It was hard to watch. I felt so badly that the mother killed herself. You hear her little boy in the background crying and his father telling him not to go into the garage.

All the scenes after that with just the dad and kids seemed so sad as well.

Anonymous wrote:1. If Maya’s pain was so horrific, why wouldn’t the family show scenes of her in pain from anytime after the mother’s death?

2. Maya did appear to be okay pain wise in every single video from the hospital bed.

3. The amount of ketamine is frightening. I think the original FL dr who prescribed this has a lot of culpability. Beata quoted his letter in her note to the judge, saying Maya will die a painful death now…and in reality, she seemed okay pain wise in the hospital and, in the following years, has regained the ability to walk, swim, hang out with friends, etc.

4. Putting aside Beata being believed or not believed, any parent who has her kid on high dose of a drug like this, who forum shops and has the child placed in a medically induced coma for high doses…SHOULD be examined. This is not to say that the dr for CPS wasn’t terrible or that the photo taking nurse was without fault…but it definitely needed to be investigated at the very least.

5. Baeta couldn’t control herself. The judge was correct in not allowing the mom to hug the child in that moment. The recorded calls actually hurt mom’s case in requesting to see the child. The sighs and comments - those shouldn’t have been done.

6. I didn’t understand what neither FL ketamine prescribing doctor didn’t testify on mom’s behalf. There was only a letter written by the original doctor but no testimony or deposition that could have been used as evidence. I’d like to know about the doctor who confirmed the diagnosis from New England. Was he an expert in the field? Why was he considered okay?

7. The billing issue is very problematic for the hospital, however: I’m not sure how the hospital is liable. They called cps. They didn’t oversee the cps investigation. They then followed cps’ and the court’s requirements. Don’t they have to? As for the photos…my guess is that mom was alleging the kid had lesions again and the only way to disprove that was photographic evidence (no lesions).

Huh? It was the medical staff that continued to allege that Maya and her mother were psychopaths and making up her diagnosis.

1. If Maya’s pain was so horrific, why wouldn’t the family show scenes of her in pain from anytime after the mother’s death?

2. Maya did appear to be okay pain wise in every single video from the hospital bed.

3. The amount of ketamine is frightening. I think the original FL dr who prescribed this has a lot of culpability. Beata quoted his letter in her note to the judge, saying Maya will die a painful death now…and in reality, she seemed okay pain wise in the hospital and, in the following years, has regained the ability to walk, swim, hang out with friends, etc.

4. Putting aside Beata being believed or not believed, any parent who has her kid on high dose of a drug like this, who forum shops and has the child placed in a medically induced coma for high doses…SHOULD be examined. This is not to say that the dr for CPS wasn’t terrible or that the photo taking nurse was without fault…but it definitely needed to be investigated at the very least.

5. Baeta couldn’t control herself. The judge was correct in not allowing the mom to hug the child in that moment. The recorded calls actually hurt mom’s case in requesting to see the child. The sighs and comments - those shouldn’t have been done.

6. I didn’t understand what neither FL ketamine prescribing doctor didn’t testify on mom’s behalf. There was only a letter written by the original doctor but no testimony or deposition that could have been used as evidence. I’d like to know about the doctor who confirmed the diagnosis from New England. Was he an expert in the field? Why was he considered okay?

7. The billing issue is very problematic for the hospital, however: I’m not sure how the hospital is liable. They called cps. They didn’t oversee the cps investigation. They then followed cps’ and the court’s requirements. Don’t they have to? As for the photos…my guess is that mom was alleging the kid had lesions again and the only way to disprove that was photographic evidence (no lesions).

Anonymous wrote:When did the family move from Chicago to Venice, Florida? Venice, FL has beautiful beaches in Sarasota County. It also has the oldest population in the U.S.

The bolded is not true. https://money.usnews.com/money/retirement/aging/articles/places-with-the-oldest-residents

Anonymous wrote:As a person who was born with a very rare disease that makes me physically disabled and in chronic pain this documentary is very accurate about how you can get unlucky with one hospital or one doctor or one team who decide they know more than you, don’t believe you, dismiss you, ignore you, and commit egregious acts against you. I believe every single thing the father says happened, I believe the hospital staff and social workers went on a campaign to ruin this family and have zero remorse. It’s awful.

