Every line of this is horrifyingly cringe-inducing, but this – this, beloveds – if you are ever considering putting on a blonde wig and flying to your ex-fiancé’s house, please call me first, and I will take you out for…for literally anything. Anything else.
“In July 2015, Alexander commemorated what should have been her wedding day by flying to Barcelona, where, along with two close friends, she went in search of Macchiarini’s residence—and answers. In all her travels with Macchiarini, she had never been to his Barcelona home. “There was a lot of nervous energy in the car,” Leigh McKenzie, an Australian friend, explained. “We tried to keep it buoyant and convert that nervous energy into humor. But finally the nerves crept in and so we stopped at a supermarket and drank some cheap wine. And none of us drink in the morning.” With Alexander wearing a blond wig as a disguise, they set out in search of the house where she had thought she would be starting a new life.”
Never trust charming men with salt-and-pepper hair and a smooth answer for everything.
I’ve been rewatching Alias lately so when I read about her putting on a wig to go to his house I got carried away imagining her doing some Sydney Bristow style operation where she tricked him into revealing the truth and then kicked his butt, basically.
Then all she did was sit in a car while her friends talked to him and I was like oh, well, I guess that’s more realistic.
Your version is MUCH more satisfying and was what I had hoped for also!
I like to think I have better friends than that, who’d have been a little more imaginative with their delivery of the bottle of wine.
Alias version of an event is always the better option.
I guess maybe I’m not super sympathetic here because she started her relationship with him while she was married AND while she was producing a story on him so its not like they started their relationship on a solid foundation of ethics and honesty. She did have a cool dress picked out though.
That blue dress is GORGEOUS. That’s the only positive thing I have to say about this situation.
Seriously – I wanted to add it to my ‘if I was rich’ pintrest board but that seems slightly inappropriate somehow.
I’m assuming NBC didn’t consider asking for the special to be withdrawn from Emmy consideration, either. Great judgment all around.
But yeah, the complete rationalizing and fibbing about the circumstances the relationship started under makes me side-eye a little bit.
What was she trying to accomplish?? She already knew he had lied about, oh, everything. Get better friends who will pay to switch your plane tickets to Bora Bora and drink on the beach with you for a week rather than awkwardly not-confronting your weird ex, NBC lady.
I would LOVE to know about the friend who sent the e-mail:
“he very next day, May 14, Alexander received an e-mail from a friend. The subject line read simply: “The Pope.” It included a link to an article detailing Vatican plans for Pope Francis to visit South America in July—at the very time when he was supposed to be officiating at her wedding.”
Like, was the terse subject line because this person was completely fed up?
I imagine so! Theres a few clues in there that she had been sharing text msgs with friends and colleagues incessantly when he was “getting out of meetings with the Obamas” etc., and a certain % of them were probably very ::jack off motion:: about the whole thing
Best person in the whole story because there is no bullshit there.
Yup, and I’d imagine the email rather than a call or in-person notification was so they wouldn’t have to listen to any more excuses…or you know, witness the fallout when the other shoe dropped from 50,000 feet. if it did, when it looks like there was a risk it wouldn’t.
I’m fascinated that this guy tried to pull this off, and went so far, with a producer working for a company that you’d think would have researchers. Fact-checkers like the ones the VF piece went through. It’s kinda scary to think that the puff-piece aired, was nominated for awards even, and all the while dude had mismatched CVs and a gajillion red flags bobbing around his every claim.
That emailing friend was probably a very good friend at the end of a very frayed tether. I’m impressed that the subject line wasn’t an even more terse “FFS Benita”. And that there wasn’t a p.s. stating “Sorry for the email, but if I told you in person I may also find myself having to throttle the idiocy out of you.”
The saddest part of this for me was the multiple stories about former patients of his which suggested his surgeries might not actually work 🙁 can you imagine placing all your trust in this dude who’s going to give you an artificial trachea and then it turns out most of his credentials are almost totally made up???
