Rusk County mother cleared of charges after Munchausen syndrome by proxy allegations debunked

Published 5:30 am Monday, July 28, 2025

HENDERSON – A Rusk County woman has been exonerated after facing false felony child medical abuse charges for nearly two years.

Jessica Gasser, a mother of a then 2-year-old-toddler, has begun to rebuild her life and heal her family, her attorney Mike Schneider said last week. At the time of the charges, her child was seized by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (CPS) and the family has since reunited.

Gasser, who was cleared of injury to a child and medical child abuse charges in Tarrant and Rusk counties— and a state CPS custody lawsuit seeking termination of her parental rights that was eventually dismissed by CPS — was the subject of worldwide news coverage and social media mockery at the time of her arrest in 2023.

The state agency accused Gasser of Munchausen syndrome by proxy — a mental illness and a form of child abuse in which a caretaker of a child, most often a mother, makes up symptoms or causes sickness in a child in an effort to seek attention. International news outlets, including the BBC, New York Post, Newsweek, and People magazine, covered the removal of the child from her parents by CPS, reporting allegations that the child was not safe in her parents’ custody.

As Gasser and her husband’s personal freedom and family were put at risk by CPS, it was apparent a cottage industry warning of a so-called epidemic of Munchausen child abuse had been steadily cultivated in Tarrant County for years. The so called epidemic has generated consulting jobs, book deals, and podcast appearances — essentially monetizing allegations like those made against  Gasser.

“As we discovered later,” Schneider said, “their candid emails and texts show that these individuals boasted that they could become famous on a news program like 60 Minutes for ‘saving’ Jessica’s child, then evolved months later into angry and frightened acknowledgments that their actions had been uncovered.”

As the CPS and criminal cases against Gasser moved forward, Schneider said, his legal team learned and then showed in court that CPS, the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Department, along with several physicians, colluded in a secret campaign against Gasser. Evidence showed that this group knew well that Gasser’s daughter had been accurately, independently and repeatedly diagnosed with gastroparesis and hypoglycemia by medical professionals months before authorities dishonestly accused Gasser — often under oath — of falsely claiming her daughter suffered from those same debilitating ailments.

Meanwhile, the child’s health deteriorated. After being seized by CPS, the child’s steady weight gain her parents and physicians at Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic was nurturing suddenly reversed, and she endured unprecedented weight loss, violent seizures, and nearly died as she was isolated for weeks from all family in a pediatric hospital in Fort Worth, Schneider said. The child lost a dangerous amount of weight immediately after she was seized from her parents, plummeting from the 24th to the 2nd percentile in weight in her first two months in CPS custody.

Throughout 2024 and 2025, Schneider shared with prosecutors exonerating documents that CPS never disclosed to the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office which Gasser had been fighting to uncover in the Rusk County court since 2023. A five-month, 2022 CPS investigation into identical accusations against Gasser included independent medical evaluations to assess her daughter’s reported intestinal issues. After consulting medical professionals suggested by the child’s pediatrician, CPS officially recognized the gastroparesis and hypoglycemia diagnoses established by numerous physicians, ruled out Munchausen allegations, and closed its investigation in Gasser’s favor in November 2022. Yet, according to Schneider, the harassment of the Gasser family went on.

The world-renowned pediatric gastrointestinal experts at Cleveland Clinic evaluated the child in person during the CPS investigation and confirmed through its lab work and those of other medical facilities that Gasser’s representations were truthful and she and her husband had been helping their daughter gain weight. These revelations would not only help establish Gasser’s innocence, they also confirmed CPS and law enforcement knew all along that the child actually suffered from those illnesses — and they knew this for nearly a year before they deployed the misleading news releases, intentionally disparaging Gasser.

“It’s clear now,” Schneider said, “this was to divert attention from the extreme mental and physiological harm that CPS, the self-described law enforcement expert, and at least two doctors had needlessly inflicted upon the child.”

Gasser’s legal team then discovered texts and emails sent between CPS, the Tarrant County purported Munchausen expert, and at least one doctor showing the group thought they could cover up their behavior with gaslighting news releases.

“CPS deliberately made false claims about the child’s health to the court, oversaw her severe psychological decline, then sought congratulatory publicity in what became a botched attempt to cover their tracks,” Schneider said.

Schneider continued to supply Tarrant County prosecutors with volumes of detailed medical records which the court had forced CPS in Rusk County to produce — despite the agency’s attempts to conceal them. This evidence established Gasser’s claims of innocence and confirmed the child’s various medical diagnoses. Independent medical experts, comprehensive forensic psychological evaluations, and the withheld CPS evidence refuted the allegations against Gasser and validated her statements about her daughter’s delicate medical condition.

