2026-04-17 05:57:22
Last week, authorities in Louisiana issued an arrest warrant for a businessman who they believe has run a vitriolic social media account that for years has harassed and threatened critics of America’s largest hospital landlord—Medical Properties Trust (MPT). Last year, Mother Jones and Reveal investigated MPT and found that its business model was sinking hospitals around the country and hurting patient care.
Our reporting also unravelled an extensive campaign to silence MPT’s critics. The effort included surveillance by private intelligence firms and a coordinated social media push by anonymous accounts who sent thousands of messages trying to intimidate journalists and analysts raising the possibility that MPT may be committing fraud, in part through complex loans it was secretly sending to prop up its biggest tenant and joint partner, Steward Health Care, as it flailed financially. (The now-bankrupt Steward paid for the private intelligence firms.) It is unclear which anonymous trolls were paid for by the intelligence firm, but chief among them was an X user who goes by “Abe.”
Louisiana authorities believe they have identified the man behind Abe as Delaware’s Bruce Tigani Jr. He is the son of a prominent attorney and worked at commercial real estate company Newmark until sometime in 2025. Delaware State Police confirmed to Mother Jones that Tigani was arrested in Wilmington on April 2 and charged as an out of state fugitive. He was then arraigned in local court and released on $5,000 bond. (Tigani did not respond to phone calls and an emailed list of questions.)
The warrant charges Tigani with a felony for making death threats on X as Abe against a Louisiana lawmaker, state Rep. Michael Echols. For the last three years, Echols has blamed MPT for the devastation at the hospital in his district, and tried to hold the company accountable by convening public hearings and, eventually, penning legislation that targeted MPT, its board, and executives.
“Delete your account..then your life…assistance will be provided if you don’t take your own measures,” The Abe account wrote to Echols on X. “You’re going to lose everything you ever even thought about loving…wife? Bye…kids? Bye….Sweetheart it’s gonna be a long long summer you hog.. say goodbye to your children.”
For years, Abe sent similar screeds to financial analysts who questioned the image of success that MPT, which is publicly traded, has projected to shareholders. He appeared online not long after a pair of analysts—Rob Simone at Hedgeye, a financial research firm, and an X account that goes by Big River—began to publish reports asking whether MPT was hiding the damage its business was doing to hospitals with clever accounting that both overvalued its hospital real estate and papered over just how many were failing to pay rent under MPT’s oppressive leases.
Abe came after Simone with full force. He tweeted out Simone’s address and country club, threatened his family, and asked if he had security, saying that “his life is in danger.” In 2023, a prominent shortselling firm called Viceroy Research published its own report on MPT, expanding on the existing claims that the landlord was engaged in financial fraud. Abe immediately went after Viceroy too.
After we published our reporting on MPT in July 2025, Abe sent us sexist and harassing tweets and emails. We responded to his first email with a request for an interview. He answered: “Why don’t you use your superior investigative skills and look into your sources yourself,” he wrote. “Do you want to know where to look or do you want to keep being a cunt?”
Abe’s attacks on Echols ramped up in the summer of 2025, when the lawmaker introduced a bill in the Louisiana House to hold MPT financially liable for the downfall of the hospital in Echols’ district, Glenwood Regional Medical Center, which has been owned by MPT since 2013.
The bill proposed fining MPT, as well as its executives and board members, hundreds of thousands of dollars if Glenwood became insolvent. It was an attempt by Echols to prevent further gutting of the hospital by its owners.
For years, Steward Health Care had run Glenwood, while paying rent to MPT for the property. When Steward declared bankruptcy in 2024, the company revealed that it owed MPT about $6 billion in rent across more than 30 hospitals, including Glenwood. The effects of this financial deficit on patients had grown alarming at MPT-owned hospitals: Glenwood staff testified in multiple hearings that they regularly were without the basic materials they needed to do their jobs, suppliers went unpaid, and doctors and nurses left. Declaring bankruptcy solved none of these problems.
