What happened to Maya Kowalski? The horror story behind Netflix’s hit documentary
The footage is desperate, heartbreaking and the stuff of every parent’s worst nightmares. Beata Kowalski sits in a doctor’s office — the latest in a long line of medical rooms — alongside her daughter, not yet 10 years old, whose formerly vivacious energy has been slipping away before her family’s eyes. Beata and her husband, retired firefighter Jack, have watched as Maya began suffering headaches, pain and lesions, her feet turning inwards as the use of her legs deteriorated.
The doctor mentions anxiety as a possible cause, and both Beata and Maya, turning to each other when he briefly steps outside, seem sad and exasperated.
“It’s not anxiety,” says Maya, her voice small as she sits in her tiny wheelchair.
“I know, baby, I know,” her mother replies. “He’s just trying to figure it out. You just stay as calm as you can.”
The encounter was recorded by Beata, a trained and exacting nurse, as she and Jack fought to get a diagnosis and treatment for Maya after she began experiencing mysterious symptoms in 2015. The uncertainty, coupled with Maya’s worsening pain, seemed bad enough.
But the Kowalskis’ medical journey would plunge the family into heretofore unimagined depths of hell. Doctors would accuse Beata of deliberately making her daughter sick. Maya would be taken from the family’s custody. And her mother, shockingly and tragically, would take her own life.
The horrifying story would later play out in court, after the Kowalski family filed a $200m lawsuit against the Department of Children and Families and Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital. The trial began on 21 September with jurors returning a verdict just over a month later on November 9.
The hospital was found liable on multiple counts of abuse, including false imprisonment, battery and intentionally inflicting emotional distress on both Maya
