Fired over Gaza? Dr. Rupa Marya Sues UCSF, Says She Was Targeted for Speaking Up for Palestine

AMY GOODMAN: We end today’s show with Dr. Rupa Marya, renowned physician, activist, author, composer, who this week filed two free speech complaints against University of California, San Francisco. One is a First Amendment lawsuit accusing the university of violating her constitutional rights to free speech, the other a civil rights lawsuit for discrimination on the basis of speech in support of Palestinian rights and the rights of all marginalized people to have fair access to healthcare. Dr. Marya alleges that UCSF — University of California, San Francisco — began targeting her long before she began to speak out about Palestine, as her work centers research into the impacts of colonialism and structural racism in healthcare, joining us now from San Francisco, co-author of the book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice.

Dr. Marya, thanks for being with us. Explain these two lawsuits and what happened to you. When were you fired?

DR. RUPA MARYA: I was fired in May. Happy to be here again. Thank you, Amy.

I was fired in May, last month, for — you know, I didn’t expect that my career-ending move would be to say “stop bombing hospitals,” for expressing support for Palestinian liberation and for criticizing the U.S.-backed genocide in Israel. And so, you know, when this — this firing came after monthslong of repression, harassment, intimidation, defamation, in coordination with California state Senator Scott Wiener. UCSF leadership has been egregriously repressing healthcare workers, firing, suspending, harassing, for 20 months.

And so, it is time to fight back, because we cannot do our jobs without our voices. Doctors need our voices. Our healthcare workers need our voices to advocate for the health of all people. And that is what I have done for the 24 years of my work as a doctor, and that is what I will continue to do. And so, it’s critical to understand why is it that UCSF is trying to stop healthcare workers from speaking up for the rights of health for all.

AMY GOODMAN: So, when were you fired, and on what grounds?

DR. RUPA MARYA: I was fired May 20th, after a several-monthslong faculty conduct process, so that, you know, it — but, you know, I was suspended first, and they attacked my medical license. They defamed me publicly. So, all sorts of horrible activity happened for the last 20 months as I was advocating for the rights of Palestinians who are facing genocide.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about threats that you received?

DR. RUPA MARYA: Oh, horrible threats. So, when UCSF, in coordination with California state’s Scott Wiener, started publishing defamatory statements about me across multiple social media sites, I received death threats, horrific, racist death threats, rape threats. I had, you know, faculty members tell me that they were being asked to fill out false reports of my bad clinical behavior, which, you know, in 23 years of practice, I’ve had no incidents of patient safety issues.

So, these are the kinds of things that also ended up leading me on an investigation to understand what these relationships were between Scott Wiener and UCSF. And I learned that UCSF’s largest donor, the Diller Foundation, the billionaire Diller family, donates to the whole UC system, donates to California state Senator Scott Wiener and also donates to the — or, has donated to the Canary Mission, which I landed on due to these events. The Canary Mission is a doxxing, malicious website that has ties to the Israeli government, that the Trump administration is currently using to — as a list of people to deport, the students to deport across the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: You asked the university to protect you?

DR. RUPA MARYA: I did. So, in 2020, I also received threats as I was writing my book, Inflamed, with Raj Patel, and I was speaking out about COVID and our need to protect the most vulnerable people during the beginning of the COVID pandemic. And at that time, UCSF’s head of security, the office of the president of the UC system, the vice chancellor, Catherine Lucey, met with me in person to describe the risks, describe, you know, what kinds of records requests they were getting, how they were concerned to my personal safety and security. So, at that time, they were very proactive of protecting my safety.

But when these things happened in November of 2023, when I said “stop bombing hospitals” and started getting a barrage of online threats, UCSF didn’t respond when I asked for help. And that was very interesting to me. It took them about 10 days to respond. And when they finally did respond to my request for them to take down my public profile, they told me that I was under investigation for my protected speech.

AMY GOODMAN: So, finally, in this last minute, why two lawsuits? Explain the difference.

DR. RUPA MARYA: Well, they’re just different lawsuits covering different aspects, but both of them are looking to get accountability from UCSF and also to push back so that healthcare workers can have our collective voice to speak up for the rights of Palestinians facing genocide. It is our moral and professional obligation to speak out about children being harmed in the ways that they are in Gaza, about hospitals and the whole healthcare structure being destroyed in Gaza, and about our healthcare colleagues who have been abducted, tortured and killed in Gaza.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Marya — 

DR. RUPA MARYA: So, we cannot be silent. We must push back.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Marya, you were named one of the top 20 most influential women in biomedicine by Nature. You’ve served on multiple national advisory boards. But that didn’t shield you from institutional reprisal. And since your firing, over a thousand healthcare workers and students have signed open letters demanding your reinstatement, denouncing UCSF’s suppression of political expression. In this last 20 seconds, what does this kind of support mean? And do you think you might be reinstated?

DR. RUPA MARYA: Solidarity is the only thing we have. It’s our superpower to fight authoritarianism, fascism and this kind of racist repression. So, I ask for all healthcare workers around the world to stand in solidarity with me, because my fight is our fight, and our fight is for the liberation of Palestine and our collective liberation. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Rupa Marya, physician, activist, author and composer, fired in late May by the University of California, San Francisco, now filed a First Amendment lawsuit against UCSF, as well as a civil rights lawsuit.

That does it for our show. We have three job openings. Go to democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.