By the spring of 2022, Ed Aldag was fed up. The 61-year-old CEO of a multibillion-dollar real estate company called Medical Properties Trust, Aldag is a high-society fixture in the company’s hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, where MPT has donated millions to local nonprofits and where he’s regularly listed as one of the city’s most influential businessmen. But for years, Aldag had watched as MPT faced tough questions from the federal government, investors, and, most recently, a series of articles in the Wall Street Journal.
MPT makes money by acting as a landlord: It buys hospitals and then rents the facilities back to providers. Over the previous year, the Journal had published several stories that focused on the company’s finances, including reporting that dug into MPT’s biggest tenant—Steward Health Care, then one of the largest for-profit hospital operators in the nation—and the unusually close financial relationship between the two companies.
The Journal’s pieces raised concerns about whether Steward was struggling—and whether MPT was engaging in secret transactions to keep it afloat. Mother Jones and others would later report how Steward’s financial mismanagement harmed hundreds of people: We found 83 deaths across its 39 hospitals, hundreds of malpractice lawsuits, and more than 700 patient care problems documented in federal hospital inspections. The Journal, meanwhile, was the first to notice this mismanagement at work, revealing that Steward hospitals owed nearly $1 billion to medical supply companies and other vendors.
In one tense email exchange in March 2022, Aldag wrote to a PR firm, “We cannot let a deranged pretend journalist tell a false story of MPT.”
That reporting was the beginning of years of intense scrutiny of MPT in the world of finance that hurt the company’s stock price and eventually led, earlier this month, to a trio of Democratic US senators proposing the “Stop Medical Profiteering and Theft (MPT) Act” to impose limits on the company’s business. But it was also the apparent start of an aggressive, previously unreported campaign by Steward, MPT, and other still-unknown actors to silence their critics. Internal documents obtained by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and shared with Mother Jones show that MPT amassed an army of crisis management professionals to protect its reputation, eventually working alongside three different crisis public relations firms, five law firms, and two private intelligence firms. The documents, along with information from sources close to this effort, show a major effort to control the narrative: In one tense email exchange in March 2022, Aldag wrote to a PR firm, “We cannot let a deranged pretend journalist tell a false story of MPT.”
As part of a social media push that used anonymous accounts to discredit and intimidate the growing chorus of journalists, investment analysts, and short sellers who questioned the company, an intelligence firm baited MPT’s detractors online. And while the Boston Globe and OCCRP reported last year that Steward paid the British firm Audere International to surveil one particularly provocative MPT critic, new documents show a much broader tracking campaign, funded in part by Steward and other shadowy actors but focused on MPT, targeting a half dozen of the company’s skeptics.
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“They were always looking for something explosive that would make things go away,” a source close to Audere wrote in messages reviewed by Mother Jones that were confirmed with the source directly. “Although Steward was the customer, it was clear that MPT was what Audere was protecting.”
An MPT spokesperson did not respond to a detailed list of questions but made clear in an emailed statement that the company disagrees with the many critics questioning its business practices. The company, the spokesperson said, “has unfailingly disclosed each of its transactions as and when required under applicable securities laws.”
The spokesperson also said that as criticism of MPT has mounted, its executives and their families have been harassed, including receiving death threats: “As any responsible company in that position would do, we have periodically engaged advisors to help navigate this situation.” The spokesperson added: “It is critical to note that MPT has never directly or indirectly engaged with detractors on social media, nor have we paid any third-party to do so.”
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