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April 12, 2025 - Epoch Times
22:03
How a Doctor Was Prosecuted for Trying to Prevent Harm to Children: Surgeon Eithan Haim
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Time Text
These doctors knew their research was bogus, but that didn't stop them from saying publicly that this was legitimate research.
And as a doctor, that's a big deal because that means it was done so knowingly.
Dr. Eitan Haim was working as a resident surgeon at the Texas Children's Hospital when he discovered that doctors were secretly continuing and even expanding their program of gender-affirming care for minors after publicly shutting it down.
Dr. Haim blew the whistle and ended up under federal investigation.
You had an entire...
A team of prosecutors, FBI agents, HHS agents.
They had spent hundreds of hours.
I mean, I can't even imagine how many millions of dollars of taxpayer money to prosecute me for something that was fundamentally not a crime.
After three failed indictments and over 148 legal files, his case has now been dismissed.
They never thought that this was going to go very far.
But they just knocked on the wrong door, and they chose me as a target.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
Dr. Eiten Haim, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Yeah, thank you for having me.
It's a privilege.
Well, so let's go back to January 24th of this year, not that long ago.
You were expecting to be going to jail, but that's not what happened.
Give me a sense of what happened.
Yeah, I mean, it was the culmination of an entire story that, I mean, it's truly unbelievable because January 24th is when my case was dismissed.
But that day, and then the night before especially, I was getting ready to go to jail.
I was giving my wife all of my media contacts.
You know, we were thinking about, like, if they show up to my work because I was operating the next day.
And we were fully getting ready to prepare for the worst.
And all this came about because I spoke out, right?
I expressed my opinion about what was going on in this case.
And the judge was threatening to send me to jail for violating a de facto gag order, something he had not even signed.
And on the same day that I was possibly going to jail, he ended up signing the dismissal of the case.
And it was dismissed.
Let's backtrack a bit, okay?
I mean, this goes way back to 2023, when you blew the whistle on some very unfortunate activities.
So give me a picture of what happened.
Baylor College of Medicine, which is one of the academic institutions in the Texas Medical Center.
And part of the program during your training is you go to different hospitals.
One of those hospitals is Texas Children's Hospital, one of the most prestigious.
And we spend a lot of time training there.
And it actually goes back one year before because in 2022, this is when the transgender issue was really coming to the mainstream.
You know, it was after COVID that.
It went into the schools, went into the hospitals, everywhere.
And in March 2022, the hospital had released a very public statement saying that they were shutting down their transgender program because of the potential criminal ramifications.
And the reason they said that was because a few weeks earlier, the Attorney General of Texas said that it could be investigated as child abuse, right?
So it makes sense why they would release that statement.
And over the next couple of months, what I found out is that the hospital did not shut down the program.
They not only continued it, but expanded it, all of it behind closed doors.
The reason I knew this was because I worked there, and the people who were doing these surgeries told me they were doing it.
So at some point, I knew I had to blow the whistle.
It was part of my job as a doctor.
So in May of 2023, May 16, 2023, I blew the whistle anonymously with Christopher Ruffo to expose the fact that the largest children's hospital in the world was lying about a program that was manipulating,
mutilating, and sterilizing healthy young children.
You said that this was part of your job, speaking out.
Yeah. Well, when you take your oath as a doctor, you say to do no harm, right?
But that not only involves the patients who are on your operating room table, the people I see in clinic, but also the profession.
Because, you know, my dad's a doctor.
He's a pulmonologist.
And when I was growing up...
He always told me, you have to take care of your patients.
That's the most important thing.
But you also have to take care of your profession.
So part of that is holding other doctors accountable if they're lying or they're harming patients.
Because you have a responsibility to those people.
If you see something going wrong, you have to say something about it.
You have to do something.
Even if that means you may have to sacrifice because the job of being a doctor is so important.
There's no other option.
I think this is a rare view from what I've seen over the last several years.
I think a lot of that view came from what I saw during COVID because Everything I saw going on in the hospital, people dying alone, these kids who were being abused because they were locked down at home, and all that came from doctors not following through with their oaths to their profession.
So many were willing to stay silent in the face of lies.
And because of that, the people who we were supposed to take care of were the ones who were suffering the most.
And seeing all this...
Right? It was horrific.
I mean, warehouses full of dead bodies that were not able to see the people they loved the most before they passed away.
And even though I did my best to try to fight against it, at some point I'm complicit, right?
I'm guilty of it.
And I just couldn't live with my life, right?
I couldn't look in the mirror if this other thing is happening and I didn't do anything about it because I knew I could.
So... I blew the whistle May 16th, 2023, and I was anonymous, so no one knew who I was.
I was just planning on moving on with my life because I was about to finish my surgical residency and start my new job.
