S03 E03: In a Heartbeat

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Before we begin, a quick warning that in this show we discuss child abuse, and this content may be difficult for some listeners.

If you or anyone you know is a victim or survivor of medical child abuse, please go to munchhausensupport.com to connect with professionals who can help.

Every investigation begins with a question, but this film starts off with an answer.

So, did they want Jack to turn on Viata?

I would assume that they did.

That would have made their case easier.

He said that he would choose his kids over his wife.

That's what he's supposed to say.

If you say otherwise, it will be held against you.

That is the only correct answer.

The audio you just heard is a producer and a Kowalski family attorney, Deborah Salisbury, talking in the Netflix documentary, Take Care of Maya.

People believe their eyes.

That's something that actually is so central to this whole issue and to people that experience this, is that we do believe the people that we love when they're telling us something.

If you questioned everything that everyone told you, you couldn't make it through your day.

I'm Andrea Dunlop, and this is Nobody Should Believe Me.

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When Susan logged in, what she discovered shocked her to the marrow of her bones.

Though the recent insurance records contained pages and pages of information about Sophia, there was nothing about Hope.

Susan dug deeper and looked back through years of records.

There wasn't a single entry about Hope's cancer treatment.

For eight years, the Butcher family had lived with a devastating fear that their beloved daughter and sister was battling terminal cancer.

For months, they'd been preparing for her death.

But in that moment, a new horror was dawning.

For nearly a decade, hope had been lying.

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In the last episode, we talked about the broader concept of false allegations and how the Maya Kowalski case fits into this.

We talked to a couple of experts, including Dr.

Carol Jenny, a New Yorker, and a Florida doctor, to just give us a bit of an introduction into what is going on in this case.

And we talked about Dr.

Kirkpatrick, who plays a really outsized role, not just in this story, but in the media coverage of it because of his participation in the Netflix documentary.

Today, we are going to get into a really important piece of this case that was unfinished at the time of Beata's death, which is the police investigation.

And we are going to unpack the documentation we have around that, which is the police report and a transcript of the complete interview with Detective Stephanie Graham from the Sarasota County Sheriff's Department and Jack Kowalski.

So, reading through these documents in particular really changed my

idea of Jack Kowalski's role in this situation.

You know, the documentary really casts him as a very sympathetic figure.

And on the one hand, I think it's always important to recognize, and I do, that this man has been through hell.

This, this whole situation is so sad.

It's so heartbreaking.

Who is to blame for it is a different question.

But in terms of like, do I feel empathy for Jack Kowalski?

I do.

But what this police investigation and what this interview in particular, one of the things that Detective Graham is trying to get to the bottom of is what role the other parent is playing in a situation where one parent, in this case, Bianca Kowalski, is a suspected abuser.

This interview happened relatively early on in the case.

The transcript from the interview is over 170 pages, and yet only a very small clip was used in the documentary.

Here's the clip from the Netflix documentary Take Care of Maya with Detective Stephanie Graham and Jack Kowalski.

This is a complicated case.

True.

And

I think it could be very possible that someone could be looking at criminal charges.

Which is why I'm asking you, are you protective or are you complicit?

Protected my children.

Are your children truly your first priority?

I swear on my life.

On my children's lives.

I don't care.

I'll put you in my life in jail tomorrow if I need my money.

If you have something wrong, you put me in jail.

Absolutely.

Yes, I got stuck there.

Let me ask you, if Maya was released tomorrow, would you be compliant if that child was not to have any contact with her mother?

Yes.

In a heartbeat.

Here's Detective Mike Weber, friend of the show and nationally recognized expert on medical child abuse cases.

What were your thoughts as you were watching this part of the film?

The immediate thing that jumped out to me was they have one clip of one police interview that was extremely short

and very out of context.

Where was the rest of the police investigation?

What did the rest of the police investigation say about this case?

They chose the most confrontational moment of a very long interview that was very cordial.

As a detective, when you're in this point in the investigation, you can't force anyone to talk to you unless they're under arrest.

And then they can also, you can always ask for their lawyer to be there.

So Jack wasn't required to talk to Detective Graham.

And what you're not shown in the documentary is that she makes that clear to him a few times and even mentions that his lawyer probably won't be very happy that he's talking to her without them.

So, you know, it really seemed to me, though, that they were framing this as a guy being put under so much pressure that if he doesn't say that he'll choose his child over his wife, that they're going to take the kid away and he's going to get in trouble.

