BOISE, Idaho — Two weeks after a jury found that Ammon Bundy and his associate defamed St. Luke’s Health System, Bundy posted a social media video that used highly edited police body camera footage to falsely accuse a St. Luke’s doctor of lying to the jury.
The 14-minute video posted to YouTube shows Dr. Rachel Thomas, a former St. Luke’s lead emergency room physician, saying in police body camera footage that an infant at the center of a child protection case was “healthy” and “totally stable.” Bundy in the video suggests that the evidence contradicts Thomas’ court testimony, in which she told jurors the child was malnourished and could have died without medical attention.
“St. Luke’s witnesses and attorneys lied to the jury many, many times,” Bundy said in the video.
What Bundy doesn’t say in the YouTube video is that Thomas’ conversations with police and the emergency medical service report he references both centered on whether the child was healthy enough to be transported, not whether the 10-month-old was healthy overall.
Last year, St. Luke’s sued Bundy and his associate Diego Rodriguez after the right-wing activists lied about the health system online and led protests at hospitals where Rodriguez’s grandchild was being treated for malnutrition. St. Luke’s won the case by default because Bundy and Rodriguez failed to appear in court, and a jury awarded the health system $52 million in damages.
Among the “materially false and malicious defamatory statements” Bundy and Rodriguez made was that the infant “was perfectly healthy” when taken by Idaho’s child protective services, according to Ada County District Judge Nancy Baskin’s record of the defamation case.
Bundy’s recent video uses the same edited police footage that Rodriguez, the infant’s grandfather, used in a previous video, which Thomas refuted in court.
“I had already determined the severity of the infant’s condition,” Thomas told the court in a sworn declaration commenting on Rodriguez’s January video. “Rodriguez is selling a lie, that the infant was healthy, based on wrongly edited video of me.”
