Is It Over Yet?
Although the case against Dr. Dennison-Gibby has been dismissed, the dismissal has not brought a complete end to the uncertainty or reputational harm arising from these events. President Trump has continued publicly to characterize the incident as vandalism and has suggested that the cases could be revisited or reopened. As a result, dismissal has not provided the sense of finality that would ordinarily be expected when criminal charges are dropped. Dr. Dennison-Gibby continues to live with uncertainty regarding the possibility of further proceedings, while the public allegations made against her remain in circulation despite the dismissal of the charges.
Longer Lasting Issues:
Effects on Business and Income
Emotional turmoil and public humiliation
Legal fees
Effects on Business and Income
Between June 21 and August 4, 2026, while the charges against me remained pending, I experienced an approximately 30% reduction in my professional workload. My workload returned to its previous level following dismissal of the charges. Although my professional workload has now recovered, the work—and associated income—lost during that period cannot be recouped. That financial loss is permanent.
The longer-term professional consequences are considerably harder to quantify.
Before June 20, 2026, searching my name on Google primarily returned the professional footprint I had built over more than two decades: my veterinary and specialist affiliations, my businesses, and my peer-reviewed publications.
That is no longer what someone searching my name sees.
As of today, the first 13 pages of Google results returned when I search my name are dominated by material relating to the Reflecting Pool incident. My professional history has effectively been pushed beneath an enormous volume of reporting and online content generated by an event that lasted only minutes and culminated in criminal charges that were ultimately dismissed.
Rebuilding that professional visibility is neither simple nor inexpensive. I have sought estimates from experienced online reputation-management professionals regarding the cost of restoring the visibility of my businesses and professional work in search results. The figure I have been given is approximately $10,000–$15,000 per month.
And there is an important distinction here: this is not about trying to erase legitimate criticism or rewrite history. I cannot—and do not expect to—make the events of June 20 disappear from the internet.
It is about trying to ensure that when a potential client, colleague, referring veterinarian, researcher, or professional organization searches my name, they can once again find the career and professional reputation I spent more than twenty years building, rather than having that career buried beneath search results generated by an arrest and prosecution that ended in dismissal.
Dismissal may have stopped the prosecution. It has not restored what existed before it.
Emotional turmoil and public humiliation
The entire series of events—from being confronted by a U.S. Marshal, handcuffed and surrounded by more than fifteen law-enforcement officers, to being placed in a cell and subsequently formally charged—has been profoundly traumatic. The experience did not end with my release from custody. Being publicly characterized by President Trump as a “sick vandal,” while facing repeated statements law-enforcement officials at the time then from senior elected government officials about the significant prison sentence I could receive, took an enormous emotional toll. I found myself not only facing criminal charges for something I knew I had not done, but being publicly condemned by some of the most powerful people in the country before the evidence had been properly examined and before I had any meaningful opportunity to defend myself.
Legal fees
Serious criminal charges require experienced legal representation, and obtaining that representation comes at considerable financial cost. Those legal fees do not disappear simply because the charges are ultimately dismissed. They remain an unavoidable consequence of having been arrested and prosecuted in the first place.
Nor did my legal expenses end when the charges were dismissed. I must now incur additional legal fees to address the records created by my arrest and prosecution and to pursue whatever legal remedies are available to have those records sealed or expunged. In other words, even after the government abandoned the case against me, I have been left to bear the financial cost of trying to undo the continuing consequences of a prosecution that should never have occurred.