Netflix delves into the world of medical true-crime with its newest documentary, Bad Surgeon: Love Under The Knife.
The three-part series will tell the story of the Swiss-Italian surgeon Paolo Macchiarini, who became internationally renown in the mid-noughties for creating the world’s first plastic organs. But a deeper dive into his work revealed that many of the patients he had operated on later died, a fact that was hidden from the public and medical community.
He was exposed as a fraud and a fantasist; it turned out that people he claimed to have been helping suffered and died at his hands. He also entered into a relationship with and proposed to an American TV producer – despite already being married. But after several expose articles revealed the truth behind the man who has been called “an extreme form of a con man”, it all came crumbling down. So what happened in the scandal and where is he now?
The backstory
Macchiarini was born in Switzerland and grew up in Basel, where Vanity Fair reported that “he felt like a perpetual outsider”. He went on to get a medical degree – specialising in surgery – at the University of Pisa, but he was traumatised during the course when, after examining his ill father and finding nothing wrong, he died. It's a moment that Macchiarini said “forever haunted him”.
The medical fraud
Macchiarini moved around a lot in the nineties, studying at University of Alabama and getting a degree from the University of Franche-Comté, as well as being head of the department of thoracic and vascular surgery at the Heidehaus Hanover hospital.
He was a visiting professor at UCL and worked in Biomèdiques-Instituto de Investigaciones Biomédicas in Barcelona, then became a visiting professor at UCL, and Karolinska Institute (KI) in Stockholm, where he also performed as a surgeon in the affiliated hospital.
In 2011, while at Karolinska University hospital, Maccherini was hailed as performing “landmark” surgery with the first transplant of a synthetic organ, giving a man a laboratory-grown windpipe, with the graft supported by the patient’s own stem cells.
Macchiarini did a total of eight such experimental transplants between 2011 and 2014 – three in Sweden in 2011 and 2012, and five in Russia. But it later transpired that seven of these people died after the operations, and that some had not been in a critical enough state to warrant this surgery.
In 2013, the Karolinska hospital suspended all trachea transplants and refused to extend Macchiarini’s contract as a surgeon. In 2014, Macchiarini was accused by four former colleagues of falsified claims in his research.
An external review in 2015 found Macchiarini guilty of research misconduct at KI and, following the bombshell documentary Dokument inifrån on Swedish TV which showed him continuing operations with his new transplant method even after it showed little or no promise, exaggerating the health of his patients in articles as they died. Allegations were also made that patients' medical conditions both before and after the operations did not match reality, as well as questions over whether the synthetic trachea was ever even tested on animals before humans.
After he was eventually sacked from KI in 2016, Macchiarini went on to work in Kazan Federal University in Russia, until 2017, when he was fired. In 2018, the Lancet medical journal retracted two papers by Macchiarini, taking his total papers now retracted to 11.
The romantic fraud
In 1986, Macchiarini married an Italian woman called Emanuela Pecchia, and the couple went on to have two children together, a girl and a boy.
However, riding high on international acclaim for his medical breakthroughs, in February 2013 he met the NBC producer Benita Alexander to arrange an appearance on a documentary called A Leap of Faith that was eventually broadcast in 2014.
Alexander and Macchiarini grew close and went on to start a relationship, flying out on holidays to the Bahamas, Turkey, Mexico, Greece, and Italy, where Macchiarini even took Alexander and her daughter to meet his mum in Lecca. He told Alexander that his divorce had finally come through and proposed to her on Christmas day, 2013.
They planned their star-studded wedding – he claimed he had operated on Bill and Hillary Clinton, Emperor Akihito of Japan, and President Obama, so they would probably be guests – and that his close relationship with Pope Francis meant that he would officiate their ceremony, which was planned for June 2015. Andrea Bocelli would sing at the event, and the three Michelin-starred Enoteca Pinchiorri in Florence would be providing the food.
Alexander quit her job at NBC and prepared to move with her daughter – taking her out of school – to Europe.
But it all started to unravel in May 2014, when a friend sent Alexander an email showing her that the Pope was due to be on a tour of South America, when he had “confirmed” to be marrying the couple. According to Vanity Fair: “Macchiarini tried to blame the scheduling mix-up on Vatican politics and claimed that he was on his way to Rome to straighten things out. He maintained that her fears were unfounded—that he was acting in good faith and that everything would work out as planned. He said the Pope would be cutting his trip short and returning early.”
But Alexander finally saw through it, and cancelled the wedding. She wrote to him in an email: “I will never, ever understand how you could have done this to me, or to Jessie [her daughter]. Who the hell are you and what the hell is wrong with you?”
Alexander hired a private investigator who informed her that pretty much every fact Macchiarini had told her about the wedding was false, from the guests, to the performers to the caterers.
On what would have been their wedding day, Alexander travelled to Barcelona with two friends to confront Macchiarini, in the neighbourhood where he lived. While she stayed in the car, the friends spoke with him – meeting his wife and children – but he could not meet their gaze, and one friend found him “like an embarrassed schoolboy who had been caught.”
Where is he now?
In June 2022, a Swedish court found Macchiarini guilty of causing bodily harm to a patient, but cleared him of assault charges. He was given a suspended sentence, which means that were he to commit another crime during a two-year probation period, the court would re-evaluate his sentence.
However a year later, an appeals court sentenced him to two years and six months in prison.
Bad Surgeon: Love Under The Knife streams on Netflix from November 29.
