I exposed Bad Surgeon conman Paolo Macchiarini who led Hollywood playboy life as patients died ‘coughing up own flesh’

AT the age of 22, Yesim Cetir underwent a ground-breaking operation to replace a damaged windpipe, believing ‘star surgeon’ Paolo Macchiarini would change her life for the better.

Instead the trainee teacher, from Turkey, suffered a slow and torturous death over four years - undergoing 191 ops and having her airways cleaned every four hours in an agonising procedure.

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As Yesim endured horrific suffering, living in an ICU unit in Sweden until her death in 2017, Macchiarini was feted as a pioneering surgeon and lived the life of a Hollywood A-lister.

Flying around the world in private jets, he wooed influential women and claimed his client list included Bill and Hilary Clinton, then-president Barack Obama and the Pope.

The Italian medic - who claimed he could cure throat conditions using plastic tracheas - used the procedure on at least eight ‘guinea pig’ patients between 2011 and 2014, all but one of whom subsequently died.

Tragically some of the victims - including Yesim - were not suffering from life-threatening illnesses before his lethal intervention.

Fellow surgeon Kalle Grinnemo, 51, was part of Macchiarini’s team at the revered Karolinska Institute, in Stockholm, and risked his own career to blow the whistle on the botched ops. 

Ahead of the new Netflix docuseries Bad Surgeon: Love Under The Knife -  which drops today - he tells The Sun Macchiarini perpetrated the “biggest con in medical history” hoodwinking colleagues, patients and the many women he romanced.

“Paolo was really charming,” he says. “He didn’t speak loudly, he was almost whispering, but somehow he could always get everyone’s attention. 

“He had an aura around him, he was mesmerising.” 

Journalist Benita Alexander, who fell for the ‘George Clooney lookalike’ after interviewing him for a documentary for US channel NBC, knows exactly how mesmerising he could be.

She tells The Sun: “Paolo is an exceedingly charismatic, charming person. He was very good looking  - people called him a George Clooney lookalike -  but he's also very intelligent, worldly and intriguing. He speaks six languages, works all over the world and had this reputation as a super surgeon.”

The dashing doctor - who was jailed in Sweden earlier this year - “love-bombed” her with romantic gestures during a two-year romance which ended in the run-up to their “wedding of the century” in 2015, after his lies began to unravel.   

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Jet set life

Benita, now 57, was researching a story on regenerative medicine when she met Macchiarini at a Boston hotel in February 2013, and she says there was an instant “spark".

At the time, he was making headlines around the world for his ‘ground-breaking’ work on trachea implants and was preparing to operate on two-year-old Hannah Warren, who had been born without a windpipe and had spent her whole life in hospital.

“Paolo walks in and he gave me a little smile,” she says. “Instantly I felt like a silly schoolgirl … our eyes locked and there was this spark.”

Paolo wooed her with surprise trips abroad, including a romantic break in Venice, and showering her with gifts. 

“It was like romance on steroids,” she says. “In hindsight, it was a form of love bombing but at the time, I was floating on clouds. 

“He was excessively romantic. Every time we went on a trip there would be roses or champagne waiting for me in the room and it was always the best hotels, expensive dinners, shopping sprees. He was extremely generous, which distinguishes him from other conmen because money was not his motive.” 

Macchiarini often had to fly off for ‘emergency surgery’ and on one occasion, when he left her on New Year’s Eve, he told her he was part of a secret enclave of doctors who operated on world leaders, including Obama.

He also claimed he had been called to Paris on the night of Princess Diana’s fatal car crash, in 1997, bragging that if he had been there in time he could have saved her.

Besotted Benita believed his tales.

“Unfortunately, love is a bit blind,” she says. “There were things nagging at me but I didn't want them to be true. He’s skilled at fooling people and has this very convincing way of pulling you into his web of lies. He did the same with the medical profession and with the patients.”

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Slow deaths

Born in Italy and raised in Sweden, Macchiarini held prestigious positions around the globe, including in Russia, France and Italy and at University College London, where he was a visiting professor between 2010 and 2014.

Although he was later found to have lied on his CV, he had performed successful transplants using human windpipes, including one on a ten-year-old Irish boy, Ciaran Finn-Lynch, at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital in 2010.

The same year he was courted by Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, responsible for awarding the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

He convinced them he could revolutionise trachea transplants using synthetic pipes seeded with stem cells to regenerate human tissue.

“The Karolinska desperately wanted to get a Nobel Prize. They thought Paolo should be the one,” says Kalle.

Eritrean student Andemariam Beyene, who had been diagnosed with terminal throat cancer, was the first recipient of the synthetic trachea at the KI, in June 2011.

The operation was hailed a success by Macchiarini and made headlines in the States where the family of young dad Christopher Lyles, another cancer sufferer, contacted the surgeon.

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Christopher was operated on at the Institute in November 2011, but sadly died a few weeks after returning home. 

Yesim’s operation stood out because, while her windpipe had been damaged during routine surgery for excess sweating, she was not facing imminent death. 

“She had some coughing and mucus secretions that were socially troubling for her,” explains Kalle. “But there was nothing that would limit her living a normal life.”

Macchiarini persuaded her to fly to Stockholm for “second opinion” surgery, so he could examine the previous damage, but she was given a synthetic transplant after the initial operation went wrong. 

