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The tip arrived in late May: A giant health care company had dispatched a prominent law firm to pressure Amazon to remove an obscure documentary from its video-streaming platform.
This was right in my wheelhouse. I had spent the past few years writing for The New York Times about how rich and powerful people and companies often tried to stop journalists, activists and everyday citizens from scrutinizing or criticizing them. The tactics included sending strongly worded lawyer letters and, in one case, vandalizing journalists’ homes. It was a long-running trend that had accelerated during the Trump era.
One of the focal points of my reporting had been the law firm Clare Locke, a small but ferocious purveyor of threats and lawsuits against news outlets and their sources. The firm’s website boasts of its lawyers’ reputation as “media assassins.”
Now, the tipster informed me, Clare Locke was working on behalf of UnitedHealth Group, a sprawling health care conglomerate, to get Amazon to remove a video that harshly criticized one of UnitedHealth’s subsidiaries.
I had been familiar with UnitedHealth, whose coverage decisions and billing practices have been the subject of investigative reporting by numerous news outlets. Last year, I edited a series of articles about drug industry middlemen known as pharmacy benefit managers, or P.B.M.s. One of the largest P.B.M.s is a subsidiary of UnitedHealth, and the company had not been happy about our coverage. That June, I had a long but civil phone conversation with a UnitedHealth spokesman. No lawyers were involved.
After that, however, the company’s fortunes deteriorated. It was under federal investigation for potential Medicare fraud. Its stock price was sinking. And in December, the chief executive of UnitedHealth’s insurance division was gunned down on his way into a Manhattan hotel. The company’s heightened sensitivity was perhaps understandable.
Even so, I was surprised that it would go to the trouble of writing a 16-page letter complaining about a random video that had been uploaded to Amazon’s streaming service. And I was even more intrigued when, a few days after I got the tip, the video, titled “Modern Medical Mafia,” vanished from the platform.
I contacted Mary Strause, the filmmaker in Wisconsin who had created the video. She told me that it hadn’t only disappeared from Amazon. Another streaming platform, Vimeo, had removed it, too. She shared with me the email she’d received from Vimeo, which said it had taken down the video after UnitedHealth complained that it was defamatory. (The video remains available on YouTube.)
In early June, UnitedHealth went to court in Delaware to sue The Guardian for defamation for a recent article. Such lawsuits are hardly unheard-of, but here was another example of how the health care company and its law firm were playing hardball.
I got in touch with Dr. Elisabeth Potter, a surgeon in Austin, Texas, who had posted a TikTok video in January about her negative experience with UnitedHealth. Clare Locke had gone after her as well, saying her video misrepresented facts. She refused the firm’s demands to retract, and apologize for, her video. She told me that after her video spread widely online, UnitedHealth cut off negotiations to designate her surgery center as an in-network provider for the insurer’s patients. (UnitedHealth said it had decided not to classify her center as in-network before she posted her video.) Now she was worried that she might have to close her practice.
I tracked down a few other examples of UnitedHealth and its lawyers browbeating journalists and critics. Some of what I found was pretty standard fare, although it struck me as noteworthy that UnitedHealth had threatened to seek a court injunction against a local journalist in the New York suburbs.
Several days before I finished my article, which was published by The Times on Saturday, I reached out to UnitedHealth and Clare Locke to discuss what I had learned and to ask for their response.
A UnitedHealth spokesman sent me a two-sentence statement: “The truth matters, and there’s a big difference between ‘criticism’ and irresponsibly omitting facts and context. When others get it wrong, we have an obligation to our customers, employees and other stakeholders to correct the record, including by making our case in court when necessary.”
Lawyers at Clare Locke didn’t respond.
David Enrich is a deputy investigations editor for The Times. He writes about law and business.
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