Renee Bach, founder of Serving His Children in Uganda, faces allegations of practicing medicine without a license after arriving in 2007, with claims she caused over 100 infant deaths through untrained procedures like incorrect blood transfusions and improper oxygen administration. While her family denies these accusations, citing licensed supervision, evidence from her scrubbed blog and witness accounts suggest she performed fatal interventions online-guided, often taking children away before returning their bodies with cash. This case exemplifies the "White Savior Industrial Complex," where narratives of miraculous healing mask potential negligence or Munchausen syndrome, prioritizing emotional validation over actual justice for African communities. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The Darkest Episode Yet00:05:20
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share stay with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's abusing my Africa's.
I don't know how to open this episode.
Oh boy.
Thanks, Dad.
I'm Robert Evans.
This is Behind the Bastards, a podcast where we talk about horrible people.
And today we're talking about horrible people who abused Africa.
My guest today is Sophia.
How are you doing, Sophia?
I'm doing great.
Thank you so much for having me.
Thank you for being on the show.
Now, we talked last for an episode about a little lady named Georgia Tan.
Oh boy.
Some people might say the most sad and fucked up episode of your podcast.
Or at least that's what a lot of the tweets I got said.
Yeah, I would say that is the saddest and most fucked up episode of my podcast.
It was fun when people were tweeting and like being like, ha ha, that's a good joke for something so sad.
And then it got really real when people were tweeting and being like, I think my family history involves this.
Yeah.
And I was like, I am not prepared to handle this.
I am a stand-up comedian.
And then we got people making fan art about Ric Flair being stolen as a baby, which I both appreciate and feel weird about because I'm sure that's like the most traumatic chapter from Rick Flair's life.
And I don't know how to respectfully address what a nightmare that is.
Yes.
And also, I did ask for the fan art.
So it would be bad of me to condemn the people who then just executed beautifully on the fucked up thing I came up with.
I feel like let's keep that in the gray area.
No one was more wrong than Georgia Tan.
Yeah, no one was, well, except for maybe our subject for today's episode, because this might be a darker story.
It's not a darker story because the scale of Georgia Tan is so awful.
But this is, again, a story about an affluent young woman who injected herself into the lives of poorer people thinking she knew better than them what they needed, and a whole lot of babies died.
Are you purposely only inviting me on episodes that involve child murder?
Just be host right now.
No, no.
That took too long, honestly.
That beat lets me know that the answer is yes.
I feel like you're trying to challenge me as a comedian.
Maybe.
Challenge accepted, Robert.
Maybe, Sophia, it's just that I see something in you that I see in me, which is an ability to stare into the darker aspects of the human condition and look at that and analyze it and say, I want a picture of Ric Flair acknowledging that he was stolen as a baby.
Drilling Into Reality's Darkness00:15:44
Thank you.
That is the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me.
So, you know, I think.
I thought that was just being Russian, you know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I didn't want to say it's because you're Russian and can handle it.
But essentially, that's what you were saying.
Yes, yes.
Every episode you're on is like the Serbian film of Behind the Bastards.
We just like drill into the darkness of reality.
I love that about us.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I opened this episode by saying, what's abusing my Africas, which was a terrible introduction, maybe my worst.
But we are talking about someone who abused a whole lot of Africans today.
We're talking about Renee Bach.
Have you ever heard of Renee Bach?
No.
Nobody has.
She is not yet famous.
I have a feeling she's going to be soon, but we're kind of on the cutting edge of this one.
I love being avant-garde about murder.
She hasn't really gone viral yet.
So we're going to talk about that.
But first, I want to talk about Kony 2012.
Do you remember that PR campaign, whatever you want to call it?
That awareness campaign, I guess?
Of course.
Yeah, that was like the one week or so when everyone in America cared about Uganda because of a poorly fact-checked documentary.
People donated a bunch of money and they pasted stickers that said Cony 12 that you can still find on 1998 Toyota Corollas to this day.
It was a whole thing.
And then the creator of the documentary was caught masturbating in public and there was a South Park episode making fun of that.
And then we all kind of moved on from Cony 2012.
Aware in public.
It was like in the middle of San Diego, wasn't it?
He had like a psychotic break.
Oh, I do remember that story.
Yeah, that was a whole thing.
Yeah.
So many things have happened since then.
It seems like that was literally like 80,000 atrocities ago.
Yeah, yeah.
It feels like it was 300 years ago.
It feels older than World War I.
Yes.
It was really just like seven years back.
Oh, dumb man.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, there was a brief period of time where the documentary's creator, the invisible children company behind it, were lauded as like the shiny future of activism.
And like, this is how we were going to change the world in the future.
And it was a heady time when Kony 2012 was still going viral.
And during the heart of this fevered period, African writer Teju Cole posted this in a series of tweets.
From Saks to Kristoff to Invisible Children to Ted, the fastest growth industry in the U.S. is the White Savior Industrial Complex.
The White Savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening.
This world exists simply to satisfy the needs, including importantly the sentimental needs of white people in Oprah.
The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice.
It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.
Feverish worry over that awful African warlord, but close to the 1.5 million Iraqis died from an American war of choice.
Worry about that.
I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo.
You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.
Damn.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's quite a line.
I really...
That's good as hell.
Yeah, that's a real good line.
I mean, I feel called out, you know.
Yeah, yeah.
I think we're all supposed to.
Yeah, like, thank you.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, as you might expect, Teju Cole took some shit for writing that.
There were a couple of think pieces that went after him for it, and I'm not going to quote any of those here.
But he was basically attacked for being a spoil sport and for the eternal crime of, you know, bringing race into it.
People wondered, like, why should it matter that the people who made this documentary were white?
Joseph Kony is an objectively bad dude and the truth needed to get out.
So, like, what's the harm?
And of course, the harm was that Kony 2012 was hot garbage.
Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army was not active in Uganda when the documentary went viral.
It had no positive impact on the ground, and it had several negative impacts, as best elucidated by Ugandan human rights lawyer Buisegwe Bois Musagir in a 2015 interview.
He said, To be honest, it seems what skeptics predicted has come true, that there would indeed be more of a lasting impact on how people, especially in the West, perceived Uganda than on the attainment of justice for victims of the LRA conflict.
For the first time in a long time, some other monster was connected to the country than Idi Amin.
And the questions about a Kony experience pop up in spaces where they are least expected.
Imagine you are Ugandan at a youth conference somewhere in the West, and the conversation icebreaker is whether you are a former child soldier.
Invisible children may be closing, but I think many Ugandans will continue to be asked about Kony and whether they are one of his victims.
The simplifying of the narrative has just added a new layer of stereotypes for Ugandans.
This will take a while to wear off.
You may have seen a campaign on the Guardian website led by the Ugandan government comparing Uganda and Spain as tourist destinations.
Such are necessary because no one wants to visit a place where they may be entangled in a war they are not interested in.
The image of Uganda and Africa as a permanent war zone was no doubt strengthened by the Kony 2012 campaign.
So, Teju Cole was right.
Kony 2012 hurt people living in Uganda by making their country look like a war-ravaged hellhole, hurting tourism, thus damaging their economy and the livelihood of many.
But as far as consequences of white saviorism go, Kony 2012 was actually kind of the best case scenario.
And today we're going to talk about one of the worst case scenarios.
And this brings us back to Renee Bach.
It was a long intro.
I mean, all I wanted to add to that is the question of like, well, why is it bad if a white person tells a story about non-white people as long as the story is told?
I mean, inherently, that question doesn't recognize that there is a bias in being a white person telling the story of someone who's not white.
I think it just denies the idea that people should tell their own story and not have it be co-opted by someone who comes in and pretends or thinks they know what's best.
But I think people don't often make that jump.
They're just like, well, if you're helping and the intention is good, then the outcome is automatically good.