Right? That also casts some real doubt on the journalism at the heart of the Emmy nominated piece she was working on since it seems like they never bothered to follow up on the fact that his patients kept dying.
I felt like the article kind of approached that but then skirted around it by almost-suggesting it didn’t make it into the special because certain parties were banging the fraud, but seriously. If somebody dies almost immediately after one of these miracle surgeries you’re reporting on maybe you should…report on it???
Yeah, I mean maybe it’s just not part of Vanity Fair’s M.O., but the issue of people actually dying because of a doctor’s medical fraud seems more important than some cheating rich lady’s inability to have a fancy wedding.
The article also failed to mention that Macchiarini was charged with scientific misconduct by the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. He was eventually cleared (as per this recent NY Times article) but it’s interesting to note that an independent investigator came to a different conclusion, which the institute chose to reject.
In any case, as the article says: “He had operated on the three patients at Karolinska University Hospital […] removing diseased or damaged windpipes and implanting replacements made of plastic and treated with stem cells and drugs to encourage the growth of new tissue. Two of the patients, the Eritrean man and a man from Baltimore, eventually died. The third, a Turkish woman, has been hospitalized since the operation more than three years ago.”
The Karolinska institute knows about this article but hasn’t made any statements yet. I haven’t seen anything in Swedish newspapers yet either, but at least one journalist is very, very interested in this man. So I’ll pay attention to the Swedish news and promise to inform The Toast if anything happens.
Question totally unrelated to this post, for which I apologize, but Mallory, are you going to be converted into an illustration at some point? I keep expecting to see you visually reinterpreted, but perhaps the artists are stymied by trying to capture your essence? Also, yes, these people sound straight-up bonkers.
Man, I want to know what the Obamas thought, assuming that lambskin invitation actually made it all the way to them.
I was wondering about the addresses they used for these people? Did he totally make them up or did she just write “Obama Family, White House” “Elton John, England” on the envelope like a little kid writing to Santa?
I mean, it sounds like he left that part completely to her?
Which, how mortifying is that, sending what amounts to elaborately imagined fanmail to so many famous/important people, who’re then like “I’ve never heard of this Macchiarini, guess this gets sorted into the weirdo pile”
Idk why this is what stood out to me, but ugh
Now I want to write 8000 random letters to famous types and mail them with generic addresses like this.
“That young Scottish MP woman, London”
“Haruki Murakami, Japan”
“Lin-Manuel Miranda, Broadway”
Bet it would work. I was in the Peace Corps and my best friend sent me a letter that just said “Julie the American, [Town}, {Country}”. Totally got to me.
Someone I know tracked down a mutual friend in a medium-small town in Wales by just randomly calling people in the town and asking “Do you know the American girl’s phone number?” I think he hit paydirt on about the third call.
“Oh christ, is this the Salahis again?”
I know it’s completely beside the point but lambskin? I am in no ways a vegan but come on, a baby creature died for these wedding invitations? is creepy.
Is it some kind of expensive parchment?
Because my university gave degrees that are made of goatskin parchment (guaranteed to last 500 years so your multitudes of descendants can admire your Bachelors degree in 2500, and no I’m not joking), which always made me wonder how many goats are sacrificed to University of Auckland undergrads each year.
I did enjoy Bocelli’s wife’s reaction, tho, which sounded to me like “weddings? who do you think he is? he would never perform at a wedding, how gauche, can you imagine?” coupled with superior sounding laughter
Welllll, unless you are Kim and Kanye: http://www.eonline.com/news/545125/kim-kardashian…
I have not yet read the full article, and I kind of prefer it that way, because now I get to read all these comments and see all of these COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS DETAILS totally out of context.
Inviting the president to your wedding is actually A Thing; I have a lovely congratulations card on my fridge from the White House.
It is? You just invite the president and he sends you a card? Is this something the Four Hundred used to do?
Anyone can do it! My grandmother invited the president to my bat mitzvah, lo these many years ago — and yes, she got a brief but nice note back.
I wished I’d known that.