So they were trying to make her look like a bad cop, for lack of a better phrase.

It was very clear that he was doing this voluntarily.

They chose intentionally the most confrontational moment, which has to happen in that interview, right?

She's judging on whether he's going to be protective if she gets to the point of arresting Beata.

And it's just, it's just so out of context.

And it's, I view it as extremely dishonest.

So undoubtedly, you know, this is a really stressful situation for him any way you slice it.

You know, the truth is, based on my personal experience with my sister, I know what it's like to be in the position of having to grapple with the idea that someone you love might have been doing this and you might have missed it for a time.

And I think that this moment in an investigation is one of the most crucial points where a child's future is really going to be determined because the decisions that the person we believe to be the non-offending parent makes are going to have a huge impact.

And, you know, Mike, you always say it's about half and half with dads, whether or not they're willing to really accept that this abuse is happening.

And of course, with the caveat in this case, that we don't know because this was early on in the investigation or not, or if they're just going to retreat into a state of denial.

So, Mike, can you walk us through Detective Stephanie Graham's strategy here as she's interviewing Jack?

Because part of what she's trying to determine is like, is this father completely unaware of what's happening?

Is he also a suspect?

Has he been complicit complicit in the enabling of possible abuse in a more active way?

Or is he basically telling the same story as Beata?

Sure.

And it was a very effective interview.

Honestly, she is just seeking the truth, right?

But what she is also doing is letting dad lead her through that, right?

And then giving dad pieces of information that she has to get dad's reaction to

that information and kind of gauge where he's at on this.

And she's also doing this before she has all the financial records.

So she may also be considering: is this a financial scheme?

Are they doing this for financial benefit with all of the fundraisers?

Is this also child exploitation, depending on what Florida's laws on it?

She's trying to determine a whole number of things in this interview

with Jack.

And she's also trying to get information about the actual child abuse case itself and whether this medical child abuse is occurring with Maya.

Yeah, Detective Graham really seemed like she was asking the right questions in this interview.

And we also know from this documentation that she did read the peer-reviewed APSAC guidelines on investigating this abuse, the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children, and the law enforcement section of those guidelines were actually written by you.

Right.

There were definitely many things during this conversation that jumped off the page at me as being,

you know, similar to other cases we've seen.

And also just, you know, the demeanor of Jack and kind of looking at other spouses in these cases.

So I wonder, like, what, what just in an overall sense, what stood out to you about what Jack said in this conversation?

What was very interesting to me, especially for the medical abuse aspect of it, is it's very clear that the primary medical provider for Maya was Beata.

And Jack makes that very clear.

Jack doesn't know what medication she's on.

Jack doesn't really know the treatments.

He doesn't know the amount of ketamine she's getting each day.

It's very, very clear that Beata is the one administering her medical care.

Now, that's important to Detective Graham because that is identifying

who your suspect is in the medical child abuse case, right?

It's going to be the person who is actually medically caring for the child and presenting the false symptoms.

And you know, we've talked to a number of dads on this show that for various reasons just weren't that aware of what was going on in the day-to-day because of work or other reasons.

And this situation with the Kowalskis strikes me as a little bit different from a lot of families, namely because Jack was retired and he was a stay-at-home dad while all this was going on.

So here's the tape of Jack Kowalski from the Netflix documentary, Take Care of Maya.

In early spring of 2015,

life was good.

Piata was working as an infusion nurse, helping people with their treatments at home.

I was a firefighter, and then eventually retired, and I was able to spend more time with the kids.

We had a beautiful house, beautiful neighborhood, dream come true, paradise.

But then Maya started to get sick.

So then Jack presumably would be a little more involved in the the day-to-day lives of his kids.

So it's striking then that he seems to know so little in this interview about his daughter's medical history.

However, we know Beata had a really strong personality, and we know there's another reason.

Just simply because of her medical background, right?

So you have that here, but it also affords her more of an opportunity if this abuse is.

was happening to commit this abuse.

Yes.

As we see in these cases quite often, the fathers leave the care of these children completely up to the mother.

They don't have the criminal culpability of committing this crime.

You could argue that they're criminally negligent or reckless, but I think you'd have a hard time proving that.

Yeah.

And I think we've seen so many other cases, right?

Like,

you know, if we think about Fabian Ybara, who we talked to in season one in the Hope Ybara case, you know, this is a pretty normal dynamic that moms are the ones who are responsible for the medical care, you know, fairly or unfairly.

