UnitedHealth’s Response To People Cheering Their CEO’s Murder: Silence The Critics

Free Speech

from the murder-the-truth dept

When your CEO gets murdered and half the internet celebrates, most companies might pause and ask “why do so many people hate us?”

But UnitedHealth had a different response: hire more lawyers to silence the critics.

The New York Times has an excellent piece by David Enrich detailing UnitedHealth’s ridiculously aggressive campaign to quiet critics through legal threats and takedown demands. The company has targeted journalists, filmmakers, doctors, and activists—all while invoking Brian Thompson’s murder as justification for why criticism of their practices amounts to inciting violence.

In early January, Dr. Elisabeth Potter, a plastic surgeon in Austin, Texas, posted a self-made video on TikTok and Instagram that described how she had interrupted breast-reconstruction surgery to respond to a phone call from UnitedHealth about whether the insurer would cover a patient’s stay at a hospital. The call had come to the operating room’s phone line, leading her to believe it was urgent.

“Insurance is out of control,” Dr. Potter said in the video. “I have no other words.”

The short video was viewed millions of times and attracted hundreds of thousands of “likes” on social media.

About a week later, Dr. Potter received a six-page letter from the law firm Clare Locke, which UnitedHealth had retained as “defamation counsel.” The letter claimed that she had distorted the circumstances of the phone call and that her video was libelous. It noted that some commenters were responding to her posts by celebrating Mr. Thompson’s murder. The letter demanded that she retract her video and apologize.

Let’s review: UnitedHealth’s CEO gets murdered. The internet celebrates. A normal company might think, “Hmm, why do so many people hate us? Maybe we should examine our practices.” But UnitedHealth had a different idea: “The real problem isn’t that we interrupt surgeries of people already under anesthesia with phone calls about insurance coverage—it’s that people are allowed to talk about us interrupting surgeries with phone calls about insurance coverage.”

The weaponization of Thompson’s murder is particularly cynical. Rather than reflecting on why so many Americans felt schadenfreude when a health insurance executive was killed, UnitedHealth is turning the tragedy into a legal cudgel. They’re claiming that harsh criticism of their business practices—like denying coverage or making doctors interrupt surgery to get approval—somehow constitutes a “call to violence.”

But the Dr. Potter case gets even more instructive when you look at what happened next:

She had recently opened her own surgery center and had hired a consultant to help persuade UnitedHealth and other insurers to classify it as an in-network provider. Winning that designation was essential to Dr. Potter’s business plan.

Then Dr. Potter’s video went viral, and UnitedHealth stopped responding to inquiries from her representative, she said.

Blocking her surgery center from taking UnitedHealth patients because she made a video criticizing the way they handled a previous situation is extremely petty.

The fact that UnitedHealth hired Clare Locke should tell you all you need to know about this. We’ve written about them many times, including how they proudly promote how their threat letters get the media to kill stories.

This campaign to silence critics apparently predates the murder but ramped up significantly afterward. Before Thompson’s death, UnitedHealth was already threatening small local newspapers and demanding they destroy audio recordings. But post-murder, the company has gone scorched earth: suing The Guardian over investigative reporting, getting documentaries removed from Amazon Prime and Vimeo, and, as highlighted above, threatening a doctor for a viral video.

In one example the operators of a small chain of pharmacies in Wisconsin created a docuseries to call out the damaging practices of pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), including Optum Rx, owned by UnitedHealth. And then:

On May 21, Clare Locke wrote again to Amazon’s lawyers. The 16-page letter claimed that the docuseries “spreads a vociferous and false screed in a thinly-veiled call to violence for anyone who is dissatisfied with the American health care system. Recent history and Brian Thompson’s murder demonstrates the devastating and irreversible consequences of ginning up such hatred with false claims designed to inspire violence.”

The letter said the video violated Amazon’s terms of service and should be removed, in part because it “doxxed our clients’ physical address” by showing a street sign for Optum Way in Minnesota.

Within days, the video — which had no more than a few hundred views — had been removed from Prime Video.

[….]

In early June, Ms. Strause received an email from Vimeo, where “Modern Medical Mafia” had also been available for streaming.

“This content was removed due to a complaint Vimeo received concerning defamation,” the email said. “Vimeo is not able to evaluate the truth or falsity of such a claim, and it asks that you resolve the dispute directly with the complainants, Optum Rx and UnitedHealth Group.”