Then, in 2024, a Rusk County court ordered CPS to produce more evidence withheld from Gasser’s legal team that revealed the nefarious communications between DFPS and the law enforcement expert at the heart of the Gasser case. Following a court ruling that found CPS acted in bad faith and violated a Rusk County court order to release withheld discovery documents, CPS was forced to pay all of Gasser’s attorney fees related their cover-up attempt.

When turned over to Gasser’s legal team, the evidence CPS was forced to produce revealed the child’s actual medical history — and that versions of Cook Children’s Hospital’s records circulated by CPS had been altered to remove previous findings made by Cook confirming the child’s gastrointestinal illnesses. The document production also included admissions of outrageous behavior made by the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office and CPS policy makers at the highest levels of its Austin bureaucracy.

The real medical records Gasser unearthed were clear: Contrary to the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office and Cook Children’s Hospital narrative about Gasser misrepresenting her daughter’s medical history and having Munchausen syndrome by proxy, state records show that Texas and Ohio doctors correctly diagnosed E.G. with gastroparesis and hypoglycemia beginning in 2021— and that this fact was confirmed by CPS and known by Texas law enforcement in 2022, a year before Ms. Gasser’s arrest and the seizure of her child.

Under Texas law, each child the subject of CPS custody lawsuits is required to have an attorney ad litem appointed, who is independent from CPS and parents, to represent only the child’s best interests in court. In the Rusk County CPS case, attorney Haven Charlo, who specializes in child welfare law, was appointed to represent E.G. in June 2023, and in that capacity reviewed thousands of pages of medical and other pertinent records and interviewed physicians, caregivers, and other medical professionals, advocating solely for her client E.G.’s best interests.

In February 2025, Charlo executed a sworn affidavit provided to the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office urging that Gasser’s bond conditions be lifted, stating, “My duties as an ad litem for [E.G.] have led me to the conclusion that all allegations of abuse or neglect against Jessica Gasser and her husband are wholly false and without merit.”

Charlo said, “CPS was dismissed by the Rusk County Court in April 2024, at the recommendation of CPS itself, Ellie’s guardian ad litem, CASA, and me because there was no evidence whatsoever that Jessica or her husband Austin had ever harmed [their child].”

“[T]here was, however,” Charlo added, “ample evidence produced in response to discovery in the CPS Case that [E.G.]’s medical records from [Cook Children’s Hospital] have been repeatedly altered by someone to make it appear that [E.G.] did not have medical conditions Cook itself had diagnosed my client (E.G.) with on many occasions, including gastroparesis and ketonic hypoglycemia.”

On June 3, the last of the felony allegations against Gasser were no-billed by a Tarrant County Grand Jury and dismissed by the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office for insufficient evidence. This followed the Rusk County District Attorney’s request in February 2024, that the felony criminal charges against Gasser be dismissed.

Schneider said, “The prosecution of Jessica Gasser was built on one fabrication after another, and it all spun out of control once the court forced CPS to give us not only the damning hospital records, but internal CPS memos and texts, and emails between CPS, law enforcement and Cook Children’s Child Abuse Pediatrician (“CAP”) team. “Ironically, the damage inflicted upon this innocent child’s physical and emotional well-being which was spun to the press in their favor by CPS bosses in Austin, the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office, and the participating physicians is, in itself, medical child abuse. Let’s not mince words: this is state-sponsored Munchausen by proxy.”

According to Schneider, the level of abuse endured by each member of the Gasser family was extraordinary, surpassing even that typically associated with the heavily criticized CPS.

“In Jessica’s case,” he said, “the ruse devised to hide their own abuse and neglect of this child became cruelty that wasn’t merely dishonest, it inverted reality — at least until they got caught. Our investigation as to how this happened, how many other children prior to these revelations have been injured or had their parents unfairly prosecuted and bankrupted by this industry, and how to protect children and families like this in the future will continue. We must prosecute actual child abuse, but we are concerned that the Munchausen ‘epidemic’ will lead to more baseless prosecutions and unscrupulous investigations that shatter even more Texas families and injure innocent children.”

Looking ahead, Gasser said, “Our family needlessly suffered more than 1,100 days of false allegations and deliberate humiliation. We are grateful to finally be reunited and away from the harassment and allegations they knew were false before they ever leaked them to the public. What we do now to get our reputation back is beyond us. It’s been a terrible time, but we’re moving forward. We also know this: Our daughter, and countless other children like her who have been targeted by CPS because of their complex special needs, still struggles to get the care she deserves because there is no legal path to correct the trail of misleading medical and child welfare records that still haunt her. So far, the people who purposefully did this to us have not been held account able. We pray that will change.”