And I think you hit the nail on the head that's sort of the whole story we're going to be talking about today.
This idea that if the intention is good, then that's mostly what matters when it comes to activism.
Because this is a story about someone whose intentions, I really do think, have been good this entire time, and it doesn't matter because spoilers, she kills like 100 babies.
Like a Georgia Tan Jr. situation.
Like a Georgia Tan Jr.
I mean, Georgia Tan, nobody came close to GT when it came to racking up that baby count, but this is pretty bad.
I mean, she's not putting up the same numbers, but not putting up the same numbers.
I wish I knew enough about basketball to make a basketball joke about this, but I just don't.
I could make a joke about this.
All right, all right, all right, let's do it.
I mean, if she you would say that Georgia Tan's whole life is like a triple-double game, you know, where she's putting up numbers in like every category, like molestation, yes, mass murder, yes.
My dad is a judge that forgave all of my stuff.
Yes, you know, that's what I think, and then you get it.
Yeah, yeah, I think I get it.
I mean, I'm just saying, and just putting up one stat is not as impressive as putting up stats in all three, like rebounds, shots, assists.
Yeah.
Yeah, this is just Renee Bach is just putting up, I don't know, three-pointers.
Again, not great at basketball here.
Three-pointers are really hard.
Yeah.
So maybe not.
Maybe not.
All right.
Well, we'll decide to come back to the end of this.
It'll be great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So Renee Bach is not a well-known person at this point.
No major Western news source has covered her alleged crimes.
I found out about this in the first place from just a series of tweets about Renee Bach from like some local African activists, people who were with a group called No White Saviors.
They published an article in September 2018 about Renee.
And then I did a little bit more looking and I found an article by a young woman named Nikki Gagnon and she provided a lot of evidence.
And then I found even more evidence, including articles from local Ugandan news sources.
So this is a story that's much better known in Uganda than the United States.
I have a feeling based on the nature of the case that it will eventually become big news in the West.
But nobody like The Guardian or wherever has covered it yet.
So again, we're on the ground floor.
Spoiler, I did a little bit of original reporting for this, which is exciting for me.
Normally reading, normally I just get to read other people's reporting.
So I did zero reporting for this.
Well, what you're doing right now is on the ground journalism, sort of.
Thank you for trying to make me feel important.
I agree.
You can put on, you can get one of those fedoras that they stick a piece of paper into that says press, like in the old days.
Yes, get me an old-timey speaker.
Yeah.
Sorry to interrupt you.
Please go on.
No, you're not interrupting.
You're doing your job.
And it's time for me to do mine.
So there has been some Western coverage of Renee Bach.
The News in Advance, a local Virginia paper, wrote an article about her in 2017.
Its title was An Extraordinary Girl Who Said Yes to an Extraordinary God.
Bedford Native Finds Home in Uganda.
Now, that article, as you might have guessed from the fawning title, presents Renee's story as she wants it to be told, and as most of her friends back home believe it to be.
Quote, when Bedford native Renee Bach arrived in Uganda in September 2007, she was alone.
The 18-year-old had landed in Uganda very late at night, only to find her organized ride from the airport was nowhere to be found.
Construction had forced the plane to land on an airstrip where she went through immigration at a nearby tent.
The experience, coupled with the increase in guns and rustic atmosphere, made Bach begin to question her choice to volunteer at a local children's organization.
I'm like, I'm from Little Bedford and I don't know anything about life here.
And I got left really late at night at the airport, she said.
I'm just sitting in the parking lot and then got taken to a bunch of different places with random people before I made it to the town I was going to.
But really quickly after, I learned to super love it.
Super love it.
Oh, boy.
Yeah, so you get a little bit of a feeling for Renee and kind of her attitude here.
Definitely going into it with good intentions.
She's very motivated by her faith, motivated to go and do volunteer work in this country.
And obviously going to Uganda is her first time in a, I don't like the term third world nation, developing nation.
I don't like that either because like there's a there's no term for countries where your security is not as guaranteed and the infrastructure is not as built up that isn't in some way a little offensive.
Yeah, condescending.
But it's it's she's this is her first experience going from fucking suburban Virginia to a place where the roads aren't reliable and sometimes shit happens in a tent as opposed to a well-lit building and like that.
This is that experience for her.
If you've ever traveled through parts of the world like that, you know how the first time can be both like really scary and also like a really exciting and electrifying experience.
So she has that sort of experience with Uganda and she falls in love with it, which is not an uncommon thing to do.
So Renee's story is that she realizes how many little kids in Uganda were sick and malnourished.
So she decided to start her own 501c3 non-profit.
She called it Serving His Children or SHC.
She says the organization initially started as a feeding program that provided food to children, but soon children suffering from malnutrition began to show up at the center's gate in Massisi, a slum in Jinja, Bach said.
And so I thought it was so odd because I had never seen malnutrition before.
And I was like, what is happening?
This is so weird.
Her quotes are perfect.
Yes.
And then I was like, WTF, and I turned to my friend and I was like, OMG.
Yeah, that's exactly what I've said every time I've seen malnourished children somewhere in the world.
WTF, what's going on?
And also, what is that?
It's a really weird question to ask.
Yeah, she's, again, she's a sheltered baby.
Very sheltered.
And she goes to a part of the world where, you know, we have no fewer problems in our society, but we're very good at hiding them, especially from upper-middle-class kids who grow up in a place like Bedford, Virginia.
And this is a place where the problems aren't hidden.
And so she sees all of these issues and is like, I can do something to help.
And that's what she starts doing.
So very quickly, it becomes clear to her that just getting people food is not enough for her to do.
And after seeing a bunch of malnourished kids come through, she decides that the Lord is showing her that there is a need for her to provide more medical care for children.
Good question.
How did she get the money to feed the children?
Well, mostly donations.
Like she starts a charity and then it's like her family back home is connected to a large church and so they solicit donations.
Okay, so she's running.
Money starts to come in.
She's running it on the money of the people back home.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And she's her family runs ran at this point.
I don't think they do anymore, but they ran a like one of the family businesses was like a horse therapy center.
Like therapy, like oh my god, of course she's a horse girl.
That makes sense.
Yeah, she's a horse girl.
And she comes from horse money.
Like that's that's that's some serious money.
So I'm guessing her church is similarly affluent.
So she starts mostly horses, mostly very lovely horses.
Yeah, a lot of Clydesdales dropping, what's horse money?
Probably horse children.
Arabians.
Arabians?
I feel like a fancy horse.
Isn't that a fancy horse?
Probably.
The horses are best in Arabia, right?
That's what I've heard.
That's what Lawrence of Arabia taught me.
And I've never been steered wrong by that movie before.
Nope.
Speaking of colonialism and such.
It taught me how to blow up train tracks, which, let me tell you, has come in handy a few times.
Now, Renee registers as a rehabilitation center with the Uganda government, and her charity takes off.
Within five years, it had an operating budget of $17,000 a month and was helping hundreds and hundreds of little kids every year, which sounds great.
You can see why her local Virginia paper wrote a really fawning story about what she was doing out there.
It sounds like exactly the kind of story, if you're one of these missionaries who believes that missionary work is crucial for the good of the world, you can see why you'd want to publicize this as much as possible because it sounds like the success story.
So that was for years and years and years from 2008 up until 2018.
That was the story anyone outside of Uganda would have heard about Renee's charity saving his children.
Power of the Tall White Man00:05:41
But that version of the story leaves a couple of things out.
Just a couple of things out.
So I'm going to read about those couple of things for another nine pages or so.
I can't wait.
Are you really excited?
Yeah, I think you should rename this podcast White Man Reading to Me because I think that's pretty accurate.
Mansplaining the podcast.
Yeah.
Yeah, I didn't want to really, I mean, yeah.
But I love, you're lucky because I love being mansplained too.
It's nice.
