Federal prosecutors on Friday dropped the case against the Texas doctor accused of sharing personal information of patients at the largest pediatric hospital in the country to a conservative journalist, who used that information to publish a story that the hospital was secretly providing transgender care for minors.
The dismissal of the charges against Eithan Haim, 34, comes after President Donald Trump signed a slew of executive orders rolling back transgender rights and protections.
Haim was indicted in June on charges of obtaining and wrongfully disclosing identifiable health records of patients at Texas Children’s Hospital “with the intent to cause malicious harm” to the hospital’s physicians and patients. Haim, who calls himself a whistleblower, pleaded not guilty at his arraignment.
At the time, Haim had been a resident specializing in general surgery who had previous rotations at the children’s hospital, according to the indictment. Though he had finished his last rotation at the hospital in 2021, he attempted to reactivate his login over the course of several months before gaining access in 2023 to information on pediatric patients not under his care, “under the false pretenses that he needed to urgently attend to adult care services,” the indictment said, adding that he then turned over the information to his media contact.
His media contact — identified by Haim on social media as Christopher Rufo — published this information on X and other media outlets with the patients’ names partially redacted, but kept the dates of service, diagnoses, procedure codes and physician names visible, the indictment states.
When Rufo published his report in May 2023, gender-affirming care for individuals under age 18 was still legal in Texas. It wasn’t until June 2023 that Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed into law a bill prohibiting health care professionals from treating minors with gender-transitioning interventions such as surgeries, puberty blockers and hormones — which went into effect in September 2023 and was upheld by the Supreme Court in June. But the children’s hospital had announced in March 2022 that it would stop prescribing gender-affirming hormone therapies after Abbott directed Texas’s child welfare agency to investigate reports of children receiving gender-affirming care as “child abuse.”
Critics of gender-affirming treatment have long argued that children are too young to make the decision to medically transition, but a number of studies on puberty blockers have found that transgender youth treated with medications showed lower rates of depression and anxiety. Although critics have said that these treatments are akin to mutilation and sterilization, puberty blockers alone do not cause infertility, experts said. Major medical organizations such as the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry have encouraged doctors and parents to take a gender-affirming approach to a transgender child’s care.
Haim and his attorneys have repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, saying that he had not disclosed any personal information of patients, and called the case “a blatant attempt at political intimidation.” The indictment, however, stated that his actions resulted in “financial loss, medical delays in previously scheduled patients as well as threats and harm to its patients and esteemed physicians.”
On Friday, Jennifer Lowery, the acting U.S. attorney representing the Justice Department in the Southern District of Texas, and Haim’s attorneys filed a joint motion to dismiss the indictment, and U.S. District Judge David Hittner dismissed the case against Haim.
Texas Children’s Hospital said in an emailed statement that it will “defer to and respect” the Justice Department’s decisions in the case.
Burke Law Group, which represented Haim, posted on X on Friday: “The fight against the evils he exposed continues, but this dismissal represents a repudiation of the weaponization of federal law enforcement and the first step in accountability for the misdeeds we have all witnessed in this case.”
Haim faced up to 10 years in federal prison and a $250,000 maximum possible fine if he was convicted.
In his first day in office, Trump signed a slew of executive orders, one of which directed federal agencies to keep trans women, which the order described as men, out of “intimate spaces” designed for women.
The order targeted trans people’s identity documents and health care and banned federal prisons from housing inmates who are transgender women in men’s facilities. Three days after Trump signed the order, Secretary of State Marco Rubio directed his department to immediately stop issuing new passports with “X” gender markers.
The Department of Justice logo. (DOJ)
