How MSNBC smeared a doctor in its endless crusade against Trump — and may pay the price in court

MSNBC may finally be facing blowback for its deranged hatred of Donald Trump.

A bombshell $30 million defamation lawsuit against the Democratic mouthpiece recently got the go-ahead from a Georgia judge.

She ruled that Rachel Maddow and friends, goaded on by execs of parent company NBCUniversal, recklessly and falsely put out a story claiming a gynecologist working in a Trump-era immigration facility performed “mass hysterectomies’’ on women, most of which were unnecessary.

Yet as reporters breathlessly produced shocking story after story online and on air about the so-called “uterus collector,’’ the TV propagandists privately in text messages, emails and telephone conference calls expressed doubts about the veracity of the tale brought to them by a nurse “whistleblower.’’

Ultimately, the source of the hysterical “gotcha’’ reports, an embittered former nurse for the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency named Dawn Wooten, admitted her tales about Dr. Mahendra Amin, who treated patients at a Georgia ICE facility, were based on “hearsay.’’ 

(That didn’t stop her from starting a GoFundMe that raised $100,000, the lawsuit notes). 

Execs and reporters’ doubts about the story were laid bare during the case’s discovery process.

“We just don’t know if any of this is true,” Chris Scholl, an NBC News veteran who is NBCUniversal’s deputy director of standards, said in a conference call with Hayes on Sept. 16, 2020, according to the lawsuit.

According to the court document, Maddow “initially questioned reporting on the allegations,” and suggested there was a lot of “jumping to conclusions around the complaint” but proceeded to cover it anyway. “All In with Chris Hayes” did a follow-up later in the week.

In a conference call with Hayes after the show aired, Scholl acknowledged they still had no idea whether
Wooten’s claims were accurate, and whether or not Amin was a “a good doctor or a sh–y doctor.”

“The guy has a pretty clean record,” Scholl said of Amin in the conference call. Scholl added that Wooten “has no direct knowledge of this stuff” and “kind of has a beef,” though he did not elaborate.

Despite Scholl’s concerns, Hayes, Maddow, and Nicolle Wallace aired several segments about Wooten’s allegations on their evening MSNBC programs.

It seems that the opportunity to discredit anything even tangentially related to then-President Trump was just too irresistible to pass up. 

But in her ruling last month, the judge, Lisa Godbey Wood of the Southern District of Georgia, found that Maddow, Hayes and Wallace made 39 “verifiably false” allegations about Dr. Amin.

“In the end, we are left with this: NBC investigated the whistleblower letter’s accusations; that investigation did not corroborate the accusations and even undermined some; NBC republished the letter’s accusations anyway,” Wood wrote in a scathing 108-page ruling on June 26. 

She ordered a jury trial to determine if MSNBC engaged in “actual malice.’’

That’s a nice way of saying the reporters — who personally pretended to vet the story — promoted the juicy fiction and allegedly defamed an innocent medical professional in furtherance of a disgusting left-wing agenda.

Days after MSNBC’s series of reports, dozens of Democratic senators called for an investigation into Amin and the ICE facility. 

But that probe failed to confirm what the network reps desperately wanted to be true.

“The Subcommittee did not substantiate the allegations of mass hysterectomies on ICDC detainees. Records indicate that Dr. Amin performed two hysterectomies on ICDC detainees between 2017 and 2019. Both procedures were deemed medically necessary by ICE,” the Senate report concluded.

In 2021, Dr. Amin sued NBC.

The lawsuit notes that after MSNBC defamed him, Dr. Amin “suffered public hatred, contempt, scorn, and ridicule, including stalking, being called names, and receiving hateful comments, death threats, and bomb threats.”

I hope that Maddow and her collaborators in fiction publishing publicly apologize to the doctor they slimed, as well as to the public they repeatedly lied to.

And they should promptly get fired.

They seem to be guilty of journalistic malpractice, which puts the entire profession to shame as they gleefully attempted to ruin a man who performed his job honorably. This is not a victimless crime.

Come clean, people. For once in your lives, stand up for the truth.