Dr. Eithan Haim exposed Texas Children’s Hospital’s (TCH) secret “transgender” medical program in 2023. Now, he is suing the hospital for malicious prosecution.
Haim’s complaint alleges TCH, Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) and their representatives fed false information about Haim to government officials, resulting in the Department of Justice (DOJ) wrongfully indicting him for violating patient privacy laws.
Haim’s coworkers lied, the filing argues, to punish him for sending redacted medical documents to investigative journalist Christopher Rufo. The information showed TCH continued performing sex-rejecting medical procedures on children long after it claimed to stop in March 2022.
The DOJ dropped its deeply flawed case against Haim in January 2025, sparing the husband and father up to ten years in jail and $250,000 in fines. But the court battle took a heavy toll on Haim and his young family.
Haim announced his suit against TCH on X last week, thanking his legal team and benefactor Elon Musk, who will reportedly cover Haim’s legal bills, for enabling him to pursue justice in court.
Haim further thanked his original attorney, Marcella Burke, for supporting him long before his case gained national attention.
“She took the greatest risk in representing me [in 2023] and endlessly sacrificed for the next two years,” the surgeon wrote.
“She is the reason my wife has her husband and my daughter, her father.”
The facts laid out in Haim’s complaint, if true, answer some of the biggest questions left over from the DOJ’s defunct suit against him.
Why did the DOJ’s original indictment get so many facts wrong?
The DOJ charged Dr. Haim with four felony HIPAA violations in May 2024. The original indictment alleged:
- Haim improperly accessed TCH’s medical records long after his work with the hospital ended in January 2021.
- Haim released private patient information to Rufo in violation of HIPAA.
Both claims proved false. Dr. Haim worked with adult and pediatric patients at TCH through April 2023. In a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the hospital admitted it gave Haim access to the records he viewed while employed there.
Haim also redacted all identifying patient details in the photos he exported to Rufo. Though prosecutor Tina Ansari claimed the government possessed other evidence showing Haim disclosed private patient information, such evidence never materialized.
In his malicious prosecution suit, Haim claims the government got these key facts wrong because it believed false statements made by representatives of TCH and BCM.
The complaint cites an interview between Ansari and Dr. Larry Hollier Jr., the Surgeon-In-Chief and Chair of Surgery at TCH and Vice Chair of Surgery at BCM, one month before Ansari filed the erroneous indictment against Haim.
In the interview, Hollier Jr. claimed Haim:
- Was not “assigned to care for minors in any way” when he accessed information about pediatric files and surgical schedules.
- Had no work-related reason to access TCH medical records when he shared information with Rufo.
Afsheen Davis, Senior Vice President and General Counsel for TCH, witnessed Hollier’s interview. At the time, Haim’s complaint argues, both Davis and Hollier would have known or had access to the information which eventually proved the Surgeon-In-Chief’s statements false.
How did the federal government know to investigate Dr. Haim while he was still an anonymous whistleblower?
Two HHS agents informed Dr. Haim he was the target of a DOJ investigation in June 2023 — six months before he went public as Rufo’s whistleblower.
“It can take years to approach a target [of an investigation],” Burke told the Daily Citizen in 2024, “but federal officers were at [Dr. Haim’s] home a little over a month after Rufo published his first story.”
Haim’s malicious prosecution suit presents evidence showing defendants Davis and Hollier met with the two HHS agents just four days before the duo approached Haim.
The timing further supports Haim’s allegation that the defendants initiated and informed the DOJ case against him.
Why did the government choose to prosecute an alleged HIPAA violation as a felony?
Dr. Haim is the first American charged with a felony HIPAA violation absent evidence he sold or otherwise profited from sharing patient information.
Haim’s malicious prosecution case argues TCH and BCM searched for a sympathetic prosecutor to throw the book at Haim because they wanted to punish him for revealing the hospital’s secret, sex-rejecting medical program.
Enter Ansari, whom the DOJ removed from the case in November 2024 after Haim’s legal team revealed her family’s close financial relationship with TCH.
Evidence of the defendants’ malice goes beyond communicating false information to federal prosecutors. Just eight days after HHS agents showed up at Haim’s door, defendant Dr. Kristy Rialon, a pediatric surgeon at TCH and Associate Professor of Surgery at BCM, began posting anonymous comments on his WebMD page falsely accusing him of being a bad doctor.
She allegedly went so far as to pose as one of Haim’s former patients and claim he had sexually assaulted her.
Rialon later admitted to federal agents that she posted the fake comments.
Harm Done
TCH and BCM’s alleged lies upended Dr. Haim’s life. He and his wife spent their life’s savings fighting the DOJ’s prosecution in court. He remains “blacklisted” from major hospitals and academic institutions, which prevent him from getting crucial credentials and privileges.
The emotional scars of Haim’s experience also run deep. For most of 2024, he contended with the real possibility of going to jail before the birth of his first child. The death threats against himself and his family leave Haim worried for their safety.
Sex-rejecting procedures harm minors. Dr. Eithan Haim performed a brave, honorable and selfless service by revealing TCH’s secret perpetuation of these devastating interventions. He has suffered greatly for it.
Daily Citizen is a news division of Focus on the Family that provides a faith-based perspective to counter the mainstream media’s anti-Christian bias.
