Why the FBI threatened my wife over a YouTube clip

By Martin Gottesfeld

Note: Martin Gottesfeld was featured by columnist Michelle Malkin for defending Justina Pelletier when she was maimed at Harvard-affiliated Boston Children's Hospital (BCH), leading to his imprisonment without bail by a Harvard-affiliated judge and Obama-appointed prosecutors. See FreeMartyG.com, the FreeMartyG Facebook page and the @FreeMartyG Twitter account for more info.

Pelletier family photos

A picture is worth a thousand words. Both photos above are of a girl named Justina Pelletier. On the left, she's ice skating while under her parents' custody. On the right, a short time later, she's confined to a wheelchair thanks to Boston Children's Hospital (BCH) and social services in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

On the left, Justina's parents were getting her care from some of the best experts in the world for her potentially crippling and deadly case of mitochondrial disease, the same condition that was at issue recently with baby Charlie Gard in the U.K. When that photo was taken Justina was a competitive figure skater coached by her older sisters and her mother, who was a champion skater herself. The sport is in Justina's blood, and she loves it.

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On the right, we see Justina after she was medically kidnapped from her parents by Boston Children's Hospital. You see, a group of so-called "experts" there, starting with a young neurologist seven months out of medical training named Jurriaan Peters, took exception to her mitochondrial disease, or "mito" diagnosis. So, they asked her parents to agree to stop her mito therapies, including her badly needed pain killers, and when they refused, the hospital called child protective services. BCH told them the Pelletiers were "medically abusing" Justina by treating her for mito instead of a psychological condition its staff wrongly thought she had.

Eleven months later Justina was moved to a nearby facility for mentally troubled youth called Wayside, where she continued to be treated by the BCH plan – and not for mito. As Michelle Malkin found in her recent investigation:

Instead of receiving top-notch care and attention at BCH, however, Justina was snatched from her parents and recklessly rediagnosed with a psychological condition, "somatoform disorder." She was dragged from BCH's neurology department to its infamous psych ward, where she was reprimanded for being unable to move her bowels or walk unassisted in her weakened state. At Wayside, she was harassed by a staffer while taking a shower. The physical and mental torture lasted 16 months.

When the Pelletiers tried to have Justina's original doctors see her at BCH, the hospital refused to let them or other independent specialists examine her.

When a local Fox TV crew set up outside the juvenile court where Justina's fate was being decided behind closed doors, her father reported BCH was "up in arms," and an unconstitutional gag order was quickly issued, violating the Pelletiers' First Amendment rights (as well as the rights of a free press) by barring them from speaking to the media. They were also forbidden from photographing Justina and thereby visually documenting her horrifying and painful deterioration without her mito treatments.

At BCH's insistence, Justina and her family were even ordered not to discuss her condition nor care during their once per week hour-long visits (supervised by armed guards) and 20-minute monitored weekly phone calls.

Justina, a Catholic, wasn't allowed to attend Mass, take Communion, nor go to Confession.

In addition to all these First Amendment violations, Justina's federal right to an education in the least restrictive setting possible was also violated and she fell years behind her classmates. More than 14 months into this travesty, many people, including Justina herself, were terrified she was going to die before the reputation-obsessed, $2 billion, Harvard-affiliated BCH admitted it was wrong and let her go or found a way to end this situation while saving face.

By the end, nearly everyone, including BCH, seemed to understand the psychological diagnosis was wrong, but that didn't stop the hospital from continuing to accept tens, if not hundreds of thousands of federal Medicaid dollars to "treat" Justina for it. While elsewhere in the country doctors taking government money to treat a patient for a condition they know she doesn't have would worry about being arrested for federal health-care fraud, as demonstrated by the $225 million in annual federal funding BCH receives (the most of any pediatric research facility in the nation), BCH is one of the best-connected political entities in Massachusetts. Further protecting it, BCH then shared its Harvard affiliation with the governor of Massachusetts, the top federal prosecutor in Boston and even former President Barack Obama. Indeed, the Pelletiers were dismayed when even the "independent" adviser their juvenile court judge appointed to guide him through the medical details in the case listed an affiliation with BCH in her email signature.

WELL-CONNECTED: Boston Children's Hospital (BCH) shares a close connection to Harvard University with former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (top-left), former U.S. President Barack Obama (middle), former Boston U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz (top-right), and current Acting Boston U.S. Attorney William Weinreb (bottom). Clockwise (from top-left): Scott LaPierre/ CC By 2.0, Public Domain, Public Domain, Pete Souza/Public Domain

Unsurprisingly, when the Pelletiers asked, no law enforcement agency nor other government body would help them, including the Boston FBI – which brings us to the YouTube clip below and the Bureau's threat to "investigate" my wife if she refused to take it down. The clip was legally recorded and obtained. It's from FBI Agent Jeffrey Williams' sworn court testimony and confirms that though the Boston feds know about the horrible things Justina and her parents report were done to them, they didn't investigate BCH nor Wayside.

When that testimony was first given in April 2016, the Boston FBI also proudly told a biased judge the feds had hand-selected that though they let Justina suffer for over a year without lifting a finger to protect her, they immediately began investigating my defense of her life. They were forced to admit that unlike what their allies had done to Justina, my actions in her defense didn't harm a soul.

In a further irony that seems totally lost on the feds, while they still refuse today to investigate the awful things their cronies did to Justina, they recently reacted to this clip by threatening to "investigate" my wife for posting it and refusing to take it down. That's the best demonstration yet of the DOJ's crookedness in this case and shows that even if public shame eventually forces them to "investigate" what put Justina in that wheelchair to this day, these holdovers, including Acting Boston U.S. Attorney William Weinreb, himself a Harvard grad, cannot be trusted to do so honestly.

So, in their own battle to get some small bit of justice, around the time of the FBI's admission above, Justina's family filed a lengthy lawsuit against BCH and the doctors who maimed her. It reads like a medical horror story.

When the Pelletiers announced they were suing, Justina, the one-time athlete told the world, "I really, really want to walk again and skate."

She also joined thousands of supporters by saying the following about her BCH doctors: "I just really, really want them to get what they deserve."

However, no lawsuit can see to that, and if the current folks at the Boston DOJ get their way, nothing else will either. But, when Agent Williams was on the stand in April 2016, he and his colleagues couldn't care less about their corruption being exposed – and now they are desperate to get that clip taken down. I wonder, what's changed between then and now? Any guesses?

On Jan. 20, 2017, Donald J. Trump (left) was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, and on Feb. 9, 2017, Jeff Sessions (right) was sworn in as his attorney general.