[00:40:15] Bob: With that dramatic entrance comes a dramatic exit too. 5 People Vanished Along the Snake River Beginning in 1979: Will Police Finally Catch a Serial Killer? I, I thought it was ridiculous. [00:25:58] Bo Lindquist: I think he liked the challenge. And I just thought, okay, you've got some stupid little schoolgirl crush on this doctor, which is absurd. [00:24:37] Bob: Paolo is a natural subject for a documentary film. He has peoples lives in his hands.. [00:38:44] Benita: I should say this wedding turns into something akin to the wedding of the century. But at this point, they're just questions. The 56-year-old actually has a podcast appropriately titled Benita & the Berracas for the same, and she continues to be an active advocate on the matter. Benita Alexander is an award-winning television producer who is known for her won on Investigation Discoverys ID Now, Crimes Gone Viral, Dateline and Inside the Obama White House among other works. Star Benita Alexander-Noel See production, box office & company info Add to Watchlist 12 User reviews Photos Add photo [00:08:14] Benita: But we, we started looking into him, and then he was about to do a transplant on this beautiful, beautiful little toddler, um, her name was Hannah, from Seoul, South Korea. [00:23:20] Bob: Bo also spent many months following Paolo around the world, getting to know him, getting Paolo to open up to him. Call the AARP Fraud Watch Network Helpline at 877-908-3360. I was, I was conflicted about it. But on the afternoon that she met him, a day before she was supposed to begin filming him, something happened that gave her pause. They got married in October 2012. And he said, "Just tell me when you want to stop." I love some pressure, let's go for it. Dashing, successful and charming, Macchiarini, she thought, was the perfect man for her. It was killing me, and but I was also so in love with him. She is honestly proud of how far she has come (as she should be), and its evident shell never let anything or anyone take this journey/narrative away from her. And the two go on a magic carpet ride together. Alexander was working on a documentary about Macchiarinis success in the medical field. Previously, Benita Alexander had created a documentary called He Lied About Everything, where she opened up about Paulo Macchiarini and how she got love conned by him. Learn how vehicle tech like blind spot warnings and drowsy driving alerts can help make driving safer. She was devasted to learn all the lies told by Macchiarini. He was incredibly generous, you know, and so romantic and just so wonderful. That hideous under eye makeup , the obvious heavy Botox , that absurd VERY heavy makeup AND that over-dyed silly black hair says it all. "He and I started going to dinners and I was kind of pouring my heart out to him about all this stuff. She'd been in the intensive care unit in Turkey for three years, and her health was still deteriorating. So this is a lot of very heady information to take in, and he basically tells me that because hes the Popes private, personal doctor, um, and because this is such a progressive Pope, who has such a forward-thinking agenda, that the Pope a) wants to thank him for all the work hes done at the Vatican and for being his private doctor, and b) wants to use us for lack of a better term, as kind of a poster couple, so that by marrying two divorcees, you know, the Pope is going to use us to sort of open the doors of the Catholic church to allow divorcees to finally get married in a Catholic church. "When I started reading specifically the papers that Paolo himself had written, then we could quite quickly come to the conclusion that what was written in the papers was not what was going on in reality," Corbascio said. ET. [00:13:10] Benita: When I met Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, and when I was working on this story, I was at an extremely vulnerable place in my life. He told her opera singer Andrea Bocelli would be singing in the church during their wedding and that John Legend would be playing the piano at their ceremony. [00:25:28] Bo Lindquist: He was definitely prone to getting angry and, and could be quite violently. The doctors also raised the issue that Macchiarini had reported on a patient in a way that suggested the patient was still alive, even though they had died before the paper was published. Yeah. "I wanted to get all the information that I could before I really confronted him.". The qualified journalist then began working at a string of local television stations. [00:18:58] Bob: I love you in rose petals on the bed. A love story gone bad for Benita Alexander, an award-winning documentary television producer and Paolo Macchiarini, an internationally renowned surgeon. 