Echols’ bill to prevent more damage like this at MPT hospitals was voted down in committee, but the legislator became the public face taking on a powerful real estate company. The attacks online from the account allegedly run by Tigani “willfully and unlawfully use[d] violence” with “the intent to retaliate against” Echols, according to the warrant. It was just a few weeks after a legislative hearing on Echols’ bill that “Abe” sent the lawmaker the death threats that are now the basis of his felony charge in Louisiana, including, “Lol your life is over… get ready… piece by piece then all at’once remember? Little pieces for the fishies.”
“It’s disturbing that as elected officials, we have to deal with lunatics that bring our families into what are political decisions,” Echols says.
What remains unclear is why Tigani would devote so much energy to attack the critics of a real estate company. The warrant implies that it could be because Tigani wanted MPT’s stock to remain high. “Tigani Jr. heavily promotes MPT stock on social media,” the warrant notes. “Michael Echols has been publicly critical of MPT, giving Bruce Tigani motive to make threats.”
“If he’s out threatening to kill elected officials and their families and the other people who he has harassed online, you would assume he has a financial stake in something,” Echols told Mother Jones.
In a written statement, MPT denied having any relationship with Tigani Jr. “It is false and irresponsible for any media outlet to suggest otherwise. We condemn in the strongest possible terms threats of violence of any kind,” MPT told Mother Jones.
What we do know is that Tigani worked for Newmark, a commercial real estate advisory firm that helps businesses finance real estate expansions, until some point in 2025, according to a Newmark representative. Leaked documents shared with Mother Jones by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project show that a company affiliated with Newmark, Knight Frank, did valuations for MPT properties in 2020. A Newmark representative did not contest the work for MPT and noted that while Knight Frank and Newmark were affiliated then, they have not been for years.
Tigani’s father, who is also mentioned in the warrant, is a partner at Morris James LLP in Delaware. His firm has represented MPT, its hospitals, and its tenants numerous times in bankruptcies as recent as 2023.
Mforris James declined to comment, and MPT denied having any relationship with the elder Tigani.
The warrant for Tigani’s arrest and extradition to Louisiana now heads to the governor’s desk for signature. If Tigani does not agree to appear in court in Louisiana, there’s a “fugitive hearing” scheduled in Delaware in May to extradite him.
2026-04-17 05:30:17
Dave Chappelle is happy to make tens of millions of dollars on anti-trans comedy routines—”I’m team TERF,” he said in a 2021 special—but now apparently draws the line at Republicans turning those jokes into policy.
In a Wednesday interview on NPR’s Newsmakers show, Chappelle said he resents that the Republican Party’s 2024 platform “ran on transgender jokes” and was “a weaponized version of what I was doing.”
He recalled a time when Lauren Boebert, then a GOP House rep from Colorado, took a photo with him and shared it on Instagram with the caption “Just three people who understand that there’s only two genders.”
“She should never do that with a person like me,” Chappelle said.
But the comedian has long injected anti-trans material into his comedy shows, most notably in a multiyear, multi-special streak beginning with his 2017 Netflix special Equanimity. In that special, and in 2019’s Sticks & Stones, Chappelle called being trans similar to lying about one’s racial background: In Equanimity, he compared being trans to Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who pretended to be Black. The 2021 comedy special in which he claimed to be on “team TERF,” The Closer, included Chappelle’s extended defense of J.K. Rowling, whom he stated was “canceled” for saying “gender was a fact.”
“On behalf of the trans community, I’ll go ahead and address your weakest defenses. How much do you have to participate in my self-image? Not at all.” Dahlia Belle, a transgender comic, wrote in the Guardian shortly following the release of The Closer.
On Wednesday, Chappelle asserted that he was the subject of “rage-baiting” during this time. “I am a filthy nightclub comic,” he told NPR’s Michel Martin. “That’s all I see myself as.”