Wouldn’t have mattered to me – I got married during a Bush administration.
I did ask my senator (I’m in TX, so I had such a great choice of senators) to send a congratulations from the White House to my parents for their 50th anniversary, which is A Thing. It took over 2 months, but they did get the card eventually.
You can send your wedding invitation to the White House and they send you a lovely congratulations card. People in politics do it and put it in their wedding album. I hope Benita never got hers…
The second I get serious with somebody, I’m Googling their full legal name as well as “(name) arrest,” “(name) warrant,” “(name) spouse” and “(name) controversy.” Any contact information goes straight to Spokeo. If their job is something respectable enough to be worth lying about, I check up on it. You can’t be too paranoid.
I married a guy I met in sophomore year of high school. We’ve been dating since we were 18. This article was enough to make *me* paranoid.
This inspired me to google the name of the guy I’ve just started seeing for the first time. And thank god! Apparently he’s a British politician mired in a child abuse scandal, POSING as a 20-something PhD student!
Wait, what? Are you serious?
I’m guessing she means he has a name double? I mean, at least I hope so! Despite never having met someone in real life with my last name, I now have a double in my town who even lives in my neighborhood! The nerve! Previously, I was just a record-breaking high school swimmer in Iowa, which was more fun to love vicariously as.
I have a name double who is a Christian singer-songwriter. AND apparently a name double who is a bit of a heartbreaker, as if you go to <a href=”http://www.paddlepicklesrealname.net” target=”_blank”>www.paddlepicklesrealname.net you get a black website with an image of a broken heart that says “Paddlepickle broke my heart, 7/15/2008”
I have about eight name doubles, and I recently decided to check whether I would have any if I had taken my husband’s last name. Turns out, only one, but she lives in the next town over. I was oddly affronted by this.
For a number of convoluted reasons, my workmates and I have been googling each other to find the most interesting facts – real or otherwise – we can find out.
Thanks to name doubles, we now have a New Zealand model, a member of Englands Women’s National Footbal Team, and a British soul singer.
Thankfully, when it comes to actual results, this hasn’t ended anywhere near as badly as it could have. We discovered some hilariously earnest university and graduate testimonials, a prize winning honours thesis, a lot of marathon and fun run times, and that one time I was quoted in a buzzfeed feminist tweet round up. Not a skeezy police investigation or secret husband among us.
My name doubles are all related to me. You can pull up death certificates and everything, so maaaaaaybe I could pull off an “I’m secretly a vampire” scam.
I have a name double in South Africa! (My last name is pretty rare.) We used to be Facebook friends, because her friends kept trying to add me instead of her. Now I’ve gotten rid of my last name on FB, though.
I have a name double who makes terrible paintings of beagles and horses. As I am also an artist, I’m always a little bit concerned that someone is going to google me and get her instead (I sometimes wonder if she feels the same about me).
Haha no, just the same name. Unless he is VERY well disguised.
Please include my middle name then! When it’s just my first and last name, that is so common it’s ridiculous. But I often think I lucked out to have such a common name in the days of search engines.
BTW, I have a clean record and am working on the salt-and-pepper hair, but I am not that charming, so.
I have a fairly common name, and even looking for my full legal name gets me a guy who recently died after a very long life and someone who lives in the same state as me, and both of whom had/have big families of their own.
When you Google my name, it autofills “drunk driver”, because of some asshole rich guy with the same name who killed a granny with his Lamborghini. Fortunately he’s 40 years older and an entirely different gender than I am, so if you click through its fairly obviously not me.
My other name double is a black civil rights lawyer in Florida, she seems cool.
This story has renewed and refreshed my Big Hair No Heart lifestyle.
Wait, I’ve got a big heart and no hair. Have I been doing it wrong all this time?
All I can think of that picture of them in Venice is, “lol I killed so many people in the Doge’s palace in Assassin’s Creed II.” MEMORIES.
OK but realtalk: if there is any profession that should be checking fucking references, IT IS THE MEDICAL PROFESSION, so they are in part to blame.