I know.
We're all secretly programmed to love it, which is why what I've based my career upon is our internal is the authority that my voice conveys, despite it being completely unearned by my actual lived experiences.
I mean, look, we all know a white man's voice is worth more.
Yeah, well, it's fucking, I don't know, this is a little bit off topic, but not entirely.
I have talked a number of times about the magical power of being a tall white man with a stereotypically kind of authoritative voice because it's great for like walking into situations where there's like police officers and stuff and just like taking control of the situation.
If you just talk really authoritatively, like that's how so many scammers get by.
If you are like if you look a certain way and sound a certain way in our society, you can just take control of situations, which is why a guy like Beto O'Rourke can decide I'm born to be president.
Totally.
And people are like, oh my God, he's so charming.
And it's, yeah, you, anyway.
Thanks for using your white man powers for good.
We appreciate it.
At least neutrality.
I mean, I guess that's the best you can really hope for.
That's what I shoot for on this show.
Leave a neutral impact on the world.
Yeah, I would like to leave no print.
Just one of those washed away by the sea kind of prints.
Yeah, I would like my life to be inconsequential.
Like a Boy Scout campfire.
Very carefully hide all of the traces of you having ever been there.
Yeah, that really should be everybody's goal.
But that was not Renee Bach's goal.
And see, we tied it back around.
See, it's beautiful.
It's beautiful.
Now, after we come back from this ad break, because it's time for an ad break, we're going to talk about why exactly it's bad that Renee Bach didn't decide to lead the Boy Scout campfire sort of life.
But first, you know what won't leave a horrible mark on the world, Sophia?
No, what?
The products and services that support this podcast.
I love products and services.
Unless we get another Coke Industries ad.
And then I will say that I never said that I loved the products and services.
So please buy these products and services unless it's an ad for Coke Industries, which why do they even advertise on podcasts?
Who listens to podcasts and needs an oil refinery?
Like my dad, the monopoly man.
Products.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
When Good Intentions Fail00:14:55
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Maracini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, city hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey, who did it.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
Okay.
So, now, I just read to you sort of Renee's story the way she presented it, the way it was presented in her local papers.
But there's another version of the story, and it came out in, I believe, October of 2018.
It was a medium post, and it was published under the name of a group called No White Saviors.
But it was written by a young white woman who had gone to Uganda around the same time Renee was starting out her NGO there.
And this young woman was a missionary and went to Uganda with dreams of essentially doing the same thing that Renee did.
But after a little time in the country, it became clear to her that something really fucked up was happening in Jinja.
So I'm going to quote from her medium article now.
There was a child referred to our center who had previously been at serving his children.
He and his grandmother stayed with us for several months while he received much-needed medical care.
The day after we had received some good news about his heart condition, he died of a sudden heart attack.
His three-year-old body had been through a great deal of stress and it had finally given out.
We found out that this little boy had suffered a severe case of malnutrition and was brought to Renee's NGO in Massisi.
They got him fat and healthy and then sent him home without so much as any consideration for the root cause of his malnutrition.
There was no follow-up, so he fell sick again, so sick that his body was not able to come back from it this time.
So, yeah, horrible story.
And the author of that medium article met with Renee and her social worker and told them that she considered them partially responsible for the little boy's death.
I explained that had she training or experience in child welfare, she'd know how critical it is to follow up on cases like this.
I was frustrated at that point, but all I was asking was that Renee and her team do better follow-up moving forward to prevent kids from falling through the cracks and ending up right where they started.
It was soon after this that my concern moved to terror as I learned that the poor follow-up procedures were far from the most dangerous thing happening at serving his children.
It was reported by multiple parties that Renee was actively practicing medicine on children that came to the center.
She had medical professionals on staff, but she herself with no medical training chose to actively treat and respond to serious medical needs of children in crisis.
So we got another fake fucking doctor here, which is a trend on this show.
That is fucking serial killer shit.
Yeah, yeah.
It gets serial killery to coin a new verb, I think.
So it became obvious, but yeah.
Adjectives.
Yeah, grammar is not my strong suit.
Okay, you're fired off your own podcast, Sophie.
I was just hoping you'd believe that it was a verb based on the confidence in my voice.
Yeah, you almost sold me on it by just being white and authoritative.
Authoritative.
Yeah.
I was like, yeah, that is a wait a minute.
I do the same thing with pretending I have a driver's license, and it usually works.
So, it became obvious to the author of this medium post, who is anonymous, that Renee had apparently trained herself up on YouTube and started practicing medicine without a license.
Local Ugandan news sources spoke to several of her victims.
A Ugandan paper called The Spy interviewed a Miss Kakai Rose.
She said, My son, Elijah Benjamin, would be two years old today had he been alive.
I delivered him at Jinja Hospital on 21st January, 2017.
I feel his life was snatched from my arms by the actions of Miss Renee Bach.
I hope the court can give me justice.
Now, that's horrible, but it's really light on details.
It's hard to tell exactly what happened there.
I found another article from another Ugandan news site called The Independent, which explains why detail is hard to come by in many of these cases.
They also interviewed numerous women who claimed to have lost children to Renee Bach and her charity.
None of the mothers knows exactly what happened to her child.
What they all say is that their children were not growing normally and were possibly malnourished.
They all went to Renee Bach for help, and the children died.
They spoke to Beatrice Kayaga, a legal officer at the Women's Pro Bono Initiative, which provides legal aid to women in Uganda.
The Women's Pro Bono Initiative is currently suing Renee Bach on behalf of dozens and dozens of Ugandan mothers.
She is currently being charged in a civil case with contributing to the deaths of more than 100 children who were put into her care.
Annette Kikai is one of those women.
She told The Independent, these people did something to my child, and he died.
They gave him something.
When we got home, he died.
Annette's son, Elijah, was not growing normally, so she went to Bach's NGO for help since their whole thing was treating cases of malnourishment.
Annette had heard from a friend that there was a, quote, white lady who would help feed her one-year-old so he would grow up fat and strong.
She said, Elijah was playing.
He was laughing.
My worry was that he was too small for his age.
The white lady dressed in a doctor's uniform, white lab coat, took my son and went with him to another room.
An hour later, Bach left the room and asked Annette to return to the facility the next day.
When they returned, she and her baby were put in a car and taken to a health center in another town.
Elijah was given some milk.
We stayed there for two days and they discharged us.
She was not given any documentation or explanation for what was done to her child.
They didn't say anything.
They drove me up to Jinja Amber Court and gave me basically a pile of cash.
When we got home, the baby became very weak.
He died three days later, she sobs.
Those people did something to my child, and he died.
So these are kind of the details we have initially coming out of Uganda about what's happening.
And it's hard to pin what's going on clearly to a cause because these are sick kids in a country that has not great access to medical care in hospitals.
But the through line is that a number of women have the same story.
They take their kids to this clinic.
A white woman dressed as a doctor gives their kids some medication, performs treatments on them.
The kid dies, and then the lady gives the mother a pile of cash and their kid's body back.
Like, that's the story you hear again and again and again.
It's like what we were saying about being, you know, authoritative and stuff.
It's like you put on that white coat and you come in there being all like white saviory and you're like, hey, you know, I know what to do when you take the son away from the mother.
Whereas like if maybe you weren't wearing that cloak of like protection because of your whiteness and your like medical coat, then probably you would be like, hey, can I stay in the room for whatever happens?
Can I see what's going on?
Yeah.
Yeah.
But you're just trusting blindly because you're like, well, this person has authority and medical training.
Well, and if you're in a very poor part of Uganda, you've had doctors without borders and similar groups come by.
So you've seen a lot of these, a lot of foreigners, Europeans and Americans in lab coats and carrying stethoscopes.
And they've given you good medical care and your family good medical care.
And you know that that's like a thing that happens in your area.
And so this lady shows up.
