Tag Archives: Susan Goldsmith

May 9, 2016 · 12:05 pm

“The Syndrome” Makes a Splash

TheSyndromePosterAfter winning 9 awards from 13 nominations at independent film festivals since its premiere in the fall of 2014, “The Syndrome” by Meryl and Susan Goldsmith is now available on demand in North America, the first documentary distributed by trending Freestyle Digital Media.

“This has been an incredible experience,” says Susan Goldsmith, an award-winning investigative reporter who spent years as a print journalist before collaborating on “The Syndrome” with her filmmaker cousin. “How we tell the story is helping people figure out what’s going on. To see this kind of response is deeply gratifying.”

Sgt. Aaron Asheed, investigative reporter Susan Goldsmith, neurosurgeon Ron Uscinski

Sgt. Aaron Rasheed, investigative reporter Susan Goldsmith, neurosurgeon Ron Uscinski

Along with neurosurgeon Ron Uscinski, one of the physicians featured in the film, Goldsmith answered questions at a Maryland library in March following a screening organized by Marine Sgt. Aaron Rasheed, just weeks after Rasheed was cleared of shaking his youngest child. “A lot of people were shocked by the film,” Rasheed reports, “They didn’t know this was going on.”

Weeks before the screening, Rasheed says, he knew the event was a good idea, when he was contacted by another accused family, who had seen his publicity and wanted to know more. “And I could help them,” he beams. “My wife and I had done a lot of research, and we got to pass that along to a family that needed it.” His efforts had included reaching out to the Goldsmiths after he saw the trailer to “The Syndrome” and reading the book Flawed Convictions, by Deborah Tuerkheimer.

aaron.doorRasheed says the accusations started at the hospital, the day he and his wife rushed their baby to the ER with sudden, terrifying seizures. “It was shotgun blast,” he recalls. “CPS put a protective order against us. They were threatening to take all three of our children… We got busy.” They quickly discovered the controversy surrounding shaken baby and realized they had to become their own advocates, while the prosecution started narrowing its focus to Aaron, a combat veteran.

In early March, though, the court accepted a new opinion attributing the boy’s subdural bleeding to a medical condition, and the case was dropped.

Rasheed started organizing the library showing even before he knew he would be cleared. “In Tuerkheimer’s book, it didn’t seem like anyone had a good outcome,” he points out, so he figured he’d better do what he could while he was still free. “And it helped to keep my mind occupied,” he adds, “when I was worried that I would lose my family and maybe go to jail.” Now he’s planning future showings in nearby states.

Free-range parent Lenore Skenazy featured Sgt. Rasheed in the lead to an opinion piece she wrote in the Queens Times Ledger, following a showing of “The Syndrome” in Manhattan in April.

Most of the film’s reviewers have praised both its bold topic and its skillful execution. Flickfilosopher MaryAnn Johanson, for example, nailed it in her subhead:

A smartly dispassionate and skeptical look at “shaken baby syndrome,” and an accidental portrait about how science fails us when it solidifies into dogma

Daphne Howland at The Village Voice said the story is “smartly reported” and wrote:

[The filmmakers] expose the issue with depth and breadth; this well-researched investigation is loaded with credible facts and has a workaday, broadcast-newsmagazine feel.

And Maitland McDonagh wrote in Film Journal International:

[The filmmakers’] thesis is controversial, though not—as they demonstrate at some length—because the hard medical evidence is conspicuously ambiguous. Rather, it conflicts with an emotional narrative rooted in hard-wired human empathy for the weak and helpless.

But the complexity proved too much for critic Frank Scheck at The Hollywood Reporter, who opened his review, “When did it become necessary to have staran advanced medical degree in order to go to the movies?” and likened the film to “those unsettling television commercials for medications featuring an endless list of potentially harmful side effects.”

And the Los Angeles Times treatment objected to both the message and the form. The headline read, “‘The Syndrome’ takes a one-sided view of the controversy about shaken baby syndrome,” and the text charged, “The editing is shoddy and inelegant… providing both too much information and not enough.” My favorite line from the review, copied and pasted:

Though the pro-SDS doctors turned down requests for interview, it at times feels like advertising for the doctors who did participate.

I count two typos, the word “it” as the subject, and a general clunkiness, in one short sentence.

Pediatric Accountability in Central Illinois, PACI

From the PACI website

Back in the community, a screening in late April in Peoria, cosponsored by Pediatric Accountability in Central Illinois (PACI) and the Illinois Justice Project, drew its audience from both sides of the shaken baby debate. I’m told that a number of local child abuse experts and staff members from the district attorney’s office came for the film and stayed for the Q&A with a panel of two attorneys, Zack Bravos and Louis Milot; pediatric radiologist David Ayoub; and wrongly accused parent Michelle Weidner.

