Jury Decides Ammon Bundy Must Pay More Than $50M for Defaming Hospital
Anti-government agitator Ammon Bundy must pay an Idaho hospital more than $50 million for defaming it and targeting it with protests while it cared for an associate’s grandson—who was taken into protective custody after child welfare officials determined he was malnourished.
In March of last year, Bundy was arrested for trespassing outside of St. Luke’s Meridian Medical Center, where 10-month-old “Baby Cyrus” was being treated. The then-gubernatorial candidate organized a week-long protest, claiming Cyrus was “medically kidnapped” over a “missed non-emergency doctor’s appointment.”
Two months later, St. Luke’s hospital filed a defamation suit against Bundy and Diego Rodriguez, the child’s grandpa and an activist in Bundy’s far-right People’s Rights Network (PRN). The complaint also named their companies, including Rodriguez’s Freedom Man Press, which posted Baby Cyrus “kidnapping videos.”
A jury delivered its verdict on Monday: Bundy, Rodriguez, and their companies would owe $26.5 million in compensatory damages and nearly $26 million in punitive damages.
Erik Stidham, an attorney for St. Luke’s, told jurors he thought the hospital deserved at least $16 million. “My hope is that you will look at this and you will deter (Bundy) in a way that he hasn’t been deterred yet,” Stidham said in closing arguments, according to the Idaho Statesman. He added that Bundy’s and Rodriguez’s entities were a “massive ugly machine built to make money and radicalize people.”
Known for armed standoffs with law enforcement, Bundy was a consistent no-show throughout the legal proceedings. In April, a judge issued a default judgment against Bundy and Rodriguez for failing to respond to the suit, leading Bundy to put out an emergency alert that falsely claimed cops surrounded his home and that beckoned his PRN disciples to show up to defend him.
“ The conflict with St. Luke’s had become so antagonistic that Bundy was accused of threatening process servers and local deputies who delivered court papers. ”
As a result of the default, jurors in the two-week trial were tasked with deciding what damages Bundy and Rodriguez owed to the hospital system. They heard testimony from doctors and administrators about the men’s mob stoking fear among patients and families in the emergency room, and Life Flight pilots refusing to land at the facility, fearing shots from the armed crowd on the ground.
One pediatrician told the jury about the danger she believed Baby Cyrus was in: He allegedly couldn’t sit up, had a distended stomach and sunken eyes. “In my opinion, if he had been allowed to go home with his parents and continue on the trajectory he was on, he would have died,” Thomas testified, according to the Idaho Statesman.
Another doctor testified that Rodriguez’s website called her a “child trafficker,” and that she believed her family's safety was in jeopardy because of the online attacks.
“Today’s verdict is a moment of real accountability for Ammon Bundy and his reckless campaign against St. Luke’s,” said Lindsay Schubiner, Programs Director at the Western States Center, who was among the groups monitoring extremism to celebrate the outcome.
“His decision to target St. Luke’s and to use inflammatory, dishonest rhetoric about the hospital’s actions endangered both staff and patients. This verdict shows that the courts have the ability to treat this kind of threat with the seriousness it deserves.”
While Bundy and Rodriguez haven’t stepped foot in court, they’ve publicly commented on the controversy since the case was filed. “I’ve tried everything I could to make peace with St. Luke’s executives” and their attorneys, Bundy said in one February video, in which he shows off a pile of legal mail. “But they’ve rejected every offer of peace, every token of peace that I’ve offered to them. And they’ve actually come after Diego and I even harder.”
The lawsuit reveals St. Luke’s hospital sought punitive damages, and an award of at least $250,000 to each of the plaintiffs—which include a hospital executive, doctor, and nurse practitioner—from each of the defendants. If granted, Bundy, Rodriguez and their companies would have been on the hook for $7.5 million in damages.
“So what did these people do to earn this money, to deserve this money? Well, they participated in taking Baby Cyrus from his loving and caring parents,” Bundy said in his video. “And what did Diego and I do to deserve everything we own and more stripped from us? Well, we said bad things about them for taking Baby Cyrus away... things that were exposing them.”
Bundy then went on to conflate offerings of gender-affirming care for children at St. Luke’s to the hospital’s treatment of Cyrus, and noted St. Luke’s received millions from donations and COVID relief funds. “And what are they using it for?” he said. “They’re using it for things like child sex changes and to pay high-dollar attorneys to come after their political enemies.”
On July 10, the day the civil trial began, Bundy posted a letter to a new judge presiding over the trial. “Please, do not give rich and powerful people false justification to destroy my life,” Bundy wrote. “Please do not sanction a war that may end in innocent blood and require others to bring justice upon those who are responsible for shedding it.”
“May God bless you with the strength to do what is right and to let the consequences follow,” he concluded. “In the sacred name of Jesus Christ I write this letter.”
The conflict with St. Luke’s had become so antagonistic that Bundy was accused of threatening process servers and local deputies who delivered court papers, and one doctor expressed concern that witnesses would be too intimidated to participate in the case.
In his February video post, Bundy warned followers that St. Luke’s was trying to have him arrested. While a judge issued a warrant for Bundy in April over alleged witness intimidation, authorities never came for the 47-year-old provocateur. The Gem County sheriff, in a letter filed on the docket, said he didn’t want to risk deputies’ safety “over a civil issue.”
At one point, Bundy even appeared to threaten a standoff over the legal battle. “They’re probably going to try to get judgments of over a million dollars and take everything they have from me,” Bundy told one local news site in December. “And I’m not going to let that happen. I’m making moves to stop that from happening. And if I have to meet ’em on the front door with my, you know, friends and a shotgun, I’ll do that. They’re not going to take my property.”