At least for now their docuseries remains available on YouTube, but who knows for how long.

The chilling effect is real. The Guardian postponed publishing a second investigation into the company after UnitedHealth sued over their first piece—filed conveniently the day before the second article was scheduled to run, and right after The Guardian had informed UnitedHealth that it intended to run its new investigation.

Meanwhile, you know how “free speech” absolutists so frequently seem to love to silence their critics? Well, sometimes that appetite for censorship comes back to bite them.

Take Bill Ackman. Last year, he hired Clare Locke to send a ridiculously pathetic threat to Business Insider over reporting on his wife’s alleged plagiarism. He was so pleased with their work that he publicly called Clare Locke “the rock stars of defamation law” and said “they should be your first call” if you face similar criticism.

Clare Locke, it turns out, took that endorsement very seriously. When Ackman shared Dr. Potter’s viral video and suggested investors should bet against UnitedHealth’s stock, guess who came calling?

One of the many people who shared Dr. Potter’s video was the billionaire investor Bill Ackman, who has nearly two million followers on X and regularly wades into controversies. In a post accompanying the video, he suggested that investors should bet against UnitedHealth’s stock and that the Securities and Exchange Commission should investigate the company. The post brought even more attention to Dr. Potter’s video.

Mr. Ackman soon heard from Clare Locke. He already knew the firm. He and his wife, Neri Oxman, had hired Clare Locke to threaten Business Insider after it reported in 2024 that she had plagiarized parts of her doctoral dissertation. (They did not end up suing.)

Now, though, the roles were reversed. One of the firm’s co-founders called an aide to Mr. Ackman and told him that the video included falsehoods. And UnitedHealth contacted the S.E.C. to complain that Mr. Ackman was trying to drive down the company’s stock price.

Calling the SEC to claim that retweeting a video of a surgeon who posted a video about a ridiculous situation caused by UnitedHealth is an attempt to manipulate the stock price is… quite a choice.

Think about the logic here for a moment. UnitedHealth’s business model appears to involve taking people’s money for health insurance and then finding creative ways not to pay for their healthcare. When people point this out—sometimes rudely, granted—UnitedHealth responds by claiming that the real violence is not the denial of medical care to sick people, but rather the people being rude about it on the internet.

It’s true Trumpism: always play the victim.

In Enrich’s article, UnitedHealth spokesperson Eric Hausman defended the campaign by saying “the truth matters” and there’s a difference between criticism and “irresponsibly omitting facts.” But their targets aren’t making things up—they’re documenting real experiences with the company’s practices, often with receipts.

The company’s own annual report reveals the likely real motivation: “Negative publicity may adversely affect our stock price, damage our reputation and expose us to unexpected or unwarranted regulatory scrutiny.” Their stock is down 40% over the past year, and they face multiple federal investigations into potential Medicare fraud and antitrust violations. But rather than addressing the underlying issues that generate negative coverage, UnitedHealth has chosen to wage war on the coverage itself—a strategy that probably isn’t inspiring much investor confidence either.

Of course, the best way to avoid “negative publicity” is to… be better? To maybe take stock of your practices and look at why you’re getting so much bad press.

But that’s not UnitedHealth’s style apparently.

It reveals a deep-seated problem at the company. The management team appears to view the real problem not as their harmful practices, but as people talking about those practices. That’s not a sustainable approach to crisis management—it’s an admission that they can’t defend their actions on the merits.

David Enrich, who wrote the Times piece, explored these tactics extensively in his book Murder the Truth—about the growing industry of lawyers who specialize in using legal threats to silence criticism (including large portions of the book discussing Clare Locke). You may recall that we interviewed him about the book on the Techdirt podcast earlier this year. The title perfectly captures UnitedHealth’s approach: rather than confronting the truth about why their CEO’s murder was met with celebration, they’re trying to murder the truth through legal intimidation.

This approach might silence some critics in the short term, but it won’t change the underlying reality that they act as though their business model depends on denying care to people who need it. And every legal threat just reinforces the public perception that UnitedHealth would rather attack critics than fix the problems critics are highlighting.

If UnitedHealth really wanted to address the problem, they’d focus on being better, not on silencing the people pointing out how bad they are.

Filed Under: bill ackman, censorship, david enrich, defamation, journalism, silencing critics, threats
Companies: clare locke, unitedhealthcare