5. One name kept coming up over and over again, Dr. Paolo Macchiarini. Um, and so he had, we were coming back into the room after dinner one night, and I was kind of teasing him. Powered by WordPress.com VIP. [00:35:01] Matthew Christopher: No, no, just her friends who are so much fun. Um, maybe I felt like that at some point when I was really young and I had a, had a crush in school, I don't know, but I don't, I don't ever remember feeling like that. [00:30:34] Bob: Now your wedding is a cause. See production, box office & company info, Fatal Experiments: The Downfall of a Supersurgeon. So now, if you wish to learn more about the latters narrative as well as her current inspirational standing, weve got the details for you. It could go out the window. And she was Daddy's Little Girl. And that presence was really something, it was really something. So he was very interesting and very fascinating and also because he was a pioneer, and he was pushing the envelope, you know, he was a little bit, a little bit radical, but doing, he was taking chances that nobody else would, and we actually need people like that in medicine. In addition to her work at NBC, she was the Executive Producer of the Oxygen documentary, "Seduced by Evil," which premiered in 2019 and reveals how a group of women banded together to take down the man who stole everything from them. And I was ready to ride off into the sunset, into this new life in Barcelona, and but it was also a very, very difficult decision for me. It's, it's a very um, it has a lot of stature, that building and a lot of meaning. He traveled to Illinois to operate on a Korean toddler who was born without a trachea and who was going to be the youngest person to ever receive an artificial one. And it was, it was things like this all the time. Documentary producer Benita Alexander thought it was love when her job introduced her to internationally renowned surgeon Paolo Macchiarini. Oxygen.com interviews filmmaker and reporter Benita Alexander, an executive producer of the 90-minute documentary "Seduced by Evil," about con man Derek Alldred. [00:31:37] Bob: Matthew is no stranger to dressing important people at important times. "The outcry was such that the Karolinska Institute had to do something," said Ritchie. He was listed as one of . TV producer's romance with star surgeon begins against better judgment: Part 1Benita Alexander met Paolo Macchiarini while covering his pioneering work for a. Since her romance with Paolo imploded in 2015, the brunette beauty has continued working on documentaries and docuseries. And he was not doing well, and I was really struggling with the fact that I was about to become a single mother. It does make it difficult sometimes, because you, some stories are so heavy and so difficult, and I would sometimes, it would take me weeks sometimes to sort of shake a story, and people would sit with me, and their stories would sit with me for a long, long time. Wake up to the real world! The story with making a couture gown is, you know, it goes through, gosh, a team of pattern makers, drapers, um, stitchers, sewers, hand stitchers, beading and embroiderers, lace, and all that kind of stuff. www.aarp.org/volunteer. To inquire about a licence to reproduce material, visit our Syndication site. I loved my work at NBC. And this is something very clandestine and secretive and he cant talk about, but hes been doing this for many years, and he is a celebrity surgeon to a number of famous people and celebrities, but that he cant talk about this because hes tied to people who want a private doctor who will attend to them but, you know, they have these private doctors, because they don't want anyone to know, you know, whats going on in their private life. I was just kind of like, um, 'cause Benita's so awesome and like, you know she was totally in love with him. On your mark, get set, go. I truly was for a period there, happier than I think I've ever been. Since her romance with Paolo imploded in 2015, the brunette beauty has continued working on documentaries and docuseries'. 2023 Cinemaholic Inc. All rights reserved. Benita was also the Co-Executive Producer and narrator for the 2016 TLC documentary, "Breaking the Silence," about sexual abuse. (Pasadena, Calif.) - This Valentine's Day, Investigation Discovery (ID) presents a love story gone wrong with HE LIED ABOUT EVERYTHING, the astonishing true tale of the love affair between award-winning investigative news producer Benita Alexander, and the brilliant, world-renowned surgeon Paolo Macchiarini.What started as a picture-perfect dream relationship between two people at the . What to tell her. You will be asked to register or log in. [00:31:00] Bob: One of those nondisclosure agreements is signed by Matthew Christopher. After a few days there, she traveled to