INDIANAPOLIS (Legal Newsline) – Left to find the source of gossip, an Indiana court will take the word of a mental health and addiction facility and toss a patient’s lawsuit against it.
The state Court of Appeals on April 26 ruled for Wabash’s Otis R. Bowen Center for Human Services after it was sued by Kimberly Hyslop, who claimed an employee there connected socially through children leaked the results of her drug test.
But facility staff testified that when co-defendant Mia Miller accessed Hyslop’s file, she did not view the drug test results and therefore could not have started that rumor.
“And even if we accepted as true that Joree told Emma, who told Alisha, that Hyslop tested positive for drugs in a urine screen, the only way to connect that information with Miller is to afford credibility to Hyslop’s conjecture that Miller had disseminated the confidential medical information,” Judge Robert Altice wrote.
“The source of the information that Joree allegedly spread cannot be ascertained without resorting to speculation.”
Hyslop is the mother of Alisha, who was once friends with Joree in 2016 when they were around 9 years old. The two stopped their friendship after a text message incident.
After the incident, Hyslop entered Bowen for addiction to pain medication. Miller worked the reception desk there and is the grandmother of Joree.
Eventually, a third girl Emma told Alisha that she’d heard a secret about her mom – that she’d tested positive for methadone, marijuana and a third drug she could not remember (Percocet).
Hyslop reasoned that the information must have come from Miller accessing her drug test, telling her granddaughter Joree, who told mutual friend Emma, who told Hyslop’s daughter Alisha.
Emma even testified that she’d heard the “secret” from Joree. But the court ruled that wasn’t sufficient to link it back to Joree’s grandmother, Miller.
Miller testified she never accessed that part of Bowen’s file, though she did get in it for scheduling purposes.
“(T)o conclude that Hyslop has satisfied her burden… by allowing her to advance speculative theories as to what ‘might have happened,” would defeat the purpose of summary judgment inasmuch as a plaintiff could proceed to trial on any theory regardless of proof,” Altice wrote.