Founder of America’s Frontline Doctors is sentenced to prison for role in Capitol riot

Simone Gold, a Beverly Hills physician who founded a doctors’ organisation that challenged pandemic public health measures and promoted unproven covid therapies, has been sentenced to 60 days in prison by a US federal court in Washington, DC, for illegally entering the US Capitol building during the riot on 6 January 2021.

Gold came to prominence in July 2020 with a viral video introducing America’s Frontline Doctors on the steps of the US Supreme Court. Seven white coated physicians denounced lockdowns and masks, questioned the utility of vaccines, and touted the benefits of hydroxychloroquine, a drug which had recently been endorsed by Donald Trump.

Most of the organisation had no experience treating covid patients, but Gold was then a working emergency department physician. Trump later retweeted the video, making her an overnight star in the conservative media. She has 482 000 Twitter followers, is banned by Facebook, and travels with a bodyguard, her lawyers told the court.

Gold pleaded guilty in March to a charge of entering and remaining in a restricted building during the riot. Prosecutors asked for a 90 day sentence, saying that America’s Frontline Doctors, which is under congressional investigation for selling ineffective covid treatments online, used her trial to raise $430 000 by portraying it as an assault on free speech.

“I find it unseemly that your organisation is raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for its operations, including your salary,” US District Judge Christopher Cooper told Gold. “That is a real disservice to the true victims of that day.”

“January 6 was about a lot of things,” he said, “but it was not about the first amendment [on free speech], and it was certainly not about covid treatments or vaccines,” Cooper said.

While inside the Capitol that day, Gold gave a speech opposing vaccine mandates. She was filmed by the spokesman of America’s Frontline Doctors, John Strand, who prosecutors described as her boyfriend. He refused a plea agreement and will stand trial.

After a police officer told her to leave, Gold stopped in the Rotunda, where she climbed a statue of President Eisenhower and gave a second speech through a bullhorn.

Gold told the court that she had been scheduled to speak at a 6 January “health freedom rally” outside the Capitol, organised with the Trump campaign, but that her speeches had been cancelled and she had been swept into the Capitol with the crowd, so she delivered her message there. She had been “misguided,” she told the court, and had never intended to get involved “in a situation that was so destructive to our nation.”

But Cooper said that camera footage showed her entering the building immediately after a police officer was violently pulled to the ground in front of her. She had made no effort to assist, despite her training, he noted.

After the sentencing, she retweeted a statement from America’s Frontline Doctors which said that the “Biden DOJ [Department of Justice] has decided to make an example of those who speak out for constitutional rights in this country.”

“60 days in prison for ‘trespassing’? This injustice must not stand,” said the organisation, encouraging followers to tweet the hashtag “FreeDrGold.”

Days before sentencing, the court received a letter from the president of the Medical Board of California, Kristina Lawson, who wrote that Gold “is dangerous and must be stopped.”

Lawson documented a campaign of threats and harassment which she said Gold orchestrated.1 Several men followed her children to school, flew a drone over her house, and confronted her in a dark parking garage, Lawson said, because the board was investigating doctors who prescribed hydroxychloroquine.

Gold still has her medical licence in California, but her lawyers told the court that a bill advancing in the state legislature is specifically aimed at empowering the state medical board to revoke it, and that Gold’s name was invoked by legislators in debates. The bill was recently modified only to penalise the spreading of covid misinformation in a patient care setting.2 After the Federation of State Medical Boards warned doctors last year that spreading covid misinformation could threaten their licences, at least 14 states with Republican dominated legislatures passed laws barring state medical boards from imposing such sanctions.

Revocation of Gold’s California licence would not preclude her practising in other states. She has recently moved to Florida, where governor Ron DeSantis has appointed a member of America’s Frontline Doctors, Joseph Ladapo, as surgeon general.3