NBCUniversal is settling a $30 million defamation lawsuit brought by a doctor at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center, Mahendra Amin, after MSNBC’s biggest stars aired false accusations that he was a sinister figure known as “the uterus collector” who performed mass, unnecessary hysterectomies on migrant women. 

A court filing on Friday said that NBCUniversal and Dr. Amin, had reached a settlement of his defamation lawsuit. 

The terms of the deal were not immediately clear as the filing said the parties were “diligently working” on the settlement agreement, and they “expect to effectuate the settlement in the next several weeks.

Mr. Amin became the subject of  what a judge ruled were “verifiably false” statements by some of MSNBC’s top talent, such as Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes, after NBC News’ “immigration reporter,” Jacob Soboroff,  interviewed in 2020 a disgruntled nurse who’d filed a whistleblower report about the ICE detention facility. 

The nurse, Dawn Wooten, who worked at the facility, claimed Dr. Amin had performed “mass hysterectomies” that were often botched. She also said he was known as the “uterus collector.”

Mr. Soboroff, son of the former Los Angeles Police Department Commissioner Steve Soboroff, published an article on NBCNews.com on September 15, 2020. The report, written with  two other NBC News reporters, Julia Ainsley and Daniella Silva, claimed that the “uterus collector” moniker was whispered fearfully by female detainees at the facility. In an interview with the network, Ms. Wooten claimed that a migrant asked her if the doctor was “collecting all of our uteruses.”

The discovery process in Dr. Amin’s lawsuit disclosed internal communications at NBC News, which inside 30 Rockefeller Plaza works in concert with MSNBC, despite claiming to the public that they are separate operations. Emails and texts handed over to Dr. Amin’s legal team, along with statements made in depositions, disclosed that  NBC News’ editorial standards department had serious concerns about the veracity of the story — yet allowed it to be published.

Text messages show Mr. Soboroff expressing “mixed feelings” about Ms. Wooten’s story, and Ms. Ainsley questioning the number of procedures that were actually performed. Then, as the report was being turned into a video report to be aired on  MSNBC (NBC News’ television platforms such as “Today” and “Nightly News” appear to have passed), MSNBC’s powerful, left-wing hosts themselves  appeared to question the accuracy of Ms. Wooten’s claims before they decided to go forward with the story. 

Mr. Hayes said that, at first, he “discounted the whole thing.” However, on the evening of September 15, he interviewed Ms. Wooten for a segment titled, “ICE whistleblower speaks out, alleges mass hysterectomies performed on migrant women.”

Ms. Maddow also aired a segment about the allegation on her show. She quoted  a detainee who said, “I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp.”

“The nurse says she and her fellow nurses, quote, questioned among ourselves like goodness he’s taking everybody’s stuff out that’s his specialty, he’s the uterus collector … He’s taking all their uteruses out or he’s taking their tubes out,” Ms. Maddow added on her program. 

On September 16, the day after MSNBC aired the false claims, the deputy director of NBCUniversal’s standards unit, Chris Scholl, had a conference call with Mr. Hayes.

“We just don’t know if any of this is true,” Mr. Scholl said of the story. He also said Mr. Amin “has a pretty clean record” and that Ms. Wooten “has no direct knowledge of this stuff.”

In an email, Mr. Scholl said of the NBCNews.com article, “Essentially, it boils down to a single source — with an agenda — telling us things we have no basis to believe are true.”

The reporting by NBC and MSNBC resulted in a Senate investigation of the allegations. 

However, just days after Ms. Wooten’s complaint was made public, the allegations were already falling apart. The Associated Press reported on September 18 that it “did not find evidence of mass hysterectomies as alleged in a widely shared complaint filed by a nurse at the detention center … a lawyer who helped file the complaint said she never spoke to any women who had hysterectomies.”

The Senate investigation also did not find evidence to support the claim of “mass hysterectomies.” It did find evidence of two procedures that were performed that were deemed to be medically necessary. 

Dr. Amin sued MSNBC for defamation in 2021. His lawyer, Scott Grubman, told the New York Post, “[As] an immigrant himself, the allegation that he would take advantage of ICE detainees is ludicrous.”

