What Happened to Martin Gottesfeld and Where Is He Now?

Peacock's new documentary The Battle for Justina Pelletier details the fight Justina's parents, Lou and Linda Pelletier, went through to have her returned home after Boston Children's Hospital took custody of her in February 2013.

At the time, Justina's mother took her to the hospital in order to be seen after she'd been suffering from extreme stomach pain. Justina had been diagnosed with a rare illness, mitochondrial disease, months prior but the medical staff at Boston Children's Hospital believed she had somatoform syndrome.

Somatoform syndrome is a mental illness where a person has physical ailments without any physical cause. They later believed that Justina had Munchausen syndrome by proxy as a result of her parents over-medicalizing her, and they filed a 51A report in which they said they had suspicions Justina's parents had been medically negligent. The Pelletiers denied these accusations and fought to have her returned home.

During the period in which Justina was in Boston Children's Hospital, human rights activist and Anonymous member Martin Gottesfeld hacked the hospital in April 2014, in a cyberattack designed to push them to let Justina return home. Gottesfeld's story is also depicted in the four-part docuseries.

What Happened to Martin Gottesfeld?

In March 2014, Anonymous called for Justina to be released from Boston Children's Hospital, and when this did not happen, Gottesfeld initiated the cyberattack on their computer system and that of Wayside Youth & Family Support Network, the center Justina had been put in, while they were having a fundraiser.

In a statement given to the Huffington Post in 2016 about the incident, Gottesfeld said: "I'd have to hit Children's where they appear to care the most, the pocketbook and reputation.

"All other efforts to protect Justina weren't succeeding and time was of the essence. Almost unbelievably, they kept their donation page on the same public network as the rest of their stuff. Rookie mistake."

It was explained in a 2017 Rolling Stone interview with him that Gottesfeld knew "patients and medical records would not be affected" by the cyberattack, which saw him launch a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS).

A DDoS is when a website is flooded with data, so much so that the website either becomes slower or is shut down entirely by it.

The FBI began an investigation into the DDoS in April 2014, and they were able to connect Gottesfeld to the attack through a YouTube video he'd published on behalf of Anonymous calling for Justina to be allowed back into her family's care in March.

Justina was allowed to return home in June, but the investigation into Gottesfeld continued and in February 2016, he and his wife Dana, who appears in Peacock's documentary, decided to escape to Cuba.

Gottesfeld and his wife began their journey to Cuba but their boat broke down, and they had to issue a distress call in order to be rescued. They were picked up by a Disney Cruise Line ship, and they returned to Miami on February 17.

The FBI arrested Gottesfeld on federal hacking charges upon their arrival in Miami. He was charged with conspiracy and intentional damage to a protected computer under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

In August 2018 a jury found him guilty of two counts, per Reuters, and in January 2019 he was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Where Is Martin Gottesfeld Now?

Gottesfeld is still serving his prison sentence at the Communications Management Unit in Indiana, where, his wife explained in the documentary, he can only have two 15-minute calls a week and he is kept in his cell for 22 hours per day.

According to the documentary, he is set to be released on April 11, 2024. He is also said to have a job offer as a web developer following his release from prison.

The Battle for Justina Pelletier director David Metzler told Newsweek what it was like to include Dana Gottesfeld in the documentary, and why it was important to have her and her husband's story also be featured in the four-part series.

"I think it was important, obviously Justina's takes up most of the documentary, but we made sure that we had a portion dedicated to Marty's story in each episode and the reason being is largely because our story more or less starts when Justina goes to the hospital, right?" Metzler said.

"There's some background to it [...] but the narrative storytelling really starts when Justina goes to BCH for the first time, and Marty is involved not long after that, and is still involved almost 10 years later.

"And, so, we wanted to make sure that that story had an arc to it as well, that the hack that he does in the beginning is a big moment that has a lot of consequences, and so we wanted to make sure that as a viewer you follow those consequences so that you're invested in it.

"Just like Justina's story, if you're gonna draw conclusions about how you feel about what happened you need to really understand what happened, and Marty's story doesn't end at the moment of the hack, it goes on for a long time after."

Metzler met Dana Gottesfeld through Rolling Stone contributing editor David Kushner, who interviewed Martin Gottesfeld for a 2017 piece, and the documentary crew told his story through the audio recordings of that interview and conversations that were recorded between him and Dana from prison.

"During the period we were filming we could not get access to Marty and we made several requests to the warden, and we were denied interview requests with Marty," Metzler told Newsweek. "But what we had was we had all of David Kushner's previous interviews recorded, and almost all of Dana's phone calls with Marty recorded. So we had this incredible archive of Marty telling his story to a variety of people.

"I finally got to speak to Marty on the phone after we completed the project. I, for some reason, was finally able to get on the phone with him. So I did speak to him for about 15 minutes. But Dana was terrific in giving us, just like the Pelletiers, all the access we could ever want to all the material she had.

"And you know that story, gosh, it's a really hard story to wrap your head around, right? Because Marty took Justina's case on, took her cause on without ever having met her, and took it on principle, and then took it further than probably any of us would.

"And then there's the other side of that story, where it's a children's hospital, and—while Marty will tell you, and Dana will tell you, and his supporters will tell you, that no one was harmed and he knew what he was doing, and it was just the outward facing server of Boston Children's Hospital—there's a compelling argument on the other side, the 'what if' part of it, like you as a hacker couldn't possibly know the extent to which that server connects to things you didn't know about. So those were kind of the two arguments, right, and talk about a grey area.

"When you think about intention versus action, versus punishment, it's really hard, and, again, I think viewers should make up their own mind. But it's really hard to come to a conclusion about how that should have been handled. It's a really, really tough case."

Reflecting on working with Dana Gottesfeld, he said: "I think what's really interesting about Dana's side of the story is she's along for this ride, whether or not she wants to be, and she has been Marty's biggest supporter.

"Obviously for Marty it's very hard to go to a prison like that for 10 years, but it's very hard to be the wife of somebody who's gone to prison like that for 10 years, and now is all alone and the one advocate who is always advocating."

The Battle for Justina Pelletier is out on Peacock now.