“The questions were good,” Bravos reported. “It was a chance to present some good information.”

In the hall outside the screening room, organizers said, polite young women, possibly college students, handed out a fact sheet listing a number of organizations that support the diagnosis of Abusive Head Trauma (AHT) and commenting:

“The validity of AHT in all of its various forms has been established and there is no debate among the majority of practicing physicians.”

Meryl and Susan Goldsmith

Meryl and Susan Goldsmith

At a pair of screenings in Bloomington Hills, Michigan, on the other hand, the crowd seemed to be entirely in support of the filmmakers, according to a friend of mine who attended. Organized by the Torn Family Trust, which came together last year around the case of Joshua and Brenda Burns, the showings featured in-person appearances by Susan and Meryl Goldsmith, the Burnses, and Julie Baumer, exonerated in 2010 after serving five years for the death of her nephew. On Friday morning before the weekend showings, Fox 2 in Detroit broadcast this interview with the Goldsmiths.

The Pediatric Justice Association in North Carolina also garnered press coverage for its April showing of “The Syndrome,” at a performing arts center in downtown Wilmington.

So “The Syndrome” has joined the debate, big time. Film critics and their readers are being exposed to a new angle on child abuse, and community showings are not only bringing affected families together but also bringing the topic into the press.

“The Syndrome” is not, of course, the final word on the subject, nor is it trying to be. “I’m not sure this was a movie about the science as much as it was about the battle,” reflected Dr. Doug Smith, a retired professor of pathology who writes occasionally about shaken baby syndrome on the Washtenaw Watchdogs blog, “but that was a choice the filmmakers made, and I respect that.”

Although I had hoped for a closer look at the science, I found the film riveting, and I’ve been gratified that so many mainstream reviewers shared that reaction. I’m not surprised, though, that some critics rejected the message or the treatment—the topic is unsettling, and “The Syndrome” is not for anyone looking for escapist entertainment.

One friend of mine, who has spent years working for justice in this arena, offered a perspective I can endorse:

I’m behind the film. “The Syndrome” is not perfect, but it’s much better than I would ever have thought we would have.  I wish it would get broader exposure.

For more press reports on “The Syndrome,” you can see:

The sympathetic Los Angeles Weekly review at http://www.laweekly.com/film/the-syndrome-exposes-the-shaken-baby-syndrome-myth-6789457

The Pacific Standard treatment, which explores the topic further, at https://psmag.com/a-new-film-challenges-shaken-baby-syndrome-and-courts-controversy-a768d2415398#.w4rydprh8

An interview on IndieWire with Meryl Goldsmith at http://blogs.indiewire.com/womenandhollywood/meryl-goldsmith-on-fighting-a-medical-standard-in-the-syndrome-20160414

A skeptical look at the film by columnist Carrie Poppy for the Skeptical Inquirer at http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/does_a_new_documentary_prove_shaken_baby_syndrome_doesnrsquot_exist

The CultureFly review at http://culturefly.co.uk/the-syndrome-review/

A short, positive review on CINEMACY at http://cinemacy.com/newport-beach-film-festival-the-syndrome/

An interview with Meryl Goldsmith on Westword at http://www.westword.com/arts/the-syndrome-explores-the-shaken-baby-myth-at-sie-filmcenter-monday-6756370

And more. Slowly, slowly, the word gets out.

copyright 2016, Sue Luttner

If you are not familiar with the debate surrounding shaken baby syndrome, please see the home page of this blog site.

5 Comments

Filed under abusive head trauma, AHT

Tagged as , , , , ,

October 25, 2014 · 8:20 am

Finding a Voice, and a Community

Beth and John Fankhauser in the lobby of the Glenwood Arts Theater, after the premiere of The Syndrome.

Beth and John Fankhauser in the lobby of the Glenwood Arts Theater, after the premiere showing of The Syndrome.

The premiere earlier this month of The Syndrome, a documentary that questions shaken baby theory, was even more thrilling than I’d expected: The film is riveting, and its first public showing, at the Kansas International Film Festival, drew a crowd so excited to meet each other that the lobby buzzed for an hour afterwards.

Beth Fankhauser was smiling, with tears in her eyes. “We thought we were the only ones,” she marveled. She and her husband John, who are now rearing their grandchildren while their daughter serves her prison time, met half a dozen other accused families that afternoon, reinforcing their decision to start speaking up after six years of waiting quietly and praying for justice.

