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Fact check: Ammon Bundy used edited video to falsely accuse St. Luke’s doctor of lying
Ryan Suppe
Mon, September 11, 2023 at 6:00 AM EDT·5 min read
Two weeks after a jury found that Ammon Bundy and his associate defamed St. Luke’s Health System, Bundy posted a social media video that used highly edited police body camera footage to falsely accuse a St. Luke’s doctor of lying to the jury.
The 14-minute video posted to YouTube shows Dr. Rachel Thomas, a former St. Luke’s lead emergency room physician, saying in police body camera footage that an infant at the center of a child protection case was “healthy” and “totally stable.” Bundy in the video suggests that the evidence contradicts Thomas’ court testimony, in which she told jurors the child was malnourished and could have died without medical attention.
“St. Luke’s witnesses and attorneys lied to the jury many, many times,” Bundy said in the video.
What Bundy doesn’t say in the YouTube video is that Thomas’ conversations with police and the emergency medical service (EMS) report he references both centered on whether the child was healthy enough to be transported, not whether the 10-month-old was healthy overall.
Last year, St. Luke’s sued Bundy and his associate Diego Rodriguez, after the right-wing activists lied about the health system online and led protests at hospitals where Rodriguez’s grandchild was being treated for malnutrition. St. Luke’s won the case by default because Bundy and Rodriguez failed to appear in court, and a jury awarded the health system $52 million in damages.
Among the “materially false and malicious defamatory statements” Bundy and Rodriguez made was that the infant “was perfectly healthy” when taken by Idaho’s child protective services, according to Ada County District Judge Nancy Baskin’s record of the defamation case. Bundy currently is facing trial for contempt of court charges after allegedly violating a court order that barred him from “witness harassment” and intimidation.
Bundy’s recent video uses the same edited police footage that Rodriguez, the infant’s grandfather, used in a previous video, which Thomas refuted in court.
“I had already determined the severity of the infant’s condition,” Thomas told the court in a sworn declaration commenting on Rodriguez’s January video. “Rodriguez is selling a lie, that the infant was healthy, based on wrongly edited video of me.”
Edited footage skirted references to diagnosis
Thomas was an emergency room physician at a St. Luke’s hospital in Meridian, where Rodriguez’s grandchild was admitted following a child welfare check on March 12, 2022, according to a transcript of Thomas’ court testimony.
The infant had experienced vomiting and weight loss in recent weeks, and the child’s parents neglected hospital discharge instructions following a three-day stint as well as multiple check-up appointments, according to Baskin’s record of events. The missed appointments sparked intervention by Idaho’s child protective services.
After an ambulance brought the child to St. Luke’s, Thomas examined the infant as a crowd of protesters gathered in the hospital’s ambulance bay. She diagnosed the 10-month-old with “severe malnutrition and dehydration that could lead to death if not immediately addressed,” according Baskin’s record.
Thomas then decided the infant should be transferred to St. Luke’s Children’s Hospital in Boise for “a higher level of care,” she told the court. She also told a Meridian police officer that she wanted to create separation between the child and the mob outside the Meridian hospital, according to body camera footage.
Thomas had conversations with fellow hospital personnel and law enforcement officers about how the infant should be transferred to the Boise hospital, according to the footage.
“I state that the infant is ‘medically stable’ and totally stable’ for transport, meaning that the infant will not likely have a cardiac event or other catastrophic health incident while being transported from Meridian to St. Luke’s Boise,” Thomas said in her court declaration. “I was not providing — and it would not be appropriate to provide — a comprehensive evaluation of the child’s health to the law enforcement officer.”
Bundy and Rodriguez’s edited versions of the footage don’t include Thomas’ references to the infant’s diagnosis. Immediately after saying the infant was “totally stable” for transport, Thomas said the child was diagnosed with “failure to thrive,” when a child’s weight is significantly below standards.
Thomas also went on to tell the officer that the infant had lost three-quarters of a pound since the child’s last check-up. That portion of the footage was not included in Bundy’s or Rodriguez’s videos.
Baby was healthy for transport, doctor said
Thomas in her court testimony also addressed the EMS report, which quotes her as saying the infant was a “healthy baby with no interventions.” Thomas said that’s not the language she used and her statement was taken out of context.
“With our EMS crews and for us as well, we’re required to document that we don’t assume there will be any loss of life during a transport,” Thomas told the court. “My statement to EMS was, the child was previously healthy with no medical conditions other than the malnutrition and failure to thrive we were addressing.”
“No interventions” referred to the fact that the infant didn’t need medication during a 15-minute transport to Boise, Thomas said.
Bundy could not be reached to comment.
Thomas, after facing online attacks from Bundy and his supporters, told the court that she planned to take a break from medicine and move her family to New Zealand.
“I have constant fear to be in my own home,” she said.