A database of news and information about people with disabilities and disability issues...
Copyright statement: Unless otherwise stated, all posts on this blog continue to be the property of the original author/publication/Web site, which can be found via the link at the beginning of each post.
More than a year before she allegedly murdered her son with an overdose of pills, millionaire Gigi Jordan was diagnosed with Munchausen by proxy syndrome for "medical abuse" of the boy, prosecutors revealed March 19.
The mental illness causes parents to invent ailments for a young child or make them sick - and then seek treatment for then.
"Professionals have diagnosed her as [having] Munchausen syndrome by proxy," Assistant District Attorney Kerry O'Connell said in court.
"She was seeking unnecessary treatment of her child," O'Connell said, adding that hospital staffers saw that as "medical abuse."
She provided no other details, including what illness Jordan claimed afflicted 8-year-old Jude Mirra (pictured), who was also autistic.
The discussion came up during a hearing on whether Jordan should be released on $5 million bail from a hospital jail ward and sent to a psychiatric hospital or allowed to live in her Trump International condo under 24-hour guard.
Prosecutors said that aside from the Munchausen's diagnosis in 2008, "we don't have any idea what her mental illness is."
"You're being asked to buy a pig in a poke," O'Connell told Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Charles Solomon.
Defense lawyer Gerald Shargel says a psychiatric report from Elmhurst Hospital, where Jordan is being held, isn't ready yet.
But he says the fact that she tried to commit suicide when she killed her son Feb. 5 at the Peninsula hotel is proof she's sick in the head.
He dismissed the prosecution's claim of a Munchausen diagnosis, but acknowledged that his client "traveled through this country from hospital to hospital" hoping to find a cure for autism.
Outside court, Shargel said that during an involuntary mental-ward commitment in Wyoming in 2008, his client was initially found to be suffering from the syndrome - but then it was withdrawn.
"That diagnosis wasn't found, she was released." he said, adding that prosecutors "are cherry picking the medical records."
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From the NY Daily News:
