Andrea Dunlop

And it made me very uncomfortable how much she...

took pains to blame this situation on the child throughout this episode and that's sort of a whole separate thing but like um you know that the two-year-old had i guess thrown the baby i mean it wasn't like that the bassinet tipped over with both of them in it like that the the two-year-old had sort of i guess chucked the seven-week-old out of the bassinet which again you know having having little kids in this time of my life being really relatively recent um

I don't know if that's impossible, but it's a strange story.

Just after my interview with Randy, we obtained a copy of Amanda Cernofsky's lawsuit.

And in reading Amanda's account of this incident, I caught yet another discrepancy, giving us a total of three versions of the story.

According to news reports from the time, Cernofsky told paramedics that she was out of the room when the fall happened and came in when she heard crying.

The story Amanda tells in the media is that she awoke to a thud and found the baby on the floor with its onesie undone, and that her toddler was sitting in the bassinet, which would indicate that the baby was pushed or tossed out.

In her lawsuit, however, Amanda includes what appears to be a direct quote from the hospital, which says that an RN determined that, quote, mother has been consistent in her reporting that the two-year-old pulled the baby out of the bassinet.

A toddler pulling a baby out of its bassinet is more developmentally possible than a toddler throwing a baby out, but it's not the same story.

If the toddler pulled the baby out of the bassinet, why did Amanda find her toddler in the bassinet afterwards?

It just doesn't make any sense.

I wish Serial would let me know how they decided that this case was in a gray area, but sadly, they declined my invitation to speak about it.

They did make a gesture at hearing out the other side by publishing a roundtable discussion with a number of child abuse pediatricians on their paywalled newsletter, not on the podcast.

And I wanted to ask Randy what he thought of this attempt to balance Serial's reporting.

Yeah, and I think it's like there is this presentation where, you know, because people like Diane Neary and Mike Hickson-Bogg, I sense, this is my just editorializing, I think they know they won't be seen as credible if they just outright say, we don't think munchausen by proxy abuse exists, and we don't believe the science behind abusive head trauma, right?

So they really...

do this other sort of roundabout thing of just saying, well, these cases are so gray and how can we know?

And I'm like, but you can know.

And like, furthermore, as a journalist, you can know a lot about the case by doing a FOIA request.

It's like they act like the only way they could get to the bottom of it is if they could get Dr. Jensen on the record about the case.