(LifeSiteNews) — CBS recently canceled a planned news segment about parents’ lawsuits against Amazon for selling products being used for suicide by their now-deceased children.
According to Carrie Goldberg, an attorney representing the families, even as CBS was preparing to film an interview with one of her clients about their legal faceoff with Amazon, a producer called her to tell her “higherups” at CBS had squashed the story.
Goldberg shared on Twitter how she had originally reached out to 60 Minutes producers as Amazon continued to sell the chemical sodium nitrite at a lethal concentration when ingested even after they were informed that both teens and adults were buying it to commit suicide.
On February 3, 2022, Goldberg helped file a lawsuit against Amazon on behalf of the Estate of Mikael Scott, who died at age 27 after Amazon sold him 98 percent pure Sodium Nitrite, which has no household use and causes a “very painful death” when ingested.
Goldberg recounted how Amazon’s lawyers said the company would continue to sell Sodium Nitrite, even after Scott’s death, “because they can’t be held liable if somebody uses one of their products for suicide.”
“The day we got the letter from Amazon’s attorney defending their right to continue to sell this product was a turning point in my life. At the same time, my partner in this case and I realized this: Amazon is a serial killer,” Goldberg said.
“Amazon’s decision to continue selling the suicide product was not out of ignorance or obliviousness. It was an intentional counseled decision,” she continued.
She discovered that two weeks after Amazon had sent that letter, they sold the same brand of Sodium Nitrite that killed Scott to 17-year-old Tyler Muhleman from Santa Cruz, California, who likewise used the chemical to commit suicide. Muhleman’s parents added Tyler as a party to the already-filed lawsuit, despite the protest of Amazon’s lawyers that it would be “unfair and inhumane” to do so.
In February, The New York Times initially identified 10 — and later, over 50 — people who committed suicide using Sodium Nitrite bought through Amazon, “including a 16-year-old girl in Ohio” and “a pair of college freshmen in Pennsylvania and Missouri.”
In response, a bipartisan group of congressmen pressed Amazon about the suicides in a letter, “saying that the ease and swiftness with which vulnerable people could buy the compound … was a ‘grave concern,’” the Times reported.
Since then, on September 29, 2022, two parents filed another lawsuit against Amazon, accusing the corporation of facilitating the suicides of their 16-year-old daughter and 17-year-old son, respectively, by selling them the deadly substance.
Goldberg shared to Twitter that CBS had seemed eager to do a story on the legal battles and the stories behind them until unnamed executives stifled it because “they didn’t want to risk anybody dying from suicide on account of their segment.”
“My clients took it graciously, but they also saw through the explanation,” recounted Goldberg, adding that one of them remarked that “everyone is afraid of Amazon,” and another noted, “Maybe the execs at CBS didn’t want to be too hard on Amazon since they have a partnership with Amazon Prime.”
Indeed, Goldberg affirmed, CBS “has a streaming deal with Amazon,” as is apparent with a quick internet search, and “ViacomCBS has a big deal for its entire broadcast footprint on AWS (Amazon Web Services).”
“If it was really about not wanting to report on suicides, why did they assure us so many times they knew how to handle it? How come they had confidently spotlighted suicide before, but this was different?” Goldberg asked.
In fact, CBS has repeatedly and even recently reported on suicides, including during prime airtime.
In April 2022, the news outlet aired and published a story on the “rise in suicides” schools were seeing during the COVID “pandemic,” followed by a 60 Minutes segment on the subject. In September, CBS reported specifically on how suicide attempts among young girls “increased 50 percent” during the COVID-19 outbreak.
“What’s clear to us is that Amazon knowingly profits from suicide. And proceeds as if it’s too big to be burdened by morality,” Goldberg continued on her Twitter thread last week.
“I’m f—ing disgusted by how many more lawsuits we’re going to be filing,” Goldberg concluded.
Suicide help and support resources can be found here.
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Author Emily Mangiaracina
