Florida Woman Charged With Terrorism

What happened to free speech? Briana Boston has been charged with terrorism for repeating back to Blue Cross and Blue Shield their own policy strategy

UPDATE: As of 12/14, Briana Boston has been placed on house arrest. She met the 10% threshold of her $100,000 bond and was granted a pre-trial release. Boston is permitted to go shopping once a week, attend medical appointments, church, and work, and is under GPS monitoring 24/7.

Her house arrest allows for various conditions such as once-a-week shopping and the ability to attend medical appointments, church, and work.

In an arguably unprecedented case on the meaning of free speech, a 42-year-old Florida woman named Briana Boston has been arrested and charged on terrorism charges against Blue Cross and Blue Shield health insurance corporation. According to the arrest affidavit, after BCBS denied her health insurance claim, Boston responded, "Delay, deny, depose. You people are next." Apparently, though Boston does not own a firearm, has no violent criminal history, and indicated no acts of violence whatsoever—this statement amounts to a threat of terrorism and mass shooting. Let’s Address This.

Briana Boston has little engagement in political activism, with a single $1 donation made to a New York political race years ago. But like millions of Americans, she received the hurtful news that her health insurance claim had been denied.

When Lakeland Police contacted Boston at her home, she admitted to using the “Delay, Deny, Depose” phrase and added, “healthcare companies played games and deserved karma from the world because they are evil.” She went on to say that she used the phrase, “because it’s what is in the news right now.” Lakeland Police Chief Sam Taylor responded that, “[Boston has] been in this world long enough that she certainly should know better that you can’t make threats like that in the current environment that we live in and think that we’re not going to follow up and put you in jail.”

But what actual threat did Boston make, especially when compared to the violence corporations actually and knowingly impose upon the American people? As an attorney who represents women who are survivors of domestic violence, I cannot count how many times a survivor sought a restraining order against an abusive partner, and could not attain it because despite past abuse, and despite the new threat to “bash your face in” was too vague and unclear. What makes Blue Cross and Blue Shield so special that they deny a woman’s healthcare claim and then get her arrested for terrorism because she peacefully and verbally expressed frustration?

Booking photo of Briana Boston released by the Lakeland Police Department

Likewise, as a human rights lawyer who has also literally survived violent death threats made against me and even testified in federal court against the man who threatened to kill me, I have to ask—what about her statement is a threat? The phrase “Delay, Deny, Depose” is a common insurance statement, used for decades as official policy to actively prevent having to make payouts. And the results of this policy are not hypothetical, they have been punitive, deadly, and are ongoing.

For example, in addition to suffering claim denial after claim denial, Americans are $220 billion in medical debt, 68,000 die annually due to lack of healthcare, and 500,000 file for medical bankruptcy, annually. None of these documented deaths or cruel policies are considered terrorism or violence—yet a woman repeating that policy statement back to insurance corporations is suddenly terrorism? Meanwhile, since the ACA passed, the health insurance industry has enacted the “Delay, Deny, Depose” policy to make a whopping $371 billion in profits. Corporations like UnitedHealth have led the way at raking in more than 40% of those profits, while simultaneously leading the way in denying 32% of all insurance claims.The hypocrisy is beyond glaring.

And the corporate coordination is obvious.

A GoFundMe to establish a legal defense fund for Briana Boston was quickly shut down. This is especially shocking because a GoFundMe for Daniel Penny, the former Marine acquitted of manslaughter charges for killing Jordan Neely, thrived with more than $3.5 million in contributions. Why is a defense fund for a man accused of manslaughter after actually killing someone allowed to remain, but a defense fund for a woman who merely stated an insurance company’s policy shut down?

The answer is, this is what class warfare looks like.

Class warfare against working people is when billion dollar insurance corporations can live by “Delay, Deny, Depose” for decades—even as their policies actually and knowingly enable tens of thousands of annual deaths—but when a working person denied healthcare merely says that exact phrase—it’s terrorism. The logical conclusion then, if we are to understand this, is that corporations ARE people when enacting policies that kill people, but NOT people when we demand arrest of the corporate executives who enact the policies that kill people, but ARE people again when a person repeats back to them the exact policies they use to kill people. Again, the hypocrisy is beyond glaring.

Last week I wrote about America’s Violent Health System, in part stating,

This same day the assailant killed the UnitedHealth CEO, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield announced that patients will have to pay out of pocket for anesthesia if their surgical procedure goes longer than expected. To call this dystopian is an understatement. And in case you were wondering, anesthesia typically costs $400 for the first 30 minutes and then $600 an hour after that. Change will not come until we recognize that each of the nearly 70,000 lives annually lost due to denied healthcare, is as preventable and as cruel as the UnitedHealth CEO’s targeted death. Because whether you are pulling a trigger in broad daylight, or denying life saving medication to an innocent 4-year-old child, the end result is the same preventable death.

And just a few days ago I asked Where is Our Corporate Reckoning? adding:

If we agree that murder is wrong, then we must also agree that corporate policies knowingly designed to prioritize profits over human lives are equally immoral. If denying care that leads to death isn’t murder, then what is it? Our system allows the rich to kill the poor through bureaucracy, all while masking it as business as usual.

I then provided numerous examples of corporations enacting policies they knew would kill people, yet never once facing consequences or prison time for their deadly policies. That reckoning awaits, because this model is unsustainable. And the arrest and charge of Briana Boston is yet another example of how our class warfare system will always protect billion dollar corporations, but will punitively punish anyone who dares step out of line. I’m reminded of the speech the villain named “Hopper” gave to his fellow grasshoppers in the 1998 film, “A Bug’s Life.”

You let one ant stand up to us and they all might stand up. Those puny little ants outnumber us a hundred to one, and if they ever figure that out there goes our way of life!! It's not about food! It's about keeping those ants in line.

Understand that the point of arresting Briana Boston goes well beyond her. The BCBS CEO knows full well she alone is incapable of causing any violence or harm to their corporation. The decision to charge and arrest her with terrorism for an innocuous statement of frustration is an intimidation tactic meant to suppress dissent and force compliance. I do not advocate for violence, but I do study history. And the history of every violent economic revolution is such that when the billionaire or elite class pushed working people to the brink of human desecration and berated them until they had nothing left to lose, the only people that actually lost everything, were the elites.

The fear we’re seeing from corporations like UnitedHealth, BCBS, and other exploitative billion dollar corporations is because they know this history, but their greed is too strong a force to get them to stop exploiting us. But we cannot relent or slow down in our demands for justice and human dignity. As I’ve written before, this is a fight for human rights that we must win. It is a fight for our children, for the 70,000 Americans who die needlessly every year, for the 500,000 Americans who file medical bankruptcy annually, and for the tens of millions of families trapped in the cruel cycle of profit-driven exploitation. Let us demand better. Let us demand guaranteed universal healthcare—because our lives literally depend on it.