BREAKING: Police & Nurses Conspired to Fabricate Evidence Against Brittany Watts, Suit Says

The suit fights back against pregnancy criminalization

In what may be the first lawsuit of its kind since Roe was overturned, an Ohio woman wrongfully arrested and prosecuted for her pregnancy loss is accusing her nurses of conspiring with police to fabricate evidence against her.

I know you all remember Brittany Watts, who was arrested and charged with ‘abuse of a corpse’ after miscarrying at home. Watts was put through absolute hell by prosecutors, police, local media and the hospital tasked to help her—all while being in the midst of a life-threatening medical crisis. Now, some of those tormenters are being named as defendants.

On Friday, Watts filed a suit against the city of Warren, the hospital where she was ‘treated,’ the police officer who interrogated her as she lay in a hospital bed, the doctor who denied her care, and the nurses who turned her in despite having done nothing illegal.

I’m sure you’re all thinking what I am: Good for her.

The suit details “an expectant mother’s worst nightmare,” blasting the defendants for depriving Watts of medical care and reporting her to the police when she was “most vulnerable.” She was interrogated, the suit says, while “tethered to her hospital bed with IVs.”

But it’s the claim that police conspired with hospital staff that took my breath away. Two nurses and an officer, lawyers allege, conspired to “fabricate evidence to falsely implicate” Watts in criminal conduct:

“They knowingly created reports and hospital notes that contained blatantly false information. As a result, Ms. Watts was arrested and charged with a felony: abuse of a corpse. She faced a year in prison for simply having a miscarriage at home.”

Let’s start at the beginning: Watts was 21 weeks pregnant when she sought out care at St. Joseph Warren Hospital, where she was diagnosed with a placental abruption. Despite being told that she was at risk of hemorrhage, sepsis, infertility—and even death—Watts received no care. I don’t think I need to tell you how dangerous this delay is, especially for a woman like Watts, who is Black: Maternal mortality for Black women in this country is a horror and on the rise.

Frustrated, Watts went home after eight hours of waiting. When she returned early the next morning, Watts was informed by doctors that her pregnancy wasn’t viable. They also told her that she had an infection, that her cervix was dilated, and that her life was at risk. (All of which is detailed in medical notes.)

Still, Watts received no care. The Washington Post would later report that behind-the-scenes, doctors at the religiously-affiliated hospital were debating the “ethics” of treating her—even though they understood the risks of waiting. One doctor even warned against “waiting until mom is on death’s door.”

After another 10 hours, Watts—“confused and even more devastated and scared than on the previous day”—went home. That’s where she miscarried.

What I appreciate about this suit is that it lays out the reality of pregnancy loss; her lawyers describe the toilet bowl as “a mess of tissue, blood, and blood clots.” They write that Watts understandably believed that the clots and tissue were her fetus, which she thought wasn’t intact.

“Confronted with this bloody mess, Ms. Watts did what was reasonable: she flushed the toilet. The toilet began overflowing. Ms. Watts did her best to clear the toilet, removing some of the bloody mess with a bucket.”

I cannot stress enough that this was a medical emergency: The complaint describes Watts collapsing on the floor, bleeding and in shock. That’s the condition she went back to St. Joseph in. And instead of getting empathy, understanding, and much-needed medical care, she got targeted.

The suit names two nurses, Connie Moschell and Jordan Carrino. First, Moschell contacted the hospital’s risk management department and falsely claimed that Watts had given birth to a viable baby and left it “in a bucket.” Carrino then wrote in a medical note that Watts had said she saw and touched the fetus—which was also false. Finally, Moschell called the police.

It’s bad enough that this nurse violated a patient’s medical privacy, but Moschell also told officers that Watts didn’t want her baby and that she didn’t look to see if it was alive. She also suggested there could be live baby in Watts’ home. And remember: these nurses knew that Watts had been carrying a nonviable pregnancy.

I want to pause for a moment to remind folks that this is not unusual. Organizations like Pregnancy Justice and If/When/How have published studies showing that when someone is targeted for their pregnancy outcome, it is most often health care providers who turn them in. What’s more, there’s a growing hospital-to-prison pipeline in this country—with some emergency rooms housing their own police station outposts.

So when police officer Nicholas Carney arrived at St. Joseph’s to question Watts, it should not surprise us that he met with the two nurses “to discuss their plan.” The complaint notes that even though Watts was awaiting surgery and in distress—hooked up to IVs and machines while in a hospital gown—Carney and Moschell “descended upon” the vulnerable woman and closed the door behind them.