“We allowed ourselves to be shamed… We thought we had to protect our family from the notoriety,” Beth explained, “But the system has betrayed us, and it’s time for the truth. I feel empowered to know that others are also walking this path.”

Denver, Colorado

Denver, Colorado

A weekend like that was the antidote I needed to get past my disappointment at the 14th International Conference on Shaken Baby Syndrome, in September in Denver, where the emphasis seemed to be on discrediting all critics.

In a breakout session on the first morning, for example, pediatrician Robert Block named me personally as one of the child abuse denialists who have “fooled the media,” and some judges, into thinking there is a controversy in this arena. “I would ask the parents who are here whether they think SBS is a myth,” he admonished, pointing out that writing a blog requires no qualifications and no certification, just like writing a book or making a movie—like Flawed Convictions and The Syndrome. Block objected that all our works disregard the real victims—the injured babies—and focus instead on the perpetrators.

Prosecutor Shelley Akamatsu from Boise, Idaho, reported that prosecutors are pressing abusive head trauma cases harder than ever in the courtroom. She remembered the first shaken baby conference, in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1996, when “convictions in AHT cases were not common,” she said, because only a few prosecutors, those who had taught themselves, knew how to handle the medical content. Eighteen years later, national training programs have prepared prosecutors “to meet untrue defenses, prove the severity of the forces inflicted, and effectively educate jurors,” she said, so that now “convictions in AHT cases are the norm rather than the exception.”

scalesAkamatsu called for an organized response now to defending these cases on appeal. “True justice means expertly defending the convictions we’ve worked so hard to get,” she said. “There’s a place for Innocence Projects,” she acknowledged, but “not in this arena, because these cases are so factually driven.”

Law professor Joëlle Anne Moreno argued that the courts, the press, and the public are all misinformed about infant head trauma. She dismissed on legal grounds the adequacy of the “new evidence” that was behind the reopening of the Jennifer Del Prete and Quentin Louis cases, the reversal of the Audrey Edmunds conviction, and the minority opinion in the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the Shirley Ree Smith case. “We need to clear up these legal questions,” she said. “Don’t confuse causation with culpability. That’s what Professor Tuerkheimer is doing when she says this is a medical diagnosis of murder.”

Dr. Sandeep Narang, who is both a physician and an attorney, dismissed the idea of any real controversy about abusive head trauma as a fallacy manufactured by the defense and parroted by the media. He devoted the first hour of his talk to the medical literature, concluding that serious brain injury or death from a short fall is “very rare,” bleeding disorders are easy to identify, and both subdural hematoma and retinal hemorrhages are highly correlated with child abuse. The second hour he spent rebutting the “straw man” argument that shaken baby syndrome is “medically diagnosed murder.” He said he was puzzled by the claim that the child abuse literature exhibits circular reasoning:

There’s a lot of accident literature where we just looked at accidents. We didn’t look at abusive cohorts. We just looked at accidents. How is that circular?

Because Dr. Narang had the floor, no one answered his rhetorical question, but this is my blog, so please let me explain: These studies typically start with a series of patients seen at the authors’ hospitals over a period of time. Not infrequently, researchers studying accidenbabySilhouettetal injury simply remove from the study any cases of presumed child abuse, with the stated goal of limiting the study to verifiable accidents. The filtering out of abuse cases is typically done by the local child abuse team, or sometimes by the authors. The problematic result is that, if a child comes in with a serious injury and a history of a household fall during the study period, the case is diagnosed as abuse and therefore never appears in the data. This self-fulfilling sorting algorithm also taints the studies that attempt to describe for physicians how to recognize child abuse—for an on-line example, please see http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=348423.

Which brings me back to something that bothered me when I first read the trial transcripts of the 1996 case that brought this medico-legal tragedy to my attention:  As long as the child abuse teams continue to treat every one of these cases as obvious abuse with immediate symptoms, there is almost no way to gather evidence to the contrary. Decades of convictions have been based entirely on sincere but unproven medical opinion, and at this point, the opinion is based on decades of convictions.

Kathy and Kevin Hyatt at the Glenwood Arts Theater.

Kathy and Kevin Hyatt at the Glenwood Arts Theater, where The Syndrome premiered.

Last weekend I met not only Beth Fankhauser, who says her daughter Megan was watching a 15-month-old who fell off a bed, but also Kathy Hyatt, found innocent at trial in 2009 after a baby she was watching rolled off the couch, and the family of Amanda Brumfield, now in prison, who told emergency responders her goddaughter had fallen trying to climb out of a portable crib. I don’t understand what makes the doctors so sure that all these women, wives and mothers with good reputations in their communities, simply lost it and attacked babies they had been watching for months, babies they knew and loved.

