Alec Bohm and his parents have settled a multimillion-dollar financial mismanagement lawsuit, nearly six months after the Phillies’ infielder accused the elder Bohms of enriching themselves off his baseball earnings.
The terms of the settlement are confidential, said Gary DeVito, a Zarwin Baum attorney representing Bohm.
The 30-year-old one-time All-Star accused his parents of using several limited liability companies to funnel money from his personal financial accounts, which they then “converted to their own use,” the suit said.
The young Bohm asked a Philadelphia Common Pleas Judge to order his parents to pay him at least a $3 million judgment.
Justin Kadoura, a Holland & Knight attorney for Daniel and Lisa Bohm, confirmed the case was settled and declined to comment further.
Bohm’s parents had overseen his finances since 2019, using a series of LLCs to hold the money and assets he earned as a professional baseball player, the suit says.
The Phillies player alleged his parents told him they needed to take a 10% interest in those LLCs on paper in order to act as authorized representatives of his interests, but he would retain all the assets and funds they contained.
Daniel and Lisa Bohm went on to gain access to their son’s personal financial accounts, the lawsuit says. They would limit the amount of money in Alec Bohm’s personal accounts, and transfer the rest to ones held by LLCs, according to the suit.
While the money was intended for “traditional investment purposes,” such as stock trading, to secure the player’s passive income, the suit says, Bohm’s parents “converted to their own use” an undetermined amount, and used money from the Alec Bohm Foundation — which they also established — to “pay their own personal expenses.”
When Alec Bohm asked his parents in January to provide him with information about his holdings, the suit says, they opted to “engage counsel,” who then gave minimal information.
Bohm’s parents later allegedly indicated they would bill the Phillie for “all the time they spent to administer Alec’s affairs” at a rate of $50 per hour.
In the suit, the 2018 third-overall MLB draft pick asked the court to order his parents to return any money they used for their own purposes, as well as pay “make Alec whole.”
Daniel and Lisa Bohm said in court records their son was aware of the corporate entities that held his assets and the entities were created based on advice ofAlec Bohm’sattorney and financial adviser.
The baseball player’s “apparent lack of knowledge” over his finances “emanates solely from his own lack of attention and interest,” the parents’ said in a court filing.
“He had been perfectly happy to have Mom and Dad do all of the work, while he focused on baseball and enjoyed an otherwise carefree life,” the filing said.
The settlement was announced Thursday night, hours after a scheduled hearing in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas that did not take place.
In a May hearing, attorneys clashed over a request for an injunction that would have halted arbitration proceeding in Florida and freeze $528,618 that his parents transferred into their attorney’s trust account.
The majority of the hearing surrounded minute legal details about jurisdiction and the type of fraud that Bohm alleged his parents committed.
Throughout the summer, the parties sparred in court filings over when Alec Bohm would sit for a deposition. The parents’ attorneys sought a court order compelling their son to be deposed. They called the delays in scheduling “gamesmanship designed to avoid the truth.”
Attorneys for both sides declined to say whether Bohm was deposed.
Philadelphia-area health systems have been moving swiftly to pull offline web links that publicly revealed the daily work schedules and cell phone numbers of healthcare workers, information that hospitals traditionally do not make available online.
The information for thousands of medical workers at Penn Medicine, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, ChristianaCare, and dozens of hospitals nationwide was published online through a popular scheduling service, QGenda.
Experts said the online availability of internal information raises serious security and privacy concerns at a time when healthcare workers increasingly face the threat of workplace violence and doxing.
The Philly-area health systems took down the schedules in late August after The Inquirer alerted them that the information was publicly available. Penn and CHOP did not respond to questions about whetherthey were aware the link was accessible without a log in.
A spokesperson for ChristianaCare said the system “recently became aware” the pages were public, and “immediately” worked with the QGenda to “eliminate the vulnerability.”
“We are not aware of any impact to caregivers, clinicians, patient care, or operations,” Christiana’s statement said. “Protecting the privacy and security of our caregivers, clinicians, patients, and information systems remains a top priority.”
Other Philadelphia-area systems did not appear have publicly available links.
The web pages managed byQGenda, an Atlanta-based workforce management software company, exposed months of schedules of physicians, nurse practitioners, social workers, and other hospital employees.
The links don’t appear on Google searches, but anyone with access to basic AI chatbots could pull up live schedules showing the hours and assigned hospital service for on-call doctors andother providers.
“That’s very concerning,” said Lane Kantor, a fourth-year medicine-pediatrics resident at Penn and CHOP, explaining that healthcare providers’ work “sometimes comes with patients who can harass and threaten us.”
Kantor, a leader at Penn’s resident union, said the public information of providers who work with undocumented immigrants or in the areas of gender-affirming or abortion care was especially concerning.
QGenda is used by more than 4,500 organizations, according to the company’s website, including many hospitals that use the software as a one-stop source of information about providers who are on-call and available for consult at any given moment.
It is not clear how the schedules became public, how long the information was available online, to what extent hospital administrators knewthe information was not safeguarded with a log in requirement, or whether anyone — let alone someone wishing to inflict harm — accessed the information.