I think what’s even worse is the one place that did check his credentials decided to just let him go on lying because they didn’t want to embarrass the politician who’d wanted them to hire him.
assassin’s creed 2 is surprisingly true to real italy!
The pictures and the dresses and the trips, oh my goodness.
This just cements my conviction that over the top romance is the guise of deception and creepiness.
Also? I really hope that Emanuela is not learning about this mess by reading it in Vanity Fair.
I for one am HIGHLY skeptical that a certain former producer hasn’t boozily called up Emanuela at some point and laid it out there for her already.
I’m sure this is not the first time his lies have come back to haunt him and I am nearly equally sure that he has a good story ready for him. For example- the producer was obsessed/stalking him, he wouldn’t agree so she used her connections to publish this hit piece.
I wonder if I could lie into an academic career so easily if I moved countries.
don’t even have to move countries! just make sure David Broockman never sees your research
It worked for Hannibal Lecter! Then again, he’s Hannibal Lecter.
Look, we can’t all be murder wizards.
Which is ultimately a really GOOD thing, and yet, I feel a little deflated about it. Oh, Hannibal. Why is your life so aspirational??
He’s just so FANCY.
For a very different sort of deceiver (but again very good at it), check out this new New Yorker article.
This is WILD I think elaborate fraud is my new fav nonfiction genre
I have a fantasy of writing a novel about Anna Ekelof.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Ekel%C3%B6f
Unfortunately, it looks like I’d either have to learn Swedish or be in a position to pay a Swedish-reading assistant.
eta: the “impostors” Wikipedia page is a glorious time suck.
I learned to read Swedish for my research–it’s really not bad! Probably one of the easiest languages an English-speaker could pick up for reading, if not pronouncing. And this woman’s story sounds worth it!
The language has changed a lot since the 1700s, though. Spelling reforms, different grammar, etc. HOWEVER, I know a few Swedish early modern historians who would looove to dive into this!
“Anna Ekelöf admitted posing as a Count, but denied to have ever posed as the heir to the throne, and if so, only under the intoxication of alcohol.”
This is my new definition of a seriously good party.
I remember this story as it was being reported, the whole thing reminds of the
movie Princess Caraboo with Phoebe Cates and Kevin Kline
That story also reminds me of this story from 2014 http://www.buzzfeed.com/katiejmbaker/why-did-char…
Oh thank you for that! I know Konnikova is writing a book on conmen, which I am really looking forward to.
The whole debacle shakes my (teeny tiny) faith in journalism in general. I mean, come on, “I know this relationship is totes unprofessional and against all code of my profession but whatever yahoo wee-hee tra-la-la”?
It made me think of how Petra Mayer and Linda Holmes talking about the ubiquity of “woman journalist sleeps with her subject” trope, because that’s not supposed to be a thing!
Are you saying it’s actually about ethics in journalism, tho.
Just dipping my toe back into dating, three years after a horrifying break-up. I REALLY shouldn’t have read this article. Argh…
HEAVENS
“And none of us drink in the morning”
whaaaaaaaaaat ( I don’t know why this stood out to me so much among all the other weirdness? Maybe because she felt the need to specify?)
To underscore how much the situation was shaking them up, probably.
These are not drunk as you suppose, for it is only 9 o’clock in the morning!
My church is situated next to a serious party school. I love that reading.
Never trust charming men with salt-and-pepper hair and a smooth answer for everything.
So basically what you’re saying is the Dos Equis guy is hiding something?
Of course he is! You don’t get that interesting without collecting a few secrets.
Oddly enough, that is a description of my soon-to-be ex-husband, so I heartily agree.
Read this article last night (thanks, THIS!) and my first thought was “who’s the woman with two young kids hanging out by the front door? Is she duped wife number two? Does she know about “still 30 years married to wife uno numero?” WHO IS THIS WOMAN?
