Introducing: Nobody Should Believe Me — The Catalyst | EP 1

Betrayal Seasons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

This episode explores the controversial 'Take Care of Maya' case, examining how a documented Munchausen by Proxy abuse case was misrepresented in media and film, leading to widespread conspiracy theories. It dissects the

Key takeaways

• Munchausen by proxy abuse was extensively documented in Maya Kowalski's case

Transcript preview

This is an I-Heart podcast, Guaranteed Human. There was no anything inside those eyes. They turned black. It scared the hell out of me. Evil, wake up. I'm the woman, saw the murder, take place by Krievac and DiPippo. Anthony de Pippo showed no signs of remorse. I said I'm not guilty I'll take it to the grief. Listen to the Devil's Quar in the Bone Valley Feed on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. podcast hosted by me, Hotacopby. If you're craving inspiration to maximize your joy, tune into these candid, uplifting and moving on-air chats. Open your free I-heart radio app, search Joy 101 and listen now. Joy 101 with Hotacopby is presented by CVS. Hi listeners, I'm Anasinfield, the host of The Girlfriend Spotlight Podcast, and I'm excited to share these incredible stories with you. I wanted to let you know that you can now get access to all episodes of The Girlfriend Spotlight as well as seasons one, two, three, four and five of the Girlfriends 100% ad free with an Iheart True Crime Plus subscription available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Plus you'll get access to all episodes of the Girlfriend Spotlight one week ahead of everyone else available only to True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcast search for I Heart True Crime Plus. today. Hi, I'm Andrea Gunning, host of the Betrayal Weekly Podcast, and I'm excited to share this riveting story with you. I'm also excited to tell you that you can now stream every episode of Betrayal Season 1 through 5, as well as Betrayal Weekly, seasons 1 and 2, completely ad free. Plus, get exclusive 1 week early access to all Betrayal Weekly season 3 episodes with an I-hard True-Plus subscription, only on Apple Podcasts. Plus you'll get access to other chart-topping true crime shows you love. Like creating a Khan, the story of BitKond, Paper Ghosts, Piked In Massacre, Murder Homes, Unrestorable, The Godmother, The Girlfriends, and more. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for I-hard True Crime Plus and subscribe today. abuse which may be difficult for some listeners. For resources about abusive head trauma go to shaken baby.org. Take care of Maya trial. New details was Wilma. Take care of Maya trial. Well, Maya Kowalski and her family have waited now five years to hear a verdict and their 220 million dollar lawsuit against Johns Hopkins all children's hospital. to Maya. That was the question posed by Diane Nere in her viral feature for New York magazine that ran in the fall of 2022. There was that headline, along with a close-up of Maya Kowalski's eyes. I remember reading this article long before I'd end up reading thousands of pages of court documents, medical records, testimony, and police records about the case, and thinking, I don't think this reporter understands what actually happened here. And then of course there was the Netflix film. No matter what we did, the court sided with the hospital staff. Judges don't care about evidence. You don't get to the truth by accepting what's in front of you without questioning it. And I realized that this was a lot bigger than just the Kowalski's. How many times are you allowed to be wrong and destroy lives before they say, okay, that's enough? These families walked in hoping for help for their child. And some of them walked out in handcuffs. And this was followed by a high profile court battle. Nobody should believe me had been on the air for about a year at this point. And this was the biggest story about Munchaus and by proxy since Gypsy Rose Blanchard. So I felt like I needed to address it. I pulled in some experts for a roundtable discussion about the film. My impressions were it was a huge opportunity lost. What they could have done is looked at the actual issue. using this abuse. They could have looked at, you know, in this case there wasn't. And that was all I originally planned to do. But everyone else just kept getting it so wrong. But it is not the person who's doing the medical record review's job to interview every doctor, it's to look through those records. And that is how you put what it is. How do you get that? Why do you believe that that's the case? If she is making her, if she is the sole person making the recommendation to the judge, the judge, the judge, the judge, the judge, the judge, the judge is. She was not the sole person. I'm sorry. There was there was affidavits and testimony from numerous other doctors in. No affidavits and testimony in the court. What actually happened to Maya Kowalski is that she was the victim of extremely well documented munchausen by proxy abuse. In the year preceding her fateful hospitalization at Johns Hopkins All Children's, Maya Kowalski was subjected to 55 infusions of ketamine, a powerful. hallucinations memory loss and bladder issues among other side effects. Her