QGenda did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The Hearst-owned company offers “QuickLinks” to allow “any staff member without a QGenda account” to easily access the schedule, according to the company’s website. The site also notes that “on-call schedules may contain sensitive information” and that there is risk of “unauthorized access or data breaches” without proper safeguards.
The platform also enableshealthcare systems to restrict access,“so that only devices on your practice’s secure network can access schedule data on the public-facing landing page,” the company’s site says.
Health systems in the Philadelphia area and across the country have taken steps in recent years to minimize doctors’ publicly available information in response to the growing politicization ofmany health services, especially those involvingdiversity, equity and inclusion, abortion, and gender-affirming care.
CHOP, for example, removed provider names from the webpage of its gender and sexual development program in 2022 as the clinic received threats because it provides gender-affirming care for teens. But information on clinic’s providers was available through the now-removed public schedule.
Security experts say releasingpublic work times and locations alongside cell numbers leaves providers vulnerable to being targeted by dissatisfied patients, or individuals who disapprove of the type of medicine a doctor practices.
“This is really alarming,” said Will Owen, a spokesperson for Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a New York-based privacy nonprofit. “Hospitals must scrutinize the platforms they work with in their data collection to minimize information that can be weaponized.”
Live hospital schedules exposed
After receiving a confidential tip that three East Coast health systems had public QGenda web pages, The Inquirer identified public landing pages for nearly 50 health systems or hospitals nationwide, including Veterans Affairs hospitals, using OpenAI’s Codex.
For some, like Penn and CHOP, the landing pages for the entire system were public. For other hospitals, schedules for only one department or service surfaced.
Some of the United States’ largest and most prestigious institutions had public QGenda links, including Johns Hopkins Medicine and the University of California-San Francisco.
The Inquirer attempted to reach out to each hospital or system for which it found schedules before publication. At least 10,including Hopkins and UCSF, have removed the public link completely or added a password requirement.
A spokesperson for Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles said it was “unaware” that its anesthesia department’s schedule was public. The schedule has since been removed.
The call schedule for the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and dozens of hospitals nationwide, was available online through a public QGenda link. CHOP updated the web page’s permissions to require a login after being alerted by The Inquirer.Screenshot
CHOP informed hospital staff last week about security updates made to QGenda “out of an abundance of caution.”
“We are taking a precautionary step to update access to the QGenda platform used to display CHOP on-call schedules,” CHOP said in an email to staff obtained by The Inquirer.
QGenda’s platform does not contain patient information, and CHOP “continually assess our systems, processes, and technologies with an eye toward privacy, security, and operational needs,” a CHOP spokesperson said in a statement.
Penn said it uses QGenda to support communication among care teams.
“We continually monitor the risk environment surrounding online information and, as it continues to evolve, we are adding controls that both preserve appropriate protection and provide reliable access for those who need the information to coordinate patient care,” Penn said in a statement.
Gennadiy Ryklin, a hospitalist at ChristianaCare, was surprised to learn a colleague had done a work-hour analysis for ChristianaCare’s attending union using an AI model.
“I asked him, ‘well, how’d you do that without having Claude get access to our private schedules?’ And, well, it’s not private, there’s a public link here,” Ryklin said.
Privacy and data security are principles are drilled into physicians through policies, procedures, and training courses, Ryklin said.
“We understand that patient information in the wrong hands can cause a lot of harm,” the doctor said. “Where’s that same concern for us?”
A June shooting that killed one IT intern and left another injured in ChristianaCare’s Wilmington Hospital underscored for Ryklin the threat of violence within health systems. Law enforcement charged a third intern in connection to the incident.
He reached out to hospital administrators and last week the hospital began removing the public web pages.
Employee privacy exists in a legal gray area, with protections often dependent on institutional policies, said Matthew Bodie, a law professor at the University of Minnesota.
Publicly sharing schedules and cell numbers does “feel invasive,” Bodie said, “especially if employees didn’t know about it.”
The combination of cell numbers and work schedules could be used to cause harm, whether by patients, politically motivated individuals, or stalkers, said Sharona Hoffman, a co-director of the Law-Medicine Center at Case Western Reserve University.
The lack of any sweeping federal employee privacy requirements makes the online availability of the information, “not surprising though very disturbing,” the professor said.
In a 2-1 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit held that ICE violated the federal immigration law and the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution by holding undocumented immigrants who have been in the country for years in detention without a hearing. The policy, enacted last summer, has been a key part of efforts by President Donald Trump’s administration efforts to ramp up deportations across the country.
The ruling will take immediate effect in Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Undocumented immigrants who have lived in the United States for decades “are entitled to due process rights beyond those provided to noncitizens at the border,” Circuit Judge Patty Shwartz wrote in the majority opinion.
The government has a legitimate interest in keeping dangerous noncitizens in custody, the judge said, but a “neutral decisionmaker” should make that assessment on a case-by-case basis — rather than a practice of detaining all undocumented immigrants indefinitely.