But on the day of my graduation, a month later, June 23, 2023, a few hours before the ceremony, a few hours before I'm about to meet up with my parents and my entire program, I get an aggressive knock on my door.
And I open it, and there's two armed agents with Health and Human Services.
And they tell me that they're investigating a case regarding medical records.
And that's when I knew that the Federal Leviathan showed up to my door.
And that this was going to be a fight.
Luckily, my wife is an attorney.
She's actually a federal prosecutor.
She works at DOJ.
And she had advised me not to speak with them without an attorney.
But they gave me a target letter that named me as the target of an investigation.
And what followed after that was so corrupt, so treacherous.
A case that was so wrong that it's hard to even put it into words.
There's so many layers of corruption that we were always surprised by the depth they were willing to go.
What were you charged with?
In general, what they were charging me with was accessing records without authorization.
And then initially they charged me with disclosure.
Those were the two big things, the two operational components of HIPAA.
Access and then disclosure.
The thing with this case which makes it unprecedented in American history is that their own evidence, the evidence they gave us, showed that I had access to the hospital because I was working there.
And then...
Their first indictment was built on a fabricated story.
So that one fell apart.
So they had to drop the disclosure because I had never released patient names.
Everything was de-identified.
The same type of information that hospitals give to public health agencies or news organizations to report about public health diseases.
So they had reinterpreted the law in the most radical way possible.
Essentially to charge me with a non-crime.
They had never even defined the nature of the charges after all these months of fighting.
I still don't know what they were charging me with because they never told us.
And so you mentioned the first indictment, so there was a second.
Yeah. So there were three total.
And just imagine how much, you know...
legal costs that took to get through three the first indictment fell apart because their story was was Not real.
They said after January 2021, I had no reason to be at Texas Children's Hospital.
So they were making it seem like I was some type of, you know, like grifter, some type of liar who was lying about needing to access records at TCH in order to get into the medical system.
That was not true.
I was working there.
I was rotating at the hospital in April and May of 2023.
So once that became known, then they had to go back to a grand jury and get a second indictment.
The second indictment fell apart because the language they used in the charges were not part of the statute, which is like a big deal.
So they charged me with something that wasn't a crime.
But then also, they included a typo in their indictment.
And not just like a their, their type thing.
Instead of subchapter XI, they wrote subchapter XL.
The problem with that is that it doesn't exist.
That's a major legal problem if you charge someone with a crime that's not on the books.
So we had this long hearing.
The judge ripped into the prosecutor, and they ended up having to get a third indictment.
So this was after months and months of fighting in court.
Dr. Haim, just one quick sec.
We're going to take a break, and we'll be right back, folks.
And we're back with general surgeon and whistleblower, Dr. Eitan Haim.
And this, you know, I just want to mention, I saw that there's 148 filings in this case, which is really kind of, well, let's just say it's a lot, right?
And all of these things, as you mentioned, are expensive, and so, you know, there's incredible resources were used here.
Yeah, and it's really remarkable because when you go to the legal docket, you can go online and when you scroll through all of them, it actually takes some time to scroll through them.
My legal team had to fight so hard to define even the basic components of this case.
So when you think about when people say the process is the punishment, well, this is how this plays out in real life.
Write an indictment that's based on a fabricated story.
A couple hundred thousand dollars to prove that in court.
Then they charge you with crimes that aren't in the statute.
We have to file motions for that.
My lawyers have to put in hundreds of hours, which all translates to an immense amount of financial billing.
And this is just...
Week after week after week of bitter legal fighting.
I mean, it was unbelievable to think that my attorneys had to argue for certain points that were completely obvious, but the DOJ was fighting so hard in order to bleed us dry of all of our resources.
You believe this was the strategy.
It was like this, people call it the process is the punishment.
Absolutely. Yeah.
I mean, I know this for a fact because the DOJ had never intended for this to go as far as it did.
They thought I was going to plead to some misdemeanor and make this all go away so that they get their victory.
They criminalized whistleblowing.
In hospitals.
And, you know, they get elevated within the Democratic Party superstructure because that's who these people are.
They never thought that I was going to fight back because the day of my first arraignment, an arraignment is when I plead not guilty.
I have to go into court.
And, you know, before and after me, these are serious crimes, right?
You know, people who are rapists, murderers, drug traffickers, everyone's in orange jumpsuits except for me.
I go up and I plead not guilty, but before that, my attorneys went to the lead DOJ prosecutor, and the first thing she says to my attorneys is, are we really trying this?
Like, are we really going to bring this case further than it needs to go?
Just from that alone, it reveals that they never thought that this was going to go very far.
But they just knocked on the wrong door when they chose me as a target.
