With the arrival of the jaw-dropping Netflix documentary series Bad Surgeon: Love Under the Knife, you might be wondering: what happened to Benita Alexander and where is she now?
In 2018, Wondery launched a true crime podcast titled Dr. Death, an anthology series telling shocking stories of medical malpractice cases, starting with the nefarious Christopher Duntsch – a man you wouldn’t want anywhere near a scalpel.
Season 3 centers on Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, a so-called miracle surgeon whose acts of deception left numerous patients dead and landed him in prison. Duntsch’s case was dramatized in Season 1 of Peacock’s Dr. Death series, and now the same will be done for Macchiarini, with Season 2 set to drop later this month.
Until then, Netflix subscribers are busy poring over the shocking details of Macchiarini’s case in the new docu-series Bad Surgeon: Love Under the Knife – not only was he a conman in the medical field, but also in his love life.
Bad Surgeon: Where is Benita Alexander now?
Benita Alexander, Dr. Paolo Macchiarini’s ex-fiancée, continues to advocate for the patients who died as a result of the former surgeon’s actions. She is the executive producer for ID’s Crimes Gone Viral and is CEO of Berraca Productions, a company she founded to further her advocacy work empowering women who are the survivors of fraud.
Alexander also hosts the podcast Benita and the Berracas, which is said to “empower strong and brave women to not be shamed into silence, by exposing love cons and frauds.” The award-winning investigative producer and journalist currently lives in New York, and while she married a man named Edson Ricardo in 2012, it’s believed they have since separated.
Appearing in Netflilx’s Bad Surgeon: Love Under the Knife, Alexander shares her side of the story, explaining that she met Macchiarini in 2013 while producing an NBC special called A Leap of Faith. The two-hour documentary aimed to focus on the supposed miracle surgeon, who claimed to have created and implemented revolutionary trachea transplants using synthetic scaffolds seeded with patients’ own stem cells.
Macchiarini swept Alexander off her feet, taking her on whirlwind trips across the world, showering her with lavish gifts and expensive dinners, and eventually proposing to her. However, some of his grandiose claims caused concern. Macchiarini told Alexander and her loved ones that he was supposed to have treated Princess Diana after the car crash but couldn’t get there in time.
He also said he was the personal surgeon for Barack Obama and the Clintons, while also alleging that the Pope would officiate their wedding, and he was set to invite Putin. When a friend shared news that contradicted Macchiarini’s promises, Alexander began to doubt everything.
At the same time, allegations of medical misconduct began to surface, as professionals questioned whether he had falsified data and skipped testing his windpipe surgery on animals before using them on human patients. Although Macchiarini told Alexander the allegations against him were all lies, it later transpired that seven of the eight patients who received the experimental transplants died after the operations and the eighth had to have it removed.
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In Episode 3, Alexander explains how the list of lies just kept stacking up and so she decided to start secretly recording her phone conversations with him. But with missing pieces of information, she called on a few of her friends and headed to Barcelona where he was living at the time.
Although Macchiarini had told her he was in Russia when they showed up at his home, not only was he there, but he was with “a blonde woman and two little kids.” As Alexander later found out, the children are his own, and the blonde woman is believed to have been his wife, Emanuela Pecchia. Macchiarini married Pecchia in 1986, and the pair went on to have two children together: a boy and a girl.
It was at this moment Alexander realized that he had been lying to her and her daughter the whole time they were together. Significantly, he had been lying about his medical credentials and to the patients of his experimental treatment.
Alexander told her story to her friend and Vanity Fair reporter Adam Ciralsky, who published an in-depth article in the February 2016 issue, that discussed the fact that numerous patients had died under his care.
As his house of cards came crashing down, Macchiarini was dismissed from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, where he had conducted much of his work, and his research papers were retracted from scientific journals due to ethical concerns and falsified data.
“Eventually, the allegations landed him in Swedish appeals court, where he was charged with aggravated assault and bodily harm against his former patients,” says Netflix. After he was found guilty, Macchiarini was sentenced to two years and six months in prison in June 2023, meaning he is still serving out his time.
To learn more about the life and crimes of Macchiarini, Bad Surgeon: Love Under the Knife is available for streaming on Netflix now, and you can check out more of our true crime coverage below:
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