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Where is Netflix’s ‘Bad Surgeon’ Paolo Macchiarini now? The doctor in the true crime series lied to his girlfriend about planning a wedding with Barack Obama as a guest, and faces 2.5 years in prison

STORYLynn Farah
Paolo Macchiarini, the disgraced surgeon at the heart of a Netflix show, has been sentenced to 2.5 years in jail. Photo: Steffan Larsson/Karolinska Institutet
Paolo Macchiarini, the disgraced surgeon at the heart of a Netflix show, has been sentenced to 2.5 years in jail. Photo: Steffan Larsson/Karolinska Institutet
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  • His questionable medical decisions resulted in his firing from Karolinska Institute, which selects Nobel Prize winners, and he has been sentenced to 2.5 years by a Swedish court
  • The Swiss-born doctor also fooled star NBC producer Benita Alexander with promises of a wedding with guests from Vladimir Putin to the Clintons despite already being married

Swiss-born surgeon Paolo Macchiarini was once the darling of the medical world as he promised groundbreaking developments in regenerative medicine – in particular for windpipes. Macchiarini quickly became a celebrity doctor and was accepted to a prestigious medical research centre with members that were on the Nobel Prize panel.

But as documented in the popular TV show Bad Surgeon: Love Under the Knife, the latest in a slew of true crime series on Netflix, his dodgy medical decisions, double life and questionable ethics were eventually revealed. So where is the infamous Macchiarini now? Here is everything you need to know.

“Bad Surgeon” Paolo Macchiarini’s rise to fame

Paolo Macchiarini (second from right) was part of a team that performed a “world first” operation of transplanting a trachea into a child. That child later died. Photo: Getty Images
Paolo Macchiarini (second from right) was part of a team that performed a “world first” operation of transplanting a trachea into a child. That child later died. Photo: Getty Images
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In 2008, Macchiarini, now 65, made headlines after creating a new airway for a young woman from Barcelona, Claudia Castillo. Per The Guardian, his method was to chemically strip windpipe cells from a deceased donor and then seed the bare scaffold with stem cells taken from Castillo’s bone marrow. The development was widely hailed a medical success and game-changer.

Just a few years later, in 2011, he was working at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. The university is widely considered one of the world’s finest medical centres, where professors are on the panel for selecting winners of the Nobel Prize in medicine. According to The Guardian, Macchiarini then developed another technique where he had plastic scaffolds made to order instead of stripping cells from donors while at the institute. Macchiarini quickly joined the ranks of celebrity doctors and was sometimes hailed as a “miracle worker”.

How he fooled a lover – and the world

 

Benita Alexander was a news producer for NBC who met Macchiarini while working on a piece on his medical breakthroughs – and fell in love. According to People, Alexander said the doctor spoiled her with trips to Italy, rose petals and love notes.

He proposed in 2013 but, two years later, she learnt that he was still married and the wedding he claimed he was planning was all a farce. Per Vanity Fair, the doctor told her that their wedding would include guests such as Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin and the Clintons.

In 2014, The New York Times published an exposé claiming that Macchiarini was conducting medical experiments that were leaving a trail of dying patients. The publication relied on whistle-blowers who revealed that his actions resulted in a number of misconduct allegations.

Macchiarini’s lies exposed