Liberty board member Tim Dunn is among Paxton’s biggest individual donors, having given him $820,000 since he first ran for attorney general. Political action committees associated with Dunn have also donated more than $950,000 combined to Paxton. Neither Shackelford nor Dunn responded to a request for comment.

First Liberty’s executive general counsel, Hiram Sasser, who briefly worked for the attorney general’s office under Paxton, said he doesn’t know how donations would have affected the attorney general’s decision.

But Sasser said he would have been disappointed had the attorney general chosen to represent the commission. He alleges that the commission is violating the Waco justice of the peace’s rights under the Texas Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which limits government actions that substantially burden someone’s ability to freely exercise their religion, and the Texas Constitution because it violates her freedom of speech and religion.

The judicial commission’s private attorneys said that the justice of the peace argued those points before the commission in 2019 but lost the case. They maintain that she did not appeal that case, so she has no right to pursue a new lawsuit that claims the warning was invalid.

State law says the attorney general’s office shall represent the judicial commission in court at its request, which indicates Paxton has minimal wiggle room to refuse to defend them, said Paul Nolette, director of the Les Aspin Center for Government at Marquette University, who researches attorneys general.

“This seems more like the AG choosing to adopt a certain constitutional interpretation and then saying, 'Well, I believe it's unconstitutional, therefore, I'm not going to defend it.' But it's still ambiguous. It's not like an open and shut case.”

Contrasting Legal Approaches

While about 15 years apart, two cases against the University of Texas at Austin lay bare the different approaches taken by Paxton and Abbott, Paxton’s predecessor and now the state’s Republican governor.

Under Abbott’s leadership, the attorney general’s office defended UT-Austin in federal district court against a lawsuit filed by Abigail Fisher and another student. In the 2008 lawsuit, the students, who were white, alleged that the school’s consideration of race in admissions prevented them from being accepted. The attorney general’s office argued that the university’s admission policy was legal because Fisher had not proven it was adopted in bad faith. The office also argued the policy was narrowly tailored to achieve needed diversity there.

Fisher appealed the district court’s decision in favor of the university in 2009. Although Abbott did not represent the university throughout the entire appeals process, he submitted a nearly 50-page brief in December 2011 when the case first went before the Supreme Court, urging the high court to reject the case. The attorney general office’s leading argument was that Fisher, by then scheduled to graduate from another university in 2012, could no longer assert that she intended to apply to UT-Austin as a freshman or transfer student.

Abbott did not respond to a request for comment.

In 2016, the Supreme Court upheld UT’s affirmative action policies in a 4-3 decision. (Justice Elena Kagan did not take part in the decision and one seat was vacant at the time.)

In contrast, Paxton not only withheld a decision on representing the UT System in another affirmative action case earlier this year, but also kept the agency in limbo by holding off on allowing it to hire outside legal counsel.

On Jan. 12, a lawyer with the UT System sent a letter to the attorney general requesting representation after a man named George Stewart filed a federal lawsuit against six medical schools that had rejected his applications for admission. All but one of the schools were in the UT System. Stewart, who is white, argued that the schools were “unlawfully discriminating against whites, Asians, and men.” Stewart and his attorneys declined to comment.

Over the next several weeks, UT System attorneys contacted a deputy chief in Paxton’s office numerous times. They called. They emailed. The deputy chief told UT lawyers that “decisionmakers” at the attorney general’s office were aware that filing deadlines were approaching but were still considering the request, court documents show.

UT System lawyers eventually were forced to ask the plaintiff’s lawyer for an extension, delaying the case.

More than a month passed before the attorney general formally responded.

The attorney general’s office wrote in a letter that it agreed with the plaintiff’s argument that considering race and gender in student admissions was illegal and that it was awaiting the outcome of other affirmative action cases before the Supreme Court. The attorney general’s office also wrote in the letter that it had filed briefs urging the court to do away with affirmative action because it was “abhorrent to the Constitution.”

“For these reasons, we are choosing at this time to withhold a decision on your request for representation and for outside counsel,” the letter said.