That's not out of the ordinary for like the mom to be the one that knows, you know, what's going on medically with the kids, that knows when they're doctor's appointments, that has ever gone to a doctor's appointment.

I mean, that is very common.

And, you know, in Fabian Ybara's case, nobody in Hope's family just had any reason to suspect her until they did.

So in addition to reading the transcript of the Detective Graham and Jack Kowalski interview, I've also read some of Jack's later testimony.

So this was years out from this situation, and it was really striking to me that though Maya, by many accounts, is doing really well now, she's not taking any prescription medications, she's not receiving any ongoing treatment from specialists, she's working out regularly, and she has just what sounds like a much more normal life.

You know, she has friends, she has a boyfriend, she's 17, so she's thinking about college possibilities.

But in Jack's testimony, he really seemed to me like he was trying to emphasize the fact that she's still in pain, that she's still sick.

And the court order that came down at the end of this put some restrictions on what doctors Maya could see and that every medical decision still has to be run through the courts, even after Beata died.

And that was what came up in his testimony.

And that's pretty interesting to me.

That tells us that though they did, of course, let Maya go home with Jack after Beada's death.

They decided that was in the best interest of the child.

It was not, as they state in the film, because of Dr.

Chopra's diagnosis that she had CRPS, and we will unpack that in a future episode.

But my take on that court order is that there wasn't no concern about Jack Kowalski possibly continuing with these treatments when Maya went home with him.

And now, look, how this case would have played out if this investigation had been completed and if charges had indeed been brought against Biata Kowalski and it had gone to trial, no one knows.

This is an unbelievably complicated case.

But it made me really sad that Jack Kowalski, when he was talking about his daughter, rather than emphasizing that she's doing really well, she is,

you know, now doing so much better health-wise.

Her mental health, I can't imagine how that suffered because of this situation.

But, you know, she's 17 and you want to encourage a kid to believe they have a bright future ahead of them.

And instead, you know, Jack's talking about how, well, she goes and cries herself to sleep because she's in pain, but she doesn't feel like she can tell me she's in pain because she knows we can't get treatment.

And it's clear from his testimony that what Jack is talking about when he says treatment is still that high-dose ketamine treatment.

And this whole thing just makes me sad.

And I don't know why Jack Kowalski is emphasizing Maya's continued pain.

I don't know if that's because he genuinely believes that or if it's because his lawsuit obviously hinges on the fact that she has a really serious chronic condition.

Now, one of the things that we did discuss with our Florida pediatrician friend is that in her understanding, pediatric CRPS actually has a pretty good prognosis overall?

And here again is our Florida pediatrician friend.

As a reminder, we are not using her name at this time because of her proximity to this case.

The idea is that children actually, overall, from the studies I read, do better than adults.

So their actually overall prognosis is better.

And then the actual incidence is significantly less than adults.

That being said,

because the studies aren't done on kids, are the numbers accurate?

You know, because every study kind of gives a different number.

But that being said, I think the children in general, I would say, have better outcomes is definitely something that I've found, which goes against a little bit of what comes up during the course of this case.

So it could be that it was very serious at the time that this happened and that it's gotten better or that she's in a remission.

It strikes me that there is a possibility that this situation continuing to play out for as long as it has, especially with the level of media attention that it's getting,

is continuing to put Maya in a sick role.

And that's really damaging, even if she does have some underlying condition.

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Now, medical child abuse can happen for a number of reasons.

It doesn't always involve deception.

Sometimes parents harm their children because they're deeply anxious or they're having delusions.

But as I got deeper into the documentation of Maya's case, a few huge things jumped out at me as possible evidence of fabrication.

Maya's CRPS diagnosis, her nutrition, and her asthma diagnosis.

So I I think with the CRPS diagnosis,

because it is going to be impossible for us sitting here to say whether or not this child has CRPS, there was disagreement amongst doctors.

It doesn't matter in terms of abuse because you could have a legitimate condition and you could be treating it in such a way that is so extreme and out of,

you know,

like out of line with what they need that that is still abuse.

And I think there is a strong argument within within this documentation that subjecting a child to a procedure with a 50% chance of death is extreme.

And it does appear that Beata was pursuing this treatment pretty hard.

So with the CRPS stuff,

we're not going to be able to get to the bottom of whether or not that was a

exaggeration, whether that was a fabrication, or whether that was a case of maternal anxiety.