Circuit Judge Theodore A. McKee, who was appointed by Bill Clinton, joined the opinion written by Schwartz, who was appointed by Barack Obama.
In a dissent, Circuit Judge Jennifer L. Mascott said the ruling was inconsistent with federal immigration law.
“A bond hearing focused on flight risk and dangerousness would generate irrelevant facts, not material to individual determinations,” wrote Mascott, who was appointed by Trump.
The Justice Department disagrees with the ruling and believes its position will “ultimately be vindicated,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
“This is a huge win for due process,” said Rachel Rutter, a lawyer and executive director of Project Libertad, a Phoenixville-based nonprofit that provides free legal and social services for migrant youths facing deportation. “The Third Circuit has joined a chorus of other circuit courts striking down the Trump administration’s inhumane practice of mandatory detention of people who have spent years building lives in the U.S.”
The decision “reaffirms decades of case law stating that these people have the right to challenge their detention through a bond hearing,” Rutter said.
Nine other circuit courts have issued rulings on mandatory detention, and seven found the policy unlawful. The Justice Department petitioned the Supreme Court in June, asking the high court to resolve a split it said was “disrupting the orderly administration of immigration law.”
The mandatory detention policy was rolled out by the Trump administration last year, and has led to an avalanche of lawsuits by immigrants who challenged their incarceration and demanded a bond hearing.
These requests, known as habeas corpus petitions, were rare not long ago, but since the policy change, they’ve dominated the docket in Philadelphia’s federal courthouse. More than 1,100 such petitions have been filed since September. Between 2020 and 2024, by contrast, only 11 such suits were filed.
The Third Circuit case involved two undocumented immigrants who have been in the United States for over a decade and were picked up by ICE after the mandatory detention policy took effect. Neither has a criminal history. Federal judges in Philadelphia ordered their release, finding their detention was unlawful.
Christopher Casazza, a Philadelphia-based immigration lawyer who represented one of the immigrants at the center of the case, called the court’s decision a “great ruling that will help thousands of people.”
The benefit for immigrants, he said, would come primarily in two forms: Anyone still being detained in the region after being arrested under the Trump administration policy can now apply for a bond hearing. And going forward, anyone who is arrested will be able to ask an immigration judge for bond.
That doesn’t guarantee release, Casazza said, but it provides people the opportunity to make a case to an immigration judge, as had been the practice before the new policy took effect after Trump began his second term.
“We’re going back to the rule of law that’s been the case for 30 years,” he said.
When President Donald Trump’s administration sued Philadelphia over one of seven newlocal restrictions on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — a ban on law enforcement officers from wearing masks or concealing their identity — the federal lawsuit included a footnote.
“The United States has grave concerns over the constitutionality of other parts of the Bill as well as other components of the ‘ICE Out’ legislation and reserves the right to bring additional challenges in the future,” the June complaint said.
The U.S. Department of Justice did so Monday evening, expanding its lawsuit to challenge a second ordinance.
The “ICE Out” legislation package that took effect July 6 codified the city’s long-standing practice of not honoring immigration detainers, which are requests by ICE that a local law enforcement agency keep a person in custody long enough to be handed over to federal agents.
The ordinance makes it illegal for a city agency or employee to comply with a detainer by keeping people otherwise eligible for release in custody because of an immigration detainer, an administrative warrant, or suspicion that they violated immigration law.
The ordinance imposes a “blanket refusal” by the city to cooperate with the federal government, the suit says, and amounts to a “standing assurance that the federal handoff Congress built into federal immigration law will never happen within Philadelphia, whatever the circumstances.”
The amended complaint does not mention Philadelphia’s history of not cooperating with ICE jail detainers. But with the local law, the city “foreclosed” the prospect of using the mechanism to deport people who were arrested, the suit says.
Since the ordinance took effect, ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations office in Philadelphia sent the city 26 detainers, the suit says. Fifteen were not honored and the city released the people from custody, the complaint says, while the subjects of the remaining 11 are incarcerated and the detainers remain active.
The detainers were for people arrested for crimes that include violent assaults, harassment, and drug distribution.
“Without these detainers being honored, ICE was only able to arrest a fraction of the aliens, with the remaining criminals ending up at-large,” the suit says.
A spokesperson for the city’s law department declined to comment. District Attorney Larry Krasner, who is also named as a defendant, did not respond to a request for comment.
The Justice Department beefed up its lawsuit nearly two months after a judge ruled Philadelphia could not enforce a ban on law enforcement agents concealing their identity or using anunmarked vehicle, with some exceptions, finding it was an unconstitutional attempt by a city to regulate how federal agencies operate.
Parker signed the ban on honoring immigration detainers.
The case against the mask ordinance also benefited from a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that a California bill requiring agents to “visibly display identification” was unconstitutional.
But courts so far have been unconvinced that the federal government can force cooperation with ICE.
For example, last yeara federal judge in Illinois dismissed a Justice Department lawsuit challenging Cook County and Chicago’s sanctuary city policies that included a ban on honoring immigration detainers.
