UPDATE: Judge grants permanent injunction blocking the release of Bob Saget’s death investigation records
Last month, Saget's widow, Kelly Rizzo, and his three daughters filed a lawsuit against the sheriff and medical examiner's office
Aux News Bob Saget
Update, 3/15: Ninth Judicial Circuit Judge Vincent Chiu has granted a permanent injunction blocking the release of records related to the actor’s death, including the final death report. This decision comes nearly a month after Saget’s family filed a lawsuit against the Orange County, Florida Sheriff and Medical Examiner’s office and after Chiu granted a temporary order to keep the files sealed.
“The entire Saget family is grateful that the Judge granted their request for an injunction to preserve Bob’s dignity, as well as their privacy rights, especially after suffering this unexpected and tragic loss. We are pleased this issue has been resolved, and the healing process can continue to move forward. All of the prayers and well wishes continuously extended to the family are beyond appreciated,” Saget family attorney Brian Bieber says in a statement to CNN.
A judge has granted a temporary order that will block the release of records from the investigation into Bob Saget’s death. This comes after Saget’s widow, Kelly Rizzo, and his three daughters filed a lawsuit against the Orange County, Florida Sheriff and Medical Examiner’s office in order to keep those files sealed.
According to the lawsuit filed earlier this week, Rizzo and her daughters wish to block the release of those records due to their graphic nature. “In the process of these investigations, Defendants created records which include photographs, video recordings, audio recordings, statutorily protected autopsy information, and all other statutorily protected information,” the lawsuit explains, per CNN. “Upon information and belief, some of these Records graphically depict Mr. Saget, his likeness or features, or parts of him, and were made by Defendants during Defendants’ investigations.”
The family believes that if those graphic materials went public, it would cause them “irreparable harm in the form of extreme mental pain, anguish, and emotional distress.”
Judge Vincent Chiu agreed with the family’s argument and granted a temporary ordered that will block the release of the records. ABC reports that this injunction, though temporary, will stay in effect until a future court decision.
A lawyer for the family told CNN, that though the “facts of the investigation should be made public,” they wanted the more graphic details to be kept confidential “out of respect for the dignity of Mr. Saget and his family.”
“It’s very simple—from a human and legal standpoint, the Saget family’s privacy rights outweigh any public interest in disclosure of this sensitive information,” the lawyer added.
In a statement, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department said, “”While we are sensitive to the family’s concerns about the right to privacy, that must be balanced with our commitment to transparency, compliance with the law, and the public’s right to know.”
Saget died on January 9 after a head injury sustained from a fall in his hotel room. In his report, Chief Medical Examiner, Joshua D. Stephany, ruled his death an accident.
84 Comments
This is what the public has the right to know about a celebrity dying:They died. It was natural causes/accident/criminal.That’s it. No one has a right to see photos from an investigation, and certainly not his autopsy photos.
“They died. It was natural causes/accident/criminal.”I’m not even sure the public has a right to that information, but I can at least see an argument. But, yeah, there should be no doubt about the rest. It’s ridiculous that a judge’s order is even required here.
If there’s foul play involved then I can see a potential public safety angle. If none, say so and move on privately.
I think it’s important to know if it’s criminal for the sake of trying to solve the crime. That’s probably it though.
Good points on the crime element, bfred and Citric. I hadn’t thought of that.
Lacking that and additional written documentation, it isn’t hard in our current culture to imagine every celeb death turning into a winding conspiracy theory, enrapturing hoardes of bored people and spawning all sorts of pizzagate-esque blowback.
Especially because Saget’s death was unusual. I don’t say that thinking even in the slightest that foul play was involved. But when you hear a guy died unexpectedly after a serious head injury, surely that’s more likely to spawn a conspiracy theory then when, say, Betty White dies.
It’s important for these types of things (not just for celebrities) to be public to maintain transparency in the coroner’s/police offices. There could be a pattern of cover-ups or who knows what all going on at any time. Not saying at all there’s reason to believe there’s anything like that going on here, but it makes sense that you’d need a judge’s order to keep the activities of government officials private since there is a public interest in governmental transparency.
Why would anyone want to see autopsy photos?
Ghouls gonna ghoul.
I had an ex in highschool send me photos once. I hadn’t spoken to her in a while and she said it was vile. It was the interior of a house fire. Turns out it was her house and her sister died in the fire. The firemen had posted the pictures to the internet. There were some terrible comments on the photos.I am married to a medical professional. She vents things to me sometimes, she vents to her coworkers. But posting on the internet is another damn level. Ghouls are everywhere.
Is this your first day on the internet?
You actually typed that knowing the world we live in.SMH…
I know the world I live in (whoa-oh-oh)
And these are the hands I’m given (whoa-oh)
I have to sometimes look at them in the course of my work. Wish I didn’t.
1st day on the Internet?
You can’t really be this sweetly naive, right?
I can try
Why would anyone want to see autopsy photos?Hi! Welcome to the internet! You must be new here.
Death certificates are public records, and I can kinda see why in a broad sense. If, say, Acme Corp’s drainage facilities are close to the public water supply, it’s helpful to know if your town has 15x times the national cancer rates. All of TV’s crime shows make people think of criminal proceedings in specific cases, but it also offers some insight into how competent your local Medical Examiner’s office is overall.
That said, I do think you have to balance that against a family’s right to privacy, and candid autopsy photos of celebrities are obvious vulture bait.
Not everyone has a right to see every death certificate in every state. For example, here are New York state’s rules:
https://www.health.ny.gov/vital_records/death.htm
On the other hand, if ordinary folks don’t have the same right to privacy, why do celebrities?
I would like to see the law changed. Because it shouldn’t matter if you are a celebrity or not, your records and private details should not be available to just anyone and everyone. Saget’s family deserves privacy, but not because he’s famous. It’s because it’s a right all should enjoy.
That law already exists, and its abbreviated as HIPAA. It even applies after death unless someone who is authorized releases the information. Everytime the details of a celebrity’s death gets reported in the news, my first thought is “Did the family authorize this?” If not, someone probably broke the law.
HIPAA is about medical records, and I don’t know if a coroners’ report really counts as a medical record, at least legally speaking. If releasing them was a HIPAA violation I doubt you’d see them released very often, if ever.Florida is particularly open when it comes to public records. That’s a big part of why “Florida man” has become a meme. It’s not necessarily that people in Florida are more apt to commit crazy crimes, just that the arrest records are automatically released to the media, so everybody knows about it right away. eta:https://www.vox.com/recode/22363011/hipaa-not-hippa-explained-health-privacy “HIPAA only applies to what are called “covered entities.” Those are, essentially, health care providers (doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies, for instance), health insurers, and health care clearinghouses (which process medical data). It also covers their “business associates,” or contractors who have to handle medical records in some way to do work for those covered entities.”So apparently it doesn’t include coroners’ offices.
C’mon, have you BEEN to Florida? It’s where people go when they’ve been run out of every other state in the country and are about to be pushed out to sea on a raft. I’m not talking about Naples, Palm Beach or Ponta Vedra. There’s like 8,000 miles of coast to work with!
There’s a reason I said it’s not *necessarily* because people in Florida are more apt to commit crazy crimes. I mean, it still might be.
Say, that link icon when you write a comment? It doesn’t work.At some point, whoever owns this site decided to remove the option to hyperlink to other pages. Fine. But instead of implementing this properly, they kept the link icon, so that you would think that you are able to hyperlink.
And on top of that, instead of just stripping out the links in your comment, the text that is hyperlinked also gets shoved to the front of the paragraph. So your comment ends up being completely incomprehensible.This isn’t the sort of thing that a functional media organization allows to remain uncorrected for months, as Gawker or whoever it is owns the A.V. Club has done here. It’s just excruciating to watch.
theres eventually gonna be some autopsy photos EVERYONE is going to have to see- just to make sure
I don’t have a problem with the order here. In particular, photos of the deceased seem uniquely sensitive, and producing them feels ghoulish.But I think your position overall is wrong. These are records maintained by government agencies, meaning they memorialize work that Florida residents paid for, and that was done on their behalf. If Florida residents have an interest in autopsies being performed (and they apparently do, because they pay for the government to do them) then they have an interest in how that work is being done. The default position should be that all government records are public, and we should be careful about exceptions to that.Remember also that the determination of natural causes/accident/criminal is not always a clear one, and one the public may have an interest in scrutinizing. Let’s say, for example, that collisions in which white drivers killed black people were less likely to be labeled criminally negligent than collisions in which black drivers killed while people. We’d have an interest in looking at the reports to know whether those findings were accurate, or whether they reflected some kind of bias by the people making the determinations. We can’t do that if the government just gives us a label stating the outcome of its investigation, and not how it arrived at that outcome.It appears Saget died unexpectedly, hours after receiving a serious head injury that is at least somewhat unexplained. I don’t have meaningful doubts that his death was accidental. But that is at least the kind of death that the public has some right to know the details about.
And yet, nothing is said about if a girl was raped and murdered in 1990
I came here for this.
What does Bill Clinton have to do with this?
That definitely DIDN’T happen!
Given what happened to Zelda Williams, I think this is prudent.
Oh Jesus, what happened to Zelda Williams? If I even want to know, given the context here…
People spammed her social media with the photos of her dad’s corpse within minutes of them becoming available.
Jesus fucking Christ.
He can’t fucking help you now.
People are such assholes.
https://edition.cnn.com/2014/08/13/tech/social-media/zelda-williams-twitter/index.html
Imagine how much worse it would have been if actual pictures of her father had been released.
Or the Bryant family.
Fucking L.A. sheriff deputies. I mean the L.A. Sheriff’s Dept is known for being just horrible, but selling pictures of Kobe’s dead body is really low even for them.https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/los-angeles-sheriffs-department-gangs-rand-report-1225982/
Nothing happened to the Bryant family. They brought a suit on the argument that photos might be released so that someone in the Bryant family might see them. To date not one photo of anyone killed in the crash has been released in public. There was an accusation that a cop showed a photo to one other person; that person was not a member of the Bryant family.
This was a smart call by the judge. Isn’t Saget one of a recent crop of celebrities that have passed that have become fodder for conspiracy theorists? My understanding is that the anti-vax crowd wants to claim that folks like Saget and Betty White were vaccinated but still died from Covid and this fact is being hidden from the public.
The anti-vaxxers want to use these celebrity deaths to claim that vaccinations do not work and are dangerous. Of course, it is the anti-vax folks who are more often than not dangerous, but I have no plans to confront an anti-vaxxer face to face. Not looking to get into a fracas with these individuals.
The report actually did mention that he was still suffering from covid, as it was detected in his system. However, they don’t believe that’s what killed him. Unfortunately, that add more koolaid to the conspiracy fire.
What I’ve been hearing (not that I’m tracking, it’s just happened) is that the damage to his skull went way above what a simple fall would do, but I have no idea if there’s any actual basis in fact.
That’s what I read as well.
At age 65, you don’t need a blow strong enough for a skull fracture to cause a cerebral hemorrhage. If there’s enough acceleration/deceleration of the brain, one of more of the bridging veins that attach the brain to the meninges can tear. These generally have a lot less elasticity once we get older.
Sure but what he’s saying is that the report specifically mentioned it seeming like more trauma than would be caused by a fall.
Right, that I understand. But it’s suggesting that his skull was fractured significantly. That’s where people are saying it’s “weird.”
But his skull was fractured in two places. In the back and in his face.
I once fainted in the bathroom, broke open the skin on the back of my head, then when I attempted to get up and call for help I passed out again and fractured my jaw. Once you’re already dazed it’s easy to get hurt a second time.
Honestly sometimes this weird shit just happens. The human body is generally resilient but you have these one-in-a-million cases where a simple fall causes an aneurysm or whatever.
My mom took a spill on carpet 15 years ago when she was in her early 60s. She looked fine, but luckily my dad was there and took her to the doctor. She ended up having skull/brain surgery due to the swelling between the brain and the skull and now has a metal plate in her head.
