NBC News has settled a $30 million defamation case with Dr. Mahendra Amin, an obstetrician-gynecologist based in Georgia. The case involved allegations of unnecessary procedures performed on female immigrants without their consent while in custody.
The case was set to go to trial on April 22 in a federal court in Waycross, GA, but the two parties informed the court on April 4 they had reached a settlement in February and were finalizing the agreement, Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
Amin’s defamation case stems from an MSNBC report that aired in September 2020. The story focused on a whistleblower complaint that alleged the doctor performed two unnecessary and unauthorized hysterectomies on immigrant women at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Ocilla, GA.
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Court records show that the medical records for both hysterectomy patients show ICE authorization, and the two patients also signed informed consent forms for their procedures. The NBC News report disputed that these women provided their informed consent.
Lisa Godbey Wood, the U.S. District Judge overseeing the case, found that NBC News did not provide evidence of Amin performing more than the two hysterectomies, but still published that “mass hysterectomies” were conducted by him and that detainees knew his as “the uterus collector.”
“A jury could conclude that [Amin] performed unnecessary and unauthorized gynecological procedures, including the two hysterectomies,” Wood said in the order. “A jury could also conclude that these accusations were materially false.”
Meanwhile, attorney Stacey Evans, who represented Amin told Fox News that MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow’s treatment of her client in the “uterus collector” case was “preposterous” and “disappointing.”
“It was Rachel Maddow who tried to tie Dr. Amin as the next chapter in the continuing saga, essentially, of mistreatment of immigrants by the Donald Trump administration. And she opened that block by talking about child separation policies and this former Trump administrator who had been tracking women’s menstrual cycles — just some really sick stuff — and then to say that Dr. Amin was the next chapter in this saga, it was preposterous the way she did it,” Evans told Fox News Digital.
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Evans said it was “frustrating to see how reckless” Maddow and her MSNBC colleagues were when spoiling the reputation of Amin, who is an immigrant himself.
“It’s very, very sad,” Evans said. “Seeing her go from skepticism about whether the story was true to making it her A-block and tying someone who was a private doctor, tying him to Trump administration policies, and using that as her A-block in eight minutes, at least that’s what it appeared to be on paper, was very, very, very disappointing.”