ProPublica’s child abuse pediatrician exposé breaks new ground, revealing failures of medicine, government – and journalism.

Images by chatGPT, (with thanks for the caption to Andrew Brown of the
Texas Public Policy Foundation whose op-ed in The Hill used it as the headline.) 

A brief preface for any journalists who may be reading this: 

OK, all you reporters and editors, admit it: You’ve gotten the calls or the long emails from parents insisting that the child protective services agency that took their children lied.  But they can’t see you when you roll your eyes and think: Yeah, right. After all, the CPS workers are hard-working, underpaid, mostly well-motivated, white-collar professionals – just the sort of people reporters can identify with.  

That person who sent the long email – the one that runs two pages with no paragraph breaks – well, they’re probably child abusers, right? They conjure up images of the worst case you’ve ever covered. So why check out what they have to say? 

When you read about the visit supervisor who called out her own colleagues for lying – and who was pressured to lie herself – you may wish to reconsider. 

The context: child abuse pediatricians 

It’s become a staple of investigative journalism: Every few months, some news organization exposes the horrors inflicted on children and families by some child abuse pediatricians – the doctors who are supposed to find child abuse where it is – but sometimes also find child abuse where it isn’t. 

There was the stunning series by Mike Hixenbaugh of NBC News and more stories by Hixenbaugh and Keri Blakinger, then with the Houston Chronicle. There are the stories from Wisconsin Watch, the Anchorage Daily News and even excellent reporting from The Alligator, the student newspaper at the University of Florida, all dealing with the same child abuse pediatrician who kept getting run out of one job after another. Then there’s this story from Illinois, and this story from Texas, and these stories from Georgia. And of course, there was the reporting from the Sarasota Herald Tribune on the case that was the subject of the documentary Take Care of Maya. 

The most recent stories, from ProPublica, co-published with Minnesota-based APM Reports, add some new elements to consider. 

● They zero in on the extent to which child abuse pediatrics appears to be a closed club, a small group that constantly reinforces each other, tolerates no dissent and demands absolute deference. (Indeed, some child abuse pediatricians have suggested publicly that other doctors should stop doing so much thinking!) 

● The stories show how the harm caused by this culture can extend far beyond the harm done to families directly affected by their blunders. 

● The stories illustrate the extent to which child protective services agencies can be complicit.  

● And the stories illustrate a couple of embarrassing failures by a big local newspaper. 

At the center of all of it is Dr. Nancy Harper, the child abuse pediatrician who leads a team at the University of Minnesota’s Otto Bremer Trust Center for Safe and Healthy Children. The bill of particulars alleged concerning Harper is much like those concerning the child abuse pediatricians in all those other stories: An unwavering belief in the validity of “Shaken Baby Syndrome,” a refusal to consider any other explanation for injuries, running roughshod over anyone, including colleagues who disagree and leaving a trail of despair for children and families needlessly separated. 

As one of the ProPublica stories notes: 

[T]wo federal lawsuits filed recently accuse Harper of ignoring or even concealing alternative explanations for children’s injuries. And, more broadly, medical and legal experts are increasingly questioning a leading child abuse diagnosis, shaken baby syndrome, which is also known as abusive head trauma. 

But this may be the scariest thing of all about Dr. Harper: As the ProPublica story puts it: 

By Harper’s own estimation, she’s never been wrong.

 When the family police are complicit 

The role of the family police agency (a more accurate term than “child welfare” agency) in Hennepin County, Minnesota, itself is aptly illustrated by a case discussed toward the end of one of the stories:  

In this case, a child had multiple bruises and fractures. No one called to report the parents, they saw the bruises, they were alarmed, they brought the child to the hospital. Harper immediately said: child abuse. Not only did authorities take the child on the spot, the county attorney immediately filed for termination of parental rights. 

Here’s what happened next: 

The baby was placed in foster care with a woman who worked as a nurse. … While in the care of the foster parent, the baby developed new bruises and Harper evaluated him again. 

Instead of considering that her diagnosis might be wrong – and remember, Dr. Harper says she’s never wrong. 

A new abuse investigation was opened against the foster parent, and [the child] was moved to a second foster family — in this case, a pediatrician and her husband. Once again, the baby developed new bruises, according to his visitation supervisor. 

So would Harper change her mind now? No way! Instead, she said maybe those bruises weren’t really bruises. 

But prosecutors came up with something even more outlandish: They alleged the parents were finding a way to abuse their son clandestinely during visits – even though all visits were supervised by a professional whose job is – to observe visits. 

And here’s where the whole issue of lying comes in. The visit supervisor 

provided a sworn affidavit saying that she did not witness any abusive behavior from the parents, and that she’d become so stressed in part from the pressure to say she had witnessed abuse that she asked to be taken off the case. She also wrote that CPS workers were lying to and about the couple, claiming that the foster parents spoke Spanish, which they did not, and that [the Spanish-speaking parents] were unreliable about keeping visitation appointments. 

“The parents attended every visit. They never cancelled,” the supervisor wrote. “Even when their tire popped on the way to their first supervised visitations, they got an Uber and were only about five minutes late.”

The collateral damage 

The other key figure in the main ProPublica story is another pediatrician, and one with a distinguished record in his own right. Dr. Bazak Sharon could be difficult with his colleagues, but was notable for his compassion for his patients and their families. He was also the one and only doctor in Minnesota, and one of the few in the nation, who was an expert at treating a rare, traumatic childhood condition known by the acronyms PANS or PANDAS. 

