In the letter, the surgeon was told that UHC had never asked her to step out of surgery and only called her because the company believed that her request for her patient's overnight stay — a claim that was eventually denied — was made in error.

Furthermore, the company accused Potter of knowingly sharing "misinformation" and hosting threats against the company's executives because people made references to Luigi Mangione, the alleged assassin of UHC CEO Brian Thompson, in the comments of her videos.

"Your claims are false. You clearly know they are false. You falsely laid the blame for your office's error on UnitedHealthcare publicly, unleashing a firestorm of dangerous misinformation," the letter, which Potter posted in full on her Instagram, reads. "We expect you to promptly correct this publicly by removing your videos and posting a public apology."

This "gaslighting and harassment," as the surgeon calls it, has only strengthened her resolve to speak out about healthcare inequities — and she's going to need it.

As Bloomberg reported around the same time that Potter posted the cease and desist letter, UHC had hired preeminent defamation law firm Clare Locke — the one that got Dominion Voting Systems a nearly $800 million settlement in 2023 in its defamation case against Fox News — to handle its case against Potter.

Along with taking Potter to task, Clare Locke also sicced the Securities and Exchange Commission on billionaire investor Bill Ackman after he shared the surgeon's video on his own X account

Oh my God. I wanted to find a smoking gun paragraph, but the second half of the article was a crescendo of stupidity. You're highlighting a case where you denied someone an overnight stay in a hospital. You're acting like a hospital doesn't have a time table for their surgeries. You're claiming that the person with a TikTok account is hosting the comments on the video. You're making a doctor who had the public's attention for her indignation against you upset. And you're doing an own goal by going after a billionaire who is, by definition, a psychopath who can think of nothing but short term profit.

These people have completely forgotten the neutral jing. If you hold all the power and we hold none of it, what are we going to do if you do nothing? This shit gets memory holed in a miasma of bullshit if you do nothing. You're really really telling on yourself that you need to make a big production of protecting billionaires and the only reason I can think of for that, which lines up with the ridiculous display of escorting Luigi, is some maniacal out-of-touch celestial dragon asshole needs security theater because they're scared of what happened to Brian Thompson.