The uterus collector allegations were widely aired across different MSNBC programs. Dr. Amin said false statements were made about him six times on Nicolle Wallace’s show, seven times on Mr. Hayes’, and 10 times on Ms. Maddow’s program. 

The judge presiding over the case, Lisa Godbey Wood, ruled in June 2024, “In the end, we are left with this: NBC investigated the whistleblower letter’s accusations; that investigation did not corroborate the accusations and even undermined some; NBC republished the letter’s accusations anyway.”

She also said the trio of left-wing anchors made a total of 39 “verifiably false” statements about Mr. Amin. 

She ordered a trial to be conducted to determine if MSNBC engaged in “actual malice,” the high bar needed to hold someone liable for defamation. The trial for the defamation case was scheduled to begin in April. 

NBCUniversal did not respond to the Sun’s request for comment.

It is rare for defamation cases against large media companies to make it to trial. Most cases, if they  are not thrown out, are settled before the trial begins. 

While the bar is high for a plaintiff to prove defamation in court, NBC was facing an increasingly hostile landscape for national news organizations. Plaintiffs have been filing their cases in Southern courts, where judges and juries tend to be less sympathetic to the liberal reporters and editors and news producers from New York City.

In January, CNN was found liable for defaming Navy veteran Zachary Young after it aired a segment that implied he was operating on the black market in Afghanistan and preying on desperate Afghans who were trying to flee the country.

The case went to trial, and Mr. Young’s attorneys showed CNN’s journalists repeatedly disregarded evidence that refuted the main thrust of their allegations and aired the segment anyway.

A jury in Florida awarded Mr. Young $4 million for lost earnings and $1 million for personal damages. Before the jury could determine punitive damages, which would have been meant to punish CNN and act as a deterrent for other news outlets to avoid similar behavior, CNN and Mr. Young agreed to settle for an undisclosed amount.  

In December, ABC News settled with Mr. Trump for $16 million after he sued them in a Florida court over comments made on ABC’s air by George Stephanopoulos, the former Clinton operative, who repeatedly made the false statement that Mr. Trump had been “found liable for rape” (in fact, Mr. Trump was found liable for “sexual abuse” in the case of E. Jean Carroll, a sex columnist who says Mr. Trump raped her in a dressing room on the lingerie floor of Bergdorf Goodman, the upscale Manhattan department store).

Mr. Trump is also suing CBS News, also in Florida,  for seeking to alter the election by selectively editing an interview Vice President Harris did with “60 Minutes” in October. Even though CBS News claims the suit is meritless, CBS’s parent company, Paramount, is reportedly seriously considering settling the suit, in part to clear the road for the acquisition of Paramount by the son of the billionaire Larry Ellison.

Further, the board that awards the prestigious Pulitzer Prizes is also being sued in Florida by Mr. Trump for giving the award to the New York Times and Washington  Post for their reporting on the 2016 Trump campaign’s connections to Russia. The case has now entered the discovery phase.

In 2021, NBCUniversal settled a defamation lawsuit brought by a former Catholic school student, Nicholas Sandmann, over the media conglomerate’s properties’ coverage of an encounter he had with a Native American protester at Washington, D.C.

At the time of the incident, Mr. Sandmann was 16 years old and was confronted by a Native American protester. Several commentators cast Mr. Sandmann, who was wearing a MAGA hat, as the aggressor and claimed that the incident showed he was engaged in an act of “white supremacy.” His lawsuit alleges that NBCUniversal “created a false narrative by portraying the ‘confrontation’ as a ‘hate crime’ committed by Nicholas.”

However, additional footage of the encounter showed that Mr. Sandmann and the group of students with him had been accosted by a group of Black Hebrew Israelites. The footage also showed that the Native American protester, Nathan Phillips, awkwardly marched up to the students, banging a drum, debunking the narrative that Mr. Sandmann and his fellow students had gone out of their way to accost and mock Mr. Phillips in some demonstration of “white supremacy.”