How I Almost Ended Up in Jail for Exposing a Secret Gender Transition Program | Eithan Haim | CLIP

[Music] let's go back to January 24th of this year not that long ago um you were expecting to be going to jail but that's not what happened give me a sense of what happened yeah I mean it was the culmination of an entire story that I mean it's truly unbelievable because January 24th is when my case was dismissed but that day and then the night before especially I was getting ready to go to jail i was giving my wife all of my media contacts you know we were thinking about like if they show up to my work because I was operating the next day and uh we were fully getting ready to prepare for the worst and all of this came about because I spoke out right i I expressed my opinion about what was going on in this case and the judge was threatening to send me to jail for violating a de facto gag order something he had not even signed and on the same day that I was possibly going to jail he ended up signing the dismissal of the case and it was dismissed with prejudice which means it could never be brought again let's backtrack a bit okay i mean this goes way back to 2023 when you blew the whistle on some very unfortunate activities but so so give me a picture of what happened yeah so yeah I was a surgery resident in general surgery at Baylor College of Medicine which is one of the academic institutions in the Texas Medical Center and part of the program during your training is you go to different hospitals one of those hospitals is Texas Children's Hospital one of the most prestigious and we spent a lot of time training there and it actually goes back one year before because in 2022 this is when the transgender issue was really coming to the mainstream you know it was after COVID that it went into the schools went into the hospitals everywhere and uh in March of 2022 the hospital had released a very public statement saying that they were shutting down their transgender program because of the potential criminal ramifications and the reason they said that was because a few weeks earlier the attorney general of Texas said that it could be investigated as child abuse right so it makes sense why they would release that statement and over the next couple of months what I found out is that the hospital did not shut down the program they not only continued it but expanded it all of it behind closed doors the reason I knew this was because I worked there and the people who were doing these surgeries told me they were doing it so at some point I knew I had to blow the whistle it was part of my job as a doctor so in May of 2023 May 16th 2023 I blew the whistle anonymously with Christopher Rufo to expose the fact that the largest children's hospital in the world was lying about a program that was manipulating mutilating and sterilizing healthy young children you said that this was part of your job speaking out so explain to me what your thought is behind that yeah well when you take your oath as a doctor you say to do no harm right but that not only involves the patients who are on your operating room table the people I see in clinic but also the profession because you know my dad's a doctor he's a pulmonologist and when I was growing up you know he always told me you have to take care of your patients that's the most important thing but you also have to take care of your profession so part of that is holding other doctors accountable if they're lying or they're harming patients because you have a responsibility to th to those people if you see something going wrong you have to say something about it you have to do something even if that means you may have to sacrifice because the job of being a doctor is so important there's no other option i think this is a rare view from what I've seen over the last several years i I think a lot of that view came from what I saw during CO because everything I saw going on in the hospital people dying alone right these kids who were being abused because they were locked down at home and all that came from doctors not following through with their oaths to their profession right so many were willing to stay silent in the face of lies and because of that the people who were we were supposed to take care of were the ones who were suffering the most and seeing all this right was was horrific i mean warehouses full of dead bodies that were not able to see the people they love the most before they passed away and even though I did my best to try to fight against it at some point I'm complicit right i'm guilty of it and I just couldn't live with my life right i couldn't look in the mirror if this other thing is happening and I didn't do anything about it because I knew I could so I blew the whistle May 16th 2023 and I was anonymous so no one knew who I was i was just planning on moving on with my life because I was about to finish my surgical residency and start my new job but on the day of my graduation a month later June 23rd 2023 you know few hours before the ceremony a few hours before I'm about to meet up with my parents uh and and my entire program I get a aggressive knock on my door and I open it and there's two armed agents with Health and Human Services and they tell me that they're investigating a case regarding medical records and that's when I knew that the federal Leviathan showed up to my door and that you this was going to be a fight you know luckily um you know my wife is an attorney she's actually a federal prosecutor she works at DOJ and she had advised me not to speak with them without an attorney but they gave me a target letter that um you know named me as the target of a investigation and what followed after that was you so corrupt so treacherous you know a case that was so wrong that it's hard to even put it