Detainers offer localities and states “the opportunity to assist in civil immigration enforcement,” U.S. District Judge Lindsay C. Jenkins wrote. But policies that ban honoring these requests “don’t make ICE’s job more difficult; they just don’t make it easier,” the Joe Biden appointee said.
And last month, Eric C. Tostrud, the Trump-appointed chief judge of the federal district court in Minnesota, issued a similar ruling finding that immigration detainers were requests, not mandates.
All publicity is good publicity, the adage goes, but the Penrose Hotel had a rough reputation before closing its doors in March 2020.
Online reviews paint a vivid picture of the establishment to the north of FDR Park before its post-pandemic renovation and rebrands: Bedbugs, fossilized vomit, blood splatters, gang tags, and mold encompassed with the aroma of urine, cigarettes, and weed.
“At least I wasn’t alone through this and the bedbugs keep me company,” a Yelp review from 2018 says. ”I guess you can say I am survivor but I wouldn’t recommend this to the faint of heart.”
The Justice Department accuses a New Jersey-based father-son duo, Pankaj Sheth and Rajan Sheth, among other family members, of using chronically understaffed and underfunded hotels in a state of gross disrepair, and a revolving door of business entities, to fraudulently obtain government-secured loans.
The sprawling 332-page, 133-count federal complaint, filed Friday in the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, names as defendants seven members of the Sheth family, 21 business entities, and eight of the family’s business associates.
It asks a federal judge to order the defendants to return “all funds paid by the United States by which the defendants were unjustly enriched.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment.
Rajan Sheth, the son, denied the Justice Department’s claims against him, his family, and their businesses.
“The business we’re in is buying distressed properties and we turn them around,” Sheth said. “There is no scheme here.”
The U.S. Attorney’s Office has been investigating the operation for more than two years, Rajan Sheth said, and the family complied with requests for documents. “Every penny” the family borrowed was paid back and they continue to operate and invest in the hotels, he said.
The family intends to fight the allegations and file a countersuit, Rajan Sheth said.
Repeated cycle
The lawsuit alleges the Sheth family and its associates obtained government-backed loans they were not eligible for because of their financial history — past defaults, bankruptcies, fraud judgments, and overwhelming debt — by transferring the ownership of over a dozen hotels in the Mid-Atlantic to straw companies.
These companies, typically limited-liability corporations, would lie to obtain a loan for a property, the suit says. The funds would go to pay old loans and enrich the Sheth family, according to the complaint, while defaulting on the new loan. The Sheths would then use delay tactics in court to prevent foreclosure until another straw company obtained a new fraudulent loan.
“The Sheths repeated this cycle many times,” the complaint says.
The family owned the hotel on Penrose Avenue since 1999, according to the complaint, and defaulted on the loan it obtained to purchase the property shortly thereafter.
The hotel has changed names multiple times in the years since, from Skyview Plaza to Penrose, Radisson, and most recently Holiday Inn Philadelphia Airport-Stadium Area. During that time, the Sheths transferred ownership and created new shell businesses that claimed to run the operations of the hotel. That was to prevent banks and the federal government from knowing about past defaults, according to the suit.
For example, in 2018, the family used a company called Penn Hospitality Management LLC to take a $5 million loan from the Small Business Administration and a $3.1 million loan from a commercial lender. The Sheths pocketed $1.8 million, the suit says, which was intended to renovate the hotel before rebranding as the Radisson.
The hotel defaulted on the 2018 loan at the end of 2020, the suit says, and the Sheths used a new straw company, 2015 Hospitality Management LLC to secure a fresh $12 million loan, which allowed them to keep control of the property.
The family also took advantage of federal COVID-19 recovery efforts, such as the CARES Act business loans and Payment Protection Program.
All told, the Sheths used the Penrose property as collateral to obtain loans worth more than $45 million, the suit says, and like at other hotels, nearly every new, larger loan was used to back pay the previous default. In other words, according to the government, a Ponzi scheme of $100 million across the various properties.
The federal complaint focuses on Penrose in the period between 2016 to 2022 but Philadelphia property records show that the hotel is still owned by Vraj Brig PA LLC, one of the business entities named as a defendant.
Editor’s note: This story was updated to include information from an interview conducted with Michael van der Veen and William Brennan after the story was published. van der Veen, Brennan, and their attorney, George Bochetto, did not responded to multiple interview requests in the days leading up to publication.
A newly formed local group sued the Gayborhood’s Bar X this month, alleging it is a public nuisance. The group wants to shutter the decade-old business, whose clientele is largely Black.
The lawsuit asks a Philadelphia Common Pleas Court judge to order the Camac Street bar to cease operations. It arrives at a time of increased police presence on the nightlife strip and heightened tension between the city’s Black LGBTQ+ community and police.
Bar X has “repeatedly generated excessive noise, disorderly conduct, disturbances, violence, public intoxication” and requires a constant police presence, the complaint says. It also claimed neighbors have observed “public displays of drunkenness and sexual activity” outside the bar.
The city failed by maintaining the establishment’s business license, the suit says, urging a judge to revoke it.