The second thing is the issues around Maya's nutrition, especially because these just come up so much in these cases.

And at one point, Maya was on TPN nutrition.

So TPN nutrition, total perinatal nutrition, is IV

nutrition.

So TPN is used when a child is just not able to consume nutrition any other way.

So usually it's, you know, they can't eat food by mouth.

They go to a nasogastric tube.

They then graduate to the gastric tube that goes, you know, surgically implanted in their stomach and then move on to TPN, which is actual nutrition in their IV.

So in the original Johns Hopkins hospitalization where Beada was there, she was requesting that Maya get TPN nutrition.

And she was saying that because of her pain, she couldn't have the nasal gastric tube.

So again,

Maya has a documented history of eating issues and maybe her mother's just really concerned that she's going to waste away.

So this is another example of mom pushing for what appears to be an unnecessary treatment.

And the third thing that jumped out at me as possible evidence of fabrication is all of the stuff around this murky asthma diagnosis.

There were multiple instances in the records where Beada described Maya as having life-threatening asthma.

This does come up a bit in the film.

Here's Beata describing some of Maya's symptoms in the Netflix documentary.

And she couldn't go outside.

Every time she went outside, she started to cough.

So Maya's asthma is also allegedly the thing that brought on the CRPS.

Now, there are a couple different stories from Beada in this documentation about how the onset of the CRPS happened.

But the one that is presented in the film and the one that comes up the most often is that she had a severe asthma attack in July of 2015 and then started having CRPS symptoms.

And Dr.

Kirkpatrick testified about that, and his comment was that he was not aware that this was a way that CRPS could start.

And that is consistent with what we have heard from all of the other doctors who testified about CRPS.

Beata also reported at some points that the onset of the CRPS happened after a gymnastics injury in May of 2015.

So again, this is an example of things that, you know, are any of us going to give an exact right, you know, account of things that happened?

No, but these are different enough that it's notable.

And Jack describes in the film that he and Beada were taking Maya to a number of different doctors.

Here's that tape from the Netflix documentary, Take Care of Maya.

We went to doctor after doctor,

one hospital to another,

trying to get an answer.

And as a nurse, Beada was very thorough, so she documented every doctor visit from the very beginning.

But they've just put their arms up in the air and said, There's nothing we could do.

We don't know what it is.

In fact, according to the records, this is not what happened.

The Kowalskis did see a number of doctors between the alleged onset in July of 2015 and the CRPS diagnosis that was eventually given by Dr.

Kirkpatrick that fall.

But the doctors they saw in between told the parents that Maya was suffering from something called conversion disorder.

Again, here's our Florida pediatrician friend explaining what that is.

There's the concept of conversion disorder, which as we understand it is children present with neurologic symptoms that they are not creating, but that are somehow being perceived as being present by their bodies or by their mind.

So kids can present with vision loss with no MRI findings, no spinal fluid findings, no lab findings, anything to suggest why that would be the case.

But they

truly have vision loss.

They cannot see out of the eye that they're claiming to not see out of.

And it's not that they're lying and saying they can't.

It is truly they can't.

And that

concept of conversion disorder is often hard, I think, for physicians to completely explain other than that you can usually tie it to some stressful event or something else going on in the child's life that then precludes this onset of conversion disorder.

The thing with conversion disorder is it's there.

So if they have vision loss, it is there until it's not and they've gone through therapies and all the things to try to reverse the process.

But it's important to say that those kids, it's not in their control.

It is an altered pathway or something that the brain is not fully understanding what it's experiencing.

So getting back to the police interview with Jack Kowalski, one of the things that I was interested about is how much of this documentation and how much of this medical information Detective Graham had when she was doing this interview and where she would have gotten it from.

So needless to say, there was a lot of documentation in this case.

One of the numbers I saw in a piece of deposition was 35,000 pages of medical records that were eventually collected from various institutions.

And so that is what Dr.

Sally Smith, who again, she is a child abuse pediatrician and she is not an employee of Johns Hopkins.

She worked for Suncoast Center, which is a community care-based organization that works with DCF.

She was tasked with reviewing for this case.

And we do not have her eventual 45-page report on all that documentation, but we do have her testimony and the initial report that she wrote supporting the shelter decision.

And she mentions some things that were pretty telling in terms of her eventual diagnosis of medical child abuse, which we know she gave.