Shortly afterwards, Yesim developed a mucus clot and was unable to breathe. She suffered heart failure and was put onto a heart-lung support machine.

Over the next four years, she suffered agonising bronchial clearing every four hours, her kidneys failed, meaning she needed dialysis, and underwent a lung and oesophagus transplant.

Kalle claims Macchiarini had no interest in the aftercare of Yesim. 

“That’s when we got to see the true Paolo, because he didn't care at all for this patient. 

“After a year, Paolo decided that we needed to put in a new plastic tube and that one was too big, so the situation became even worse, but he blamed us. He didn't take any responsibility. It was not possible to make contact with him. 

“He wanted to forget her.”

Back in Iceland, Andemariam was suffering similar problems, which Kalle and colleagues were unaware of until he returned to the Institute in October 2013.

Kalle realised that Yesim’s problems had not been caused by the cardiac arrest, as Macchiarini had claimed, but by the plastic tubes themselves.

Kalle and two colleagues, Oskar Simonson and Matthias Corbascio, examined video footage of Andemarium’s airways, finding the “plastic windpipe was collapsing and rotting inside his body.”

They found “no stem cells” on the implants and said patients were “doomed from day one.”

“Everything was fake. What was written in the medical journals was a lie. At that time, I really understand that Paolo is a ruthless conman.”

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Unnecessary deaths

In the year of Yesim’s surgery, Macchiarini performed the same transplant on two young Russians, both of whom had trachea damage which was not life-threatening.

One, dancer and mum Yulia Tuulik, is seen in the documentary sitting alongside the doctor at a press conference, hailing his success.

But, when Swedish documentary makers researching contacted the family, they discovered she died shortly afterwards.

Her mother called the result of the op “torture and murder” saying she “went through pure horror until her death. She was coughing up pieces of her own flesh.”

In Sweden, Macchiarini’s colleagues were in the dark.

“My last meeting with Paolo was in October 2013. I raised problems we had with Yesim and Andemariam and asked ‘have you seen these problems in patients in Russia?” says Kalle.

“He got furious, said it was nothing to do with me, I should take care of Yesim and not go digging into what's happening with other patients. He left the room in a rage.”

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A further look into the records revealed Macchiarini had falsified results, even swapping Andemariam’s biopsy results. 

But when the trio presented their findings to the Institute, executives backed Macchiarini and even had Kalle and his colleagues questioned by police over alleged data breach. 

“They thought they were lucky to get Paolo,” says Kalle. “He was a star surgeon in Sweden and around the world and we demonstrated that he is a liar and the basic science behind these plastic tubes doesn’t exist.”

Vice Chancellor Andes Hamsten held a press conference in 2015, clearing the surgeon of misconduct.

“That was the worst day in my life because then they spread the rumour that we have been lying and gave Macchiarini a new position as a visiting professor, so we couldn’t stay at Karolinska,” says Kalle.

“It felt hopeless and I felt very lonely. I felt there was no way out and I should end everything. It was pretty dark.”

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Fake wedding

For Benita, the lies came crashing down in the run up to the couple’s planned wedding in July 2015.

After a romantic Christmas day proposal, Macchiarini convinced her they would wed in Italy’s stunning Castel Gondolfo, with the Clintons and Obamas among the guests and the Pope officiating.

She and her daughter were set to move to his home in Barcelona, although she had never seen it.

Everything slotted into place when she learned the Pope would be in South America on a long-planned trip on the day they were to wed. Guests who rang the Castello were told they had never heard of Macchiarini.

When she confronted him, he tried to convince her he was actually a CIA sniper.

Benita hired two private detectives and on the day she should have been walking down the aisle, she flew to Barcelona, where she discovered he had another partner and two children.

She later discovered an Italian wife, with whom he had children, and she suspects he had many more women on the go as well.

Benita now believes Macchiarini is a "pathological liar. Narcissist and megalomaniac… some type of sociopath or psychopath.

“I think people like him get some kind of sick rush out of convincing people of their lies. It's the thrill of getting away with it.”

Left “devastated, heartbroken and humiliated”, she says any hurt the doomed romance caused her “pales into insignificance” next to the harm he did to patients and their families.

“That was the most heartbreaking part of all of this,” she says.

“People thought of him as some kind of god, like he walks on water, and what happened to those patients is horrifying. 

“People lost loved ones and they died excruciating, horrible, unnecessary deaths.

“I met Yulia’s husband and he broke down in tears. He told me when they met Paolo, they thought they'd won the lottery but it turned into the worst nightmare imaginable.”

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In 2016, a Swedish documentary exposed the scandal and several members of the Karolinska board were forced to resign.

Early this year, Macchiarini was convicted of gross assault on patients and jailed for two and a half years.

Kalle says it was a "relief" but also says the board of the Karolinska "need to take the consequences of covering up for so many years."

"For me, it didn't matter if he received two years or one. It was important to demonstrate that this was a severe assault to these patients, done under the radar of Swedish law. 

“Paolo was found guilty but there are several heads of departments who should also stand trial because right now, it's not safe in Sweden for patients."

Bad Surgeon: Love Under The Knife airs on Netflix from Wednesday.