Stochastic terrorism: Children's Hospital blames Libs of TikTok for the bomb threat a mentally ill woman called in; says the woman shouldn't get prison time

Update: Sentencing rescheduled for July 18.

Children's Hospital has joined Catherine Leavy's attorney in asking leniency for the Westfield woman when she is sentenced Friday for calling in a hoax bomb threat that forced the lockdown of the hospital and part of the Longwood Medical Area in 2022 - specifically, that she not be ordered to serve any prison time.

In a victim statement filed in US District Court, the hospital's attorney, Christopher Viney, says hospital officials came to believe Leavy is sincere in her expressions of remorse for what she did during "restorative justice" sessions with two hospital representatives, which followed her guilty plea and a lifetime of mental illness and cognitive impairment - and that she made her threatening call on Aug. 30, 2022 only after succumbing to deceitful online campaign by Chaya Raichik's Libs of TikTok and Raichik's minions:

The BCH [Boston Children's Hospital] representatives found Ms. Leavy to be a young woman who has faced significant challenges in her life and was manipulated by the instigators' online disinformation campaign. It was the instigators' campaign that led Ms. Leavy to make the bomb threat to BCH. ...

In terms of a punishment for her crime, BCH does not believe that an incarceration sentence will serve Ms. Leavy, BCH, or the community. BCH submits that the real culpable individuals in this case are the four instigators who have orchestrated this disinformation campaign unabated for the past two years. As for Ms. Leavy, BCH believes that she has acknowledged her wrongdoing, and has taken steps to rectify it.

In its statement, Children's detailed what Libs of TikTok and three other "instigators" were doing in 2022 - and what the hospital says they are continuing to do today:

Beginning in August 2022 and continuing to the present, BCH, its patients, doctors, and staff have been the target of an orchestrated campaign of disinformation to threaten and intimidate the Hospital and its doctors and staff from providing gender-affirming care. This campaign has been primarily carried out by four individuals that began a public campaign using their respective social media accounts to spread disinformation to their millions of followers about health care provided to gender-diverse and transgender children at pediatric hospitals around the nation. In particular, these four instigators have posted inflammatory falsehoods about the health care provided at these hospitals, claiming that there was "castration," and "butchering, mutilating, and sterilizing" of children occurring. One instigator went so far as to write to his 2.4 million followers on X: "The trans agenda was invented by pedophilic psychologists, degenerate quacks, lunatic sexologists, literal Nazi scientists, and other assorted deviants. A collection of the most despicable monsters imaginable came up with all of this stuff."

While many pediatric hospitals around the country were targeted, none more so than BCH and its GeMS program. For example, on August 11, 2022, one instigator, whose X account has approximately 2.6 million followers, posted fourteen separate incendiary tweets about BCH, GeMS, and its gender-affirming care, falsely claiming "gender-affirming hysterectomies for young girls" were occurring, and writing that the hospital "needs to be shut down." Another of the instigators posted a video which stated, "According to Boston Children's Hospital, literally every toddler who has ever been born or will ever be born is trans. Now if it seems like they are casting the widest imaginable available net to capture the most children they can and put them all on a path to sterilization and butchery before they can even talk, well that's because that's exactly what these monsters are doing." Another instigator tweeted: "Children cannot consent to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or ‘gender-affirming' surgeries. Stop the child abuse."

In truth and in fact, BCH and its providers have not stated that "every toddler" is trans, nor have they engaged in "sterilization" or "butchery." BCH does not perform genital surgeries on patients under 18-years-old as part of gender-affirming care and does not provide any gender-affirming care to minor patients without the consent of the patients' parents or guardians.

In addition to disseminating these false allegations, the instigators also are singling out specific BCH doctors who provide care to gender-diverse and transgender children, such as by posting edited videos of BCH doctors. One of the instigators posted a video of a BCH doctor explaining transgender care, and added his own note that stated: "Boston Children's Hospital blocks your child's puberty, cuts off body parts, and sterilizes them." The instigator has suggested violence directed at doctors who provide gender-affirming care. Specifically, he wrote in March 2023 that "[a] prison sentence is the least that doctors who transition kids should get. They should be thankful if that's all that ever happens to them. During no other era in human history would we have been so kind." A few weeks later, he wrote: "We do not have enough millstones for doctors who transition kids," a biblical reference to the punishment of hanging a millstone around a person's neck to cause drowning. In May 2023, another instigator posted on her X account: "There will be no safe space left in this country for child mutilators and butchers by the time we're done."

As one graphic example of their lies, the hospital pointed to a supposed header on a hospital Web page that showed a little blonde girl in braids, maybe 3 or 4, on an exam table with a silver-haired doctor over the words "Boston Children's Health Physicians: Gender Affirming & LGBTQ Care."