There's a lot here, but here are just a few of the things that stuck out to me from Sally Smith's deposition and her initial report on October 11th of 2016.

So again, she mentions that Beata was requesting that Maya be put in a medically induced coma.

And Dr.

Smith said that Beata portrayed these treatments that Maya was getting as, quote, last-ditch efforts to treat a condition that was terminal.

with no hope for a cure.

Something else that really stuck out to me in Dr.

Sally Smith's deposition and notes is this stuff about the port that Beata had had placed in Maya to get these ketamine infusions.

So this was placed at Johns Hopkins.

This is an elective procedure and it was ordered by Dr.

Kirkpatrick.

And Dr.

Smith notes that Beata, who as a reminder, by her profession is an IV nurse, had been giving her daughter IV ketamine, immunoglobin, immunoglobin, thallium, and other narcotics through the port.

The prescriptions for these is a whole other central mystery of these records, but that was against medical advice to give those at home.

Dr.

Smith also mentions these asthma claims, and that Beata claims that Maya has severe Addison's disease.

This is a condition affecting the adrenal glands.

and there is no other record of her having this disease.

So, as a sort of sum up, one of the quotes from Dr.

Sally Smith's initial report was that her mother presented extensive history by various physicians that is false based on review of the previous records.

So these are just a few of the pieces of the puzzle from Dr.

Sally Smith.

And again, none of these things are mentioned in the film.

And this film goes to great lengths to try and discredit her.

But these things that Dr.

Sally Smith is saying here are confirmed by many other pieces of deposition, affidavits, and records that are available in the public record.

So I find myself struggling with this one to see what other possible explanation there is here.

Is she lying?

Are they all lying?

Perhaps Maya is that one in a million medical mystery case and only Dr.

Kirkpatrick could make the right diagnosis.

But that doesn't explain any of these other things.

And there were a lot of other things that came up here that I haven't even mentioned.

There was the Addisons.

there was a possible diagnosis of POTS at one point that Beada mentioned.

And there was this incredibly disturbing story that was in the deposition from one of the Johns Hopkins nurses that was there in that October hospitalization, where she reported that Beada gave Maya a volume as a treat for being a good girl in the hospital.

So again, all of these are just a piece of this investigation.

And you know, a well-executed investigation in these cases looks like a thorough review from an expert like Dr.

Sally Smith of all the medical documentation.

So you're getting interviews with individual doctors, you're getting affidavits from individual doctors, but someone has to look at the whole picture because these opinions sometimes differ as they did in this case, which we will talk about.

I talked to our Florida pediatrician friend about this and asked her what stood out from Dr.

Sally Smith's deposition and reports.

I mean, I think having worked, again, in the state of Florida, and then also knowing people that actually do work for these child protection teams, so physicians that work in that capacity, it needs to be understood that it's their role to collect information within reason.

I mean, we can only get the information that's given to us.

Again, if you are never getting records from Mexico, you can't.

determine what the records from Mexico said.

So it is still a system.

The system with the electronic medical record is actually getting better because places are linked.

So it's basically a consent that is signed at the time of admission that gives you access to other places that also have electronic medical records.

But that being said, the role of the head of the child protection team, so Dr.

Sally Smith, and then different doctors in each county, is to review as much as they have in front of them and put it into a report.

Otherwise, you have, you know, thousands, as in your sister's case, how many thousands of of pages of records?

Someone has to be able to take that information and put it into a concise document for the courts then to kind of do what they need to do with it.

So it is completely appropriate that she took all of that information and put it into a

report.

And it doesn't mean she was putting words in those physicians' mouths.

It does not mean she was the only physician that felt that way.

That is her role.

Her role is to take all of this information and bring it in one package.

So, the fact that this is one doctor that they mentioned multiple times, it's one doctor's, you know, having it out for these families or whatever.

It's, it just does not hold up.

And another thing that is a huge piece of these investigations, and this is the reason for the no contact orders that were issued, and we will get into all of that in a bit more depth in a future episode.

But the reason that you do no contact is so that you can have a clean clean separation test, which means you take the person who is possible abuser out of the picture and you see how the child does.

Now, in the film, they suggest, and they being Jack Kowalski, Dr.

Erkbatrick, Maya herself, suggest that she was deteriorating in the hospital.

Here's a clip of Jack Kowalski from the Netflix documentary.

The visit was very brief

and it was very difficult

because I seen her condition just going downhill.