Behind the lawsuit is Michael van der Veen, a 62-year-old high-profile Center City lawyer whose office is in the building across from Bar X on Camac Street.
The bar has been using the office’s parking spot for years, van der Veen said, despite repeated requests to remain off the lawyer’s private property.
But things escalated in July when, according to van der Veen, he was assaulted while leaving his office around 9 p.m. at night.
“When I got jumped from behind and got coldcocked, I was done,” he said.
Days later, veteran criminal defense lawyer William Brennan incorporated Save Our Neighborhood for Tomorrow Inc., the group that filed the lawsuit against “the dive bar of the Gayborhood,” as Bar X pitches itself.
“This changed when passive-aggressive behavior became assaultive-aggressive behavior,” Brennan said. “It can’t be tolerated.”
Save Our Neighborhood for Tomorrow does not appear to have a website or social media presence.
Defense attorneys Michael van der Veen, left, and William Brennan arrive to criminal court in New York in 2022 for Trump’s tax fraud case. Seth Wenig
George Bochetto, the attorney who filed the lawsuit on behalf of the newly formed group, did not respond to repeated requests for an interview. Bochetto is also representing a different group of Pine Street and Spruce Street residents who won an injunction to pause safety upgrades to bike lanes.
The lawsuit against Bar X names owner Tony Tsang, business entities associated with the bar, the city, and the commissioner of the Philadelphia Department of Licenses and Inspections, Bridget Collins-Greenwald. The city did not respond to requests for comment.
Tsang disputed the allegations of public drunkenness and sexual activity and said the bar is a longtime fixture of the block.
“You don’t like it, you like it quieter, how come you don’t move out of the city?” Tsang, 59, said in a recent interview at the bar. “One block, three bars, how come they’re only complaining about us?”
A ‘very homey’ gay bar
Bar X sits between Locust and Spruce on Camac, a narrow, 200-year-old street that is home to two other gay bars, Tavern on Camac and UBar. It is also around the corner from the bar 254, which replaced Tabu. Those three bars are all owned by the Tavern Group.
Tsang said the majority of his clientele is Black and suggested that the lawsuit had more to do with his identity and that of his patrons than the noise or disturbance allegations.
“To me, it’s the color. I’m Asian. My English isn’t too good. They want to play a game with me,” Tsang said.
Tsang opened his bar in 2016, naming it Bar X so it would be easy for people to remember. The bar’s exterior features a rainbow mural of tropical leaves; inside Tsang hung Ikea posters of Audrey Hepburn and James Dean. He said he stocks the bar himself, buying whatever club soda is on sale at the supermarket.
The bar has a large dance floor and a DJ booth that abuts the alley.
Joseph Ward, a part-time bartender at Bar X who also runs its social media and marketing, said the bar stands out because it’s “very homey,” with Taco Tuesdays and twice-weekly karaoke. (There’s also a male revue every Thursday night.)
Bar X owner Tony Tsang said he stocks the bar himself with whatever club soda is on sale at the supermarket.Elizabeth Robertson / Staff Photographer
“You [can] just chill and not have to worry about the hustle and bustle of a nightclub,” Ward, 36, said. He said the bar is one of the last minority-owned clubs in the Gayborhood and hosts a largely nonwhite crowd.
The lawsuit cites negative Google reviews from people purporting to be Bar X customers, including accounts of stolen phones and allegations that a bartender gave patrons drinks containing sedatives.
The remedy to the situation, the suit says, is for the city to shut down the bar.
Ward said that rumors of drugged drinks at the bar had gained traction online earlier this year, but that staff had not been able to verify any crimes, despite reaching out to those making the accusations. In response, the bar ordered covers for customers’ drinks.
“We take pride in it being a safe place in the Gayborhood,” Ward said, “so we obviously want to keep it that way.”
A new police deployment
Bar X’s block has seen an increase in crime incidents this year, according to Philadelphia Police Department public data.
The lawsuit claims that since last summer there have been nearly 70 crime incidents at the property, including “multiple reports of a person with weapons, assaults, robbery, and disorderly conduct.”
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In April, the Washington Square West Civic Association hosted a meeting with residents, city officials, and Tsang in an attempt to address neighborhood complaints. Councilmember Mark Squilla, who represents the area and attended the meeting, estimated that more than 40 people attended.
In response, the city experimented with one-off street cleanings of Camac to address litter, Squilla said. Police also began clearing the street of people on weekend nights after 2 a.m., when the bar closes.
“We’ll continue to work on compliance and whatever else is needed there,” Squilla said.
A Philadelphia Police Department spokesperson confirmed there is currently a “bar/nightclub” deployment in the bar’s general area. The department has used similar deployments throughout the city for decades to respond to community concerns and public safety needs, Sgt. Eric Gripp said in a statement.