She's dressed the same way as someone from Doctors Without Borders, and you just assume she's actually a doctor and performing actual medicine, which is not the case.
I'm going to read another story from a mother named Zubeda Gimbo.
According to The Independent, they took her son, Twalali Kifabi, from her while she was heavily pregnant.
They only returned him home in a coffin and gave me an envelope with cash in it.
They came in a car and left immediately before burial.
I had questions as to what may have killed my child.
I needed help and explanations.
None was given to me by the woman that came home with the body of my dead child.
Now, Miss Gimba was confused and obviously heartbroken, but she didn't take action until she heard stories that Renee Bach was not actually a doctor.
This surprised her because when her son had been admitted to the medical center, she'd seen Bach connect tubes to the child's arms and chest.
Beatrice Kayaga, Gimbo's lawyer, claims sources who worked with Bach saw her surf the internet for medical advice and called doctors back in the United States when she had questions on the treatment she administered.
So, again, Renee Bach's intentions seem to have been good.
She saw that there was not enough competent medical care here and decided that she could administer it herself.
And that, like, in the absence of actual trained doctors, her just Skyping a doctor or looking on YouTube for guides on how to solve issues would be enough to handle it.
So it's both like this.
I'm suspicious as fuck, though, because it seems like she was just like trying to find a cover for like being an angel of death.
You know, I wonder about that.
The evidence I have makes me think she was really trying to do good.
I think it's more which doesn't mitigate at all the fact that she got a lot of kids killed.
So I'm not saying it to mitigate it.
If you're noticing that you keep killing children while you're trying to heal them, if that was what you were really trying to do, wouldn't you be like, oh, clearly I'm not doing this well.
I should probably stop.
Unless your whole point was to feel like you're caring and whatever, but then actually to be like, well, you know, probably it's a mercy to murder them.
Don't you think?
Just to have access.
We'll see as we get a little bit through this.
I read through her blog a lot, which has since been scrubbed by the internet.
She has a blog?
She used to have a blog.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, we'll be talking about it a lot.
There were hundreds of kids she dealt with, and most of them didn't die.
And most of them, you know, it's the kind of thing where, like, you know how people can convince themselves that like whatever sort of weird snake oil they take heals them just because most problems you have, if you're a healthy person, you will eventually get over.
So if you're like rubbing fucking oregano oil on yourself as your body heals naturally, you can convince yourself, oh, this oregano oil is healing me or whatever, just because like that's the bot.
So she dealt with a lot of kids, some of whom she was able to give actual help to just because she had access to the money to give these kids nutritional supplements.
Some of whom just got better on their own.
But she has all these stories about kids getting better on her blog, some of which she attributes to like miracles and stuff, which I'm guessing like that's I think that's another explanation than that she's a serial killer.
It's just most of the kids she saw didn't die.
So she assumed, well, you know, I'm giving medical care to these kids.
They can't all survive, but I'm still doing a good thing.
Which gives her more confidence and more confidence to treat more kids, which means she ends up killing more kids too because she's taking on more and more people and getting further and further out of her actual area of competence, which is raising money to provide food for kids.
I guess I did not think that's what happens.
I guess I did not realize that she, in addition to killing a large portion of kids, also saved a larger portion, or maybe they got back better on their own.
Yeah.
didn't realize that there was a high higher survival rate than death rate because I was using my Georgia tan brain.
I'm like, probably 100%.
We're not talking 100%.
It's impossible to say what the rate is because I don't know how many kids she actually dealt with.
But it also is like most of the kids she sees are just kids who aren't, they're not dying.
They're just, they don't have, they're malnourished.
So if she's able to like hook these kids up with like nutritional supplements and better food, then that actually does help them.
And then, you know, they go off at it.
So she's, I think that's part, and that's that's part of why she gets, I think, more and more into providing actual medical care.
Is the more kids who come by with minor problems and she's able to help, the more convinced she becomes that she can do stuff like give them fucking blood transfusions, which is where this story ends up.
Yeah.
So again, none of this mitigates the fact that she was performing unlicensed medical care on children that got them killed because what she's doing is horribly fucked up.
I don't think she's a serial killer.
I think she's someone who got way overconfident because of her ability to provide moderate help to some of these kids.
And that leads her to kill others of them.
That's my interpretation.
We'll see if you agree as I finish the story.
Anyway, there is some evidence that she got addicted over time to playing doctor on these kids.
Kayaga, that legal representative, Renee, says that Renee hired social workers to comb government health facilities for new children she could treat.
So she eventually starts actually seeking out really sick kids that she can perform medical operations on.
Dude, that's fucking Dr. Mangle and shit.
She is right.
She's a serious fucking murderer.
Absolutely not right.
And this was apparently common knowledge within the Ugandan missionary community.
The author of that medium post wrote: Taking children from actual hospitals and medical centers, Renee and her team would bring children back to the center in Messisi.
Renee herself would openly talk about how much she enjoyed hands-on medical care.
Exploitation Vibe and Medical Procedures00:05:30
Now, I would be remiss in my journalistic duties if I did not note that Renee's family has responded to the allegations made against their daughter.
They deny that Renee performed any inappropriate medical procedures outside of her certifications in CPR, basic first aid, and emergency stabilization.
They claim that Saving His Children, her NGO, eventually did hire doctors and nurses, and that any procedures Renee helped in were carried out under the supervision of these professionals.
As evidence, they attach an image macro.
It shows Renee attaching a tube to a patient, which is apparently a fuller version of a picture that was attached to that medium article and uses evidence that Renee was performing medical procedures.
In the version of the picture that the family sends over, you can see a man standing behind Renee, who they claim is a licensed doctor overseeing her work.
So Renee's mom attached a quote to the picture: In seeking truth, you must find both sides of the story.
Now, that's a quote from Walter Cronkite.
Now, Renee's family, I think specifically her mother, published an open letter that kind of is set at rebuting all of these claims made against her daughter.
And that's sort of the overview of the claims.
They say that, number one, you know, children in this area, there's a high death rate for malnourished children.
So, yes, some kids in the care of the center died, but that's to be expected.
They reported all of them to the authorities.
They had doctors on staff.
Renee never performed any inappropriate medical procedures.
These are the claims made by the family.
And the case has not made its way through the court system yet.
But there are some reasons to doubt Renee and her family's side of the story.
One of them is the fact that she had a blog that she maintained.
Now, Sophia.
I can't wait to hear about this.
Dear Diary.
Today I murdered three children.
It was an okay day.
I had tilapia for dinner.
One of the things that's immediately sketchy about Renee's side of the case is that she scrubbed her blog from the internet after the lawsuit was filed, which makes you think that maybe there was something incriminating in the blog.
She's like, oh no, I should have never been writing about my murders, Publishing.
Yeah, I shouldn't have been writing about the crimes I was committing.
Why did I not know that?
Damn it.
Yeah.
Now, and this is, again, part of why I think she's not intentionally killing these kids, is she details her breaking the law a bunch in this blog and doesn't seem to notice that what she's writing is fucked up.
Well, she's also not smart, clearly.
Yeah, I don't think she's a genius.
Now, I want to give a thanks first off to the young writer, Nikki Gagnon, who told me the name of Renee's blog so that I could find it on the Wayback Machine, which is why we have access to all these blog posts, because obviously nothing on the internet has ever gone forever.
And there will be links to Renee Bach's blog on our website, behindthembastards.com, if you want to read any of her posts.
I am going to do that.
Yeah.
Well, right now, I'm going to have Sophie show you what the landing page of Renee's blog looked like.
And the name of her blog was, But the Greatest of These is Love, which I think is a chunk from a Bible quote.
Now, Sophia, how would you describe that blog?
Oh boy.
Yeah.
Oh, boy.
That's...
I don't know.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's some...
Again, it's like a perfect encapsulation of this.
