Federal law enforcement agents on Thursday arrested a woman for allegedly making a false bomb threat against Boston Children’s Hospital last month.
According to the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney’s Office, the pediatric hospital on Aug. 30 received a call, in which the caller told the operator, “There is a bomb on the way to the hospital, you better evacuate everybody, you sickos.” The hospital and surrounding area was placed under lockdown over the call. A bomb squad was also dispatched, but found no explosive device at the facility.
Federal investigators traced the call back to Catherine Leavy, a 37-year-old resident of Westfield, Massachusetts. They said they obtained a warrant, arrested Leavy at her home without incident, and took away the phone she allegedly used to make the threat.
Leavy was charged with one count of willfully making a false bomb threat, an offense punishable by up to five years in federal prison.
In an Aug. 17 statement, Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Rachael S. Rollins denounced the hostility directed at the hospital, which offers “surgical care of transgender patients” at its Center of Gender Surgery.
“I want to make it clear that the Department of Justice will ensure equal protection of transgender people under the law,” she said. “While free speech is indeed the cornerstone of our great nation, fear, intimidation and threats are not. I will not sit idly by and allow hate-based criminal activity to continue in our District.”
Controversy of Transgender Surgery
Boston Children’s Hospital claimed to have become the receiving end of a “large volume” of hostile messages because of a promotional video about what it describes as “transgender care.”
In the video, accompanied by upbeat background music, pediatric gynecologist Frances Grimstad explains the process of a “gender-affirming hysterectomy.” Specifically, hysterectomy involves the removal of much of one’s female reproductive system, including the uterus, cervix, fallopian tubes, and sometimes the ovaries.
The video sparked online outrage, as many people found it highly inappropriate that a children’s hospital would promote, potentially to minors, irreversible procedures that sterilize the patient.
In response to the backlash, the hospital removed the video from its official YouTube channel, insisting that it “does not—and will not—perform a hysterectomy as part of gender-affirming care on a patient under the age of 18.”
“For a hysterectomy performed as part of gender affirming care, Boston Children’s requires a patient to be capable of consenting for themselves. Age 18 is used to reflect the standard age of majority for medical decision-making,” the hospital stated, alleging that its employees have come under “threat of violence” fueled by “misinformation” and “lack of understanding and respect” for transgender people.
“We condemn these attacks in the strongest possible terms, and we reject the false narrative upon which they are based,” it added.
A $20,000 Reward, Unclaimed
In the wake of the bomb threat, progressive activists and news outlets tried to blame it on Twitter account Libs of TikTok, which shared a 33-second clip of the removed video and claimed that the hospital offered such surgery to “young girls.”
However, Libs of TikTok openly condemned the bomb threat and teamed up with Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon to offer a $20,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the suspect.
“The Washington Post, Axios, Forbes, NBC, and the Boston Herald all wrote articles blaming me and other ‘ring-wing’ outlets for the bomb threat,” Chaya Raichik, the woman behind the popular Twitter account, wrote in a blog post. She added that she reached out to each reporter and told them about the cash reward, in the hope that they would help spread the word by updating their reports or writing new ones. None of those reporters did.
Raichik said this shows how mainstream media care more about reinforcing their preferred political narrative than reporting the facts.
“Instead of helping us find the person responsible for the threat, activists-masquerading-as-journalists continue to maintain that Boston Children’s Hospital is ‘under siege’ from ‘far-right activists’ because I spread ‘misinformation’ with the intent to incite violence,” she wrote.
“They never investigated to try and find out why hospitals are saying they perform gender-affirming surgeries on healthy minors, and they never investigated whether a bomb threat actually occurred. They just took the hospital’s desperate PR spin at face value, and dropped their interest in the bomb threat story as soon as it had served its purpose.”
