Canadian surgeon takes on CNN in court
Claims career ‘effectively ended’ after story aired
CNN and its star presenter, Anderson Cooper, are trying to force two Canadian universities and a Toronto hospital to hand over private files on a heart surgeon whose high- flying career was allegedly destroyed by a CNN report about newborn babies dying after his operations.
The surgeon has filed a massive defamation lawsuit, so any records — even from the distant past — that might undermine his claim to be “impeccably credentialed” would be useful for CNN’s defence.
Michael Black was educated and trained in Ontario, where he developed a reputation as a “miracle worker” at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children in the late 1990s. He pioneered a kind of minimally invasive heart surgery for infants, attracting newborn patients in dire condition from around the world, but he left for a leadership post at Stanford University in 1999 after a dispute with Sick Kids about ownership of surgical tools he invented.
Years later, in 2011, Black was recruited to run a new pediatric cardiac surgery program at St. Mary’s Medical Center in West Palm Beach, Fla., which tried to compete with larger Florida hospitals in the rarefied world of neonatal heart surgery, in which Black had become a superstar.
That all came crashing down in 2015 after the publication of “Secret Deaths: CNN Finds High Surgical Death Rate for Children at a Florida Hospital.” Within months, the hospital’s CEO had resigned, the surgical program was shuttered, and Black’s career was “effectively ended,” he claims in legal documents. He also claims his family has been subjected to “numerous violent threats.”
The report, which was broadcast on TV and remains online, claimed eight infants had died in a little over three years at St. Mary’s. Using data that Black alleges was misinterpreted, CNN calculated a death rate of 12.5 per cent after open heart surgeries, more than three times the reported national average.
In his defamation lawsuit, CNN manufactured “an outrageous, headline- grabbing story about an incompetent, dishonest and inexperienced doctor leading a surgical program in crisis and recklessly operating on young children to profit at the expense of those children’s lives,” Black claims.
“There is no room for in- stitutions that are lying to families to get them to offer up their babies as sacrificial lambs,” said the mother of one baby who died, quoted by CNN.
CNN is defending against the suit, which names the network; Cooper, who discussed the report on his show; Elizabeth Cohen, CNN’s senior medical correspondent and author of the book The Empowered Patient; producer John Bonifield; reporter Dana Ford; and Kelly Robinson, a key source and mother of a child with a heart problem.
Black alleges Robinson harassed his patients; for example, once coming to the hospital and shouting at a family: “Dr. Black is a babykilling wacko!”
As part of its defence, CNN has been looking into Black’s work history, in both the U. S. and Canada. Any records that undermine his claim that he is “impeccably credentialed” would benefit CNN’s defence, and could limit any possible future damages if they lose the lawsuit.
So the cross- border legal demand is something like a fishing expedition, according to records Black filed in Florida court. It demands details of “complaints, accolades, awards, performance or performance reviews,” and other records from the University of Toronto, where Black went to medical school and did a surgical internship, and later took a faculty position, and the University of Ottawa, where he trained, and Sick Kids, where he did a surgical fellowship. The subpoenas also demand details of why he left each institution, and any grants or prizes he received.
Black’s registration details with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario show no history of disciplinary action or restrictions on his practice.
Black objected to the Canadian subpoenas, calling the material CNN is seeking “completely irrelevant.” He argued the subpoenas are “vastly overbroad” and would unduly burden the schools and the hospital with a duty to dig up everything down to his pay stubs. A judge clarified the wording, but otherwise approved the subpoenas.
A hearing is scheduled for January in Toronto, at which lawyers for CNN will argue Ontario Superior Court should enforce those subpoenas, according to CNN’s counsel in Toronto, Julia Wilkes.
Black’s counsel in Virginia declined to comment.
CNN has also been trying to have Black declared a public figure, which would strictly limit his defamation claim. Public figures cannot be defamed under U. S. law except by someone who demonstrates “actual malice.”
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