Dr. Bazak-Sharon Lawsuit: Fraud Allegations and Financial Motive

Dr. Bazak Sharon’s lawsuit, filed December 12, 2025, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, accuses the University of Minnesota Board of Regents, five physicians, and two affiliated health systems of firing him in retaliation for challenging what he describes as a fraudulent institutional scheme to inflate child abuse diagnoses. Sharon, a pediatrician and infectious disease specialist who spent 17 years on the medical school faculty before his June 2023 termination, brings claims under federal civil rights law, the RICO statute, whistleblower protections, and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.¹²

The Case That Started the Conflict

Sharon joined the University of Minnesota as a fellow in 2006 and later became a faculty hospitalist and medical director of the pediatric COVID-19 clinic. He worked without major institutional conflict for more than a decade.³

In February 2022, he treated a three-month-old identified in reporting as “Hank.” The hospital’s child abuse team, led by Dr. Nancy Harper, diagnosed the infant with abusive head trauma, formerly known as shaken baby syndrome. Sharon disagreed, believing the symptoms could have stemmed from birth injury, infection, or spontaneous bleeding. He also objected to separating the baby from his parents through Child Protective Services while the medical picture was still unclear.⁴

Sharon was removed from the child’s care team. The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office ultimately dismissed the child protection case, and no criminal charges were filed. The family had spent roughly $100,000 in legal fees and caregiving costs by then.⁴

Sharon recorded a February 2022 meeting with hospital leadership. In it, Dr. Sameer Gupta, then chief medical officer at M Health Fairview Masonic Children’s Hospital, told him that keeping the family together was “the wrong decision and will never, ever happen again,” and that the medical team needed to present “one story” and “let the experts really drive the ship” to limit litigation risk. Harper said in the same meeting that if she worried about the consequences her diagnoses had on families, “I wouldn’t be able to do my job.”³⁴

Sharon received a peer review letter from Gupta flagging concerns about his professionalism and his communication with law enforcement. He was fired in June 2023. According to his attorney, the termination letter cited only a failure to follow university documentation policies. Sharon says the real reason was his refusal to stay quiet.¹

What the Complaint Alleges

The suit names eight defendants: Dr. Nancy Sanders Harper; Gupta; Dr. Joseph Neglia, head of pediatrics at the university; Dr. Jordan Marmet, director of the Division of Pediatric Hospital Medicine; Dr. Caroline George, a member of Harper’s child abuse team; the University of Minnesota Physicians; Fairview Health Services; and the Board of Regents of the University of Minnesota.⁵²

The complaint groups its claims into four categories. Under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, Sharon alleges the defendants violated his First and Fourteenth Amendment rights by retaliating against him for expressing medical opinions that contradicted the child abuse team’s findings. Under the federal RICO statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1961 et seq., he alleges the defendants operated what he calls a “child abuse enterprise” engaged in a pattern of racketeering to generate medical evidence for prosecutions. On the whistleblower claim, he alleges he was fired for reporting the scheme to senior leadership and that defendants then fabricated false sexual misconduct allegations to discredit him and prevent him from testifying in related lawsuits. A claim under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1030, is also included. The complaint seeks compensatory damages, injunctive relief, and a jury trial.⁵

The Alleged Scheme and Its Financial Motive

Sharon’s complaint describes several components of what he calls an institutional scheme. Hospital policy, he alleges, required transferring sick or injured infants away from their treating clinicians and to “forensic child abuse pediatricians” who lacked specialized training in the child’s actual medical condition. Other physicians were prohibited from documenting opinions that contradicted a child abuse determination. The defendants, the complaint says, encouraged the omission or falsification of medical evidence that could have cleared parents or caregivers. Clinicians who disagreed with the child abuse team were bullied or threatened by Harper and senior leadership.⁵

For motive, the complaint points to money. In 2015, the Minnesota Legislature established a $23.35 million annual child protection grant that distributed funding to counties based in part on the number of screened-in maltreatment reports and open child protection cases.⁶ Sharon argues that formula created a structural incentive to find more abuse. He also cites a statistical spike: after Harper arrived at the university in 2014, Hennepin County reported over 5,700 victims of physical abuse in 2016, which the complaint characterizes as a 228% increase over the previous eight-year average.¹ The complaint further alleges the scheme disproportionately affected low-income, blue-collar, and minority families who could not effectively challenge university-credentialed experts in court.⁵

Sharon was not the only physician to leave over these tensions. A neurologist also departed the hospital after disagreeing with Harper’s diagnostic practices, according to reporting by ProPublica and MPR News.⁷

Harper’s Role and Contested Diagnoses

Harper is the primary individual defendant. Since 2014 she has directed the Otto Bremer Trust Center for Safe and Healthy Children at Masonic Children’s Hospital and runs the university’s Child Abuse Pediatrics Fellowship. Her team handles roughly 700 suspected abuse cases per year. Her center operates under a contract with Hennepin County to provide medical consultation, expert testimony, and case consultations for county attorneys.³⁴