I watched my parents fight for me to be alive as a child, drag me to doctors all over the country hoping for treatment, listen to “experts” laugh at me, try to take photos of me, tell my parents I should be put in an institution. As an adult I now have to navigate this myself. The mother in this documentary sounds exactly like a mother of a chronically sick child. Remember Shirley MacLaine in Terms of Endearment - Give my daughter the shot!

I believe you op. My eyes were really opened when I had to deal with a temporary but significant medical issue for my otherwise healthy son. Explaining to each doctor what we’d already tried and trying to get them to believe/understand symptoms was absolutely infuriating. One doctor insisted I repeat an unsuccessful treatment before he would try anything else. I told him we were not going to put my kid through the side effects again just for his benefit. He got very ugly with me. I can easily see how these situations could get very bad, very fast.

As a person who was born with a very rare disease that makes me physically disabled and in chronic pain this documentary is very accurate about how you can get unlucky with one hospital or one doctor or one team who decide they know more than you, don’t believe you, dismiss you, ignore you, and commit egregious acts against you. I believe every single thing the father says happened, I believe the hospital staff and social workers went on a campaign to ruin this family and have zero remorse. It’s awful.

I watched my parents fight for me to be alive as a child, drag me to doctors all over the country hoping for treatment, listen to “experts” laugh at me, try to take photos of me, tell my parents I should be put in an institution. As an adult I now have to navigate this myself. The mother in this documentary sounds exactly like a mother of a chronically sick child. Remember Shirley MacLaine in Terms of Endearment - Give my daughter the shot!

When I saw this documentary, I witnessed the Kowalski family fighting for their child who was in excruciating physical pain and desperately seeking anyone who could help. That hit home for me because malpractice was performed on me at Johns Hopkins Hospital and I can’t do anything now since it happened too long ago and no doctors were willing to testify at that time. That being said, it was fortunate that Beata had very accurate records of the situation. The family's lawyers acknowledged that the lawsuit would not have been possible without her extensive documentation.

It was concerning that the filmmakers discovered many other families who had experienced similar issues with the same doctor and private welfare contractor. While the doctor and her company have settled their portion of the lawsuit, the upcoming jury trial in September will likely not bode well for JH, as Maya's testimony and the billing discrepancies are not in their favor.

Further investigation into the case reveals additional concerns, including the social worker's failure to obtain consent before videotaping Maya and having her undress down to her underwear for photos.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Watch any of the numerous child abuse documentaries when social services DOESN'T act conservatively for the child and there is a negative outcome where the child dies or is gravely injured. Anyone who is a child abuse reporter HAS to lean on the side of being child-centric, not family/parent centric.

There is no perfect system but I would err on the side of protecting the child. The amounts of ketamine they had her one were outrageous and dangerous.

If the child ends up injured that is a much much worse outcome than some families having to go through the court process.

There was NOTHING child-centric about how this was handled. The child was denied access to her parents, mocked, ridiculed, photographed partially naked, terrified and kept in a hospital room alone through Halloween, thanksgiving and Christmas. The mom was denied to hug her child. How does our system not provide better and more timely assistance and just leave a sick kid to sit afraid for months? How could her mom not be given supervised visits while this was being adjudicated? It is sickening and inexcusable.

I will not be watching this due to a family history of many of these issues but it depresses/enrages me that it feels like kids who are being horrifically abused manage to slip through the cracks and other families get completely wrecked with false accusations. To say nothing about how the current goal of family reunification over all else ends up repeatedly traumatizing children.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I thought the text messages between the two doctors was pretty telling and said a lot about their character. No sympathy for the mom. No sympathy for Maya. Nothing. You’ve got to be pretty effed up to say stuff like that after someone dies.

Not really, because when the mother died by suicide, this probably just confirmed for them that she had serious mental health issues, which could have resulted in the death of her daughter.

DP. Yeah, those compassionate doctors were so worried about "ketamine girl."

Anonymous wrote:I thought the text messages between the two doctors was pretty telling and said a lot about their character. No sympathy for the mom. No sympathy for Maya. Nothing. You’ve got to be pretty effed up to say stuff like that after someone dies.

