Scandal-Plagued Celebrity Midwife Strikes Back In Court
LatestCelebrity midwife Cara Muhlhahn—made famous by Ricki Lake’s documentary The Business Of Being Born—is suing New York magazine for $1 million for libel, we’ve learned. This comes as Muhlhahn fields her own malpractice lawsuit, after a stillborn birth.
Muhlhahn, who is based in New York, is alleging that Andrew Goldman’s March 2009 New York piece, “Extreme Birth,” “contained statements that were fabricated or based on unverified sources,” stemming from “actual malice,” and that it “set forth statements so inherently improbably that only a reckless person would have published them.” Last week, New York filed a motion to dismiss the claim, saying that Muhlhahn “mistakes, as defamation, divergent opinion in medical controversy… She also disregards that she has admitted many of those alleged ‘facts’ in her own voice, recorded or written.”
Muhlhahn, the author of Labor Of Love, is one of the most visible proponents of midwife-assisted home birth. The charismatic Muhlhahn became a star after she was featured in The Business Of Being Born in 2008, which mainstreamed the long-simmering debate over conventional medicine’s practices around childbearing and made the case for midwives. After the movie, Muhlhahn told New York‘s Andrew Goldman, she saw herself as having a “Moses responsibility” to spread the word about home births.
It’s these parts of the piece in particular that Muhlhahn calls out in her case against New York, with a list of “facts” she calls false — quoted verbatim from the story, but without further indication of how or why they are allegedly false. In its response, New York asks for either a dismissal or a summary judgment against Muhlhahn, and provides transcripts showing that she herself said, either in her conversations with Goldman or elsewhere, all of the statements alleged to be false. (Full text of both filings is available below.)