Maya Kowalski was pictured socializing just days after her attorneys said she was too pain-ridden to appear at her $220 million malpractice trial against a Florida hospital.
Last Friday, her lawyer told reporters that the teen’s complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) — a neuropathic disorder — had worsened due to the stresses of the court proceeding.
The pain had become so severe, she was unable to attend the trial for several days, they contended.
“It’s been horrible,” lawyer Gregory Anderson said, according to Court TV. “Maya has CRPS lesions reappearing. It’s not good.”
But lawyers for Johns Hopkins All Medical Center said in court Tuesday that Kowalski was well enough to hit the town with several girlfriends — and they had the social media pictures to prove it.
In a saga chronicled in the hit Netflix documentary “Take Care of Maya,” Kowalski’s mother admitted the then-10-year-old girl to the hospital in 2015, telling doctors that she required risky ketamine treatments to ease her symptoms.
Skeptical about Beata Kowalski’s unorthodox demands, staffers alerted Florida child welfare authorities, who removed Maya from her parents’ care and made her a medical ward of the state.
After being barred from seeing her daughter for 85 days and facing child abuse allegations, Beata Kowalski killed herself in the garage of her family home.
Asserting that the hospital wrongfully committed Maya and cruelly separated her from her mother, the Kowalski family is suing the facility for $220 million.
Maya Kowalski has testified that she still suffers from the debilitating effects of the disease, and accused hospital staffers of dismissing her complaints while she was under their care.
But seizing on the social media images from the weekend, hospital attorney Ethen Shapiro asserted that she appeared to be in robust health.
“This is the life of Maya Kowalski today,” Shapiro told the judge. “We did not aggravate a pre-existing condition. She’s at her prom, she’s out in heels, has friends — it’s in complete contradiction to her testimony.”
Kowalski’s attorneys argued the photos were inadmissible, but the judge in the case allowed several of them into evidence.
Jurors are weighing whether Kowalski’s doctors wrongfully dismissed her mother’s suggested treatments or had grounds to suspect she was risking her child’s health.
Staffers believed Beata was suffering from Munchausen by Proxy syndrome, where caregivers contrive or exaggerate a child’s ailments for attention.
Maya’s father, Jack Kowalski, is alleging false imprisonment, medical malpractice, and infliction of emotional distress.
Beata Kowalski had endorsed putting Maya in a ketamine coma in a Mexican clinic and said the treatments had provided her daughter relief.
A doctor who prescribed prior ketamine treatments for Maya previously testified that the approach was medically sound.
But testifying for the defense this week, Dr. Elliott Krane, emeritus professor of anesthesiology and chief of pain management at Stanford School of Medicine, said the ketamine regimen was dangerous and disallowed in the United States.
The trial is ongoing.