So her feet turned in more.

She had more lesions

and just seeing her getting weaker and weaker, that was the most frustrating thing of all.

But that's not what the Johns Hopkins hospital staff was observing.

She was spending a lot of time in the child life area, which is the sort of big area they have in these pediatric hospitals where kids can do things other than be a sick child.

They did say that she was being very resistant to some of the therapies, and they were concerned that some of the communication with her parents was actually causing that resistance.

And that was one of the reasons that they were being so strict about the no contact order.

But one of the things we know from Dr.

Sally Smith's deposition is that Maya did appear to be showing significant improvement after being removed.

And we talked to Detective Weber about the appropriate protocol in these cases.

What do we know about these cases?

How do we prove this?

What is the gold standard?

You separate the child and see what medical conditions the child actually has.

Also, let's look at how these treatments de-escalated once she was removed from her mother's care.

She was on 25 different medications when she came into the hospital.

She was down to three

by 1026 of 16.

So 13 days, she's been weaned off of that many medications.

They were able to wean her off the ketamine and some of the other medications that she was on.

And she had gained eight pounds in three weeks.

So, I mean, she was healthier by these objective measures.

Now, she was still reporting pain, but the staff there made observations about this reporting of pain that were very consistent with what doctors had observed before this hospitalization, which was that Maya's reports of pain were not resulting in any physiological symptoms.

And also,

that she would report a 10 out of 10 pain almost every time she was asked, despite if she was happily in the middle of doing something, every time they would ask her about her pain, she would say, it is a 10 out of 10.

And

these are people who work in a pediatric hospital.

Presumably, they have a good idea of what a child looks like when they're in pain.

And, you know, part of the language in the actual charge in Jack Kowalski's case that they discuss a bit in testimony is this idea that Johns Hopkins kept Maya, quote, locked in a dark room.

There was some back and forth about possible light sensitivity.

But, you know, by the accounts of the staff, Maya was up and about quite a bit.

She was going around in her wheelchair.

She was, again, spending, you know, up to five hours a day in the child life area.

She was playing piano.

You know, and really they talk about just her moods being really up and down, which makes sense for a child who's in this situation.

I do not doubt that Maya was very upset about being separated from her parents.

I don't downplay that at all, but I think in terms of having physical and physiological symptoms, that's just not what they were observing.

And the other thing that comes up in many of the doctors' records is about these alleged lesions, which is something that they address in the film and is a symptom of CRPS.

But all of the doctors who examined her, And of course, we're not talking about Dr.

Kirkpatrick and Dr.

Hannah at this time, right?

They were her treating physicians before, but the doctors who examined her thought that these were self-inflicted scratches.

These added to the concern that Maya was

trying to present herself as sick because she possibly felt pressure to do that.

And there's more to say about that.

There were some really interesting comments that Maya herself made during a neuropsych eval, and we will talk about that in a later episode.

So I want to switch gears from talking about all of the voluminous medical information that's in these files to to talk about another interesting piece of this investigation and where it was when Beata died.

So one of the things that Detective Stephanie Graham had done, which is a really important part of these investigations, is subpoena records from nine different social media accounts that were associated with Maya.

The detective obtained warrants for nine social media accounts, including two Facebook accounts, two Instagram accounts, a WordPress account, a GoFundMe account, a YouCaring account, a YouTube account,

and a Twitter account.

Now, a couple of these were Maya's, but the detective notes in her narrative that most of these appeared to have been ran by Beata.

So Maya was 10 at the time.

You can't really have your own social media at 10.

Well, I suppose you can, but your parents are obviously involved in that.

And one of the things that we uncovered from Dr.

Sally Smith's testimony is that one of these accounts, which was a blog, was written in Maya's voice, but was clearly written by Beata.

And we know that because she was updating this blog while Maya was in a coma in Mexico with pictures of Maya in a coma.

And so can you explain

why

those social media accounts, like why was the detective looking at all that?

What makes that social, those social media accounts so important?

They are so important because Beata is posting in her own words about what is actually happening with Maya's healthcare, right?

So you can then take those and compare them to what's actually going on in the hospital during visits and what she's telling the doctors.

And oftentimes, those two things are very, very, very different.

I've had cases where they're claiming things that simply aren't happening at all.

They're claiming diagnosis that never occur.

We don't know.

I want to be very clear.

We have no idea if that's the case in this case because it never got to that point in the criminal investigation.

Right.

