Penn Medicine tried to make a malpractice lawyer take down his TikTok videos, and that’s just the start of a twisted tale

Representing a man who died of a ruptured aortic aneurysm, lawyer Tom Bosworth turned to an unusual platform in April to argue that the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania was at fault.

He went on TikTok, where more than 175,000 followers know him as the blunt-spoken “tommythelawyer.”

In a pair of videos, Bosworth accused Penn Medicine of failing to hire enough doctors to read the X-rays of his client and others, despite having plenty of money. One of the posts, on April 4, was titled “Medicine Has Become a Money Machine,” in which he quoted a Penn physician who had testified in the case that the radiology department was “massively understaffed.”

Lawyers talk about their cases in the media all the time, but Bosworth’s outspokenness and his use of social media were unusual — as was Penn Medicine’s response. Lawyers for the health system filed emergency motions to try to shut him down, testing how the legal system grapples with a platform on which posts can be readily shared and re-shared by the thousands.

The videos misrepresented the facts and had “poisoned” any potential pool of jurors, Penn’s lawyers argued before Common Pleas Court Judge Denis Cohen. They asked the judge to order that the videos be taken down, that Bosworth be barred from making additional public comments about the case, and that he be hauled before a state disciplinary board.

They did not succeed. In an April 14 ruling, Cohen said the videos could stand, ruling that Bosworth had not violated the state’s rules of professional conduct for lawyers. The judge did not elaborate, nor did he address the content of the videos, but it was clear he believed that the case had pushed the law toward a new frontier.

“These are incredibly important issues and fascinating from an intellectual standpoint, as well,” Cohen said during the hearing.

Lawyers for the health system aren’t the only ones who have questioned Bosworth’s approach. His boss at the time the lawsuit was filed, prominent lawyer Thomas R. Kline, urged him not to publicly criticize Penn’s radiology department before gathering more facts.

Bosworth initially complied. But separately, he continued to post other criticisms of health systems and insurance companies on his TikTok page. In one titled “The Dirty Truth About Hospitals,” he claimed all hospitals have executives whose job is to cover up medical mistakes. Kline and partner Shanin Specter grew increasingly uneasy. In November, they fired him, accusing him of devoting too much energy to his social-media presence and not enough time to managing cases.

The aftermath has been one of the messier public disputes in recent memory of the Philadelphia legal community, prompting more than a dozen articles in the Legal Intelligencer since late December.

Kline and Specter have filed two lawsuits against their former associate, accusing him of defamation and poaching clients, and he has sued them — in addition to responding on TikTok. In a series of videos, one of which drew 1.4 million views, Bosworth accused his former bosses of “greed.”

The 34-year-old’s bluntness also can be apparent in traditional legal settings, the Intelligencer reported. On May 2, a federal judge accused him of being abusive and “obnoxious” toward opposing lawyers in the case of an Altoona, Pa., baby who died in a rocking-sleeper device, and imposed sanctions.

Bosworth has continued to represent the widow of and the estate of George Kaplan, the man who died of the ruptured aortic aneurysm in August 2019. He alleges that some of the blame lies with Penn’s radiology department — the target of the videos he posted April 4 and 6.

The first video specifically mentions the aneurysm case, in which Bosworth alleges that partly because of understaffing, Penn physicians took more than five hours to read his client’s X-ray, contributing to his death. The other video is more general, alleging that Penn Medicine increasingly uses technicians “with no medical training” to “interpret” patient X-rays.

Not accurate, the health system says. The formal term is radiologic technologists, and some of them do get special training to perform preliminary reviews of X-rays, at Penn and elsewhere. But they do not interpret the images or render a diagnosis. Those functions are the job of radiologists — physicians — and Penn Medicine has plenty, health system officials said in a statement.

“Our radiology department’s staffing model has consistently been aligned with national standards and our peer institutions,” the statement read. “In addition, we do not now and have never relied on radiology technicians to issue diagnostic reports on imaging studies. All imaging studies at Penn Medicine are interpreted by qualified and experienced radiologists.”

Still, some in the radiology department believe that there is room for improvement, according to depositions that Bosworth quoted in the videos. The “massively understaffed” comment was from Benoit Desjardins, the Penn radiologist who interpreted the X-ray in the aneurysm case.

Bosworth also deposed Penn’s chief of radiology, Mitchell Schnall, who testified that the department “could be 10% to 15% better staffed,” a quote not included in the video.

Penn’s use of technologists to look at X-rays also has drawn fire from an advocacy group called Physicians for Patient Protection, which argues that the task is best left to doctors. After Penn physicians published two studies in which they found the practice was promising, the advocacy group challenged the methodology of the second study, and Penn withdrew it.

Within a week after Bosworth posted the videos, lawyers for Penn filed the motions to try to get them taken down.

In the state rules that govern lawyers’ conduct, there is no express prohibition against publicizing testimony from pretrial depositions.

But ordinarily, such testimony is not part of the public record, and lawyers for Penn argued that by broadcasting excerpts from it, Bosworth had prejudiced the pool of potential jurors. They warned that Bosworth’s use of TikTok had enabled him to spread the information with remarkable speed, as one of the videos had been forwarded hundreds of times.

Bosworth countered that there was nothing special about TikTok from a legal standpoint, and that the First Amendment protected his right to alert the public about a health risk. As for Penn’s objections to his quoting from closed-door depositions, Bosworth said they all came from excerpts of testimony that he referenced in motions he filed in the case — meaning they were part of the public record.

The judge agreed. That means the case will continue to drag on as before, now nearly four years since Bosworth’s client died in the hospital.

The question of whether Penn Medicine is at fault in that death may someday be up to a jury. In the meantime, Bosworth is free to keep advocating for his client — both in court and as “tommythelawyer” on TikTok.

And he has made clear he will keep using the platform to advocate other views — whether they’re criticisms of hospitals and insurance companies, or other public-health threats such as the recent chemical spill in a Delaware River tributary. This year alone, he has posted 115 videos on the social-media site, an average of nearly one video a day.