“People had drinks, and they just were gruff and said what they said back then. And it was never a big deal,” he continued.
But Chappelle’s fixation on trans people, and anti-trans routines, extended across years and multiple specials. They were indistinguishable from, and grist for, the material of conservative streamers and right-wing edgelords. The comedian’s remarks about what would happen if LeBron James said he was a woman and dominated the WNBA were used in Donald Trump’s 2021 rally against trans rights; Candace Owens made the same Rachel Dolezal comparison last year.
“I challenge Black cishet men to interrogate what their identity means to them,” writer and transgender rights activist Raquel Willis wrote in a 2021 social media post about Chappelle’s comedy. “Who are you without being the “head” of the household/tribe/culture?…Who could you be if you took on expanding Black masculinity and manhood without having to repress other Black experiences of the feminine, gender nonconforming, queer variety?”
2026-04-17 05:02:24
A civil rights lawsuit against the Polk County Sheriff’s Office in Florida overcame a tricky and nuanced legal hurdle this week in federal court.
As Mother Jones originally reported, Taylor Cadle was 12 years old in 2016 when she told a sheriff’s deputy that she had been sexually abused by her adoptive father, Henry Cadle. Instead of arresting the abuser, Deputy Melissa Turnage charged Taylor with filing a false police report. According to Taylor, her adoptive mother pushed her to plead guilty. As part of her probation, she was required to write apology letters to a sheriff’s deputy and her abuser.
After returning to her adoptive father’s care, Taylor was raped again. But this time, she recorded the assault with her phone and collected key physical evidence.
After reporting the abuse for a second time, Taylor’s adoptive father was arrested and sentenced to 17 years in prison for sexual battery of a child.
Taylor had never shared her story publicly until Mother Jones reporters connected with her in late 2023. After the story was published and was picked up by other outlets, including Rolling Stone and People, Taylor said no one from the Sheriff’s Office ever reached out to apologize. The absence of a reaction didn’t seem to align with a sheriff who has said that he would “go to the ends of the Earth” to arrest child sex abusers and that if his office makes a mistake, he would “dress up, ’fess up, and fix it up.”
Now 22, Taylor filed the suit last fall alleging that the sheriff and his deputies violated her civil rights by conducting a biased investigation, falsely arresting her, and leaving her abuser free to rape her again. The suit was filed against Sheriff Grady Judd in his individual and official capacity, two detectives involved in the investigation, and her adoptive father.
Judd’s office directly responded to Taylor’s claims, calling her lawsuit “frivolous.”
A spokesperson for the Sheriff’s Office wrote the following to the Lakeland Ledger last year: “Unfortunately, in today’s highly litigious society, lawyers will file frivolous lawsuits for just about anything, including second guessing nine year old criminal investigations, and then run to the news media attempting to get publicity for their lawsuit. In this case, our deputies did an extensive investigation and made deliberate and rational decisions based upon the information and evidence we had at the time.”
The sheriff’s attorneys filed a motion to dismiss the case, arguing that Taylor had waited too long to sue. They argued that Florida’s statute limits Taylor’s civil rights claims to seven years, and she filed her suit nine years after she was falsely arrested.
However, Taylor’s lawyers presented a legal argument that—to their knowledge—hasn’t been used in this district court. The seven-year time limit functions as a “statute of repose,” preventing federal courts from applying it. Therefore, the court should consider the clock paused during the years she was a minor living with a guardian whose interests were working against hers. The team argued that under that interpretation, her deadline shifted to four years after she turned 18. Taylor filed within that window, the day before her 22nd birthday.
District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, a Trump appointee, agreed. She ruled that most of Taylor’s claims could go forward, including allegations that sheriff’s detectives had maliciously prosecuted her and violated her right to bodily safety.
“I felt pride in Taylor and a sense of relief,” said attorney Brenda Harkavy. “There’s a long road ahead, but the court has given her the opportunity to prove her case, and that itself feels like a step toward justice.”