The nurse and officer, Watts’ lawyers say, “jointly interrogated” the ill woman for nearly an hour. The pair would sometimes step out of the hospital room “to continue discussing their strategy,” and at one point included the other nurse, Carrino, in their conversations. They tasked her with getting ultrasound pictures to use in their questioning.

The pair lied to Watts, telling her she wasn’t in trouble, and refused to believe her when she explained the details of her miscarriage. “Instead, without basis, they accused her of nefarious conduct, suggesting that perhaps Ms. Watts had birthed a live baby and hidden it ‘in a cabinet,’” her lawyers write.

Carney was so attached this false version of events that Watts’ lawyers say he provided “flatly false information” in police reports—including the nurses’ lie that Watts had seen and touched her fetus and “placed it in a black bucket.” He didn’t include Watts’ statements about never seeing the fetal remains, or her belief that it wasn’t intact.

“In sum, Defendant Carney set out to present a false version of the facts to make it look like a crime had been committed: that Ms. Watts had given birth at home to a live baby and caused it to die,” the lawyers write.

As all of this was happening, by the way, police were tearing up Watts’ bathroom, looking for the fetal remains in her toilet. And while a pathologist would report that the fetus had died in utero, Carney went to Watts’ home about two weeks later to handcuff and arrest her.

You all know what happened next: Local media got ahold of the case, reporting Brittany’s pregnancy loss as a crime story. Using only police reports and prosecutor’s version of what happened, headlines claimed that a woman had killed a newborn by shoving it down a toilet. The sensationalized coverage was crafted to make Watts seem callous—a tactic we’ve seen in other criminalization cases.

Watts also had her home address and phone number published online, and started getting unsolicited phone calls. Reporters were hounding her.

That’s to say nothing of the prosecution–a case built on fabricated ‘evidence.’ (Carney even withheld information from the prosecutors and defense lawyers: a recording of his interrogation of Watts.)

And while actual evidence provided showed that Watts had suffered a pregnancy loss and that her fetus had already died before she miscarried, prosecutors made clear that they simply didn’t care. An assistant prosecutor, for example, argued that the issue wasn’t what caused the miscarriage, but that the fetus “was large enough to clog up a toilet, left in that toilet and she went on [with] her day.”

Simply put: They didn’t think she was upset enough. This mirrors what happened in the hospital; I reported last year that medical staff started to be suspicious of Watts after she had the temerity to use the word ‘abortion.’ These people wanted to believe that Brittany didn’t want her pregnancy, and that she was callous over its loss—a belief likely bolstered by racism.

Even though a grand jury declined to indict Watts, the damage was very much done. The complaint points out the pain, suffering, public humiliation, and reputational harm she suffered. That’s to say nothing of medical danger the hospital put Watts in: by delaying and denying her care, the religious institution endangered her life. (The complaint includes an affidavit from an OBGYN certifying that the doctor who treated Watts “breached the standard of care” by not offering her an abortion, and the suit alleges that the OBGYN made disparaging comments about her patient.)

In the time since Watts was cleared of the bogus charges, we’ve seen other women targeted in much the same way: A Georgia woman was questioned by police over her miscarriage last year, for example, and just last week a woman in Texas was arrested for ‘abuse of a corpse’ after losing her pregnancy in a public restroom. And so a case like this—a suit that proactively seeks to hold people accountable for the torment they put an innocent woman through—is important.

Karen Thompson, legal director of Pregnancy Justice, tells me “I’m happy that she is trying to bring accountability for destroying people's lives."

“Ms. Watts' lawsuit is the exactly right response to those who would use the criminal legal system to punish pregnant people for the nonexistent crime of experiencing a miscarriage.”

After all, we want zealous prosecutors, nurses, police officers, and others to think twice before targeting someone over their pregnancy loss. Maybe a splashy and expensive suit can help make that happen.

As Watts’ lawyers note, the defendants “saw to it that she would face criminal charges for having an experience shared by hundreds of thousands of women every year.” Pregnancy loss is normal, criminalizing it is not.

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A note from Jessica:

You may remember that Abortion, Every Day brought Brittany Watts’ story to a national audience. After I covered her story in the newsletter and on TikTok—with a video that got over 1.5 million views and nearly 250,000 likes—Watts’ case became a viral example of Republican cruelty.

It wasn’t just the newsletter’s reach that mattered here: AED provided vital context about how criminalization works, and the way women like Watts are targeted. That background and framing ensured that by the time the case hit national media, the antagonism of the original local coverage had largely been replaced with facts and sympathy.

That’s why the work we’re doing here is so important—and why your support matters now more than ever. AED doesn’t have the support of big mainstream outlets, so if you appreciate independent feminist media consider signing up for a paid subscription, gifting one, or donating to AED directly.