The Account That Called In the Bomb Threats
In 2022 a large social-media account amplified false claims that U.S. children's hospitals were sterilizing minors. Within days those hospitals were fielding bomb and death threats, forcing at least one lockdown as clinicians were harassed.
On the afternoon of Aug. 30, 2022, a caller told Boston Children's Hospital that an attack was imminent. “There is a bomb on the way to the hospital. You better evacuate everybody, you sickos,” the caller said, according to a federal complaint described by CBS News. The hospital was locked down and multiple agencies responded; no bomb was found.
The threat did not arrive out of nowhere. For weeks, doctors and children's hospitals across the United States had been the target of harassment and death threats over the care they provide to transgender young people, much of it traced to a single account, NPR reported. The account, Libs of TikTok, run by a Brooklyn woman named Chaya Raichik, had 1.3 million followers on Twitter, its largest platform, NPR said.
A false claim, widely amplified
The campaign centered on the false claim that hospitals were performing gender-affirming hysterectomies on minors. After Libs of TikTok circulated a video from Boston Children's, the hospital said it “does not — and will not — perform a hysterectomy as part of gender-affirming care” on patients under 18, according to Forbes. Children's National Hospital in Washington, targeted over a similar recording, told NPR: “The information in the recording is not accurate. We do not and have never performed gender-affirming hysterectomies for anyone under the age of 18.”
The harassment was not confined to two hospitals. Children's hospitals in Boston, Seattle, Chicago and Portland, Oregon, were also targeted, NPR reported. Dr. Angela Kade Goepferd of Children's Minnesota told the network that misinformation had recast careful, team-based care as something sinister. “People have misperceptions that we're doing surgery on young kids,” Goepferd said. “The fact that somewhere the message has gotten through that it's okay to attack physicians, pediatricians, children's hospitals in this way is just a really disturbing societal trend.”
From posts to a lockdown
Researchers who study online harassment describe a recognizable pattern in which viral falsehoods precede real-world danger. “The online threat escalates very quickly into offline violence when we start to see these patterns of attack,” Joan Donovan, then of Harvard's Shorenstein Center, told NPR. Ari Drennen of Media Matters for America told the network the account “has been a major actor in driving a lot of the harassment campaigns that we've seen over the past year.”
The Boston bomb threat forced exactly that escalation. Boston police secured the hospital perimeter and a bomb squad searched the grounds before determining there was no device, Forbes reported. “Bomb hoaxes cause fear, panic and a diversion of resources that have a real impact on our communities,” U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins said, according to CBS News.
An arrest, and a limit of the law
Investigators traced the call to a phone account belonging to Catherine Leavy, 37, of Westfield, Massachusetts, who was arrested weeks later and charged with making a false bomb threat, GBH reported, citing The Associated Press. She later pleaded guilty and, on July 18, 2024, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Leo T. Sorokin to three years' probation, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
The prosecution reached the person who dialed the phone, not the mechanics that carried a false claim to millions. That gap — between the individual who acts and the online machinery that primes the act — is the recurring question in cases where a viral falsehood ends at a hospital's front door.