Not really, because when the mother died by suicide, this probably just confirmed for them that she had serious mental health issues, which could have resulted in the death of her daughter.

I thought the text messages between the two doctors was pretty telling and said a lot about their character. No sympathy for the mom. No sympathy for Maya. Nothing. You’ve got to be pretty effed up to say stuff like that after someone dies.

Anonymous wrote:Watch any of the numerous child abuse documentaries when social services DOESN'T act conservatively for the child and there is a negative outcome where the child dies or is gravely injured. Anyone who is a child abuse reporter HAS to lean on the side of being child-centric, not family/parent centric.

There is no perfect system but I would err on the side of protecting the child. The amounts of ketamine they had her one were outrageous and dangerous.

If the child ends up injured that is a much much worse outcome than some families having to go through the court process.

There was NOTHING child-centric about how this was handled. The child was denied access to her parents, mocked, ridiculed, photographed partially naked, terrified and kept in a hospital room alone through Halloween, thanksgiving and Christmas. The mom was denied to hug her child. How does our system not provide better and more timely assistance and just leave a sick kid to sit afraid for months? How could her mom not be given supervised visits while this was being adjudicated? It is sickening and inexcusable.

Anonymous wrote:I'm the PP whose DD has CRPS. I can't get this documentary out of my mind. Frankly, I regret watching it.

Here is an article about Dr. Smith and some other families she accused of abuse:

https://stories.usatodaynetwork.com/torn-apart/sally-smith/

The link below has another story with more information about the events when Maya was hospitalized. It helps me understand why Beata was so upset about being reported to the Nursing Board, as her shifts were paying for all of Maya's treatments, which weren't covered by insurance. The stress of trying to find answers, exploring and funding treatments, and supporting her suffering child was already overwhelming without the abuse investigation to deal with.

https://www.thecut.com/article/child-abuse-munchausen-syndrome-by-proxy.html

I wish the documentarian would have devoted more time to the issue of retaining a private company to perform these abuse investigations. Perhaps that's a separate story, but it is one that needs to be explored with a critical eye.

Omg that article in The Cut is horrifying. I haven't watched the documentary and don't think I can handle it. That is such a nightmare situation.

No oversight. This part stood out to me:
"At All Children’s, Smith wore an ID badge bearing the hospital’s logo and, during the pandemic, sometimes sported a white lab coat. Families often assumed that she was a doctor on staff and that what they told her was protected by doctor-patient confidentiality. In reality, she didn’t work for All Children’s, and her primary employer was not the state. Florida privatized its child-welfare system in 2004, and the work in Pinellas County is outsourced to a company called Suncoast Center Inc. Smith was one of its 117 employees. Suncoast and similar entities across the state are funded by more than $3 billion of public money, yet there is little oversight of how effective they are in stopping child abuse — or of how often they allege wrongdoing where none exists. In Pinellas County, children are almost two and a half times more likely to be removed from their families than the state average."

Anonymous wrote:Watch any of the numerous child abuse documentaries when social services DOESN'T act conservatively for the child and there is a negative outcome where the child dies or is gravely injured. Anyone who is a child abuse reporter HAS to lean on the side of being child-centric, not family/parent centric.

There is no perfect system but I would err on the side of protecting the child. The amounts of ketamine they had her one were outrageous and dangerous.

If the child ends up injured that is a much much worse outcome than some families having to go through the court process.

You object to the amounts of ketamine that doctors prescribed for a diagnosed medical condition? Isn't that a medical issue rather than a family issue? Doctors could have refused Ketamine without separating the family. Dr. Smith diagnosed the mother with Munchausen syndrome by proxy and determined that Maya did not have CRPS, which turned out to be wrong, as evidenced by the fact that the hospital was treating Maya for CRPS. Why not seek other medical opinions? The answer seems to be that this was never about helping Maya, it was about proving an abuse case by any means necessary.

Watch any of the numerous child abuse documentaries when social services DOESN'T act conservatively for the child and there is a negative outcome where the child dies or is gravely injured. Anyone who is a child abuse reporter HAS to lean on the side of being child-centric, not family/parent centric.

There is no perfect system but I would err on the side of protecting the child. The amounts of ketamine they had her one were outrageous and dangerous.

If the child ends up injured that is a much much worse outcome than some families having to go through the court process.