A surgeon in New Jersey is accused of “celebrating” the murder of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk — and a nurse who condemned the vile act says she was suspended for speaking up. Lexi Kuenzle, a nurse at Englewood Health, filed a lawsuit on Friday in Bergen County Superior Court against the hospital, Dr. Matthew Jung, and several others.
She says she was wrongly fired after using her personal Instagram to call out the doctor for allegedly celebrating Kirk’s killing. “[Kuenzle] had the audacity to question how Dr. Jung can comply with the Hippocratic Oath’s and the American Medical Association’s Code of Medical Ethics while celebrating the murder of a non-violent Christian speaker who was on a college campus,” the suit says.
Fired for Right Protest
Kuenzle says she was standing at the nurse’s station with eight colleagues — and a patient on a stretcher nearby — when the news of Kirk’s death broke. “Oh, my God! That’s terrible! I love him!” Kuenzle said, before Jung shot back.
“I hate Charlie Kirk. He had it coming. He deserved it,” the bariatric surgeon allegedly said.
“You’re a doctor. How could you say someone deserved to die?” Kuenzle remembered responding.
“It was mind-blowing to me,” the 33-year-old Hoboken resident told The New York Post on Saturday. “I was so angry and upset.”
Kuenzle said she went straight to management to report what happened on Wednesday, and later that evening, she also shared her concerns in a post on social media.
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The next day, Kuenzle said she was called into a meeting with hospital leaders and suspended without pay while they launched an investigation. She claimed a union representative even advised her to start searching for another job.
Unjustified Action
Kuenzle, a proud conservative whose Instagram shows her posing in a bikini with an American flag and holding a life-size cutout of President Trump, has worked as a nurse for a decade — nearly two of those years at Englewood Health.
As of Saturday, it wasn’t clear if Jung had faced any discipline for his comments.
According to the lawsuit, the doctor did offer to “buy lunch” for the nurses who overheard his rant, but if Jung “were to follow through on his mocking offer it would not have included plaintiff because she had been suspended without pay.”
Kuenzle is asking for damages in her lawsuit, though the amount hasn’t been specified.
Meanwhile, GOP activist Scott Presler praised the nurse as one of “Charlie’s Angels” and raised concerns on social media about whether Dr. Jung can fairly care for patients who don’t share his political views.
“Would he treat them differently? Would he allow his emotions to cloud his judgement, as he did by saying such a statement in front of a patient?” he said.
