Marty Gottesfeld: Prisoner in the hole for "brewing coffee"

The CMU limits communication, but it does not stop it altogether.

USBOP in Marion, Illinois

For the last two days, Marty Gottesfeld has sent me and others furious emails, making various allegations against staff at the Communications Management Unit (CMU) he is within the US Bureau of Prisons (USBOP).

Marty is serving federal time after a stunt in which he directed enormous internet traffic at the website of Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH). At the time, BCH was embroiled in controversy because they were involved in taking Justina Pelletier from her parents and having Justina placed into social services custody.

Justina suffers from a rare mitochondrial disorder and BCH wasn’t even where she was treated but her parents wound up there one day in 2013.

A doctor there decided it was not a mitochondrial disorder but rather psychosomatic.

There was nothing wrong with Justina besides what was put in her head, this doctor concluded, by her parents.

Social services were called, and Justina was taken into their custody on the spot.

Pelletier first arrived at Boston Children’s Hospital at 4 a.m. on Feb. 10, 2013, with severe stomach pain and dehydration. On a scale of one to 10, Pelletier said the pain was at a seven. Four days later, she said, she was making Valentine’s Day cookies with her mother when several guards in black uniforms swept her away.

“All of a sudden, I just didn’t see her. She wasn’t there,” Pelletier said.

“Did you get a chance to say goodbye?” John Martin, Pelletier’s lawyer, asked her.

“No,” she said.

The doctors on Pelletier’s care team believed her symptoms were largely psychological, rather than due to a rare genetic condition called mitochondrial disease, as her parents believed. The illness affects how cells create energy. Instead, the doctors suspected Pelletier’s parents of abuse that might be causing some of her symptoms. So later that day, they moved her to the hospital’s locked psychiatric ward.

“All of a sudden, they said, 'You are going to go up there,' and I didn’t know why,” Pelletier said at the trial. “I didn’t want to. I just kept saying I wanted to go home.”

Marty engaged in hacktivism, hoping his disruption would pressure BCH into releasing her.

She {Gottesfeld’s wife} said that her husband shut down the main Boston Children’s Hospital website and never put any patients in danger.

Boston Children’s Hospital did not respond to an email for comment.

Dana Gottesfeld said her husband was concerned for Justina’s safety and his hacking had an effect.

“The effects were that Justina was moved to a new facility in Connecticut AND the ridiculous visiting rules were more relaxed. Being moved to the new environment afforded her the opportunity to record a video with her sister in which she begged the governor and her judge,” Dana Gottesfeld said. “’All I really want is to be with my family and friends’ and, ‘You can do it. You’re the one that’s judging this. Please let me go home,’ and shortly later she was released.”

During the period when Marty Gottesfeld hacked into the hospital’s website, the Pelletier case received widespread media attention, covered by Megyn Kelly, Glenn Beck, Mike Huckabee, and locally.

The stunt landed him a prison sentence of more than eight years.

Since being imprisoned, he has spoken out about the conditions. He’s previously reported to me about guard misconduct including sexual harassment, COVID protocol breakdowns, and racism.

He also wound up in the CMU, a unit inside two prisons within the USBOP which is designed to significantly restrict communication.

Those restrictions have only had limited effect on Marty.

Now, he is back with more allegations.