Jacen Bowman, president of Philly Black Pride, testified earlier this month at a City Council Committee on Legislative Oversight hearing into the Philadelphia Police tactics used during Pride celebrations in June.Tom Gralish / Staff Photographer
“Black and brown LGBTQ+ people are watched differently. We are approached differently. We are policed differently,” Jacen Bowman of Philly Black Pride said at the hearing. “Too often we are made to feel like visitors in a neighborhood that is promoted as the heart of Philadelphia’s LGBTQ+ community.”
A former cardiac thoracic surgeon at one of Main Line Health’s flagship programs says in a federal lawsuit that he was fired after reporting a series of bad patient outcomes.
Gianluca Torregrossa accuses the nonprofit hospital system in the Philadelphia suburbs of failing to thoroughly investigate a pattern of complications among the patients of another senior surgeon, including one instance that led to a heart transplant.
The Italian physician attempted to have the cases reviewed multiple times during his tenure, which was just short of five years, but instead Torregrossa was marginalized by hospital leadership, suspended, and eventually terminated before the end of his contract, according to the suit.
The termination caused issues with the physician’s visa, which required him to return to Italy without his wife and daughter while he got his new visa in order, according to the complaint. Torregrossa, who began working at Cleveland Clinic in June, says he also lost wages during the three-month period and his reputation suffered.
“Cardiac surgery is a small professional field, and news of his suspension and termination spread nationally and internationally, creating questions about his professional standing despite his clinical outcomes and subsequent employment by Cleveland Clinic,” the suit says.
Torregrossa’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment.
The lawsuit, filed July 31 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, names only Main Line Health as a defendant. The health system declined to comment on the active litigation.
“Main Line Health’s Robotic Cardiac Vascularization Program is an important part of our commitment to providing advanced surgical care,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “The program helps ensure patients have access to specialized surgical expertise and innovative, minimally invasive treatment options close to home.”
Torregrossa was recruited by the Montgomery County hospital system in 2021 to assist in expanding the robotic heart surgery programbased at Lankenau Medical Center, the lawsuit says.
The opportunity to join Main Line Health was lucrative. The surgeon signed a five-year contract starting at $800,000 a year, plus bonus, according to the lawsuit.
Main Line Health is a national leader in a robotic procedure to replace a clogged artery with a new one, known as coronary artery bypass graft, which is the most commonly performed heart surgery in the United States. But at Main Line it is often performed in an uncommon way.
Shortly after joining Main Line Health, Torregrossa became concerned about the outcomes of patients whom Sutter operated on robotically that the physician believed were preventable, the suit said.
Torregrossa asked in 2023 for a review of seven of Sutter’s cases, the complaint says, but a team discussed them “only superficially, no meaningful follow-up was initiated, and the pattern of complications involving a single surgeon was not examined.”
The physician continued to raise concerns over allegedly preventable complications through 2025, as well as ethical breaches in patient assignment at the program, according to the complaint.
The Inquirer was unable to reach Sutter, who retired in July, based on publicly available records.
Michael Carboine (left), physician assistant, and Jeff Roman (right), scrub nurse, watches the monitor as lead surgeon Francis Sutter moves the robotic instruments in the patient’s heart on Monday, June 26, 2023. Lankenau Hospital, part of Main Line Health, uses robotic coronary bypass surgeries at a higher percent than other hospitals.Allie Ippolito / Staff Photographer
Following his internal reports, the suit says, Torregrossa was marginalized by leaders of the program and hospital.
Human resources opened an investigation into Torregrossa based on a comment he had made in a brief recruitment interview, according to the complaint. The documents do not repeat the comment or provide more context to what was said.
“That HR event reflected a broader pattern in which routine professional interactions involving Dr. Torregrossa were escalated against him, while more serious concerns involving others, like patient safety, were not meaningfully investigated,” the lawsuit says.
In November 2025, the hospital system told Torregrossa that his contract would not be renewed past June 30, the suit says.
Torregrossa continued to push internally for reviews, but his pleas fell on deaf ears, according to the complaint. In January, he submitted an external patient safety report to the Pennsylvania Licensing System and the Joint Commission, a hospital accreditation organization, which conducted a surprise visit to Lankenau shortly after.
The surgeon also circulated an anonymous letter about the Sutter cases in question, the suit says without saying who were the recipients.
Sutter’s medical license is active and Pennsylvania Department of State records show no disciplinary history. Lankenau has passed a series of Pennsylvania Department of Health inspections since January that found the hospital in compliance.
Main Line Health placed Torregrossa on administrative leave in February and barred him from accessing the system’s hospitals and clinics. The system accused him of disparaging the health system during a presentation and engaging in unprofessional conduct.
The lawsuit says both excuses were false and pretextual, leading to his March termination.
The complaint accuses Main Line Health of violating the Pennsylvania whistleblower protection law and breaching his employment agreement. It asks for damages in an unspecified amount greater than $75,000.
“Being removed from practice for approximately three months deprived him of the ability to operate, teach, proctor, maintain case volume, and continue refining a rare and demanding surgical technique,” the lawsuit says.
Montgomery County on Tuesday sued some of the nation’s largest social media companies in a Northern California federal court, joining nearly 3,000 actions from parents, school districts, cities, counties, and states that say the platforms are harming the mental health of children and teens.
