Anna Pou and Rick Simmons

Anna Pou and Rick Simmons were linked by a defense relationship that expanded from legal counsel into a sustained effort to manage the consequences of public accusation. As scrutiny of deaths at Memorial Medical Center intensified, Simmons advised Pou on her professional and public exposure, fought to protect information she had shared with Tenet personnel, and negotiated how she would appear in the criminal process. Their partnership did not resolve the underlying dispute over what happened to patients; it shaped how Pou confronted the investigation and how her case entered public view.

Counsel amid public scrutiny

As news coverage escalated, Pou faced reporters at her home and at the Baton Rouge hospital where she had gone to work. She regarded their attention as harassment, and Simmons advised her not to watch the news. When a visitor at the hospital claimed to represent a pharmaceutical company, Pou suspected she was a reporter and told a resident to keep her from interfering with patient care. Simmons shared her concern that public scrutiny had made the environment difficult for her to practice in and that she needed to allow it to cool.

Pou, Simmons, and the head of her department at Louisiana State University reached the same conclusion: she should stop performing surgery. The decision carried immediate consequences for her patients. Pou had to notify people, including patients with advanced cancer, that they would need another surgeon. She called James O’Bryant and his wife, Brenda, to tell them that he would need someone else for an upcoming operation, which would have been the third she performed on him. The episode shows Simmons’s role extending beyond courtroom procedure: he advised a physician whose legal predicament was disrupting her work and her relationship with patients.

The dispute over Tenet conversations

A central legal contest concerned what Pou had told Tenet personnel after she left Memorial. Investigators wanted to interview Tenet media chief Steven Campanini, who had received Pou’s urgent call for advice and spoken with her extensively. Simmons sought to block the interview, arguing that conversations involving Campanini and Tenet attorney Audrey Andrews should remain confidential. Andrews had been involved in some of the calls and had not immediately told Pou that she represented Tenet rather than Pou.

The dispute turned on the point at which Andrews clarified that distinction. In May, the Louisiana Supreme Court denied investigators access to what Pou had told Andrews before being informed that Andrews was exclusively Tenet’s lawyer. Later statements to Andrews or Campanini were otherwise open to investigation, so Simmons filed further motions to prevent disclosure. Although prosecutor Butch Schafer agreed to a hearing focused on when Andrews had explained whom she represented, Simmons used the hearing to press for broader protection. On June 26, the lower court ruled that material Pou had discussed before the notification remained protected even if she repeated it later; Andrews’s notes were protected as well. Investigators’ effort to obtain the conversations was consequently frustrated, and Simmons continued to contest disclosure as the case moved through the courts.

At the end of September, an appeals court again sided with Simmons, leaving the information protected while Schafer petitioned the state’s Supreme Court to revisit the matter. This legal fight mattered to the relationship because it made Simmons both Pou’s adviser and the principal advocate for limiting investigators’ access to potentially significant accounts of what she had said after the evacuation. The record establishes the scope and outcome of the motions, but does not establish what Pou disclosed in the protected conversations.

Arrest and public defense

In July 2006, Simmons contacted the attorney general’s office to ask whether Pou would be arrested. He reminded Schafer that the lawyers could arrange a self-surrender, an option previously discussed to avoid a surprise arrest. Simmons understood that Pou, Cheri Landry, and Lori Budo might all be allowed to surrender themselves. He asked Schafer to call so Pou could be brought in without a public procession, and Schafer assured him that there would be no such spectacle. Simmons told Pou to keep her surgery schedule, but she instead gave up plans to spend a long weekend in New Orleans with her mother and drove her mother back to the capital. During that weekend, Pou continued visiting O’Bryant in intensive care, speaking with his nurses, and sitting with Brenda.

After the arrests, Simmons challenged the way the case had been presented. In a press conference, he accused Charles Foti of using the arrests to obtain mug shots for a media event and emphasized that Pou had not been formally charged. He stressed that the decision whether to pursue indictments belonged to Orleans Parish district attorney Eddie Jordan, not Foti, and said that he intended to present evidence to Jordan in an effort to discourage further action. Simmons also characterized the arrest affidavit as a collection of allegations rather than a final account of guilt. His response framed the arrests as an accusation still subject to scrutiny, while contesting the political and publicity effects he believed accompanied them.

Managing the media and the case’s afterlife

Simmons also tried to shape Pou’s participation in television coverage. He arranged an interview with the program 60 Minutes, but Pou was nervous and refused to meet the crew on its first visit. For the eventual interview with Morley Safer, Simmons arranged a complete audio recording so that the conversation could not later be taken out of context if the program were subpoenaed. He expected the broadcast to present Pou favorably and worked to coordinate statements of support from professional medical organizations for the period after it aired. He even objected to the timing of a planned statement by the American Medical Association, reasoning that a highly anticipated New Orleans Saints game might draw local attention away from the interview.

Simmons’s efforts extended to fictional portrayals that might affect public understanding of the case. Before an episode of Boston Legal about a doctor accused of killing patients after Hurricane Katrina was broadcast, he pressed the producers, arguing that the program was insensitive to Pou and to the families of the dead and that its timing was inappropriate while a grand jury investigation was approaching. When he could not persuade the producers to disclose the verdict in the episode, he sought a local disclaimer to reduce any possible effect on jurors. Pou supporters separately tried to stop the broadcast. These efforts show the partnership operating not only through formal legal motions but also through attempts to limit or contextualize media narratives before they could influence the climate around the case.

A partnership without a settled verdict

The evidence presents Simmons as Pou’s persistent legal and communications advocate through a period of uncertainty: he counseled her about the press, helped her suspend surgery, challenged access to her conversations, arranged a controlled surrender, and sought to shape both news and fictional coverage. Those actions strengthened Pou’s capacity to contest the accusations, but they did not settle the questions at the heart of the investigation. The relationship is therefore defined by advocacy under pressure rather than by a documented resolution: Simmons worked to protect his client and her account, while the criminal and ethical meaning of the patient deaths remained contested.