An NBC News reporter at the center of a defamation lawsuit is leading the network's coverage of the California wildfires.
Jacob Soboroff, a national correspondent for NBC News, coauthored a 2020 article about a doctor, Mahendra Amin, who allegedly "routinely … performed unnecessary procedures, including hysterectomies," on women in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers. A subsequent NBC investigation found that the source, a former nurse at the detention center, made false accusations against the doctor, Mahendra Amin.
Amin sued NBCUniversal over its coverage of Soboroff's story for $30 million, and a federal judge last July found that MSNBC hosts Rachel Maddow, Nicolle Wallace, and Chris Hayes made at least 39 "verifiably false" accusations about the doctor, the Washington Free Beacon reported. But Soboroff's shoddy reporting hasn't resulted in any changes to his role at NBC, with the network putting him on air more than 30 times since the outbreak of the fires. Soboroff, whose childhood home in the Pacific Palisades burned down last week, has appeared on the network more than 30 times since the outbreak of the fires, including for an extensive interview with Gov. Gavin Newsom (D., Calif.).
Court documents in the Amin lawsuit show that Soboroff, who is named as a defendant in the case, wrote in a text that he had interviewed an immigration attorney who had said "mixed things" about the whistleblower.
That uncertainty, however, was not reflected in the news organization's coverage of the allegations. Hayes subsequently hosted the nurse behind the story, Dawn Wooten, on his show in September 2020 to discuss the allegations, even though Hayes previously said he "discounted the whole thing" when he saw some of the details on social media.
Hayes previewed his interview with Wooten as "shocking whistleblower allegations of atrocities at an ICE detention center, including forced hysterectomies on women who don't need them." The following day, court documents show, NBCUniversal's deputy director of standards, Chris Scholl, said in a call with Hayes that "we don't know if the doctor did anything wrong here."
But MSNBC's coverage continued. Hayes, Maddow, and Wallace all went on to run segments about Wooten's allegations.
The defamation trial, which is scheduled to start April 22, marks the latest black eye for the liberal news network.
In 2021, NBCUniversal settled a lawsuit with Nicholas Sandmann, the Covington Catholic high school student whom the network and others falsely accused of harassing a Native American activist at the Lincoln Memorial in 2019. And MSNBC, a subsidiary of NBC News, has faced scrutiny after the Free Beacon reported that Al Sharpton, an MSNBC host, received $500,000 for his nonprofit from the Kamala Harris campaign shortly before interviewing the Democrat in October.
NBC News did not respond to a request for comment.