Maya Kowalski files criminal complaint against hospital alleging sexual abuse

The 17-year-old girl featured in the popular Netflix documentary “Take Care of Maya” who won a bombshell medical malpractice case against Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, has filed a criminal complaint against the same hospital claiming she was sexually abused there.

An attorney for Maya Kowalski told the Daily Mail that she filed a criminal complaint with the Pinellas County Sheriff’s department involving the hospital Friday.

The complaint cites assault and battery at the hospital between Oct. 8 and Oct. 13 in 2016.

The new legal action comes after a Florida jury found the hospital liable on all counts against it, ruling that the facility wrongfully separated Maya from her mother — who later took her own life.

The hospital is facing damages of $261 million.

The jury awarded the Kowalski family monies for a range of offenses, including wrongfully placing the child under video surveillance for 48 consecutive hours and making her strip down to shorts and a training bra for a photograph.

A hospital staffer, they found, also committed misconduct by sometimes kissing the then 10-year-old and having her sit on her lap.

Attorney Greg Anderson said that while Maya was in “imprisonment” at the hospital, a man who appeared to be a doctor came into her room and pulled down her pajamas and underwear and stared at and touched her private parts.

“Maya suppressed this until about four weeks ago, [but] she did put in some notes to both the psychiatrist there at the time Dr. Katzenstein and later to Dr. Henschke, the two female psychiatrists that she saw along the way.” Anderson said.

Kowalski was taken to the hospital in October 2016 by her mother for treatment of a painful neurological condition known as Chronic Regional Pain Syndrome.

Beata Kowalski demanded that her daughter receive aggressive ketamine treatment, an approach she said had previously relieved her symptoms.

Maya’s mother said she was put in a ketamine coma in Mexico, an unconventional treatment that had improved her state.

But doctors became wary of the mother’s demands, eventually concluding that she suffered from Munchausen by proxy syndrome, where a parent manufactures or exaggerates a child’s symptoms to garner sympathy and attention.

Kowalski testified at the trial that hospital personnel dismissed her condition as largely imaginary, and often scoffed at her complaints of pain.

The facility contacted Florida child welfare authorities to report suspected child abuse. After an investigation, a judge made Maya a medical ward of the state, cutting her off from her family.

Distraught over the severance and facing child abuse accusations, Beata Kowalski hung herself in the garage of her family home three months later.

Maya clutched Beata’s rosary beads and cried uncontrollably as the jury’s decision was announced in court Thursday.