UT could represent itself, the letter continued, but only for the purpose of requesting extensions in the case. Although state agencies like UT often have their own in-house general counsel, the attorney general is officially their lawyer. The state agency lawyers aren’t necessarily litigators, or litigation may only be a small part of their job. Often, their time is spent giving internal legal advice, reviewing contracts or consulting on employment issues. State agencies smaller than UT may not even have attorneys on staff.

Catherine Frazier, a UT System spokesperson, would not comment on the lawsuit or answer questions but said that the school, like every state agency, is required to ask the attorney general for representation or outside counsel. Every case is different, she said, and the UT System has ultimately been able to secure counsel.

Months later, the Supreme Court would rule in a 6-3 decision that consideration of race in college admissions violates the U.S. Constitution. But neither the attorney general nor UT lawyers knew how the high court would vote when Stewart filed his lawsuit.

“The law was clear that affirmative action was allowed (at the time),” said Terry Goddard, a Democrat who was Arizona’s attorney general from 2003 to 2011. “I don't think you get to wait for the next round of Supreme Court decisions to make up your mind.”

Goddard’s approach to the attorney general role, he said, was that if he could make any constitutional argument in support of a law, whether or not he agreed with it, “it was your job to take that argument and do the best job you could.”

"Now, that's not what we're hearing today from people like Paxton,” Goddard said. “He's basically saying, 'Look, I'm not gonna make the argument at all.' He didn't even take what I think is the appropriate fallback, which is, ‘I won't support it. And the record will show that I'm not supporting your position, but I'm going to get you counsel.'"

About a month after Paxton was impeached by the Texas House and suspended from his position, the attorney general’s office, while under the leadership of interim Attorney General John Scott, finally allowed the UT System to hire outside lawyers in the affirmative action case.

“Playing Favoritism”

Just as Paxton has declined cases where he has an opposing view, he has chosen to get involved with others with whom he is aligned ideologically.

In 2020, Lucas Babin, a district attorney in East Texas, obtained an indictment against the streaming service Netflix for distributing the French film “Cuties,” a documentary about a Senegalese immigrant who joins a children’s dance troupe. The director has said the film critiques the sexualization of young girls, but critics focused on some of the film’s advertising depicting the girls dressed in tight, midriff-baring clothing or scenes showing them dancing. Babin alleged the film violated a state law that bans the “lewd exhibition of the genitals or pubic area of a clothed or partially clothed child,” which Netflix has disputed.

Less than two weeks before Babin announced the indictment, Paxton was one of four attorneys general who signed a letter to Netflix “vehemently” opposing the continued streaming of the film.

After an appellate court ruled in an unrelated case in 2021 that the lewd exhibition charge was unconstitutional, Netflix requested that Babin dismiss his indictment. Babin dropped that charge in March 2022 after he brought four new indictments that alleged the film violated state child pornography statutes.

On March 3, 2022, Netflix filed a request for injunction in federal court, arguing Babin was “abusing his office” by bringing the new indictments in response to Netflix’s effort to get the first indictment dismissed. The film had won awards, Netflix argued, and Babin was infringing on the company’s “constitutional rights.” (The Texas Tribune is among a group that has filed an amicus brief in support of Netflix in its case against Babin.)

The following day, Babin arrived in court, this time as a defendant, with a lawyer of his own: an assistant attorney general from Paxton’s office.

Under Texas state law, the attorney general is obligated to represent state district attorneys under limited circumstances, specifically when the case is in federal court and when the person filing the lawsuit is in prison.

It’s not unusual for a district attorney to ask the attorney general’s office for help, said Nolette. What’s surprising, he said, is that the state said yes.

“This isn't a case where the DA said, ‘Please help me in this case to prosecute Netflix,’” Nolette said. “It's that they're being sued by Netflix for essentially prosecutorial misconduct. And yet, the AG is getting involved in a local issue where this is not a state agency.”

“It just gives the perception, and obviously some of this is specific to Paxton, that he's playing favoritism,” Nolette said.

Neither Babin nor Netflix responded to a request for comment.

In November 2022, a federal judge granted Netflix’s request for a preliminary injunction, essentially preventing Babin and his office from pursuing new indictments against the tech company until the initial case is resolved. Babin has appealed that decision.

The attorney general’s office, along with a private attorney, continue to represent him.

Carla Astudillo of The Texas Tribune contributed reporting.

by Vianna Davila and Jessica Priest