Catherine Leavy convicted of hoax bomb threat against Boston Children's Hospital after Libs of TikTok campaign

What happened

On August 30, 2022, Boston Children's Hospital received a phone call claiming bombs had been placed inside the building. The hospital evacuated and went on lockdown. The threat was a hoax.

The caller was Catherine Leavy, 37, of Westfield, Massachusetts. The FBI arrested her on September 15, 2022. A federal grand jury indicted her on October 7. She pleaded guilty in September 2023 to one count of making a false telephonic bomb threat. In July 2024 she was sentenced to 30 days in prison and three years of supervised release.

BCH received two additional bomb threats during the same window. One in late August. A third in November 2022.

How it started

The hoax call did not come out of nowhere. Two weeks earlier, on August 16, Boston Children's Hospital had warned its employees about an organized online harassment campaign aimed at the hospital's pediatric gender clinic. Libs of TikTok and other far-right accounts had been amplifying claims about the clinic's services. Staff names, photos, and professional backgrounds circulated. Outlets including The Guardian tied the bomb threats directly to the campaign.

Leavy was not a random caller. She was downstream of two weeks of escalating online targeting that named the hospital, named its staff, and primed an audience to act.

Why this case matters

This is the conviction case. The line from "Libs of TikTok post" to "FBI arrest, guilty plea, federal sentence" rarely closes that cleanly. Most doxxing-amplification campaigns produce harassment, threats, and operational disruption without producing a single criminal case. The speech is constitutionally protected. The harassment is diffuse. Prosecutors don't have a target.

The hoax bomb threat is the act that crossed the line into a federal crime. Once Leavy made the call, 18 U.S.C. § 1038 gave the U.S. Attorney's Office a clean charging instrument, and the FBI a clean target.

For the hospital staff named during those two weeks, the conviction is symbolic accountability. It is not structural protection. The same staff names are still on the same broker pages. The same audience is still one search away from a home address.

What this means for you

If you're a physician, nurse, or hospital staffer who provides care that draws political attention, the BCH timeline is the operational template. A high-volume social media account names your employer or your clinic. Within days, your name is attached. Within a week, your address is the next click for anyone who wants it. See /healthcare/physicians for the full threat shape.

The criminal-law backstop is narrow. It catches the rare actor who picks up a phone and makes a federal threat. It does not catch the broader pattern of address exposure. That part runs through the broker layer, the same layer documented in the Bernard case two months earlier in the same year.

Continuous opt-out is the part that closes the lookup before the next call.

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