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BOSTON, April 15, 2018 – I doubt that the people who give to Boston Children's Hospital (BCH) know that their money may be used to deal with abuse and pedophilia allegations filed against the hospital and its staff. For example, according to the New York Times, in 2011 BCH's former chief of ambulatory pediatrics, Dr. Mel Levine, shot himself in the head the day after 40 now-grown BCH patients came forward saying that he molested them. A little while later, lawyers paid by BCH had a lawsuit filed by other alleged victims of Dr. Levine thrown out on a technicality. According to the Boston Globe, that suit alleged that BCH knew of Levine's pedophilia as early as 1966, but rather than report him to authorities, BCH apparently preserved its own reputation at the cost of future victims by allowing Levine to quietly move to North Carolina, where he would eventually lose his medical license after accusations against him piled up there too.
As Levine was leaving BCH, future convicted pedophile Richard Keller was just joining the hospital's staff. The year after Levine committed suicide, Keller was busted with over 100 DVDs and 500 high-gloss print outs of child pornography. Whether Keller's collection included images of BCH patients remains unknown. The hospital said it had no plans to contact his former clients.
And it's not just pedophiles that Boston Children's may be hiding. There appear to be a growing number of cases like that of Justina Pelletier, who was taken from her parents' custody when they refused to allow BCH to stop her medications. Among other things claimed in her family's lawsuit against BCH, Justina says that hospital staff left her on the toilet for hours when she couldn't move her bladder or bowels and that they ripped her toenails by dragging her feet on the floor.
For some of the other stories like Justina's, please see the cases of Sindre Hylland, Chelsey Cruz, Elizabeth Wray the T. family, and Eithene (RIP) and Gabriel Hilliard.
Now, I believe that if BCH's future donors were to become aware of all this that they would choose to give to other Boston hospitals. But every Marathon Monday, BCH kicks its fundraising efforts into high gear and few of the media outlets providing coverage of the hospital perform due diligence to fully inform their audiences of BCH's unfortunate history. Meanwhile, other publications know full well about BCH's past and yet still choose to omit the salient facts above in what appears to be their deliberate efforts to spare the hospital from the truth. In so doing however, those outlets, perhaps unintentionally, also invalidate the suffering of survivors by suppressing the knowledge of the atrocities that the hospital allegedly committed against them while effectively lauding their apparent abusers.
So, as a human rights activist and as a Senate candidate, I implore the media in Boston to tell the full story of Boston Children's Hospital, not just on Marathon Monday, but throughout the entire year.
