Man Records Doctors Insulting Him During His Own Colonoscopy; Shock, Anger and Lawsuit Follow.
[By Bruce Hennes] Restaurant workers putting disgusting substances in customer’s food. Politicians seeking and accepting favors. Employees on disability doing yard work. Police officers committing crimes.
Every day, a new shocking story on Twitter, another Facebook “caught on tape,” a “you won’t believe what the camera saw” on YouTube.
Everyone you know now carries a smartphone with a video camera and audio recording app allowing them to easily upload audio and video to Facebook, YouTube and CNN and more. With free audio apps, just hit “record,” stick the cell phone in your breast pocket or purse, march into the office of your boss, the elementary school principal or the plant manager and get them to say something to you that they’d never say in public and WHAMMO, you’ve got it on tape. The same’s true for phone calls.
Putting aside the legality of making that recording (most states require only that YOU know you’re making the recording; other states require the knowledge and consent of both parties), once it’s on tape, it’s tough to argue the evidence.
C’mon folks. Doesn’t everyone know we live in a digital world?
Lament the end of saying what you want, even in private. Call it “political correctness,” if you will. It doesn’t matter. The reality is that words do have meaning, and words can hurt (despite the old “sticks and stones” schoolyard refrain).
We constantly tell our clients this: If you don’t want to see or hear it on YouTube, don’t say it, because there’s no spinning your way out of bad behavior.
A couple of doctors in Virginia learned this the hard way. Their patient, about to be sedated for a colonoscopy, hit RECORD on his smartphone before the start of the procedure so he could review what the doctors told him after waking up (short-term amnesia is very common after colonoscopy).
The doctors cruelly insulted the man during the procedure. The Washington Post reported that at one point, the anesthesiologist told the unconscious patient “after five minutes of talking to you in pre-op, I wanted to punch you in the face.” Unbeknownst to the doctors, their vicious commentary in the operating room was recorded, including a discussion of avoiding the man after the colonoscopy, instructing an assistant to lie to him, and then placing a false diagnosis on his chart. The net result? A half-million dollar judgment against the doctors for defamation and medical malpractice.
You can read the whole Washington Post story – and listen to the actual audiotape – here.
We live in a digital world, where terabytes of data are created every hour. And very little of that data is erased. Even if you think you know how to wipe your cell phone or your computer’s hard drive of all data, files you think are gone forever can sometimes be restored. And nowadays, with so much data backed up in the cloud, you may not even know where your data is stored.
Your reputation is fragile and you can be its worst enemy. Digital recording devices and social media supercharge our gaffes and make them available forever, easily searched for and retrieved; the shame re-lived again and again.
If that’s an abrogation of your First Amendment rights, you can still take refuge in the Fifth Amendment – and think more carefully every time you’re about to speak so you don’t incriminate yourself in the Court of Public Opinion.
Your reputation may depend on it.