November 2015 Update: You can now host a screening of The Syndrome, http://www.resetfilms.com/hostascreening/

If you are not familiar with the debate surrounding infant head injury, please see the home page of this blog site.

© 2014, Sue Luttner

16 Comments

Filed under abusive head trauma, AHT, National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome, parents accused, SBS, shaken baby syndrome

Tagged as , , , , , ,

October 10, 2014 · 6:17 pm

“The Syndrome” Trailer Makes Waves

TheSyndrome

Based on the trailer and publicity posted on the film’s web site, a group of child abuse professionals has written to the Kansas International Film Festival (KIFF) requesting that organizers cancel Sunday’s premiere screening of The Syndrome, a documentary about the debate surrounding shaken baby theory.

KIFF organizers received two letters earlier this week, one from the National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome (NCSBS) that calls the film’s promotional materials “appalling, inaccurate, and potentially dangerous” and worries that viewers might get the impression that shaking a baby is not harmful, so that “numerous infants could be put in significant danger.”

A second letter signed by 29 child-abuse physicians protests:

“The prerelease materials… clearly state that the film provides a national platform for the tiny  handful of well-known child abuse defense witnesses to publicize their fringe message—that shaking an infant cannot cause death or traumatic brain injury.” [italics in original]

The physician letter calls The Syndrome “a gross and deliberate mischaracterization of vital public health and child safety issues,” and the authors seem to be threatening a lawsuit:

“This is a public health matter and as organizers of this film festival we hope you share this concern. Under these circumstances, we also hope that you will reconsider featuring this film as part of your upcoming festival. In the event that you decide to continue with premiering this film, we may opt to pursue additional legal action.”

MerylSusanCropped

Filmmakers Meryl and Susan Goldsmith, who are cousins

The letter-writers had threatened litigation earlier, complaining that a news clip in the trailer presented the words of a child abuse pediatrician out of context. Director Meryl Goldsmith says her intention was not to deceive but to include quotes from both sides in the preview. Investigative reporter Susan Goldsmith explains why they edited the trailer: “Instead of hassling with them over a few seconds, we just cut it even though it was exactly how the news clip appeared. We made no changes to the film.”

You can see the letter to KIFF organizers from NCSBS executive director Ryan Steinbeigle by clicking here, NCSBS letter, and the letter from the medical professionals by clicking here, physician letter.

Co-producer Meryl Goldsmith

Director, editor, and producer  Meryl Goldsmith will speak at the premiere showing of The Syndrome, on Sunday, October 12, in Overland Park, Kansas

The move to block The Syndrome isn’t surprising, after all the grief the film received from speakers at last month’s NCSBS conference. Political science professor Ross Cheit from Brown University, for example, in his talk “‘Exonerating’ the Guilty: Child Abuse and the Corruption of the False Conviction Movement,” characterized The Syndrome as “a love letter” to three defense experts. He said it was “a defense lawyer’s dream . . .  you get to put on your testimony and there’s no cross-examination.” He objected to the term used in the trailer, “shaken baby syndrome industrial complex,” which he said shows “incredible arrogance and remarkable ignorance” on the part of the filmmakers because, “Child abuse is not where the money is. Child abuse defense is where the money is.”

Professor Cheit compared The Syndrome to Capturing the Friedmans, a 2003 documentary that raised questions about a 1980s child sex-abuse case in New York. Prof. Cheit portrayed that film as a whitewash on behalf of father-and-son felons Arnold and Jesse Friedman. Noting that Capturing the Friedmans was a finalist for an academy award the year it came out, Prof. Cheit said he worries about the “gullible acceptance many people have for a movie that’s labeled ‘documentary.'”

Presumably the KIFF organizers and judges made their choices carefully, both when they included The Syndrome in their program and when they nominated it for a jury award. I haven’t seen the film yet, but I hope it addresses some of the troubling questions that have raged around shaken baby syndrome for decades now—and I doubt the take-home message is really that shaking a baby is safe.

As for protecting the children:  I am concerned about the infants who are denied the medical care they need when a hasty diagnosis of abuse stops the search for the medical conditions that underlie many cases of brain bleeding and swelling with no outward signs of trauma, as well as the siblings who are torn unnecessarily from loving homes. I am especially concerned about the cavalier opinion that household falls do not cause serious injury or death. I wish that parents were warned not only about shaking infants but also about dropping them. While most falls do not cause major injury, lives could be saved and injuries prevented if we started installing mats under changing tables and padding in play areas. Meanwhile, doctors simply do not know enough about infant neurobiology to support the definitive statements about infant shaking that have been winning in court for 30 years.