Exploitation vibe.
Real serious exploitation vibe.
Yeah, it's a very close-up picture of a malnourished child on his mother's arms with very large eyes looking up at the camera on a background of what looks like a burlap sack, I guess she superimposed the picture onto.
Not a great graphic designer.
And her blog in general is filled with lurid pictures of sick and injured Ugandan children.
Dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of them.
You might call it suffering porn.
I was just going to call it that.
Yeah, that's the overwhelming feeling you get from looking through her blog.
Many of the pictures are before and afters, showing children after time in her care.
Others just seem to emphasize the suffering and pitiable state of her patients.
I can't overemphasize how many pictures of sick children there are in this site.
And I have no evidence that there's also pictures of her performing operations on people.
I have no evidence that the people in those pictures consented to have their images used or that the parents of the kids in those pictures consented to have their images used.
Who knows if those children were murdered by her?
Like, that is so fucked up.
Some of them may have been.
Because she does talk about some kids dying in her blog.
Now, she regularly talks about performing medical operations on children in this blog, although she always uses the term we for this.
So it's possible that there's medical professionals with her performing these procedures for some of them, but she's very vague about it.
She almost never refers to doctors being present.
She occasionally mentions a nurse being present, but there is no evidence given in the blog that she's working under their direction or guidance.
She tells frequent stories of children being healed by miracles in her clinic after doctors in cities gave them prognoses of doom.
And while I was browsing through her blog, I found some posts that directly contradict the claims that her mother made in that open letter.
Is That a Good Ad Pivot00:06:20
But we're going to get into that after some ads, because this is a great time for ads.
Buy stuff.
Buy stuff.
Buy a product.
Unless that product is a charity that is actually killing kids.
Always do your research.
Always do your research before donating money to some fucking 20-something year old rich kids charity.
But don't do your research before supporting the companies that support this show.
Is that a good ad pivot, Sophie?
No, you're not happy with that one?
See, I mean, like, it's hard not having you in person, but the fact that now I'm singing across from Sophie and we can just both frown at you at the same time, it's pretty great.
It's like looking in a beautiful blonde mirror.
I can feel y'all's disapproval coursing over the airwaves, traveling through the internet and beaming out of the screen of my laptop.
And how could you tell it apart from like regular disapproval that you just would get from living in Portland?
You know, there's different flavors of disapproval that you get, but Sophie and Sophia, you both have, I would say, a tangier taste of disapproval.
And it really fuels my heart in the same way that the products and services you're about to hear ads for fuel this podcast with their advertising dollars.
Bam!
That's a fucking ad pivot.
Are you proud of me now, Sophie?
Okay, well, it's as good as it's getting.
Products!
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios.
This is Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey.
What did it?
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's docks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach.
Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
I'm still proud of myself for that ad pivot.
Giving Kids Wrong Blood00:13:47
Just like Renee Bach was proud of herself for her medical charity.
Anyway, so we're talking about Renee's blog.
And I found a post in 2014 as I was reading through very old articles in this man slaughterer's child slaughterers.
I'm not sure what the legal term for her crimes is, blog, that seem to contradict directly the claims made by her mother.
If you will remember, she stated, like that open letter stated, that Renee did not perform any sort of medical operation without like the direct supervision of doctors and nurses.
I also love that the evidence was a picture of a man standing behind her.
She's like, it's a man.
There was a man there.
Are you kidding me?
How could you accuse her of any malpractice?
A man was standing behind her.
Was standing right behind her.
Behind her.
So I'm going to read.
In front of every fake doctor is a murderous woman, also pretending to be a doctor.
That guy might have been a real doctor, but the fact of the matter is there's documentation that she was performing a shitload of medical interventions without a doctor present.
So I'm going to read a quote from a 2014 blog post.
The baby's name is Patricia.
She is nine months old.
She had fallen sick three weeks ago.
Her mom had taken her to a health center, but there was no improvement.
She continued to get worse despite my treatment that was given.
One of their relatives told them about a hospital in Messisi with a white doctor.
So that Sunday morning, they left their home early and journeyed to Jinja in hope of finding someone, anyone who could help their daughter.
So you can see right there, at no point does she say, of course, I wasn't a doctor.
Of course, I wasn't running a hospital.
She presents this as like, kind of like she's proud that she's become known as the white doctor in Uganda.
She's like, I don't know if you heard about the local angel saving everybody, but she and I are the same.
That's the feeling you get reading this blog.
Rene, of course, leapt into action.
While I was listening, I was attempting to diagnose the many problems that could potentially be at hand.
Diagnose, see?
Got it.
Malaria, positive.
HB, 3.2.
Both are a big problem.
And together they create an even bigger, most likely fatal problem for such a small child.
She needed a blood transfusion, and fast.
After doing a search for blood around Ginger Town, we found her type, and it was a match.
We started the transfusion, praying with every drip.
About 30 minutes into her transfusion, she started showing signs of having an anaphylactic reaction.
Not good.
Not good at all.
Her neck and face started swelling a lot.
I'm talking about a ton of swelling.
Within 15 minutes, her breathing went from bad to worse.
Her throat was beginning to close.
We gave her an antihistamine, and off to Kampala we went.
We arrived at one of the best hospitals in Kampala by around 8 p.m. and then sat in the ER for over three hours waiting to see a doctor.
It was a very long night to say the least, but surprisingly, she made it to see the morning.
So, Renee is posting in this about giving a child a blood transfusion and giving that kid the wrong blood, which causes an allergic reaction, which can very, very easily be fatal.
Why did she say we found her match?
Yeah.
That's how dumb she is.
She didn't even know.
They're both blood.
She's so bad at this blood's red.
This blood's red.
Yeah, she's like, it looks like it's a match.
This is a human.
This is a human.
It tastes the same.
One human go in one other human.
That worked for me.
It gets grosser.
Because Rene's story, again, she, this is part of why I don't think she's intentionally killing these kids.
She shows no self-awareness at how, like, a person reading this would be like, you just gave a kid the wrong kind of blood.
What the fuck, lady?
And she goes on to talk luridly about how in the ER they found out that she and this little kid had the same blood type.
So she was able to donate her own blood to save this child who she'd actually put in danger in the first place by giving the wrong blood initially.
Which, like, that's so crazy.
It's so fucked up.
It's so fucked up.
She's definitely an insane person who needs a version of others.
And for people to be like, oh my god, yes.
What a hero.
You gave this kid your own blood.
Yeah.
After giving the kid the wrong blood.
Now, in that open letter published by her family, they claim saving his children has perfect records of every child they treated and every child that died in her care.
They say Renee is blameless and all of that.
But goddamn if Renee's blog does not paint almost the same picture is painted in that medium post.
There is evidence that the open letter published by her family contains at least a few direct lies.
For one thing, Renee's family claims that they first brought a real doctor onto their team three days a week in 2011.
Perhaps they did.
But again, Renee's own blog posts say otherwise.
See, and this is the little bit of reporting I got to do here.
Because I wanted to make sure I wasn't slandering this.
It would be totally possible, totally possible, that like the shit I saw on Twitter and whatnot was wrong.
This was just a case of like, yeah, some kids are going to die.
It's like it's a tough place to perform medical care.
I didn't want to get sued by the family.
So I was kind of looking for a smoking gun in the blog that showed that there were lies in the open letter.
And I found at least one thing that suggests that.
Because that blood transfusion thing happened, I think, in October of 2011.
And the next year in May of 2012, Renee posted an update with the title, We Need Your Help.
And the post details a story about a woman with a sick child coming in the night.
Renee claims she and her staff had to drive around to find a doctor who could see them.
After knocking on just about every door in the hospital, I found a nurse.
She promised to call a doctor and then disappeared again.
I made my way back to the ER and watched, waited, prayed.
