The Georgia physician accused of performing unnecessary, nonconsensual gynecological procedures on immigrants in detention is pursuing defamation cases against two media outlets.
A jury is set to determine in April if NBCUniversal Media defamed Dr. Mahendra Amin by saying he performed “mass hysterectomies” on women detained at the now-shuttered Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility at Irwin County Detention Center. Amin is also suing Amazon’s podcast company Wondery for referring to him as a “uterus collector.”
The terms refer to claims made by Dawn Wooten, a nurse who worked at Irwin and filed whistleblower reports to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Office of the Inspector General about a lack of resources to mitigate COVID-19 and her concern about Amin’s gynecological procedures on detained immigrant women.
In these reports, Wooten expressed concern about how many women Amin treated received hysterectomies and how several of those women did not seem to understand that they would no longer be able to have children.
“I’ve had several inmates tell me that they’ve been to see the doctor and they’ve had hysterectomies and they don’t know why they went or why they’re going,” Wooten wrote in the report to DHS.
DHS shuttered the ICE facility at Irwin less than a year after the report, citing a low number of people detained there.
The U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations spent a year and a half investigating the accusations under the leadership of Georgia U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff. The bipartisan investigation spoke to formerly detained immigrants, former medical staff, multiple medical experts and ICE officials.
Karina Cisneros Preciado testified in front of the subcommittee. She was detained at Irwin for 7 months and had recently given birth before she was detained.
She asked for a postpartum check-up and was sent to Amin, who she said did not explain what he was doing.
“I had suffered from sexual assault before as a child. So this kind of …the experience with Dr. Amin made me feel the same thing,” Cisneros Preciado said. “I felt…it made me feel like I had no control over my body. I had no say. No vote, no nothing.”
The investigation found that while Irwin held only four percent of all women in ICE detention between 2017 and 2020, Amin accounted for at least one-third of all gynecological procedures performed on women in ICE detention. He also received nearly half of all payments from ICE for these services in the same time period.
The Senate subcommittee’s report found only two hysterectomies performed by Amin in that time period, both approved by ICE, and that the whistleblower’s descriptions, like “the uterus collector,” could not be substantiated.
That’s the crux of the lawsuits.
“Morbid: A True Crime Podcast” titled a now-removed episode “The Uterus Collector.” Reporters and hosts on NBC, including Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes, claimed the doctor performed “mass hysterectomies.”
Federal judge Lisa Godbey Wood in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Georgia ruled in June that some of the statements NBC made were “verifiably false,” and the lawsuit was granted a trial.
These cases are examples of publishers spreading lies about Amin, according to Stacey Godfrey Evans, an attorney representing Amin.
“The podcast in the most recent action is all the more egregious because the publishers referenced a Senate Report that stated specifically that Dr. Amin only performed two hysterectomies and that both were authorized and medically necessary,” she said.
Amin’s lawsuit seeks $15 million in damages from Amazon, Wondery and the podcast host. The suit against NBC seeks $30 million in damages. Amazon and Wondery did not return requests for comment. A spokesperson for NBCU News Group declined to comment.
The Department of Justice is involved in a years-long investigation into the whistleblower complaint. In the meantime, no charges have been filed, although a class action lawsuit against the doctor is pending. An attorney representing Amin in the class action lawsuit did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.
Amin remains a practicing doctor in Douglas, Georgia.
