Identical Twins Win $1.5M Lawsuit After Medical School Accused Them of Cheating on Exam

Kayla and Kellie Bingham
Kayla and Kellie Bingham
Ethan Letkeman

A pair of identical twins won a $1.5 million defamation lawsuit after they were accused of cheating on a Medical exam.

Kayla and Kellie Bingham, then 24, were in their second year of attending the Medical University of South Carolina when they took an exam in May 2016, Business Insider reported. Kellie told the outlet they were assigned seats about four or five feet apart and could not see each other because the monitors blocked their views.

Two weeks later, they were called into the office and accused of cheating after scoring similar test answers.

“My mind was racing,” Kayla told Insider. “I was sobbing and incredulous that this was happening to us.”

“There’s no way to process your emotions when you’re accused of something you didn’t do,” she added.

According to a court filing, the twins alleged that faculty members accused the students of sending signals to one another and passing notes during the test.

While the twins were hoping the school would withdraw the faculty’s allegations, the twins were found guilty by the College of Medicine’s Honor Council, People Magazine reported.

Although the dean cleared them of any wrongdoing one week after the council’s ruling, word had spread of the alleged cheating, and the Binghams were shunned on campus.

Kayla and Kellie told Insider that their reputations were destroyed as longtime friends had stopped talking to them and that they were “uninvited” from weddings.

The twins filed the defamation suit against MUSC in 2017, but their case was not heard until five years later.

Their lawyers presented evidence to the court of the twin’s education testing history, showing that they have scored similarly in the past.

Nancy Segal, a professor at California State University, Fullerton, who also runs the school’s Twin Studies Center, testified on behalf of the twins. She told the court that research shows identical twins generally score similarly in IQ scores and specific mental strengths and weaknesses compared to fraternal twins.

“Identical twins do tend to show similar patterns, similar test-taking behaviors, similar wrong answers because they process information in the same way,” Segal later told the Washington Post.

The jury ultimately agreed with the twins’ legal team and Segal’s assessments and awarded them damages totaling $1.5 million last month.

Kayla and Kellie, now 31, both left MUSC in 2016 and have since become lawyers, a decision they arrived at separately, the Post noted. They currently work at the same law firm in Columbia as government affairs advisers.

The twins told Insider that they hope to one day want to help others with complex defamation suits similar to what they faced.

“We did not want anyone to have to go through what we had been through, ever again,” Kayla said. “We switched paths so that we could at least try and ensure sure that people don’t have to endure what we did.”

You can follow Ethan Letkeman on Twitter at @EthanLetkeman.

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