Macchiarini's home in Barcelona, Spain, with some friends who came along for support. Previously considered a pioneer for using both biological and synthetic scaffolds seeded with patients' own stem cells as trachea . I'm never viewed like that, but I was definitely like, huh? Gerdin also said Macchiarini had failed to obtain ethical permits to perform the transplants, which he said amounted to experimentation on human subjects. These were made in a lab out of the very same plastic that a soda bottle is made out of, and then he would bathe this in the patient's own stem cells in something called a bioreactor, and then transplant that, this plastic windpipe into people. [00:14:35] Benita: The thing about Paolo is he's a very good listener, and we, after a shoot sometimes, would go out to dinner, or we would be in a group of people talking. "None of these people were coming," Benita said she tragically discovered. AARP is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that empowers people to choose how they live as they age. I don't want you to do anything except find your dresses and just, all you have to do is show up and look beautiful. Macchiarini ran into some legal trouble regarding his stem cell treatments with Swedish prosecutors recently appealing a sentence given to the Italian surgeon, the Associated Press reported. Benita graduated magna cum laude from Wayne State University in Michigan, with a B.A in journalism. "I was doing a story about regenerative medicine and his name kept coming up," Benita, a New York resident, said on the podcast Dr Death: Miracle Man. The Perfect ScamSMis a project of theAARP Fraud Watch Network, which equips consumers like you with the knowledge to give you power over scams. [00:11:57] Benita: Ooh, you're going to make me do math. Macchiarini claims the synthetic trachea didn't shorten Tuulik's life or the lives of any of his other patients, or cause their deaths. She works in Rockefeller Center and flies all around the world, and on one of these trip, she meets the man of her dreams. I really felt that we made a difference, you know, we, our story played a huge role, I think, in paving the way for him to finally bring his son home, and those are the kind of things that really mean a lot, at least to me in journalism. "We had to clear her throat basically every four to six hours, sort of 24 hours, seven days a week," said Oscar Simonson, a cardiothoracic surgeon who worked at the Karolinska Institute and its affiliated hospital at the time. And right about then, across the Atlantic Ocean, Bo is about to find out the real truth about Paolo too. [00:00:01] Bob: This week on The Perfect Scam. Alexander was working on a documentary about Macchiarini's success in the medical field. Her daughter has thus been the only constant in her life. She found out exactly what hed lied about - and she said it was extensive. In 2015, Alexander sent emails to the Karolinska Institute expressing concerns about the acclaimed surgeon. Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music| Spotify | Stitcher|TuneIn. After doing some digging, it transpired that Macchiarini was not the medical genius she thought he was. Macchiarini took Alexander to several romantic getaways in Europe. The group eventually grew into four doctors, who compared the journal reports Macchiarini had published about his procedure -- all of which reported relatively positive results -- to the actual medical records of those patients. When she continued to press Macchiarini about the pope, she said he blamed Vatican politics, alleging that the more conservative former Pope Benedict went behind Pope Francis' back to stop him from officiating the wedding. Cetir's family has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the manufacturer of the plastic tube used in Macchiarini's procedure. She couldn't run around and play. Exploring the troubling tales of people manipulated by claims and promises that proved too good to be true, it reveals how the perpetrator fooled their victims and made them pay the price for their misplaced trust both emotionally and financially. The third season, called "Dr. Death: Miracle Man" includes 6 episodes, along with a bonus episode that is an interview with Benita by host Laura Beil. She later tied the knot with a ballroom instructor Edson Jeune in 2012, yet even that didnt work out. She graduated magna cum laude from WSU with a degree in journalism in 1987. And he was putting artificial tracheas, the windpipe, into patients. A successful TV journalist, the single mother-of-one was interviewing him for a report on cutting-edge medicine. After relocating to New York, Benita worked for NBC and was featured in NBC's documentary "A Leap of Faith" in 2013. 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