But when Dr. Sharon dared to challenge Harper, and especially when he put his concerns in writing (which can be really embarrassing if there are ever, you know, lawsuits) – he was forced to resign.  That reduced the number of doctors to whom Minnesota parents could turn to treat their children’s PANS/PANDAS to zero. (One nurse practitioner treats it, but she works for a clinic that doesn’t take insurance.)  But the hospital that forced Dr. Sharon out did have a solution. They told parents to try a program in Madison, Wisconsin, four hours away. 

The journalistic failure 

And that brings us to the other key player in all this – one not mentioned in the ProPublica story: The Minnesota Star Tribune. 

When Dr. Sharon was forced to resign, ProPublica notes, parents were so upset that “they went to the local newspaper.” That’s the Star Tribune. On Nov. 6, 2023, they published a good story about the plight of the families. And then they came within inches of another urgent story – and missed it.  The only mention of the child abuse pediatrician issue was this one sentence: 

Sharon said he feels terrible for his PANS/PANDAS patients but that he resigned from University of Minnesota Physicians because of an unrelated dispute over the clinical management of head trauma in infants. 

That should have been a “Wait – what?” moment for the Star Tribune. Child abuse pediatricians have been controversial for some time now and, in particular, it’s well known that there is considerable controversy over “the clinical management of head trauma in infants.” 

So one would hope the Star Tribune would dig into the resignation – which could have led them to the revelations that ProPublica would report nearly 18 months later. 

But I can find no follow-up. I found nothing at all about the controversy until Dr. Harper was sued. Then the Star Tribune wrote about the lawsuit. 

Would at least some of the harm done to children and families since November 2023 have been averted had the Star Tribune then done the reporting ProPublica has done now?  Why didn’t that happen? Did the Star Tribune make a concerted effort to find out more, but simply couldn’t get the story? Did it not occur to them to try? Or is it that the whole notion of false allegations and wrongful removal makes the Star Tribune uncomfortable? 

I sent two emails and a text message to the reporter who wrote the Star Tribune’s 2023 story seeking comment. I have received no reply.

This brings us to the second Star Tribune failure that contributed, albeit indirectly, to this tragedy.  Here’s how the ProPublica story explained it: 

Harper’s arrival in Minnesota coincided with the fallout of a high-profile tragedy: the 2013 death of 4-year-old Eric Dean.

Dean lived with his family in sparsely populated Pope County, in west-central Minnesota. According to an investigation by The Minnesota Star Tribune, teachers and caregivers reported signs that Dean was being abused to child protection workers at least 15 times before his stepmother threw him across a room, causing injuries that would kill him. She is in prison serving a life sentence. 

In response, then-Gov. Mark Dayton signed an executive order in 2014 creating the Governor’s Task Force on the Protection of Children. The next year, along with a slew of other reforms, the state Legislature created a $23.35 million grant to give counties money based partially on the number of open child protection investigations. 

The number of child abuse cases soared. For instance, in Hennepin County, where Minneapolis is located, cases of physical abuse more than doubled from 2015 to 2016, before dropping over the next several years.

The lawsuit suggests an even bigger jump: 

In 2016—after Harper arrived  and her … policies and procedures were put into place – 5,709 children in Hennepin County were reported as alleged victims of physical abuse, an increase of 228% over the previous eight-year average. In one calendar year, physical abuse cases in Hennepin County rose by 223%. 

The lawsuit also has more about the financial incentives that may have been at play, alleging that the Bremer Trust Center itself was “offering substantial financial bonuses for the identification and prosecution of child abuse.” 

But what does any of this have to do with the Star Tribune? 

It wasn’t the death of Eric Dean itself that set all this in motion. It was the Star Tribune’s hype and hysteria-filled coverage of the death of Eric Dean, and the foster-care panic it caused – in a state already tearing apart families at a rate far above the national average -- that set all this into motion. It was the Star Tribune’s blunders that led to the Task Force, which compounded the blunders. More about how the Star Tribune and the Task Force failed can be found in this NCCPR report. And in this column for the child welfare trade journal, The Imprint. 

This kind of failure is bad enough done once, but the Star Tribune not only learned nothing, it tried to do the same thing again in 2023. Fortunately, Minnesota lawmakers seem to abide by the adage “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.” They did not repeat their mistakes – they even passed legislation intended to curb needless removal. 

But the damage done by the first foster-care panic has yet to be undone.  As of 2023, Minnesota still was tearing apart families at a rate double the national average when rates of child poverty are factored in.  And now, thanks to ProPublica, we know about some additional collateral damage. 

The stories told by ProPublica involve families who were able to fight back. We’ll never know if there are others whose children may have been misdiagnosed by the child abuse pediatrician who says she’s always right. 

At a minimum, families accused under these circumstances should be entitled to obtain a second opinion from an expert of their choosing at no cost. 

Also, ProPublica reports: 

Hennepin County has a contract with Harper’s employer, University of Minnesota Physicians, to provide medical consultation, expert witness testimony and case consultation with county attorneys. 

That contract should end. 

Oh, and wouldn’t it be great if the University of Minnesota apologized to Dr. Sharon and offered him his job back?