into words there's so many layers of corruption that um you know we were always surprised by the depth they were willing to go what were you charged with yes so in general what they were charged me with was um accessing records without authorization and then initially they charged me with disclosure those were the two big things the two operational components of HIPPA access and then disclosure the thing with this case which makes it unprecedented in American history is that their own evidence the evidence they gave us showed that I had access to the hospital because I was working there and then their first indictment was built on a fabricated story so that one fell apart so they had to drop the disclosure because I had never released patient names right everything was deidentified the same type of information that hospitals give to public health agency or news organizations to report about public health diseases so they had reinterpreted the law in the most radical way possible essentially to charge me with a non-rime they had never even defined the nature of the charges after all these months of fighting i still don't know what they were charging me with because they never told us and so but you mentioned a first indictment so there was a second yeah so there were three total um and just imagine how much how much you know legal cost that took to get through three the first indictment fell apart because their story uh was was not real they said after January 2021 I had no reason to be at Texas Children's Hospital so they were making it seem like I was some type of you know like grifter some type of liar who was lying about needing to access records at TCH uh in order to get into the medical system that was not true i was working there i was rotating at the hospital in April and May of 2023 uh so once that became known then they had to uh go back to a grand jury and get a second indictment the second indictment fell apart because the language they used in the charges were not part of the statute which is like a big deal so they were charged me with something that wasn't a crime but then also they included a typo in their indictment and not just like a their their type thing instead of subchapter XI they wrote subchapter XL the problem with that is that it doesn't exist that's a major legal problem if you charge someone with a crime that's not on the books so we had this long hearing the judge ripped into the prosecutor and um they ended up having to get a third indictment so you know this was after months and months of fighting in court and this you know I just want to mention I saw that there's 148 filings in this case which is really kind of well let's just say it's a lot right and and all of these things as you mentioned are expensive and so you know there's incredible resources were were were used here yeah and it's it's really remarkable because when you go to the legal docket you can go online and when you scroll through all of them it actually takes some time to scroll through them my legal team had to fight so hard to define even the basic components of this case so when you think about when people say the process is the punishment well this is how this plays out in real life they write an indictment that's based on a fabricated story you know a couple hundred,000 to prove that in court right then they charge you with crimes that aren't in the statute right we have to file motions for that my lawyers have to put in hundreds of hours right which all translates to an immense amount of financial billing so um and this is just week after week after week of bitter legal fighting i mean it it was unbelievable to think that my attorneys had to argue for certain points that were completely obvious but the DOJ was um fighting so hard in order to bleed us dry of all of our resources you believe this was the strategy it was like this that people call it the process is the punishment absolutely yeah i I I mean I know this for a fact because the the DOJ had never intended for this to go as far as it did they thought I was going to plead to some misdemeanor make this all go away so that they get their victory they uh you know criminalize whistleblowing in hospitals and you know they get elevated within the Democratic Party superructure because that's who these people are they never thought that I was going to fight back because the day of my first arraignment an arraignment is when I plead not guilty i have to go into court and um you know before and after me there you know these are serious crimes right you know people who are uh rapists murderers drug traffickers everyone's in orange jumpsuits except for me i go up and I plead not guilty but before that my attorneys went to the lead DOJ prosecutor and the first thing she says to my attorneys is "Are we really trying this?" Like "Are we really going to bring this case further than it needs to go?" So just from that alone it reveals that you know they never thought that this was going to go very far but they just knocked on the wrong door when they chose me as a target you know and you know for the benefit of our the few audience members who may not be aware at this point um most cases in the US are settled basically there's very few that actually go to trial the vast majority the vast majority uh of federal criminal cases will plead to a lesser charge and the very small proportion that goes to trial you will lose so even for us we were in this extreme minority of cases and not only that we were willing to go to trial but especially the fact that before then the case was finally dismissed with prejudice which is an even smaller number of cases because once it's dismissed with prejudice that means that the case had no legitimacy to to begin with because they can never bring it again in the future