A woman has filed a $25,000 (£14,910) lawsuit against the University of Cincinnati Medical Center and two of its employees after her STI test results were screengrabbed and posted to a Facebook page called ‘Team No Hoes’, which has more than 2,000 members. One of the employees she’s suing? Her ex-boyfriend. The photo received hateful comments such as ‘slut’ and ‘hoe’. She’s also had people call her on her home phone to abuse her. Creative, those trolls…
She alleges that the three employees put the screengrab of her test results – which they only had access to because of their jobs – onto the group’s page, which totally flies in the face of her records being ‘private’.
‘She was absolutely devastated. That is the most private of private medical information that was posted on Facebook and went out to a group on Facebook that had a huge dissemination,’ her lawyer Mike Allen told WLWT News.
The ex-boyfriend was the mastermind behind the plot, she claims. We're not going to name him, as it might identify her, and we think she's had enough humiliation without having to have her syphilis written about from another continent. Her lawsuit blames the UC Medical Center for not supervising its employees and for not identifying the third employee who still has her records.
As well as the money, she wants a written promise this will never happen again. The hospital has refused to comment, but according to Atlanta Daily World, the CEO Lee Ann Liska sent an email to all the employees telling them it is in violation of federal medical privacy laws to leak private information about clients (yep, in America, they’re clients – not patients).
Let’s hope, at the very least, the hospital managed to clear up her syphilis before she launched the lawsuit…
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
Picture: Eylul Aslan
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.