treatment course also included a highly experimental five-day ketamine coma in Mexico. Dr. Fernando Cantu, who performed the treatment, told Maya's parents that the procedure had a 50% chance of death. Maya was pulled from school, wheelchair bound, and dangerously underweight. Her mother Beyata Kowalski, an infusion nurse by trade, administered cadmene, delotted, and other drugs orally, intramuscularly and into Maya's port at home, often against doctor's orders. Biatta talked online and elsewhere about Maya's impending death and pushed to get her daughter labeled as terminal and attempted to seek out hospice care, despite the fact that complex regional pain syndrome isn't a terminal diagnosis. And that diagnosis was handed out to Maya by a dubious doctor after three world-class hospitals diagnosed her with conversion disorders. On October 7th, 2016, when Maya was hospitalized with reports of excruciating pain, Biatta told staff at Johns Hopkins All Children's that if they refused to administer the unheard of amount of ketamine she was requesting, that they, quote, might as well consult hospice so she can finally get enough medication and just let her die. So how did such a clear and obviously life-threatening case of abuse get twisted into a story about evil What was going on here? Once I started pulling at this thread, I couldn't stop. The case and the civil trial consumed my life for months. We just recapped this case in a mini-series, by the way, if you don't have time to listen to the previous 18 episodes I made about this. I ended up covering the trial as it unfolded over eight weeks, ending in a jury awarding the Kowalski's $261.21 million. And two years later, the story continues to unfold. Late last year, a Florida appeals court vacated the verdict, and the Kawalski's request to reconsider the appeal decision was denied. And as all this has been playing out in court, the impact of Kawalski v Johns Hopkins has been felt far and wide, because as reporter Daphne Chen said in the trailer you just heard, this has always been bigger than just the Kawalski's. Kawalski lit the match. And no matter what ultimately happens happens in their court bats happens in their, the fire won't easily be contained. People believe their eyes. That's something that is so central to this topic because we do believe the people that we love when they're telling us something. If we didn't, you could never make it through your day. I'm Andrea Dunlop. Welcome to season seven of nobody should believe me. The Kowalski's legal battle had already been going on for years by the time the story got traction in the media. Jack Kowalski filed his original lawsuit in October of 2018, two years almost to the day after Maya was originally hospitalized with the defendant, Johns Hopkins All Children's. So the original lawsuit against Johns Hopkins Hopkins All Children's, family alleged a lot of things, some of which were dismissed before trial. The original lawsuit brought claims for everything from malicious prosecution, for the hospital and their health care providers, calling the Department of Children and Family Services, reporting suspicions of medical child abuse and neglect. We spoke to Ethan Shapiro, an attorney for Johns Hopkins All Children's, about how this court case and its aftermath have played out. The counts that survived included everything from medical malpractice for the alleged misdiagnosis of medical child abuse, the alleged failure to give what we considered to be extreme doses of ketamine and other dangerous drugs. There were allegations of battery and there were allegations of intentional infliction of emotional distress, some of which the family alleged caused the mother to commit suicide. you saw from the appellate court ruling, the appellate court sided with my client Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital, ultimately finding that the hospital complied in good faith with the mandatory protection statutes and were not liable for as a matter of law or as a matter of fact for the unfortunate death of Mrs. Kowalski. There were two possible far-reaching issues with the Kowalski verdict had it withstood appeal. One is the potential legal precedent. set by allowing a family to claim damages against an institution for a suicide. And the other, of course, was holding the hospital liable for reporting abuse. The attempts to hold health care providers liable for mandatory reporting under Chapter 39 are rare, but not unheard of. In fact, if you looked at the published decisions, a lot of them are for the flip side, where, you know, for example, a parent whose child was ultimately. or a harmed is suing a state agency or a mandatory reporter for failing to report suspected abuse. Think for example, you know in a case of a contested divorce where a child reports symptoms of sexual abuse to a teacher and the teacher doesn't bring that forward you could see a situation where the other custodial parents finds out about that and then would have a lawsuit or potential prosecution against a mandatory reporter. Now all of that being said we've seen a spate of these lawsuits more in frequency since the Kowalski case, since the movie, and since the fact that it survived the initial motions to dismiss based on statutory immunity. How often do we see these