Attorney Scott Pilutik wrestles with the news of the day, from a lawyerly perspective…
[Regarding this story: Why You Might Not Want to Believe Michael Baden, Celebrity Pathologist, on Epstein’s Death]
Seeing as Medical-Examiner-to-the-Stars Michael Baden is doing the TV lecture circuit this morning about the death of Jeffrey Epstein, I’ll note that Baden is a very unreliable source for such opinions, having amply demonstrated an historical bias toward opinions that would either guarantee him money or TV interviews. Here, being the dissenting opinion on Epstein’s death guarantees him the latter.
It was Baden, more than anyone else, who turned Lisa McPherson’s “homicide” by the Church of Scientology into an “accident,” leading to the dropping of charges against Scientology. I helped work on the related wrongful death suit and Baden’s opinion was objectively preposterous. But it, together with a relentless harassment campaign by Scientology, helped drive the Pinellas County ME Joan Wood, to mentally break down and quit her job.
In the late 1970s Baden was just a bad medical examiner, losing two jobs in New York State, each within a year of being hired for “sloppiness,” “uncooperativeness,” and “poor judgment.” Then he moved to the private sector, performing autopsies on behalf of families (instead of the state) before fashioning himself into a TV expert on true-crime shows.