And for almost the next three hours, the child in my arms continued to drift away and the doctor never came.
This story, sadly, is a familiar one, a scenario that has played out for many sick children that God sends into our care.
It is a terrifying and heart-wrenching experience for mothers who have sought refuge and help in our home, as well as frustrating for me as I seek medical expertise beyond my own in a world that is often just not available.
This story and others like it would be different if we had a doctor.
So that's May of 2012 when she posts that, which seems to make it crystal clear that Saving His Children had no doctor on staff in May of 2012.
Renee explicitly spells out in that post that her staff includes three full-time Ugandan nurses and medical equipment that is not even often available in local hospitals, but laments not having a doctor on staff.
The whole goal of that post was to raise money, $15,000 a year, to hire a doctor.
Now, here's a quote from the open letter published by Renee's mom.
As a board, we have been approached in the past with concerns about the amount of medical work being done at our center and Renee's personal involvement.
Once in the fall of 2011, our response was to hire a Ugandan doctor three days a week to work with the nurses to establish treatment plans and to be available for emergency consults.
Now, that note about concerns in the fall of 2011 is clearly a reference to Renee transfusing the wrong blood into a child.
But the letter of what her family writes in the open letter makes it sound like Saving His Children immediately hired a doctor in response to that.
Renee's blog makes it clear that seven months later in May of 2012, they still had no doctor on staff.
And we don't know how long after that post it took them to actually hire one.
I just love that the number one thing that you would think from a title like Saving His Children that you would have is someone who could literally save a life, aka a doctor.
It's like she's like, no, let's buy this dialysis machine first.
It's like, probably not the right order.
Maybe get the doctor first.
Maybe invest in the doctor.
I don't know.
And I think I did wrongly say I wrote it out wrong.
When I announced that when I started reading the story about the blood transfusion, I said I found a post from 2014.
That post was from 2011, which I made clear later on.
I just want to make it super clear here.
So yeah, that seems to be a good idea.
I won't put up with this.
You know that, right?
I will not put up with this inaccuracy.
I was led to believe that you're a professional.
Sophie, can I go?
Thank you so much.
So yeah, that seems pretty damning to me, right?
You've got this letter where they're saying, we had concerns in 2011 and we hired a doctor.
And then you've got Renee seven months later saying, we don't have a doctor and we need one.
Like, that seems like a pretty clear example.
Not only is number one, her post in 2011, a clear example that she's performing blood transfusions, which goes against what they say in the open letter, but the other post in May is a clear evidence that they didn't have a doctor when her family claims they had already hired a doctor.
So like, I don't know, that doesn't mean everything that they claim in the open letter about their clinic is a lie, but it means at least one thing in that open letter is a lie, which makes me believe the local Ugandan reporting and the reporting in that medium post even more because everything they say is internally consistent and is consistent with Renee's own blog, which was written contemporaneously.
So, I don't know.
It's pretty clear she doesn't want the children to be saved.
She wants to be known for saving children, which is not the same thing at all.
And to her, I don't think the lives matter at all, which is why I still think she's like a creepy serial killer.
Yeah, it's, yeah, we'll talk at the end of this about like where we wind up on exactly what we think her motivations are.
Although I don't think her motivations really matter.
What matters is that she's giving kids the wrong blood and stuff and some of them die, which I think we're, yeah.
So having read through Renee's blog and several well-reported articles from local Uganda journalists, I feel comfortable saying that I think we've reported on both sides of the story now.
And it seems like something really messed up is going on here.
The author of that medium article alleges that several members of the Ugandan missionary community expressed their concern about saving his children at varying points.
Many of us who have tried to hold Renee and SHC accountable have been lambasted, yelled at, and referred to as the enemy by supporters of Renee.
The home church that Ms. Bach attended in Jinja, as well as a significant portion of the missionary community here, supported and defended her.
Now, according to Spy Uganda's reporting, or the spy in Uganda, Bach family members seem to make up the majority of the staff running Saving His Children.
So her mother is the U.S. director of Saving His Children.
Her 22-year-old sister Aline works with the organization's marketing and social media team.
So like the actual staff that runs the organization is all members of the Bach family.
But the majority of the employees are basically part-time Ugandan employees.
So the actual people doing most of the work on the ground and providing care are usually Ugandans and Renee.
And the people running the company and doing things like publishing open letters that have at least one major inaccuracy in them are Renee's mom and sister.
So that's how this charity is run.
Now, earlier in this episode, I mentioned Nikki Gagnon, one of the writers who covered this story.
She's the person who told me how to find Renee's old blog posts, and Nikki's done a lot of digging into this case.
Her coverage might be the best that I found so far.
For one thing, she delves deeper into Renee's blog than anyone else.
Quote, one harrowing passage from June 12, 2011 follows Bach as she simultaneously drives a vehicle and administers emergency oxygen via a bag valve mask to an infant.
She writes, Oxygen was finished, and I had been driving and bagging Raheem at the same time.
It was working, but wasn't exactly safe.
My sister and two of my best friends in the world came to my rescue.
Exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point.
They met me along the road with the oxygen cord, another set of hands to drive, and some emotional support.
Exclamation point.
The baby later died.
Wow.
That's too many exclamation points for a post that ends with a baby death.
Yeah, that's too many exclamations points.
I'm paying attention to the important part.
She's like, oh my God, I have the best friends in the world.
R.I.P. Baby.
R.I.P. Baby.
What the fuck are your priorities?
She...
Yeah.
Now, Nikki helped me iron out some of the more confusing details of the case.
That Medium post had concluded by noting that Saving His Children shut down in 2015, but other coverage suggested that the nonprofit was still operational.
It turns out that Saving His Children shut down briefly in 2015 when criminal charges were filed against Renee Bach with the Jinja Police and the Ugandan Ministry of Health.
Then the organization started back up again and has been running ever since.
So they shut it down briefly because there were criminal charges against them and then started it back up as soon as they felt like the smoke had cleared.
Nikki, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that does make it seem like it's a compulsive need for her to operate this place.
100%.
It's like, you know, those Munchausen syndrome moms that like need the attention that they get from like their kid being fake sick.
Yeah, I think that's very much what's going on here.
Now, Nikki interviewed Olivia Alasso, a social worker and a member of the group No White Saviors.
Olivia Alasso is actually from Jinja.
She's a Ugandan.
And Olivia says that she interviewed a number of families who claimed their children were harmed by Renee Bach.
She shared the story of a family from Bouzika, a rural town several hours away from Jinja, whose baby passed away after intervention from Bach back in August.
Alasso said, that means Renee is still practicing medicine.
She went on to explain that Bach supervised the child's care at a clinic and ultimately released the infant after several days.
According to the child's mother, who was interviewed by Alasso, the baby died after developing breathing complications despite being evaluated by Bach for malnutrition at the Kigandalo Health Center in Mayugi.
So, yeah, she's at least as recently as like 2018 is still performing medical interventions, not with a doctor present.
Untrained Hands in Rural Uganda00:13:45
You know, cool.
So medical with like air quotes.
With air quotes.
Medical in that she wears a stethoscope.
Yeah, she put on a white robe.
So I will say this: by the standards of the 1920s, she is a doctor.
That is a very high standard.
Again, those standards are has a white coat and stethoscope.
Amazing.
People are, you could afford your own stethoscope?
You're welcome.
Wow.
You must be a doctor.
Oh, I would 100% have been a doctor in the 20s, but I would just have sold people morphine.
Mainly so I could afford to buy morphine myself.
In the 20s, they still jerked off women, right?
Yeah, they sure did.
Yeah.
Okay, cool.
Just making sure it's still real fucked up.
That's kind of your best case scenario with a 20s doctor because if they're jerking you off, they're not pouring mercury into you.
I don't know.
I feel like you probably do both.
Yeah, you probably do.
And also, you're assuming they're good at jerking you off.