Also, my bestie* would not meekly hand over a bottle of wine and slink away, she would be screaming out righteous damnation at the top of her lungs. Wine would then be consumed by us and us alone at some swanky beach resort.
*I personally hate this particular piece of slang but it seems appropriate here.
The wine thing was so weird. Like, of course he threw it out–it was OBVIOUSLY poisoned! He’s not stupid enough to think that two friends of his duped ex would fly all the way across the ocean just to have chitchat with him on his stoop!
And really, even if your friends are insanely wealthy enough to cart you over to Barcelona, why would you bother yourself over this…person. Sweet baby Jeebus, NO DUDE IS WORTH THIS AMOUNT of “WHY, BABY, WHHHHY” nonsense.
What do you think his plan was for when the wedding day approached? Was he just going to ghost? She knew where he lived. Why ask her to marry him in the first place? Why do any of this? I don’t understand.
I think we all need to go to Spain demand answers to these questions!
if you wear the blonde wig i will bring the wine
That’s definitely the start of a country song.
I don’t think people like this have plans?
That’s my biggest question?! If the Pope trip hadn’t raised that red flag, what was gonna happen on the day of the wedding?!?!?!?! Was he gonna be like, Oops, babe, change of plans, let’s go to the courthouse instead over lunch?!?!?
It’s not about falling in love, it’s about heteronormative fantasy. “Sure I’m unhappily married to a former ballroom dancer, but I’ll dump him for this famous! good-looking! charming! European! doctor who has unlimited access to money and knows all these famous people. The Pope will marry us while Andrea Bocelli sings.”
Well when you put it all together like that it just sounds FOOLISH
This is reminding me so strongly of my favorite “I swear this super happened” wedding stories (for real though, all fanfic): Titanic bride.
In the open thread, someone mention how excellent a movie about the gruff Pennsylvania PI investigating this dude would be. . .I would also totally watch a movie about Mallory swooping into to save people from blonde-wigging it.
I’m picturing him as Denis Leary from the Thomas Crown Affair (Brosnan/Russo version.)
man, you really gotta be love-blind to think some rando has all those connections. Maybe ONE of those connections I could believe, because sure, it makes sense that famous influential people see doctors too. But ALL of them? No. Lady that don’t make no sense.
I worked in the same field (regenerative medicine) and I didn’t know him but I definitely knew of him. He was super, crazy famous, just a total rock star. He seems like a dreadful person, but he definitely wasn’t a rando.
Apparently all one has to do to completely skip all fact-checking processes in play at major news organizations (or for doctor jobs wtf??) is appear rich enough. I keep flipping back and forth between schadenfreude, rage, and planning a long-con.
I was raised a Catholic, so i’d get suspicious if a man said he’d get the pope to marry us and we were both divorced. The Holy Father doesn’t do weddings That is some next level bullshittery.
I’m grateful that I’ve known my husband since we were teenagers. If he has a double life it would have been in middle school
and nobody blinked an eye when he said the Pope was going to give Communion to a gay couple. That is honestly the most ridiculous part of the story to me. HOW DID NOBODY QUESTION THAT.
That’s about when I lost my mind of anger/disbelief/facepalmitude. How dare he add that extra level of cruel deception to those poor people just to do it. It didn’t serve his con. It didn’t do anything but go the extra mile to hurt people. Just… ugh. No. Someone please feed this guy to fire ants.
Lol rich people
Ok also the entire timeline of her tale + this piece publishing — like clearly the first thing she did upon returning to the states after this tragic little girls’ trip was call up someone at Vanity Fair and give them all her photos and details for some sort of revenge piece… in which she doesn’t come off great, either, and will probably get her fired?
She already quit because she was expecting to move to Europe, soo….. I guess she had nothing to lose?
Oh, duh, good point. I mean, I get the urge, totally, I guess I’d just advocate a friend in this situation take a few months to heal before blowing it up in a glossy (though I can’t claim I’d follow that advice myself).
If I had those gorgeous wedding dresses and wasn’t going to get to wear them, I’d call up VF for a photo shoot IMMEDIATELY. She probably feels like her entire life has crumbled anyway; she might as well get some nice pictures out of the deal.