The social media giants have faced a flood of litigation in state and federal courts, part of a public reckoning over the negative impacts their products are accused of having on young people. The lawsuits allege that the companies have developed platforms that are addictive, especially to young people, and contribute to negative self-image and social isolation.
Montgomery County is suing Meta, ByteDance, Snap, and Google on behalf of the county’s 148 schools and more than 180,000 minor students, the filing said. It accused the companies and their popular products — including Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok — of negligence and creating a public nuisance.
“Too many young people are struggling with anxiety, depression, self-harm, and other serious mental health challenges,” Jamila Winder, chair of the Montgomery County commissioners, said in a news release Wednesday. “We believe social media companies must be held accountable for the role their products play in harming young people.”
Montgomery County’s lawsuit is one of nearly 3,000 cases before a Northern District of California judge through a mechanism called multidistrict litigation. The process allows the federal court system to handle a large volume of similar complaints in one court, usually leading to a number of bellwether trials that help assess the value of a potential global settlement.
The county’s suit is part of a larger partnership between its board of commissioners and its district attorney’s office “to proactively identify, investigate, and pursue cases against companies whose actions harm consumers or create illegal costs for taxpayers,” the news release said.
The 2025 Pennsylvania Youth Survey found that 97% of youth respondents have a phone that can access the internet, 81% have a social media account, and 24% spend four or more hours on a school day on social media.
Teens who spend more than three hours a day on social media platforms have double the risk of depression and anxiety, and half of teens report that social media makes them feel worse about the way they look, according to the advisory.
Spokespeople for TikTok and Snap did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday.
José Castañeda, a spokesperson for Google, said in a statement Wednesday that “the allegations in these complaints are simply not true.”
“Providing young people with a safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work,” Castañeda said. “In collaboration with youth, mental health and parenting experts, we built services and policies to provide young people with age-appropriate experiences, and parents with robust controls.”
A Meta spokesperson also objected to the allegations, saying the company is “confident the evidence will show our longstanding commitment to supporting young people.”
“We’ve listened to parents, worked with experts and law enforcement, and conducted in-depth research to understand the issues that matter most. We’re proud of the progress we’ve made, and we’re always working to do better,” the spokesperson said.
Meta said that damages in the case could reach $1.4 trillion, according to Reuters, which is not far from the $1.5 trillion market cap of the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
(In May, Meta settled for an undisclosed amount in a case brought by a rural Kentucky school district before jury selection took place. The case was slated to be the first bellwether trial in the centralized litigation.)
The social media giants face legal challenges elsewhere, too.
Also on Tuesday, Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday sued ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, in a Pittsburgh state court. That lawsuit accuses the company of creating an intentionally addictive platform and serving inappropriate content to teens as young as 13.
The companies have argued in courts across the country that they are protected by federal laws that govern the internet, which were enacted before the advent of social media, complex algorithms, and personalized feeds.
The social media platforms themselves cannot be held liable for the content other people post, the companies have argued in court. And, they said, social media addiction is not an established diagnosis and mental health harm cannot be directly linked to use of a platform, app, or website.
But jurors in the first trials over social media’s harmful effectsrejected most of the companies’ arguments. A New Mexico judge this month ordered Meta to pay nearly a billion dollars, combing a $567 million verdict and a $375 million civil penalty, after a jury found the company had committed 75,000 violations of the state’s Unfair Practices Act.
The 56-year-old was arrested in 2022 and accused of using his position for years to lure girls, often targeting victims who had run away, been arrested, or struggled with addiction.
The women’s lawsuit accused the city of “reckless disregard for the safety of the public” by allowing a “morally corrupt sexual predator” to remain on the force and victimize at least 48 women and girls,despite years of sustained complaints of misconduct against him starting shortly after he joined the department in 1995.
The department even began the process to terminate Heron in 2008, the complaint says, following sustained allegations that included “associating with known criminals,” “little to no regard for his position as a police officer,” and having been detained by police officers for soliciting a sex worker in Kensington.
But Heron maintained his badge and went on to assault the two girls, among other victims.
“Instead of just firing him, they were moving him around different districts,” said Joshua Van Naarden of VSCP Law, the firm representing the two plaintiffs.
Heron eventually resigned in 2019 following an internal affairs investigation into an allegation that a uniformed Heron was caught by a CVS surveillance camera attempting to steal a phone charger.
Heron assaulted one of the two women in 2016 when she was 9 years old. He held her captive in his bedroom, took 22 illicit photographs while she was unconscious, and sexually assaulted her, according to the complaint.
The former officer sent her a Facebook message in 2021, when the victim was 15, and solicited photos from her as well as sex for money, the suit says.
And when the teen accused him of acting inappropriately, Heron threatened to have her arrested.
Heron assaulted the second women in 2016 while on duty. He picked her up from Temple University Hospital’s emergency department when she was 11 years old,after responding to a report that she had run away from home.
After she was discharged from the hospital to Heron while he was on duty, with instructions to take her home, Heron gave her a laced drink and took photos of the unconscious child.
