Beth Alison Maloney began her legal career in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles. Knowing the power of a true story and vowing that no child would suffer as her son had, she wrote the pivotal memoir Saving Sammy: Curing the Boy Who Caught OCD. The book reads like a novel, describing the battle it took to have her son properly diagnosed and treated for the simple strep infection that caused his “mental” illness.

On the day the book was published, she appeared on The Today Show with her fully-recovered son, and awareness of infection-triggered mental illness was pushed onto the national stage. Saving Sammy received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, a “stand up and cheer” from Booklist, and was a finalist in Books for a Better Life. Ms. Maloney continued to empower parents with Childhood Interrupted: The Complete Guide to PANDAS and PANS. Parents worldwide refer to it as their bible for children afflicted with Sammy’s disorder, known by its acronym as PANDAS/PANS. Ms. Maloney has participated in scores of television appearances, articles, broadcast interviews, conferences, and speaking engagements in the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Ms. Maloney is a 2021 nominee for the Catchers in the Rye Humanitarian Award from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. As an advocate, she has continued to press for treatment, creating the relationships that led to establishing clinics to treat the disorders at UCLA and the University of Arkansas during 2021.

As an attorney, Ms. Maloney is nationally recognized for her expertise in “medical kidnapping” cases, a term commonly used to describe when physicians attempt to leverage CPS to have state courts remove the custody of children from parents due to medical disagreements. Ms. Maloney consults nationwide on public and private custody cases involving medically complex children.

She has brought key stories about medical kidnappings to the media, including the exposé about Justina Pelletier, which story was featured on the front page of The Boston Globe and was covered by The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, ABC News, and Fox News. The circumstances served as the backdrop for the 2015 New York Times op-ed piece linked here. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/opinion/sunday/the-new-child-abuse-panic.html.

In 2020, the Maine Sunday Telegram/Portland Press Herald covered how CPS tried to remove 4-year old Jaxen Steimlosk, diagnosed with muscular dystrophy, from his parents custody at the behest of doctors, who baselessly asserted that his mother falsified his illness. Ms. Maloney, who battled CPS, three hospitals, the Spurwink organization, and a cabal of physicians and other providers in Boston and Portland, successfully prevented CPS from ever taking Jaxen.