I like the idea that there’s a Justice League-style collection of the very best doctors in the world, on permanent standby in case someone important enough falls ill.
Aide 1: “Egad! The Vice President is suffering a heart attack! There’s not a moment to lose! We must get him to surgery immediately!”
Aide 2: “Are you daft, man?! We can’t trust this surgery to an ORDINARY surgeon; this man is FIRST IN LINE TO THE PRESIDENCY! We must summon Dr. A from Melbourne, who is the finest heart surgeon on the planet according to this year’s league rankings! She can fly 12 hours to get here and do the surgery all jet-lagged!”
Aide 1: “That is self-evidently a better plan!”
Aide 2, some time later: “Bad news–Dr. A said she won’t get on a plane for anyone less than a head of state.”
Maybe they should keep at least one of these super-doctors in the air at all times, like they used to do with nuclear codes.
I feel like this should definitely be a TV show–I just can’t decide if it should be Shondaland (they are all gorgeous and sleep together!), Showtime (ditto, but with more nudity and swearing), Sorkinland (they are almost all white dudes who give simplistic and moralistic advice!) or CBS procedural land (uh. . .basically NCIS repackaged.)
CW in the style of Jane the Virgin, please.
I know this is in jest but I would totally watch that and be completely involved in it.
“It is I, Trachea-Man! I saw the Trachea-Signal over the White House, and am here to fix your trachea, Mr President!”
“Aw, crap, I was afraid this would happen. Um, Trachea-Man? That wasn’t the Trachea-Signal, it was the Gallbladder Sign. We’re waiting on Doctor Bile.”
… “I just flew here from ITALY.”
I only skimmed the article, but I was tickled to read, “When Professor Macchiarini renders an opinion on all things involving the diseased airway, people listen.”
It sounds so grave and yet so quaint all at the same time. My Airway is Diseased, said, I dunno… some heroine of a mammoth 18C novel? You simply must Render an Opinion, for you know All Things Pertaining Thereto.
I had to read the article to figure out what this was about. Wow – But where did all the money come from?
The fabulous vacations all over the world , all paid for by Mr. Wonderful – when did he get paid for his “surgery”?
He *is* a surgeon. He does real surgery (although I would have liked to see the article pretend to care a little more about the horrifying possibility that he’s covering up bad results to his bleeding-edge procedure). He presumably gets paid for them.
He’s just not a surgeon-to-everyone-famous-ever-who-can-convince-the-pope-to-do-wedding. Or single.
Yeah. that drove me a little nuts. I mean, certainly, it is delightfully sad that he clearly snowed this unethical lady and her pretty dresses were all for naught but… he killed people with his miraculous surgery that has… never worked? With no repercussions except that people let him keep trying. And obtains or tries for influential positions with lies. Can we stop and examine that for a brief moment? That seems a *bit* important.
But just a bit. I mean, dresses, obvs.
*Never trust charming men with salt-and-pepper hair and a smooth answer for everything.*
Uhmmmm but that’s the exact kind of man I like…
(Don’t worry, I know they’re awful 99% of the time…. but gosh darnit if I don’t swoon from a distance anyways)
Edited to add:
I should clarify… no swooning is involved over celebrity physicians, no matter how much they fit my physical type.
But… that guy in the coffee shop with a touch of grey and a nice pair of oxfords? The guy on the subway who looks like he should be in an ad for Italian espresso machines?
Hot damn.
Basically repeating what I said in the Link Roundup, but I’m very much more interested in the work that this guy did and how his fake credentials may have affected his being allowed to do operations that were Hail Mary passes, at best. Cutting edge medicine (so to speak) is risky under the best of circumstances, we understand that, and at least some of the patients (the little girl that’s mentioned early on) would have died anyway without any real alternative therapies, but it’s not as if they’d have let Random Country Doctor try these procedures. There’s a bigger, meatier story here than what VF served up.