Two days later, Heron picked up the 11-year-old from her house and again took illicit photographs of her.
Both women were involved in Heron’s prosecution, the complaint says, and he pleaded guilty to counts resulting from his crimes against them.
The woman who was victimized as an 11-year-old did not know about the abuse, which took place while she was unconscious, until law enforcement found photos of her on Heron’s devices, Van Naarden said.
“There are tons of other victims out there that may not even be aware that they were victimized by him,” Van Naarden said.
The city deserves credit for settling the lawsuit, which was filed in December 2024, relatively quickly to prevent the women from having to relive their trauma through depositions, testimony, and court hearings, the attorney said.
The lawsuit was settled in April and the city paid $1.3 million on July 31 to the woman Heron assaulted when she was 9 and $1 million to the woman assaulted when she was 11, a spokesperson for the city’s law department said. There were no other conditions as part of the agreement.
The city declined to comment further on the settlement or on the ongoing lawsuit.
A second lawsuit from an alleged victim of Heron was filed in April in the Philadelphia court and tells of similarly harrowing abuse.
The victim was a 16-year-old mother of a newborn when she met Heron in a courthouse in 2014, the suit says.
“She was, by every measure, among the most vulnerable individuals Defendant Heron could have encountered in his capacity as a uniformed Philadelphia Police Officer,” the complaint says.
Heron groomed her, the suit says, and starting in 2015 assaulted at least once a month for a period of four years, often drugging her “to prevent her from accurately recounting or reporting what had been done to her.” The assault included rape, according to the complaint.
The lawsuit says Heron threatened the girl to secure her silence.
“He repeatedly reminded her of his status as a police officer and his ability to weaponize that status against her, her child, and her incarcerated family member,” the lawsuit says.
Ashley Garland, an Anapol Weiss attorney representing the unnamed victim, said her client deserves the same accountability as the two victims who received payment.
“We are continuing to pursue justice on her behalf,” Garland said in a statement, “and we hope the city changes how it handles officers with sustained misconduct records, preventing them from harming the residents they are supposed to protect and serve.”
Philadelphia’s chief paramedic said in a whistleblower lawsuit that he was stripped of his leadership position for sounding the alarm about allegations of favoritism in the city’s fire department.
Jason Centofanti, who joined Philadelphia’s emergency medical services in 2007, says fire department leadership punished him for escalating a report accusing a captain of being lenient with a subordinate who had failed to fill outrequired patient records because of a personal friendship.
Centofanti, who was elevated to the role of fire paramedic services chief last year, investigated and suspected the captain attempted to cover up the conduct by falsifying an official record. But when Centofanti elevated these concerns, the suit says, he was met with a brick wall and punished.
His plight made its way to the Philadelphia Office of the Inspector General and the fire commissioner, according to the complaint. Even though some higher-ups acknowledged the retaliatory nature of his transfer in conversation with Centofanti, the suit says, it was not enough to stop it.
The lawsuit, which was filed Wednesday in Common Pleas Court, accuses the city of violating whistleblower protections and asks a judge to order the city to end the retaliation against Centofanti, pay him for lost wages, and compensate him with more than $50,000 in damages.
A spokesperson for the city’s law department declined to comment on the active litigation. Amanda Martinez, Centofanti’s attorney, said in a statement that the lawsuit speaks for itself.
Centofanti launched an investigation in January shortly after a lieutenant complained to him about the captain’s favoritism, according to the complaint.
The lieutenant also accused the captain of harassment, but the lawsuit does not describe the nature of the allegation.
Centofanti discussed the allegation with the accused captain, and escalated a report to department leadership and human resources.
During the investigation, Centofanti came to believe that the captain had altered a document to cover up the alleged conduct, the lawsuit says.
“Plaintiff explicitly stated that he believed that [the captain] submitted a falsified document for an official PFD investigation,” according to the complaint.
The aftermath of the investigation was not what Centofanti expected.
Martin McCall, a deputy commissioner for EMS, moved the captain to a new building at her request “to shield her,” the suit says. McCall also informed Centofanti that due to “work performance” he was being transferred back to field duty, according to the complaint, despite the chief’s work having been rated “superior” and “satisfactory” in a recent performance evaluation.
McCall also moved the lieutenant to a new post because, the suit says, she made the accused captain “uncomfortable.”
“The two reporters of the wrongdoing … were being transferred to less desired positions and punished for speaking out,” the lawsuit says.
Centofanti went to the department’s top leaders and claims they were sympathetic. But that sympathy did not change his fate. An official whistleblower complaint with the city’s inspector general was not enough to reverse the transfer, either.
He was formally transferred out of EMS administration to a field assignment in May, the suit says. His office schedule was replaced with a field rotation that requires nights, weekends, and holidays, according to the complaint. Centofanti lost his office, staff, and car.
Coworkers have been taunting Centofanti since he returned to the field, the complaint says.
“When are you going to learn to shut your mouth,“ one captain texted him, according to the complaint. ”Enjoy your paycut.”