Our heads can be pretty fragile, and if the brain bounces around inside the skull, a minor slip can potentially be incredibly serious.And then there’s the case of the Allman Brothers’ bassist who drove his motorbicyle into the side of a bus, got up, shook it off, only to die of a hemorrhage 4 hours later. Doctors said even if they took him straight to the hospital there would have been little they could have done at the time.
Freak injuries are a thing. Plenty of folks hit their head, run through the rest of the day normally, then die in their sleep.
I recall reading William Holden, while at home alone, fell down and hit his head. But he had just poured himself another drink so he sat down to finish it and died (not sure if he finished the drink).
supposedly the easiest time for a guy to die is when hes getting up to pee all the time, then laying back down. i guess i can deal with that.
Which is absurd, because a major complaint coming from the antivaxxers is that “deaths by other causes are being passed off as due to COVID just because they also had it.” e.g. People who would have otherwise survived cancer being destroyed by the ravages of COVID on their immune-compromised systems, and the antivaxxers claim COVID had nothing to do with it.Bob Saget’s death is the exact opposite. A man who likely would have survived COVID dying coincidentally by other causes, and no-one is blaming COVID at all…No doubt they’ll use it for their propaganda anyway. Doublethink is endemic in this “movement”.
The anti vaxx idiots are trying to claim that it’s the vaccine it’s self killed all these celebrities, as part of some large de-population plan by the elite.
Pour one out for the scumbag sheriff’s deputy who won’t get laid now that he can’t show pictures of Bob Saget dead to pick up whatever skank would be interested in that.
When I read the details about his death report, my first thought was “Umm, did his family authorize the release of this information?” At least some the details would definately fall under HIPAA protections. Particularly the toxicology report.
HIPPA covers medical records, not death records. Death certificates are public in most, if not all states. I’ve requested them myself for non-close family members.
A death certificate, though, is not the same as an autopsy report, which goes into far more detail and does usually (but not always) fall under the rubric of medical records. Some of the information that made it into the news reports about Sagat’s death seemed a little too detailed for a death certificate, that’s why I wondered if the family authorized the release of that information.
Yeah, it’s hard to say. None of the death certificates I’ve read involved anything too out of the ordinary. I certainly agree it doesn’t seem like there is a compelling reason why the public should have access to things like photos. I think a written autopsy report is a little stickier, which is why courts, not a novice like me will rule on that.
I can certainly understand the family not wanting pictures released, no one needs to see that, but from what I’ve read, the local coroner signed off on ‘accidental’ a little too quickly. His injuries are consistent with falling down a flight of stairs, or being struck several times about the head.
This is how you quash any conspiracy theories.
There are already some legitimate conspiracy theories. No one dies in their sleep of cerebral hemorrhage because they bumped their head on a door frame or whatever.
Thank you for your input, Dr Oz or Dr Phil. Pick your poison as to which of the 2 quacks you want to be.
lol, you gave yourself away too early with “legitimate conspiracy theories.”
Two weeks after I made this comment the coroners released new info that he had probably fallen backward from full body height and cracked his head on marble. That explains what was at first strange. Look at the dates of comments.
I’m too busy doing my own research on legitimate conspiracy theories. I’m about to blow the lid off this whole thing
I don’t see a need for the sheriff or the medical examiner to release anything to the public beyond what’s already out there. The cause of death is known and for all intents and purposes the case it closed. No one in the general public needs to see Saget’s, or anyone else’s, autopsy photos.But then, we are talking about Florida…
I can’t help but think TMZ is involved somehow in this.
Like in a Nightcrawler kind of way?
Ha, no, more of in a way of TMZ getting access to these photos/materials in a very disgusting, sleazy way.
BAMF!
Wouldn’t want the details to be part of any other comic’s set
They are obviously embarrassed about some aspect of his death. Like he slipped in lube while jerking it and banged his head on the sink.
Good it’s none of our business. Unless it’s funny.
If his death involved slipping on a banana peel, I want to be the first to know, god damn it.
This is by far his most elaborate version of the Aristocrats joke yet.
Pfff, the internet cares not for injunctions.
There’ll be uninformed opinions whether the facts are known or not.
The ghosts of David Carradine and Michael Hutchence nod approvingly.