Beata's death occurred before it ever got there.

In the film, they talk a lot about what a sort of dedicated documentarian Beada was of Maya's medical journey.

And we see evidence of that in the film.

Here's a clip of Maya as she prepares to be put in a coma during their trip to Mexico.

Again, from the Netflix documentary.

Yes, you will wake up.

Yes, you are normal.

Yes, and you'll be very normal when you wake up.

No, you're not weird.

I feel very weird.

Do you feel very weird?

You're doing great.

Now,

the way that this is presented and framed in the documentary is

basically that Beata has the receipts, right?

She can prove what she's saying because she has it all on tape.

I think if you are looking at this through the lens of it being a possible situation of medical child abuse, it looks very different because one of the things that offenders do and that plays a huge part

in both the investigations and just sort of the expression of this form of abuse, if it is in fact factitious disorder imposed on another, where the goal is to get attention,

is

just

so much social media activity.

So many updates, so many pictures of their children in hospital settings,

pictures of their children intubated, pictures of their children hooked up to a bunch of machines.

Dr.

Mark Feldman refers to this as medical porn.

And

this is not to say that every parent that posts a picture of their child in the hospital is doing this.

There are many ways that parents of sick children use social media that is helpful and benign, right?

So, if you have a sick kid and you are trying to keep everyone updated on that situation and you don't want to make 8 million phone calls or respond to everybody's text messages, you know, that is a way of sharing that information.

It's a legitimate way of getting support.

Lots of people find, especially if their child does have a rare disease, you know, being able to connect with other people online is obviously a huge blessing.

So it is possible that that's what we are looking at with Beada's social media activity, but the sheer amount of it is really notable.

You know, I think one of the reasons that people have a really hard time with these cases and that people have a strong emotional reaction to these stories is that if you are a parent who is legitimately in this situation where you have a chronically ill child, you may be doing some of these things like posting about your child a lot on social media and you might be seeking out different alternative therapies when you don't think something is working.

And you might have had doctors who didn't listen to you and didn't give you good care.

And right now,

with this narrative that's playing out in the media, those parents are being convinced that they are under attack and that they are at risk of having their child kidnapped.

It's really important to me to separate out those behaviors and what those behaviors look like from what we're seeing in this documentation.

The false reports or pursuing treatments that have a really high risk of death.

I mean, that's not something that most parents would do.

And so I want parents to understand that If you are a parent of a sick child, this narrative is doing you a huge disservice.

You know, we heard from people after we aired that episode on my sister's case that they stopped going to Marybridge because they read that article that made it sound like Mary Bridge was going to kidnap your sick child.

And I was just in Florida for CrimeCon.

And when I was talking to people about the subject of my podcast, I heard from a couple of parents that they had similar concerns about Johns Hopkins.

This has real effects on those parents who have sick children.

And also, those people, their experiences are being exploited by offenders, right?

I think one of the most heartbreaking things is to think about some of these support groups and that kind of thing could get infiltrated by perpetrators.

And those people are having their trust breached, those people who are in that incredibly vulnerable position of having a sick child and they're looking to lean on other parents that have sick children and they have someone in there who's a perpetrator.

I mean, that's a horrible betrayal.

And so I want to make sure that we're sort of, you know, being really sensitive to those people's experience because that's a group that I think about a lot.

And I think that's a group that is harmed by these perpetrators.

So

that is where we were in the police investigation when Beada died.

In the next episode, we are going to talk about the circumstances around her suicide.

So

if that is a really sensitive issue for you, you can skip this episode.

You will be able to pick up with us on the next one.

So just know, take care, know that's coming.

And if you or anyone you know needs help in this area, you can call the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988.

Today is September 27th.

And as we are recording this, we are about one week into the Kowalski trial, which I have been watching live on Zoom.

And just as a reminder, we are recapping that every week on Patreon and Apple.

The suit has been narrowed to just Jack Kowalski versus Johns Hopkins.

The other parties have been dropped from the suit.

So there was testimony this week from several folks on the plaintiff's side.

That's Jack Kowalski's side so far, including Jack's brother and Maya's younger brother, Kyle.

Dr.

Chopra will be testifying tomorrow.

Dr.

Kirkpatrick, unfortunately, had to pull out due to a health issue, so we will not be hearing from him.

Nobody Should Believe Me is a production of large media.

Our senior producer is Tina Knoll, and our editor is Corrine Kiltow.