In fact, the image was stitched together from two separate images for two separate sections of the Web site, one showing the girl and the doctor for a children's for a section about a general pediatrics service the hospital runs in the Hudson Valley of New York and Connecticut, the other for a section about "gender affirming and LGBTQ care" that on the actual Children's site shows four smiling teenagers:

The manipulation of the pictures demonstrates the instigators' intentional disinformation designed to incite and inflame. The day after this was posted, one of the other instigators reposted the same manipulated image and the telephone number for the Center for Gender Surgery: "Give Boston childrens a call to let them know how you feel about the mutilation of healthy children." That weekend, the Center received multiple menacing voicemails discussing gender-affirming care including one from a male caller who stated "Listen fucking closely… you're sick, fucking disgusting human. It's fucking disgusting what you do. I hope somebody finds you and fucking runs you over with a fucking bus. You're fucking sick." Another caller left a voicemail message stating "you are mutilating children and the blood will be on your hands." ...

Predictably, following such false and incendiary rhetoric by the instigators, BCH and other pediatric hospitals across the nation have been and continue to be the target of online abuse and violent threats. Such abuse has included bomb threats directed towards the hospitals, death threats targeting the doctors, and related profane, violent, abusive, racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-LGBTQ+ statements. With respect to BCH, the abusive messages have come in several forms: threatening and abusive telephone calls placed to the hospital's general appointment line; threatening and profane messages submitted through the hospital's online appointment registration system; threatening and profane messages sent to doctors via email or telephones; mail to doctors at the hospital and at their homes bearing swastikas and other violent imagery; and threatening and harassing messages posted publicly on X and other social media sites. Most significantly, BCH received several specific bomb threats over the past two years which required a law enforcement response and partial evacuations of the hospital. These threats are directly tied to the instigators' inflammatory disinformation campaign.

About three months after Leavy's call, Viney continued, the hospital got an e-mail that said bombs had been placed throughout Children's and at the homes of three doctors.

In addition to disrupting hospital operations, State Police units with bomb-sniffing dogs were sent to the homes of numerous doctors, he wrote, continuing that the online spewers found the home addresses of a number of doctors and sent them death threats at home, such as:

Another doctor told the hospital that:

[T]he harassment campaign has taken a severe toll on him, causing him stress, anxiety, and sleeplessness. It has also led him to question whether to continue practicing in the field of gender-affirming care.

With all that happening, Catherine Leavy, confined to home without the personal care and counseling she needs because of the pandemic, fell prey to the haters, her attorney, Forest O’Neill-Greenberg, wrote in a sentencing memorandum calling for no prison time and at most, a period of home confinement:

It was at this time, after undergoing a significant medication change and increase, isolated within her family home with no mental health providers or external supports, that Catherine's mental decompensation reached its height. Unfortunately, her worsening symptoms and increased paranoia and anxiety made her increasingly vulnerable to the toxic and manipulative online conspiracy theory rhetoric. Her continued isolation and obsessively paranoid internet surfing led her down into the dark recesses of online misinformation – and straight into the dangerous and hateful disinformation espoused by the "Libs of TikTok" twitter account and echoed on-line by other misinformation social media accounts– all of whom instigated and spread "an orchestrated campaign of disinformation to threaten and intimidate [Children's] Hospital and its doctors and staff from proving gender-affirming care."

In posting such manipulative hateful misinformation against Boston Children's Hospital, the instigators of the disinformation campaign against BCH sought to prey upon, and mislead, vulnerable people into believing their lies. Catherine, was, unfortunately, one of those people. Catherine's exposure to the destructive and manipulative messaging spewed by these toxic social media accounts could not have come at a worse time. Vulnerable, dysregulated, and acutely mentally ill, she lacked the ability to appreciate the falsity of the disinformation claims. In her compromised and mentally disorganized state, she was unable to meaningfully discern that the false claims of Children's performing gender-affirming surgeries on young children were actually manipulatively masked hateful, transphobic and antiLGBTQ+ messaging. Instead, Ms. Leavy unwittingly read the misleading posts literally – and taking it at face value - believed it to be fact. Believing the claims were actually revealing the truth about the harmful treatment of Children's patients, Catherine's exposure to this noxious disinformation was tragically the impetus to her split second, impulsive placement of her August 22nd call to the Hospital.

In his own sentencing recommendation, assistant US Attorney Jared Dolan acknowledged Leavy's psychological problems and sincere apology, but called for a 30-day sentence, in part to send a message that threatening innocent people does not pay.