There really is! Check what I posted a bit further down in this comment section.
Right now, the cynic in me is thinking this guy only exists IRL because Patricia Highsmith is no longer alive to have written him.
Thank you! I’ve been trying to think who this reminds me of.
So I’ve been thinking about this story all evening and I think her relationship with the truth may be complicated. There are a couple things in her telling that stand out:
1. She claims that NBC talked to her about covering the wedding which seems both unlikely and that if true would have prompted NBC to look into all the fantastic details.
2. Her complete lack of involvement in the wedding planning aside from the dress and invitations (i brought this up in the link roundup thread as well).
3. She was named as a producer on Meredith Vieira’s talk show two weeks before she allegedly quit which does not make sense. (http://www.thewrap.com/meredith-vieira-show-names-band-leader-show-announcer-producers/)
I am a terrible terrible person, but I want this as a Hey Ladies piece.
OMG
YES
I just got to the part where he said the pope would officiate their wedding.
I need a moment.
…..and even though they are both divorced, the pope was all, “Sure, why not? Love!”
Does this remind anyone else of “She Should Have Known,” by Jean Hanff Korelitz?
What does this man do today, you may wonder. Well. He runs a department at my university. I checked yesterday.
This dude was accused of academic dishonesty at my university, and also a patient of his died or got hurt in surgery at the university hospital. There was a scandal. Rumours abounded, and the school and the hospital fought about whose fault it was. The university chose to back him up, and the administration took a lot of heat. A few months ago, they controversially acquitted him of the dishonesty allegations. Lots of people were pissed and every doctor had an opinion.
I didn’t click this link until someone in the comments on the Link Roundup mentioned that he does trachea surgery. I literally thought “OMG, he’s THAT Italian surgeon??” and sure enough he was. And now it turns out that he’s lied about two degrees and several titles?
They bet their reputation on a con man.
I hope the patient/-s can get the justice they deserve now.
Every line was horrifying. Every line was cringe inducing. I should have listened to the description
I admit that I am the most gullible person I know but I have a hard time thinking ANYONE can believe that. This whole thing is so embarrassing.
“Never trust charming men,” period, full stop, y’all.
Also would like to second the other commenters wanting to know more about these controversial surgeries he’s doing where all his patients seem to keep dying. Seriously hoping someone takes a closer look at those and that the patients get some justice – the article mentioned others in the medical community being skeptical of his research and methods but didn’t really get into it.
And I have to say Benita does NOT come off as super trustworthy herself – lying about NBC being interested in covering her wedding, telling Vanity Fair that she told her bosses the relationship began during production of the documentary when sources close to the bosses say that she actually said it began AFTER production…pretty shady. I feel terrible for her daughter and the doctor’s possible multiple other wives/family and for every other innocent person caught up in this perfect storm of bullshit.
"Aw, crap, I was afraid this would happen. Um, Trachea-Man? That wasn't the Trachea-Signal, it was the Gallbladder Sign. We're waiting on Doctor Bile."
… "I just flew here from ITALY."
I wonder what all Benita lied to him about? This story is full of innocent victims but I don’t think she’s one of them.
Extremely traditional people do not include response cards as their guests are supposed to RSVP via written letter on their own personal stationery. Miss Manners persists in insisting that this is the only correct way.
Welllll, unless you are Kim and Kanye: http://www.eonline.com/news/545125/kim-kardashian…
The author of this piece seems so bored, almost as if he had been ordered to write a report. I would have done something breathy and fabulous.
It’s almost as if he doesn’t like her, which doesn’t surprise me: Any woman who thinks the Pope would officiate her THIRD wedding (because she’s special?), or who actually orders wedding invitations made from the skin of baby animals, probably isn’t a nice person.
“…she went in search of Macchiarini’s residence—and answers” is a solid zeugma though.
There’s been an update on this DoctorB (the b is for bargain!) that doesn’t involve an idiot who reckoned the pope would officiate her third wedding: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/02/karolinska…