Like, that could really be, you know, a bad fingering is really real bad.
One county doctor who was just the best at it.
Yeah.
Like, was like the most popular guy.
All the women, he's been married five times.
All the women go to him.
They're like, yeah, okay.
They're like, there's another doctor on staff.
They're like, yeah, we don't really want to do it.
A bunch of dull, oaky farmers sitting around being like, boy, Dr. Johnson's real popular.
My wife keeps biking him cakes.
She's sick all the time.
How often do you think a woman gots to go to the woman doctor?
She sees him about once, I don't know, twice every day.
Like, oh, that's too many times.
All the women folk are outside of the doctor's office again.
Feels like this happens a lot.
And it's like they finally figure out his skills.
They're like, the fingers on his right hand seem to be, the nails seem to be trimmed real nice.
You think it's got anything to do with that?
And the women are like, yes, it totally does.
Please trim your fucking fingernails.
Well, you know, I've done my job.
I made this about fingernails.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And in a way, isn't everything?
No, this story is about child murder.
Just let me get a little fingering in, Robert.
Just a little bit.
A little bit.
A little bit.
A couple of fingers in the middle.
Just a pinky.
Give me a little pinky action.
Yeah.
Well, we've had our pinky in a very authoritative way.
That is the job of a producer.
I would trust you to finger me, Sophie.
You're welcome.
Robert, I don't know.
We don't know each other all enough, honestly.
And I'm like a thousand miles away, which is, yeah.
That's the number one thing that.
And my fingernails are horrible.
Oh, gross.
Why'd you tell your listeners that your female listener is literally just unsubscribed from the podcast?
Because I'm all about cinema, which is a term I invented to describe how I do my podcast.
We talked about it in the Hubbard episode.
It's not.
Yes.
Now, I want to get back to a.
It is known.
I want to get back to Nikki Gagnon's article because she also interviewed a Ugandan former employee of Saving His Children.
This is like a local person who actually worked at Renee Bach's clinic.
And this guy's recollections are rather damning.
For us, we saw many mistakes, but whenever you happen to tell her, she was not accepting, and you know, it is such a problem.
The worker detailed a case where he watched Bot give a child a blood transfusion under a tree and claims he saw that sort of behavior numerous times.
Now, I'm not a medical professional, but I have enough medical training to say blood transfusions are not generally performed under trees.
Whatever.
That sounds like the perfect ambiance.
Are you a little bit jealous?
I could find like a nice eucalyptus, just lay down underneath it, get a needle in my arm.
It sounds romantic.
It does sound like that.
Who wants to lay with me in a meadow and get medical treatment administered by a non-professional?
Raise your hand.
You know, she used to behave as if she's a professional, yet she was not.
Second to all that, all the volunteers that used to come at the center, they used to handle medical issues.
And I remember one day confronting the doctors, the African doctors.
Why are these whites?
They are playing on our children, our children's lives.
You know what the doctor told me?
He told me, even me, I've been seeing that.
But you know, a boss is a boss.
There's nothing I can do.
Whoa.
This is a guy speaking who's being quoted.
English is not his first language, obviously.
And so I don't know exactly how he meant the term they are playing on our children.
But I think that I know what he means because English is my second language.
I think he's like, they're playing with their lives.
Like they're using them as like experiments.
It's not serious to them.
Exactly.
People don't have value.
That's how I interpreted it too.
I think, yeah, he's saying that Renee is playing with Ugandan children as if they're her toys, like playing doctor, playing pretend with human lives.
And I want to show you a picture Renee Bach took of herself and posted on social media.
Now, this is her as she wants to be seen.
And I think it is very...
Yeah.
Describe that fucking picture, Sophia.
I mean, it's like a combo of that photo of Melania when she decorated the White House for Christmas.
And it just looked like it was like haunted by all the families that have been like fucked up by the administration.
It was just very gray and white and dull.
And she was kind of in the middle as the queen.
This has that combined with like a real, what's the show with the bonnets and the red?
Oh, Handmaid's Tale.
Thank you.
It's got a real handmaid maid's tail vibe also.
And it's like she's clearly, she's like, I am Mother Teresa.
There's white glow around me.
I am, I am the bitch.
She's standing in the center of a room with a couple of empty cradles in it, and her hands are down at her side with her palms facing forward and her head bowed down in like a gesture of religious contrition.
So it's easier to steal the babies also.
Like if you keep your palms out.
She's backlit by a light shining through a window, which makes her look almost like she's got like a halo like she's a saint.
And then the walls of the room she's in are plastered in pictures of sick African children.
Hundreds and hundreds of pictures of little shirtless babies, like the ones that she puts on her blog post all around her.
Like it is.
This Mother Teresa bitch right here.
Yeah.
Mother Teresa bitch is the fucking, like you couldn't have a more white saviory picture if you if you try.
Like if you were if you were making a movie, a horror movie about a white savior character and you put this picture in it, everyone watching it would be like, well, this is over the top.
Come on.
This is on the nose.
On the little much fun.
But this is fucking how Renee Bach sees herself or at least wants to be seen.
I don't know how to say that.
So telling, man.
Yeah.
It's so telling.
Yeah.
I want to read a little bit more from that local Virginia News article I found on Bach that I opened this article with or this episode with.
It interviewed Richard Hart, her former pastor, and he talked a lot about Renee's humility, claiming she doesn't promote herself and praising her teachability.
A teenage girl out of rural Virginia going and making such a huge difference in Uganda and then just to stay with it for all these years has been a real testament to her heart and her character and the humility that she has.
Yes, when I think of humble, I think untrained blood transfusions.
Yeah.
Also, I feel like it's always kind of a red flag to me when like the first time a white person tries to help anybody, they're like, I'm going to go to another country and fix it.
Yeah.
It's like, you should just be exposed to the poverty and malnutrition and shit in America.
And then, you know, maybe try to see how you can help that community.
It'll be less of a shock for your system.
Maybe you won't co-opt other people's fucking like lives like that.
And you can maybe make a little bit of progress.
I don't know why immediately.
I feel like it's got to be such a superiority complex.
Like we are better than black people.
We're better than Africa.
We need to get our hands on it.
We need to help because we know best.
And it is such a fucked up attitude.
It is.
And it's like, even though I don't have any expertise in this, because I like my attitude towards this country, and it goes back to like the Kony 2012 thing, building this idea that Uganda is just irredeemably fucked up because things are so fucked up.
And this is also, you see it in the open letter her mom wrote where they talk about how often kids die in Uganda.
Because it's so bad here, it's okay that I'm completely untrained wandering into this situation because the situation is so fucked up that anything I do is fine.
Like if she had, like you said, if she'd started by like volunteering at local homeless shelters and like running a shelter, trying to deal with malnourished people, and if she built a really effective program in her local hometown and helped a few hundred people and then gone to Uganda and been like, I'm going to try to do this here.
I'd be like, okay, well, she's got some expertise.
It's the same thing as like, it's not white saviorism if you are a white doctor and you travel to Uganda to offer free medical care.
It's not being a white savior to be part of Doctors Without Borders or whatever.
You spend a lot of time to gain a real skill that is in short supply in an area and then you travel there to give part of yourself.
That's totally fine.
The white saviorism is this person with no skills, with a high school degree, rolling into this place and being like, yeah, I can do complex medical shit.
What does it matter if I fuck up?
Everyone's already fucked here because it's Uganda.
Like that's your attitude.
Yeah.
That's like that's what's so offensive.
And it's just so dangerous to not be aware of your own bias to the point where it never occurs to you to not start there.
Oh, here's it does occur to her.
I'm about to read that part.
So in her interview for that article in Virginia, Bach addressed directly the idea of white savior complex.
She claims her desire to avoid that is why she hired mostly local Ugandans.
It's a real thing.