“ Rodriguez would go on to solicit $115,000 in donations by falsely claiming the hospital was ‘performing unnecessary medical tests and treatments’ to prolong the baby’s time in the hospital. ”
For his part, Rodriguez challenged St. Luke’s lawyers on his Freedom Man website, writing that he was giving them “the chance to win in the court of public opinion.”
“You can win my public apology. You can win my retractions. You can get the pages on my website that you want taken down, REMOVED without a judgment or legal order. You can even get $50,000 for St. Luke’s right now. All you have to do is show the world where I have published any FACTUALLY inaccurate information, as I’ve already stated,” Rodriguez wrote.
But the hospital evidently wasn’t going to be cowed by far-right extremists.
In a fourth amended complaint, St. Luke’s argued that Bundy and Rodriguez were aiming to “benefit financially” and boost their political brands by launching a “knowingly dishonest and baseless smear campaign” against it. This campaign, the suit alleges, “claimed Idaho State employees, the judiciary, the police, primary care providers, and the St. Luke’s Parties engaged in widespread kidnapping, trafficking, sexual abuse, and killing of Idaho children.”
The lawsuit argued that Bundy and Rodriguez used Cyrus’ case “to spread their lies and further their agendas,” as they portrayed themselves as “crusaders” against their manufactured “state-sponsored child kidnapping and trafficking ring.” The men, according to the suit, directed their followers to dox and harass St. Luke’s employees.
Meanwhile, Rodriguez is accused of lying to followers about Cyrus’s care, claiming the baby had a “100% clean bill of health” when authorities took him into custody and that his parents had only missed one doctor’s visit. He also falsely claimed a St. Luke’s pediatrician had reported the parents to the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare.
The trouble began when Bundy and his flock entered the hospital’s ambulance bay at around 1:30 a.m. on a Saturday in March, the complaint says; they began cursing at staff and police, blocking patients’ access to the facility and filming the episode for social media.
“Recognizing that Bundy’s followers were growing more numerous and menacing, a hospital supervisor tried to reason with Bundy and deescalate the situation,” the complaint says. “For the benefit of those there to film him, Bundy responded by accusing the supervisor of kidnapping and then demanded that he give Bundy the Infant.
“Bundy knew full well he had no legal authority to make that demand because he had no parental rights over the Infant.”
Cops arrested Bundy about a half hour later for refusing to move. After his release from custody, Bundy quickly began to publicize his confrontation and later beefed up a “false narrative” about St. Luke’s, the lawsuit states. (Bundy took a plea deal in the trespass criminal case, receiving a $1,000 fine and suspended 90-day jail sentence.)
The lawsuit lists a slew of defamatory statements from Bundy and Rodriguez, including that the hospital was “world famous” for “killing people” and “stealing babies from their parents” and that it forced Cyrus to ingest a “toxic poison.” Bundy also allegedly claimed that St. Luke’s had targeted the baby because of Bundy’s objection to COVID “corruption.”
The hospital argues the duo’s stunt disrupted its operations and harmed staff and patients. According to the suit, the men called on their devotees, many of whom were armed, to protest in front of the hospital for a week before Cyrus was released. Rodriguez “became a daily presence,” holding press conferences outside the building, the complaint says.
Rodriguez would go on to solicit $115,000 in donations by falsely claiming the hospital was “performing unnecessary medical tests and treatments” to prolong the baby’s time in the hospital and extort the uninsured parents, the lawsuit continues. (The hospital, however, claims that Medicaid covered Cyrus’s bills and his family “never paid anything for and owe nothing for the care” received at St. Luke’s.)
Bundy’s campaign allegedly caused St. Luke’s to go on lockdown for more than an hour and for patients to be routed to other facilities. The followers also flooded St. Luke’s phone lines and email accounts with menacing communications and death threats.
But the alleged smears didn’t stop after Cyrus went home. St. Luke’s argues that Bundy and Rodriguez continued to capitalize on the episode, creating a group called “People Against Child Trafficking” and holding a rally where they further defamed the hospital, comparing its employees to “feudal lords” practicing “primae noctis.”
The complaint highlights the men’s possible financial windfall in their war against the hospital, noting that Bundy generates funds “by marketing himself as an anti-government, quasi-religious leader” through his 60,000-member PRN and uses at least two corporate entities: Dono Custos, Inc. and Abish-husbondi. Inc.
“The potential revenue to Bundy is significant,” the lawsuit says. “If each member of PRN annually contributes just $50 to Bundy through Dono Custos, Bundy could pocket more than $3,000,0000 [sic] per year.” It adds that entities owned by Bundy and Rodriguez received money from Bundy’s gubernatorial campaign.
As for Rodriguez, the complaint adds, money streams in through his Freedom Tabernacle, “which purports to be a church but is used as an entity to receive contributions, dues, or payments from members of PRN.” According to the legal filing, the church requires “members ‘tithe’ 10% of their earnings.” Another of Rodriguez’s entities, Power Marketing, hawks “three-day ‘training’ courses” for $15,000 per student.
“In fact, even after the Infant was returned to the Infant’s parents,” the suit alleges, “Rodriguez and Bundy have continued to exploit the Infant by incessantly marketing the Infant and his likeness through social media and alternative media to promote PRN, Bundy in campaign advertising, and Rodriguez and his multiplicity of sales schemes.”
Source: The Daily Beast