types of cases go to trial incredibly rare? And I think they're going to become more rare now that the Second District Court of Appeal has reaffirmed statutory rights and immunities for mandatory reporters. The Kawalsky lawsuit and its imitators positioned this legal battle very clearly as a parent's rights issue claiming that quote Dr. Smith and Johns Hopkins all children's knowingly and recklessly violated Jack and Biatta's constitutional right to make medical decisions for their child by refusing to discharge Maya following repeated requests from Jack and Bia and by conspiring to abuse a process and legislative provisions designed to protect children from imminent harm. And while some of the counts of the lawsuit, such as conspiracy, malicious prosecution, and the first and 14th Amendment claims were dismissed before trial, the spirit of these claims remained. The plaintiff's story was that the doctors had conspired to separate Maya from her mother. They'd known their abuse claims were fake and they made them anyway. And their wanton disregard for this family had driven Biata Kowalski to take her own life. And these claims have served as inspiration for a number of other lawsuits around the country against child abuse people. and hospitals, from San Diego to Minnesota to Pennsylvania. According to these lawsuits, doctors aren't just making mistakes. They're all powerful entities who are conspiring to remove children from their innocent parents for their own financial gain and career advancement. The terminology varies depending on the venue, but there is in fact a name for all of this. Medical kidnapping. Like any other conspiracy theory, it's hard to trace the exact origins of the term medical kidnapping. But it's, in fact, It appears to have gained a foothold in parents' rights-focused internet spaces sometime in the 2010s and gained significant traction during the highly publicized Justina Pelletier case, a precursor lawsuit involving Munchausen by proxy. Medical kidnapping is deeply entwined with the idea that Munchausen by proxy isn't a real form of abuse, that every allegation is necessarily false. A witch hunt against caring moms, and that CPS workers and physicians are high hiding behind their legal immunity protections. This concept has even deeper internet origins than medical kidnapping itself, going back to the Mothers Against Munchhausen Allegations website, which popped up in the late 90s. Medical kidnapping, like so many things, is a fringe idea that has migrated from the dark corners of the internet into mainstream publications, such as the New York Times and ProPublica. People magazine, where Take Care of Maya producer Caitlin Keating worked when she discovered this story, published in our in November of 2025 titled, Where Is Maya Kowalski now? All about her life after getting medically kidnapped 10 years ago. This was weeks after the verdict was reversed. So how did hospitals become such a target? So hospitals are in a very unique situation for children that are at risk for suspicions of neglect or abuse. Because often health care workers are the front line defense. being able to diagnose it and being able to report it. If you think of a situation where a child would come into a hospital with an unexplained fracture that couldn't be a result of anything other than trauma and potentially trauma in an area that couldn't be explained in the absence of intentional abuse, the health care worker would be the one that would be in the best position to make that call of reasonable suspicion to the Department of Children and Families. Now in that unique situation. where the child's an inpatient in the hospital already, the easiest thing for the courts to do to try to find an immediate safe placement for the child before the court can figure out whether one of the custodial parents or perhaps a grandparent or a relative could be filling in that rule is to shelter the child immediately at the hospital. So hospitals are put in sort of a precarious position that other mandatory reporters don't have to deal with. Think, fire fighters. teachers in some states journalists are never going to be in the situation that the person making the report may also be the person required by order of the court to provide safe shelter to the child in the short in the medium term. And does a hospital, once a child is sheltered there, does a hospital have any choice about whether or not to keep that child there under the law? No, the hospital is required to follow the court order. as anyone would be required to follow the court order. Now the hospital can make recommendations as to what they believe is in the best interest of the child from a medical standpoint for whatever medical treatment is necessary. And if you remember back to the Kowalski case, once all children's reasonably believed that Maya would have benefited from intensive inpatient or outpatient psychotherapy to treat whatever her pain syndrome was. They made a recommendation to transfer to Nemours Hospital in Orlando or experts in that. So they can make recommendations, but absent an order from the court releasing the jurisdiction, the hospital has to keep the child in custody. There was no anything inside those eyes. They turned black. It scared the hell out of me. That was your