Steven Campanini

Steven Campanini was Tenet Healthcare’s media chief and a potential source of evidence about Anna Pou’s first conversations with the company after she left Memorial Medical Center. Investigators sought to question him about those discussions, but disputes over attorney-client privilege and confidentiality restricted what they could learn. His role in the account is therefore defined less by any disclosed statement about the hospital’s decisions than by the information his communications might have contained—and by the legal rulings that kept much of it out of reach.

Role in the Investigation

In the aftermath of the storm, Pou urgently called Campanini for advice and spoke with him extensively. By then, she had left Memorial Medical Center. For investigators, the timing mattered: the conversations took place close to the events under investigation, before the passage of time and the pressures of prosecution had further shaped later accounts. Campanini was thus not simply a corporate spokesperson whose public comments could be read in the news; he was also a possible witness to what Pou had said privately.

The Louisiana attorney general’s investigators wanted to interview him at Tenet’s headquarters in Dallas. Their effort formed part of a wider inquiry into whether decisions about patients’ deaths at Memorial had been made locally or directed from higher levels. Investigator Butch Schafer wondered whether company officials might have known of, or issued, an order concerning the injections and the rapid clearing of workers. These were investigative suspicions, not established findings about Campanini. The evidence identifies him as someone who had communicated with Pou and might be questioned, but does not establish that he took part in decisions about patient care or evacuation.

The Privilege Dispute

Pou’s attorney, Rick Simmons, moved to block investigators from interviewing Campanini. His argument relied in part on the involvement of Tenet attorney Audrey Andrews in some of the conversations. Because Andrews had not immediately told Pou that she represented Tenet alone, Simmons contended that Pou could have understood the discussions to be protected and confidential. Schafer opposed the motion, arguing that Pou could not reasonably have believed a Tenet lawyer represented her: her employment contract identified her as an employee of Louisiana State University, not Memorial or Tenet.

The distinction between what Pou said before and after Andrews clarified whom she represented became central. In May, the Louisiana Supreme Court denied investigators access to anything Pou had told Andrews before that clarification. The investigators understood that later statements—to Andrews or Campanini—could still be examined, and moved to interview both Tenet employees. Tenet offered to make them available, but Simmons filed further motions seeking to prevent disclosure.

Schafer agreed to a hearing focused on when, exactly, Andrews had told Pou that she was not Pou’s attorney. The hearing expanded the dispute rather than resolving it. On June 26, the lower court ruled that material Pou had discussed before receiving that notice remained protected even if she repeated it in later conversations. The ruling also protected Andrews’s eight pages of notes. As a result, investigators could not obtain the notes or use later conversations to reach information the court considered part of the earlier, privileged discussions.

An Interview That Did Not Take Place

Rider and Schafer also wanted to interview other people at Tenet’s headquarters, including staff who had helped establish a command center and communicated by email and cell phone with Memorial employees as the floodwaters rose. Senior officials in the attorney general’s office discouraged Schafer from making the trip. They anticipated that Tenet, already represented by lawyers, would direct investigators to counsel rather than provide substantive interviews; the company had said it would cooperate and supply requested materials. The decision left the planned questioning of Campanini, and of other headquarters staff, unrealized at that stage.

A district court ruling had pleased neither side, and the privilege question went to the Louisiana Supreme Court on expedited appeal. In early November, that court rejected the attorney general’s appeal. The case over access to Pou’s initial post-storm discussions with Tenet representatives was then finished. Investigators would not hear the conversations that might have offered a relatively early account of her decisions and actions. The book does not disclose what Pou told Campanini; it emphasizes that this absence of evidence resulted from the court’s protection of the communications, not from a finding about their contents.

Public Position and Significance

Campanini also appeared publicly as a Tenet spokesman. In a March news report about criticism of the corporation and the investigation at Memorial, he said that Tenet was not a target of the attorney general’s inquiry and stated that euthanasia was impermissible under any circumstances. The remark placed a clear corporate position alongside public scrutiny of Tenet, but it did not reveal what had been discussed in his private conversations with Pou or resolve the investigators’ questions about the company’s possible knowledge of events.

The character’s significance rests on this contrast between a categorical public statement and a private record that remained inaccessible. Campanini’s title made him a relevant point of contact for a corporation under scrutiny; his earlier communication with Pou made him potentially important to investigators; and the court proceedings narrowed what they could establish through him. The resulting gap is carefully bounded: the account records why investigators sought his testimony and why they did not obtain it, while leaving the substance of the protected conversations unknown.