Over 70 Families Say They Lost Children to False Munchausen by Proxy Allegations Levied by One Doctor

AP Photo/Brennan Linsley, File

Lehigh County, Pa., is on fire right now with the outrage of at least 70 families who are on a mission to have Dr. Debra Esernio-Jenssen, a “child abuse pediatrician,” fired from Lehigh Valley Health Network (LVHN) and hopefully brought up on criminal charges. The families allege that Dr. Jenssen diagnosed all of them with the controversial “Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy” and accused them of child abuse when they brought their children into LVHN for various reasons.

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These families have been flooding different commissioner’s meetings, holding press conferences, and protesting since the beginning of the month. Their stories are outrageous.

PJ Media has been covering stories like these all over the country for years. Are the floodgates finally opening? Local Allentown media seems to be on the case for once, unlike the reticent St. Louis press that kept the Missouri court corruption scandal under wraps (though they were fully informed).

The Pennsylvania parents spoke out at an October Board of Commissioners meeting last week.

“My children, my husband, and myself are victims of the cruel practices that seem to follow Dr. Debra Jenssen everywhere she goes,” said one mother to a packed room. “The trauma, the pain, the agony of having your child ripped from your arms and taken away from you all while being wrongly and falsely accused is indescribable. On Debra Jenssen’s word, without ever having met me turned my life into a living, breathing nightmare. And it’s a nightmare that never ends. We can’t hear a car door close outside my home without jumping. We freeze at any knock at our front door fearing the police are behind it when it’s opened.”

I remind you: This is happening in America, the land of the free. 

“In 2020 a mother who attends our support group reached out to me and told me her child was taken from her. She was being accused of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. I was in shock. I knew for a fact that this woman was innocent and her child was in fact sick,” she said.

“I really thought things would be resolved quickly…I was extremely wrong,” another speaker who said she runs a support group for people with a rare disorder said. “A few months later another local family with the same genetic disorder was accused of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy by the same doctor.”

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Speaker after speaker told their horror tales of Dr. Debra Jenssen and her obsession with the rare (and possibly bogus) disorder. Local news found several lawsuits against Dr. Jenssen. In all the cases, Jenssen was the only doctor who believed that the children were abused. Other doctors diagnosed them with rare defects or syndromes. Sadly, despite these findings, families were separated and horribly traumatized and bankrupted while they fought the false allegations.

Jenssen did this to families in three different states. She worked in New York until the lawsuits began and then made her way to Florida, where there were several complaints found against her. She was eventually assigned to a position that was not in “child protection” because of it. She then moved to Pennsylvania and got a job on the “child protection” team at the Lehigh Valley Health Network, where the community is revolting against her.

The field of “child abuse pediatrics” is fraught will all kinds of scandal as evidenced in the case of Rachel Bruno, who won over $2 million when a child abuse doctor in California falsely accused her of abuse. Currently, the false allegations of a child abuse pediatrician, Dr. Sally Smith, are the subject of a Netflix documentary “Take Care of Maya” and a televised civil trial brought by the family against Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in Florida.

Is this system of declaring parents guilty and forcing them to prove their innocence when it comes to questions of child abuse finally coming to an end? And will we once and for all require people alleging “Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy” without the requisite credentials or expertise to do so to go work outside of government where they have unlimited power?

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Loren Pankratz writes in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law in an article entitled “Persistent Problems with the Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy Label,” “In my view, everyone wants to use the MSBP diagnosis, but most experts want the court to trust their personal judgment about confirming the diagnosis. I have rarely (perhaps never) seen a thoughtful assessment in which the DSM-IV criteria were used. When confronted about this, some MSBP experts have admitted that they are not qualified to make a psychiatric diagnosis of the mother. This hurdle is circumvented by proclaiming that MSBP is really a diagnosis of the child or by calling the problem ‘pediatric condition falsification ‘ and then declaring it an equivalent of MSBP.”

Here are a few examples of social workers who are not qualified to make any psychological diagnosis using Munchausen to take children away from their parents. The first video is the deposition of social worker Cathi Bedy who accused Beata Kowalski of Munchausen and was the instigator in the chain of events where Kowalski lost her child and later committed suicide. The deposition reveals that she has no expertise in MSBP but thinks she does because she read a few articles.

This next video is of social worker Candis Nelson, whose unsubstantiated accusation of Munchausen was placed in the report of Rafaelina Duval and led to her losing her parental rights to the state of California. Duval won over $3 million in a lawsuit brought by attorney Shawn McMillan, but at the time of the suit, seven years after losing her son, the court did not restore her parental rights even after it was known she was railroaded by a lying social worker.

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There is no other court in the country where the defendant is demanded to show their innocence or be declared guilty except the “family courts.” The process is backward, and it has led to the destruction of families, divorce, bankruptcy, and suicide. It’s disgusting. Why it has been allowed to continue for this long is a mystery and the only explanation is that it must be a lucrative business opportunity for somebody.

Perhaps it will stop when suing these hospitals and child protective offices becomes more lucrative than taking kids from parents. The insidious part about it is that once the hospital takes custody of a child it asks the parents to sign a “care plan” and in that plan is a release of liability for the hospital. If the parents sign it, there is no legal remedy for them even if the hospital kills their kid.

What we have witnessed since COVID-19 is the complete authoritarian takeover of every institution but none more so than the medical industry. If you aren’t scared yet, you should be. The Constitution is meaningless to the beast that is child protection services in collusion with hospitals. They can seize your child without a warrant, isolate them, and even adopt them out on the word of one malicious social worker or doctor and never need any evidence that you did anything wrong.

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This is America now after the long march to corrupt institutions has been completed. Welcome to hell.

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