Harkavy said this provides an extended timeline for other survivors to file suits if they were abused as children and continued to live under the care of someone whose interests were averse to theirs.
Had the judge ruled against her argument, Harkavy said there would be no viable way to move forward with the claims against the Sheriff’s Office and the detectives.
The suit will continue against Turnage, her supervisor William Rushing, and Judd in his official capacity. However, Mizelle dismissed claims against the sheriff personally, citing qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that shields public officials from liability.
“Taylor is a hero,” Harkavy said. “The conduct that occurred here is horrific. It’s incredibly important that [the Sheriff’s Office] recognize what they imposed upon on Taylor, that they accept responsibility for what happened. None of this was Taylor’s doing.”
Scott Wilder, director of communications for the Sheriff’s Office, told Mother Jones that the department would “continue to vigorously defend against the false and baseless allegations.” When asked to elaborate on which allegations were false or baseless, Wilder did not respond.
2026-04-17 02:16:30
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he would overhaul a preventive medicine team that risks making screenings more difficult.
“[The US Preventive Services Task Force] has been lackadaisical and negligent for 20 years,” Kennedy told members of the House Ways and Means Committee. “We’re going to have, for the first time, transparency.”
As my colleagues Anna Merlan, Julia Métraux, and Kiera Butler have reported, Kennedy’s transformation of the HHS has been extensive and relies on rejectingdecades of scientific, evidence-based research on health.
Kennedy said on Thursday he would appoint new members with “a clear mission” but did not elaborate on whether he would remove any current members. Five of the 16 panel members’ terms expired last December, but Kennedy has not filled those roles.
If the new task force stops recommendations on a certain preventive drug or screening, insurance companies would no longer be required to cover it under the Affordable Care Act, effectively taking millions of Americans off vital health interventions.
This may be the clearest sign that Kennedy will continue to dismantle the health panel. In July 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported that the health secretary planned to dismiss all 16 members because they were too “woke.” Due to the HHS’ cancellations, the panel has not met in a year; it usually meets three times annually. The members also did not submit their congressionally-mandated report for 2025.
According to Politico, the task force is working on recommendations related to autism screening in children, medication to reduce the risks of breast cancer, and counseling on early allergen introduction to prevent food allergies in infants. Kennedy has previously voiced enthusiasm for focusing on autism and food allergies in children.
2026-04-17 01:41:40
About a quarter of Americans suffer from seasonal allergies. And researchers at the nonprofit Climate Central say that if you’re feeling snifflier than normal this spring, you aren’t alone—and climate change and pollution might be behind your personal postnasal drip.
In 173 of the 198 cities Climate Central studied, the freeze-free growing season (that is, the time of year when plants are capable of, among other things, producing pollen) lengthened by an average of 21 days since 1970. In some places, like Nashville, the freeze-free growing season is now a full month longer than it used to be, and one 2022 study suggests that by the end of the century, it’ll be two months longer than it is now. And as climate change causes more-frequent extreme weather events, like hurricanes, that also means more mold and more respiratory distress.
On top of all that, thanks to changes in temperature and rainfall, some plant species, like ragweed, are moving north, and exposing people to new allergens—which means that some of us who haven’t experienced allergies before might experience symptoms for the first time this year.
“That means more patients are reacting to more plant species, for longer,” immunologist Rebecca Saff recently wrote in Harvard’s Climate Brief. “Even people with historically mild seasonal allergies are noticing sharper symptom peaks, and medications that once kept things under control are not working as well as they once did.”
So, what can the watery-eyed, scratchy-throated masses do? Saff suggests starting to take your allergy medications earlier in the year than you normally would, since your spring and fall symptomatic periods might not be so predictable anymore. She also recommends using the National Allergy Bureau’s dashboard to get accurate data on allergen levels in your area. Stock up on that Zyrtec.