Spring 2016 Update:The Syndrome, in now available on demand in North America through Freestyle Digital Media, http://freestyledigitalmedia.tv/the-syndrome/

For my blog posting after the premiere showing of The Syndrome in October of 2014, go to Finding a Voice, and a Community.

13 Comments

Filed under abusive head trauma, AHT, National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome, SBS, shaken baby syndrome

Tagged as , , ,

September 10, 2014 · 11:15 am

“The Syndrome” Promises Fireworks

Susan Goldsmith

Susan Goldsmith

“Shaken baby syndrome is the most mind-blowing story I have encountered in 26 years as a journalist,” says Susan Goldsmith, whose film The Syndrome has been nominated for a Jury Award at its premiere next month at the Kansas International Film Festival. “The deeper and deeper you go, the worse it gets.”

Even over the phone, Goldsmith crackles with the same energy that makes the trailer so compelling and no doubt earned the film its nomination. “When I found out how the promoters of the theory are trying to silence their critics,” she flares, “I knew I had to make this movie.”

She promises an “explosive” exposé, consistent with her web site’s report that the film “unflinchingly identifies those who have built careers and profited from this theory along with revealing their shocking pasts.”

Dr. John Plunkett

Dr. John Plunkett

The Syndrome profiles three of the most outspoken critics of shaking theory, forensic pathologist John Plunkett, pediatric neuroradiologist Pat Barnes, and neurosurgeon Ron Uscinski.

The film also features a few of the personal stories Goldsmith heard during years of research. “Those families, who have been ripped apart in so many ways, they keep me inspired,” Goldsmith insists. “If I was traumatized like that, I’d never want to talk about it, but you call them up, and all they want is to help get the word out.”

Dr. Charles Hyman, a critic of shaken baby theory, and Susan Goldsmith

Dr. Charles Hyman, a critic of shaken baby theory, and Susan Goldsmith

Goldsmith expects criticism from what she calls “the shaken baby industrial complex.”

“I’m used to being attacked,” she shrugs. “My job as an investigative reporter is to piss people off.”

Goldsmith has handled controversial stories before, including an article sympathetic to a convicted child molester—which later won a first-place award for crime and justice reporting—and a profile defending Nigerian anthropologist John Ogbu at UC Berkeley, tarred as a “Clarence Thomas” for his study of black high school students at an affluent Cleveland suburb. She’s often had trouble pitching her ideas, she concedes, “but I have never encountered the insane resistance I’ve seen to this story.”

Co-producer Meryl Goldsmith, Susan's cousin

Meryl Goldsmith

Goldsmith says that people seem to go “fuzzy in the head” when the words child abuse are used, “and that’s a very dangerous place for us to be in.” The same human instinct that fostered the shaken baby nightmare also made it nearly impossible to explain her conclusions, she sighs. “Over and over, people would just say, ‘They must be shaking them.'” Recognizing the resistance to their topic within the film industry, she and her cousin Meryl Goldsmith found their own funding and made their own movie.

I’m excited: The Syndrome could be a watershed in the history of shaken baby syndrome. I confess I had the same thought about Lee Scheier’s 2005 Chicago Tribune treatment, Emily Bazelon’s 2011 New York Times Magazine piece, the 2011 NPR/ProPublica/Frontline series, and Deborah Tuerkheimer’s 2014 book, but every bit of exposure helps bring the truth to light, and this film promises to be a high-wattage experience.

I knew Goldsmith subscribed to this blog, but she says in fact she’s a “religious reader” and she has “learned a tremendous amount” from it. I am gratified and encouraged.

The Syndrome premieres on Sunday, October 12, 12:15 pm at the Glenwood Arts Theater in Overland Park, Kansas. It will also be shown at the Twin Cities Film Fest, on October 24 & 25, buy tickets here.

For a sampling of Goldsmith’s work and awards, click on her tab on the film’s web site.

November 2015 Update: You can now host a screening of The Syndrome, http://www.resetfilms.com/hostascreening/

Copyright 2014, Sue Luttner

If you are not familiar with the debate surrounding shaken baby syndrome, please see the home page of this site.

20 Comments

Filed under abusive head trauma, AHT, parents accused, SBS, shaken baby syndrome

Tagged as , , ,