And for the benefit of the few audience members who may not be aware at this point, most cases in the U.S. are settled.
Basically. There's very few that actually go to trial.
The vast majority.
The vast majority of federal criminal cases will plead to a lesser charge.
And the very small proportion that goes to trial, you will lose.
So even for us, we were in this extreme minority of cases.
And not only that we were willing to go to trial, but especially the fact that before then...
The case was finally dismissed with prejudice, which is an even smaller number of cases.
Because once it's dismissed with prejudice, that means that the case had no legitimacy to begin with.
Because they can never bring it again in the future.
What was the reaction to the people that you worked with, some of the fellow residents?
There's these implications around starting a new job amidst all of this.
So just tell me about that picture.
I knew I wanted to work in a small town, and I had found this amazing place to work at outside of Dallas, you know, maybe like 40, 50 miles outside.
And when I told them about what was happening, the hospital, everyone was very supportive, especially because more people were aware what was happening to these kids.
And so many people were just fed up with doctors not standing up.
For themselves and not doing the right thing.
When the case was dismissed, I can say my knuckles were sore just from all the fist bumps I was giving around the hospital.
It was amazing.
But the one thing I was disappointed in was the people in my program, the surgeons I worked with at Baylor and TCH, there was only one of them who was willing to put himself on the line.
and defend me publicly.
Only one out of hundreds of people.
Sorry, two.
There are only two who are willing to defend me publicly.
This is an entire generation of surgeons.
We're supposed to take care of people.
We're gonna be the ones
You hope those people will have a spine.
But I think many people are coming to the realization that Most of them don't.
How do we grapple with that as a society?
Let's say this idea that there wasn't a lot of courage in the medical profession during the COVID years in this gender-affirming care realm as well.
That's kind of a common theme that has kept coming up.
Yeah, I believe it's a trend that had been going on for decades but had culminated with COVID because the censorship and the ideology that was infused into the medical profession during COVID was so strong that people hadn't.
You know, kind of primed themselves to not speak up.
They knew everything that was happening with lockdowns, with masks, social distancing, the vaccine, everything was not proper medicine or science.
That all of it was essentially witchcraft.
But they had to stay silent because the professional repercussions were so severe.
You know, people who were vomiting, they would put masks on them when someone got shot.
I almost got fired.
Right? So the change has to happen within the major academic centers.
Doctors have to be able to speak out and not face existential professional repercussions because that's what the situation is now.
And when you think about doctors are unique because you work your entire life, college, medical school, training, and the training is brutal.
And you do all that to get to this point and to sacrifice everything to speak out.
It's a lot.
And there has to be a change at the top, but also for the average doctor.
They have to grow a spine.
They have to start doing it, even when it's a hard thing to do.
That's one of these things.
If a lot of people get inspired to speak up more, then it's easier for that change to happen.
I guess a lot easier.
Yeah. And that's what happened, though.
Because for me, what I saw during COVID, because I was completely atomized and isolated during COVID.
I mean, by far the most difficult time of my life, where I'm not an angry person by disposition.
And I was very, very angry during that time because I was complicit with this crime that was...
Was so awful that it went against every principle of the medical profession.
But I saw the doctors who were speaking up, like Robert Malone, like Simone Gold, Peter McCullough.
And I looked at these guys and I was like, man, these guys are doctors.
They're putting everything on the line to do the right thing when they're being destroyed.
Like Jay Bhattacharya.
I mean, these guys are heroes.
So when I saw them speaking out, That had served as an inspiration for me.
And even in my case, when I spoke out, right, anonymously during the first go-round, May 2023, there was another whistleblower a couple of days later who anonymously spoke out and told her story about working in the transgender clinic and all of the horrors that happened behind closed doors.
Dr. Haim, any final thoughts as we finish up?
Yeah, I think that...
You know, the one thing I would hope people take away from this is the power of the average person to have a really meaningful impact if they do the right thing and then stand by it.
Because that's what our story is all about.
Because I was no one.
I mean, I didn't have a social media presence.
I didn't have anything.
We had a small friend group and we had a very small amount of money which was gone after like the first month and which is still gone.
But we were able to have this effect on the entire state of Texas and that's amazing.
I mean, that's one of the most remarkable things I've ever done in my life.
I mean, it was me and my wife who were going through it.
Even though it was so hard, it was so challenging, I can honestly say that we're closer now than ever before.
So it's not only that you'll face these challenges, but you can get through it and become stronger and have better relationships on the other side of it.
Well, Dr. Etenheim, it's such a pleasure to have had you on the show.
Thank you.
We reached out to Texas Children's Hospital.
They did not address the specifics of our query, but said, quote, Thank you all for joining Dr. Aiton,
Haim, and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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