The $261 Million 'Take Care of Maya' Verdict Against Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital, Trimmed to About $213 Million by the Trial Judge, Then Reversed in Full by Florida's Second District Court of Appeal in October 2025, With a Narrower Retrial Now Ahead After the Florida Supreme Court Declined Review

In October 2016, 10-year-old Maya Kowalski was brought to Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg with severe abdominal pain. She had previously been diagnosed with complex regional pain syndrome, a neurological condition causing extreme pain, and had been treated with high doses of ketamine. That treatment history alarmed hospital staff, who came to suspect that her mother, Beata Kowalski, was causing or exaggerating the symptoms, and reported the family to Florida's child-welfare authorities. A dependency court ordered Maya sheltered at the hospital, where she remained for roughly three months, separated from her family, with her mother barred from ordinary contact. In January 2017, while Maya was still in the hospital's custody, Beata Kowalski died by suicide. Maya was released to her father shortly afterward.

Jack Kowalski sued the hospital in 2018, on his own behalf, for Maya, and for Beata's estate, alleging false imprisonment, battery, medical negligence, fraudulent billing, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The case was still in litigation when Netflix released the documentary Take Care of Maya in June 2023, which turned the family's story into national news and put the fall 2023 trial under cameras.

The trial ran about eight weeks before Judge Hunter Carroll at the South County courthouse in Venice. Gregory Anderson of AndersonGlenn was lead trial counsel for the family, trying the case alongside Jennifer Anderson and Nicholas Whitney. On November 9, 2023, the jury found for the Kowalskis across the board and awarded $211,451,174 in compensatory damages, then returned the same day with an additional $50 million in punitive damages, bringing the total above $261 million, reported at the time as one of the largest verdicts of its kind in Florida history.

What happened afterward has to be told just as plainly. In January 2024, Judge Carroll found parts of the award excessive and cut $47.5 million from it, leaving a judgment of roughly $213 million, while denying the hospital's request for a new trial. The hospital appealed, and on October 29, 2025, Florida's Second District Court of Appeal reversed the judgment in full. The panel held that the trial court had misinterpreted and misapplied section 39.203(1)(a), Florida Statutes, which immunizes good-faith child-abuse reporting and good-faith participation in dependency proceedings. It directed judgment for the hospital on the claims covered by that immunity, including the claims brought for Beata's estate and the fraudulent billing claim, and ordered a new trial limited to Maya's intentional infliction of emotional distress claim and the surviving portions of the false imprisonment, battery, and medical negligence claims.

The family asked the Florida Supreme Court to take the case, and in early August 2026 the court declined, leaving the reversal in place. As of this writing, no money judgment stands against the hospital. The narrowed set of claims returns to Sarasota County for retrial, this time without the counts the appellate court took off the table. This page preserves the case as a documented court record: the verdict a jury actually returned, and the appellate ruling that erased it.