The Justice Department dropped charges against a doctor who was facing four felony counts after he allegedly shared transgender patients’ private medical information with rightwing activist Christopher Rufo.
Houston surgeon Eithan Haim gave internal documents that he had access to at the Texas Children’s Hospital in 2023 to Rufo. The records allegedly showed that several minors were receiving gender-affirming care, which Haim claimed was “child abuse” even though all major medical associations in the U.S. support gender-affirming care as a safe and effective way to treat gender dysphoria.
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Prosecutors during the Biden administration said that Haim gave Rufo the medical records with “intent to cause malicious harm” to the Texas Children’s Hospital. He pled not guilty and said that he would fight the charges “for whistleblowers everywhere.”
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Making medical records public is a violation of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the federal law that protects patients’ medical privacy. Still, many on the right defended Haim’s actions, arguing that stopping gender-affirming care is more important than medical privacy.
Now the charges have been dropped in a motion signed by U.S. Attorney Jennifer B. Lowery. No reasoning is given in the motion.
Prosecutors believe that Haim had access to Texas Children’s Hospital records even though he didn’t work there because he had previously done part of his residency there. He asked the hospital to reactivate his login and accessed the medical records of children not under his care. This happened after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton declared gender-affirming care a form of child abuse in a nonbinding opinion.
Haim insisted that he anonymized the identities of the patients whose records he gave to Rufo, but there is dispute over whether he really did that. Assistant Clinical Professor Carmel Shachar of Harvard Law School told Assigned Media that the records Haim leaked were not de-identified in compliance with HIPAA, meaning that people could figure out who the records originally belonged to. This could potentially make the children whose records Haim leaked targets for harassment and bullying.
He also claimed that he had to make the records public because he is a mandatory reporter of child abuse, but Texas’ mandatory reporting law requires reporters to go to state authorities like the Texas Medical Board, not the media.
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