BAD SURGEON
My surgeon fiancé killed his patients with deadly implants – it took me YEARS to discover his disgusting tricks
An Italian surgeon was secretly killing his patients with a ‘ground-breaking’ implant – until he was exposed by his fiancé.
DISGRACED doctor Paolo Macchiarini fooled the world with his “ground-breaking work,” an artificial trachea that was supposed to save lives, but instead ended them.
Netflix’s new three-part documentary series reveals the truth about Paolo’s deadly behaviour and the part his ex-fiancé Benita Alexander played uncovering the truth.
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The now disgraced surgeon was once renowned for his “ground-breaking” work in regenerative medicine. With the backing of Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, home of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Paolo was believed to have been the first person to successfully perform synthetic organ transplants.
He created a trachea (windpipe) out of plastic before coating it with a patient’s own stem cells, a strategy used when a donor organ wasn’t available or to prevent organ rejection. In theory, it was incredible, but it didn’t actually work. And, after a while, Paolo, who’d performed at least eight of these operations in Sweden, couldn’t hide how many of his patients were dying as a result of his “treatment.”
Netflix’s new three-part documentary, “Bad Surgeon: Love Under the Knife,” lifts the lid on what really happened.
Per the official synopsis, it is an investigation into “the web of shocking, manipulative and compulsive lies that were spun to extremes in both his professional and personal life.”
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It all begins with Paolo’s ex-fiancé Benita, a TV producer who he met in 2013. She was working on a story in his field for NBC and was told to talk to him because he had a reputation for being a medical risk-taker.
After meeting, the pair quickly hit it off and embarked on a relationship. As Paolo enjoyed great career success, he splashed his cash on lavish trips and gifts for Benita.
“He literally swept me off my feet and I felt like I was in a fairy tale,” she told Metro ahead of the release of the documentary.
“In hindsight, I guess you could argue that should have been a clue, but he was unbelievably romantic, and it was like romance on steroids,” she said, adding that she was “blissfully” happy at the time.
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For several years, Benita enjoyed her relationship with Paolo, who eventually proposed. He started planning an extravagant wedding for them, which would have a famous guest-list that included the Clintons, and would have been officiated by the Pope.
Used to Paolo’s lavish lifestyle, Benita went along with it. However, she had some doubts because her husband-to-be had still never invited her to his home in Barcelona. She eventually decided to do some digging and worked with two private investigators to look into what Paolo could be hiding.
Benita had no idea that her fiancé was actually already married with children.
“Of course, there was the immediate devastation and heartbreak because he upended my entire life,” she explained.
But she suspected this was only the beginning of Paolo’s lies.
“Almost immediately I had a panic attack because I knew that if he was lying to me at this level, there was no way he wasn’t lying in his medical and professional life, which was terrifying because he had people’s lives in his hands,” Benita said.
Although she had no evidence, she went to Vanity Fair to share her story. A week later, a damning documentary about Paolo’s misdeeds was revealed by a Swedish TV channel who’d been building up evidence for years.
After all but one of Paolo’s patients died, and the surviving patient had their plastic windpipe removed, the Swedish channel had enough evidence to speculate that the doctor was a fraud.
Within a month Paolo was fired, and a criminal investigation was opened. A year later, he was charged with aggravated assault and causing bodily harm in Sweden. However, he feigned innocence and eventually received a suspended sentence last June.
Earlier this year an appeal was launched which saw Paolo’s suspended sentence turn into two-and-a-half years behind bars. He was found guilty of gross assault against three of his patients, but it’s believed he harmed many more.
After finding out the truth about Paolo, Benita has done everything she can to get justice for his patients, saying that what he did to her “pales in comparison.”
“People died. What happened to me is nothing and I can recover and get past this. They can’t. We are talking about people who died unnecessarily and were used as human guinea pigs.
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“It’s just unfathomable and unacceptable, criminal, and disgusting. I still can’t wrap my head around how he could do that and still live with himself every day,” she said.
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Bad Surgeon: Love Under the Knife is available to stream on Netflix now.
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