There are people that go there and probably do what they do for themselves and the self-gratification from helping people that are less than or who were super poor or assisting orphans.
I think all too often we as Americans, we think, oh, well, they're just incapable.
So we better go and help these people.
I think that's the mindset of a lot of people.
And I would probably say that I even had a little bit of that mindset when I first went of like, oh, well, maybe they just can't do it, she said, but they can.
And I definitely learned that very quickly, that I'm definitely not needed here.
Then leave, bitch.
Yeah, like I agree with you on that.
You're not fucking necessary.
And you're making the situation arguably a lot worse.
If you found out there's no need for you, fucking leave.
I just don't understand.
I mean, I do understand she's a crazy person, but Jesus Christ.
And oh, speaking of Jesus Christ, it's even more fucked up to tie this into religion too.
Yeah.
Right?
Like, somehow is like, you're holy and like special and doing God's work when you're literally killing children.
And it's giving you this whole like, oh, you know, my mission's not only like good by earthly standards, it's also good by godly standards.
And it's like, you're the furthest thing away from that.
And there's so many stories in her blog of like this kid will get sick and the doctors will say there's nothing that can be done.
And then the kid will get better and she'll say it's like this miracle that we healed this child, even though like they said it was impossible.
This is like clearly God healing him.
And the kid goes away and it's like, well, but okay, there's a ton of fatal illnesses where it's very common for people to get better or seem better for a couple of weeks at a time because that's just how illness works and to have a few good days before they take a turn.
And we don't know the whole stories of these kids because I don't have a whole lot of faith in fucking Renee Bach's ability to keep records on these children or let us know how often they don't survive, you know, or properly diagnose them ever with no medical training.
And that's the um, that's the thing that that medium article presents is like it starts with the story of a kid who goes to Renee Bach, very malnourished.
Renee's clinic gets the kid nourished again and then just sends him off, not thinking about the fact that like, well, no, this kid has a diagnosed heart condition.
It can be dangerous when you're malnourished to feed someone a bunch and get them a bunch of weight and then send them back out into the world because like, number one, that's a huge strain on their system.
There's a reason that doctors are very careful with how they have arena.
Like, like, that's part of the problem is like when we get these stories about her saving kids, these stories that I suspect convinced her that she was good at this.
Like, she doesn't know if she's actually saving any of the kids she's claimed she's saved because she's not doing long-term follow-up.
There's no follow-up at all.
Exactly.
And like, yeah, it's, it's fucked up.
And that thing about, I have a really like morbid note on that.
Like, yes, that's a common thing with if you're treating someone who is hugely malnourished that you can't let them eat their fill.
Yeah.
It's too much.
It's, they can't go from having no food to all the food.
Morbid Notes on Failed Follow-Up00:09:01
My grandpa, who was in World War II, said that when they were like outside one of the death camps, a couple of like prisoners that had run away from the concentration camps or whatever were so starving and malnourished.
And like they gave them food.
And my grandpa was like, it was really hard and heartbreaking to not let them eat a lot.
Yeah.
Because they would still beg you for food and they like need it and want it.
And you just have to be like, no, you can only have a little bit at a time.
And it's like, even somebody like that knows that, who was just, you know, you know it from experience.
You don't know it from medical training, but just the fact that you can be more informed as a soldier about this than even a woman that's pretending to be a doctor.
Yeah.
It's super fucked up.
You know, I have a little bit of a white savior story myself, although when I was 22 or something like that, my girlfriend at the time and I went to Guatemala with a Catholic church in this charity called, I think the name was Kids Saving Kids.
And I was not Catholic.
I was an atheist at that point.
And I didn't have much of an interest in the church at all.
But like I wanted to go to Guatemala because I wanted to see Guatemala.
And the idea behind what we were doing on paper is that we were going there to help build a clinic.
So I was like, okay, well, I'll get to see Guatemala and we'll build a clinic and that'll be great.
And there was a chunk of the charity that was useful because a guy who was an actual doctor came along and he like provided he was up every day like talking to women and doing like women's health issues and stuff.
And that was great.
But the rest of us, it turned out that building a clinic was, we didn't build a clinic.
We went out into the middle of this impoverished village in like about two hours outside of Antigua and we built a barbed wire fence around a trash field.
And the main purpose of us building it was so that we could do a big photo op with the mayor and the lady who ran the charity, who was very proud of herself and spent every day sitting at the hotel, clearly on vacation.
And then at the end of it, got to do a big photo op with all these kids that she gave shoes and like the mayor of this village while we like stood around this like trash fence that we'd built.
And it was this realization for me of like.
Oh, the only thing that we needed to do was send the doctor.
And the doctor complained that like he didn't actually have much in the way of medicine to hand out to these people.
And if instead of the rest of us coming, we just sent the doctor with the value of our money on antibiotics for all of these women who, because the water was bad, like all of these women had UTIs in this village.
Like that was the thing he was like, I've never seen this, but like there's not much I can do because I don't have any medication for them.
If the 20, 30 kids that like flew out there and got put up in a hotel for a week and whatever, if we just put that money into antibiotics, real good would have been done.
But instead, there's a barbed wire fence around a trash field in a rural village in Guatemala.
So.
Yep.
Yeah.
It's really dumb.
So if you want to help places like this, maybe give some money to Doctors Without Borders or something.
Actual medical professionals.
Yeah.
Chat Charity Navigator.
Do a little bit of research.
Figure out.
Yeah.
There's a lot of really bad charities.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It turns out that everything's terrible.
I mean, as a breast cancer survivor, I'm super sensitive about people giving money to like Susan Jucomen or like really shitty breast cancer organizations that just really spent the money on like publicity and overhead and never actually on women.
Yeah.
It's crazy how often stuff like that goes down and how when you actually go to places where people need help, the folks doing actual useful work get very little money like in are operating on a shoestring budget, whereas like the groups that get the most money get the most money because they're able to do big high-profile PR events, which cost a lot of money.
And yeah, it's fucked up.
Doctors Without Borders is pretty sweet though.
Yeah.
Give them your money.
Donate.
Yeah, yeah.
All right.
Well, Sophia, you want to plug your pluggables at the end of this very happy episode about child murder?
Yeah, I mean, I feel people want more.
You know what I mean?
How could they not want more of me after this?
How could they not?
You can find me.
I host a podcast, co-host a podcast called Private Parts Unknown.
It's about love and sexuality around the world.
And you can find me at the Sophia, T-H-E-S-O-F-I-Y-A on Twitter and Instagram.
Twinstagram, Sophia, Private Parts Unknown.
Check her out.
You can also check me out.
I'm Robert Evans, and I'm on this podcast.
You actually, you already have checked me out, and there's nothing more you can do.
Nothing at all.
So go home and keep on living your life.
You're doing great.
Knowing that you have checked me out, check out Sophia.
I think that's everything.
Is that everything, Sophie?
Is she shaking her head angrily?
She's so over you.
She's very over me.
That's because I didn't plug any of the pluggables.
I was just trying to exasperate Sophie because it's what I live for.
I think she got it.
I think she got it.
I think she got that message.
You can find us on behindtheastters.com.
You can find me at IRIDOK on Twitter.
You can find this podcast on Twitter and Instagram at BastardsPot.
You can find us on TeePublic, where you can buy a shirt that does not help a good cause.
But we'll go to pay for my coffee and narcotics.
Behind the bastards at teapublic.com.
Or you can donate to Medicine Sans Frontiers or something like that.
That's the end of the podcast.
I'm sorry, Sophie.
Please forgive me.
Where's my apology?
Wait, wait, what?
What did I do wrong for you, Sophia?
Just dead babies over and over.
You've sapped the humor from me.
We're going to talk about YouTube in the next episode.
I feel like this is a trap.
Yeah, it is.
It's always a trap with Behind the Bastards.
That's the episode.
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