Harper has testified that she has never, to her recollection, incorrectly diagnosed a child with abusive head trauma. Former prosecutor Kathleen Pakes told ProPublica and MPR News that the assertion of a zero error rate “strains credulity.”⁸ In 2024, a Wisconsin judge barred Harper from testifying that a child died from “abusive head trauma, non-accidental injury, child abuse, or murder,” finding that her role as an advocate “blurs her role as scientist and clinician” and calling into question the “fidelity to the scientific validation” of her diagnoses.⁹

Other outcomes involving Harper’s diagnoses have gone against her conclusions. In 2023, Paul Marshall was found not guilty of shaking his son to death after an 11-day trial; defense experts pointed to birth trauma or vitamin deficiency. A jury acquitted day care provider Kathryn Campbell despite Harper’s affirmation of an abuse diagnosis originally made by another physician. In a separate Wisconsin case, a judge barred Harper from testifying to her cause-of-death conclusions about a woman named Joanna Ford, calling her reasoning a “leap in logic”; Ford later pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of child neglect resulting in death.⁸

The Related Reynolds Lawsuit

Sharon’s suit is connected to earlier federal litigation. In February 2025, William Reynolds filed a racketeering lawsuit against Harper and other defendants, including Hennepin County, Hennepin Healthcare, the University of Minnesota, and members of the county attorney’s office. Reynolds’ wife, Sylwia Pawlak-Reynolds, was charged in 2018 with two counts of second-degree murder in the death of 11-month-old Gabriel Cooper, based on Harper’s diagnosis of abusive head trauma. The Reynolds suit seeks more than $10 million and alleges that Harper “knowingly and intentionally falsified, modified and erased exculpatory information.”¹⁰

Specifically, the Reynolds complaint alleges Harper rewrote another physician’s initial medical report without attribution and altered digital timestamps to conceal evidence, including a head circumference measurement, skull fractures, and a genetic clotting disorder that could have offered an alternative explanation. Attorneys also found that a hospital record provided to police had been printed at a reduced scale, rendering a note about the child hitting his head illegible; a full-sized version revealed what defense counsel called “silver-bullet evidence” of a possible accidental cause. The Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office certified the manner of death as “undetermined,” contradicting Harper’s shaken-baby determination.⁸⁹

In March 2026, a federal judge largely granted motions to dismiss in the Reynolds case, throwing out claims against the Board of Regents on sovereign immunity grounds and dismissing most other claims. The court allowed one Section 1983 damages claim against Harper to proceed on behalf of Reynolds’ minor children.¹¹ Sharon has agreed to serve as a witness in the Reynolds case and in a separate related lawsuit, Ramirez v. Harper. His complaint alleges the fabricated misconduct allegations against him were meant to prevent that testimony.²

The Broader Legal Backdrop

The Sharon complaint lands during a period of judicial rethinking of shaken baby syndrome. The National Registry of Exonerations has documented more than 40 people convicted in cases linked to the diagnosis who have been exonerated since the 1990s.⁴

In October 2024, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals vacated a conviction from 2000, finding that medical science had evolved and that “there is no scientific validation to the claim that shaking alone can cause the injuries” historically attributed to it. The Michigan Supreme Court overturned a 2005 conviction in July 2024, criticizing the gap between expert testimony in these cases and reliable scientific models.⁵

Where the Case Stands

The University of Minnesota said in response to the complaint: “The university will review the complaint, but it’s our typical practice not to provide further comment on pending or active litigation.”¹ A spokesperson for the University of Minnesota Physicians previously stated that Harper’s center provides “trauma-informed medical care and psychosocial support” and that diagnostic decisions are based on “expert assessment of medical evidence,” with “further investigations and legal determinations” falling “outside of our team’s scope.” Fairview Health Services, which owns Masonic Children’s Hospital, said it takes the concerns “seriously” and is “actively reviewing the matter.”³

Gupta, one of the named defendants, has since left M Health Fairview and was appointed chief medical officer at Children’s Minnesota effective August 2026.¹² As of mid-2026, no publicly reported rulings, motions to dismiss, settlement discussions, or trial dates have surfaced in the Sharon case.²

1
Courthouse News Service. Doctor Says University of Minnesota Fired Him for Uncovering Child Abuse Prosecution Scheme
2
Minnesota Lawyer. UMN Pediatrician Lawsuit Child Abuse Diagnosis Retaliation
3
ProPublica. Child Abuse Pediatrician Minneapolis Nancy Harper CPS
4
MPR News. A Doctor Challenged the Opinion of a Powerful Child Abuse Specialist. Then He Lost His Job
5
Courthouse News Service. Sharon v. Harper Complaint
6
Minnesota Legislature. Child Protection Report
7
MedPage Today. Special Reports Features
8
ProPublica. Child Abuse Pediatrician Nancy Harper Minnesota Shaken Baby Syndrome
9
Minnesota Reformer. Conclusions of Doctor Who Specializes in Diagnosing Child Abuse Called Into Question
10
Star Tribune. Shaken Baby Syndrome Federal Lawsuit Hennepin County University of Minnesota
11
Justia. Reynolds v. Harper MD Et Al.
12
Children’s Minnesota. Children’s Minnesota Names Sameer Gupta MD MBA Executive Vice President and Chief Medical Officer