2026-04-17 00:15:12
On January 13, Aliya Rahman was on her way to a doctor’s appointment when ICE agents smashed the glass out of her car windows at a Minneapolis intersection, pulled her out of her car, hauled her down the street by her arms and legs, and detained her. Rahman—a disabled Bangladeshi-American woman with a traumatic brain injury and autism—blacked out from her injuries on the floor of the Whipple detention center. When she woke up in the emergency room, she learned that she was being treated for “injuries consistent with assault,” according to her lawyers.
Now, Rahman plans to ensure her ordeal comes at a cost to the agency that harmed her. On April 16th, Rahman’s legal team filed a federal tort claim against ICE, seeking monetary restitution for their client’s treatment at the agency’s hands. It’s a tactic more and more people are using to seek accountability for mistreatment and violence done by federal agents.
“I was never asked for ID, never told I was under arrest, never read my rights, and never charged with a crime,” Rahman said. Since her detention, ICE’s official X account has posted video footage of the moments before her arrest, implying that she has broken the law: “18 U.S.C. § 111 criminalizes impeding or interfering with federal officers.”
It’s a “blatant misinformation campaign,” Rahman’s lawyer, Jessica Gingold, told Mother Jones, adding that because of these posts, Rahman has received threats and harassment online. Her client, she said, was “going about her daily life, trying to go to the doctor, and ended up unconscious on the floor in a detention center.”
Under US law, it is near-impossible for a person to file a civil rights lawsuit against an individual federal agent, the way someone who’s been hurt by a local or state police officer could. But an increasing number of people hurt by ICE and DHS agents are filing tort claims—demanding monetary compensation for what has been done to them—through a byzantine process governed by the Federal Tort Claims Act.
“Under the Federal Tort Claims Act we can file a claim for monetary damages. That’s what we can ask for,” Gingold, of the MacArthur Justice Center, told Mother Jones. “We can’t ask for systems change under the FTCA. But we do feel strongly that [if] more people do this, demand their due for the harm that’s been wreaked over this country…that itself could make systems change happen, right?”
An ICE agent told the Washington Post that the agency received 400 tort claims in fiscal year 2025. Among the claimants: an undocumented immigrant in Chicago seeking $1 million in damages after he said he was body-slammed and put in a chokehold by a DHS agent, a 79-year-old US citizen in California who is seeking $50 million after federal agents shoved him to the ground and broke his ribs, and the wife of a farmworker who died of injuries sustained during an ICE raid is seeking $47 million.
And Rahman, now, is likely to be one of the most public faces of this tactic: since her arrest, she’s continued to speak up for immigration reform, attended the State of the Union as Ilhan Omar’s guest—and she’s been arrested a second time, for standing up during the State of the Union. (She was released without charge.)
“Our nation lacks rules and accountability around what a person claiming to be law enforcement can do to another human being, and I am not afraid to keep working on this problem even after ICE is gone,” Rahman said in February.
But though ICE and DHS are facing billions of dollars in potential tort claims, the process is likely to be slow. Filing a tort claim, Gingold said, is relatively simple: you start by filling out a form. “What’s required is not much: you just need to be able to say, this is the harm that happened.” Then, the agency has six months to agree to pay, or contest your claim. Often, though, they ignore tort claims altogether, Gingold said. If that six-month clock runs out, then a person harmed by an ICE agent would have the opportunity to take the agency to court.
“If the agency gets enough of these and understands that treating people inhumanely, ignoring disability, targeting people for their race is costly, that can lead to changes in how they function,” Gingold said.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson referred to Rahman as an “agitator” who impeded law enforcement operations “Any claim she was denied medical care is FALSE and just another smear leading to a 1,300% increase in assaults and 3,300% increase in vehicular attacks,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.
Reporter Amanda Moore was on the ground and captured video footage of officers forcefully removing Rahman from her vehicle during the arrest.
Update, April 16: This article has been updated to include comment from the Department of Homeland Security.
