Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - Botched Liposuction on TikTok

00:00:00.000 Back in July, an Ohio plastic surgeon lost her medical license after the state medical

00:00:12.180 board investigated her for live streaming operations on TikTok.

00:00:17.260 The state medical board of Ohio voted to permanently revoke Dr. Catherine Roxanne

00:00:23.460 Grah's medical license. TikTok fans know Dr. Grah by the name Dr. Roxy. And she gained millions,

00:00:32.420 millions of views and followers over the past few years by live streaming plastic surgeries

00:00:39.120 from her office. Seriously. Seriously. The journalist Judith Newman, who we're going to

00:00:46.640 talk to today, was one of those viewers. Once she stumbled on Dr. Roxy's liposuction

00:00:53.080 implants, and butt lifts, she couldn't look away. Neither could a lot of people. Dr. Roxy's been a

00:01:00.680 staple of hashtag plastic surgery talk, as well as a presence on Snapchat and Instagram for quite

00:01:07.120 some time now. She's a 40-something bubbly blonde who wears pink lipstick and dances in front of the 1.00

00:01:13.280 camera. She often prances around the operating room, hugging and high-fiving her patients right 1.00

00:01:20.220 before they're about to go under the knife.

00:01:22.480 She's good at talking to the camera. 0.97

00:01:24.600 Real good. 1.00

00:01:25.580 Although sometimes she does use some questionable props. 0.82

00:01:29.940 She explained one vaginoplasty procedure

00:01:32.420 by using a ham sandwich.

00:01:37.120 During the surgeries, Dr. Roxy narrates them

00:01:40.240 and also answers live questions

00:01:43.500 while she is cutting into patients' bodies. 0.72

00:01:47.980 You can also see her vigorously suctioning fat from people's butts and stomachs

00:01:53.300 and wiping away flecks of blood and lymphatic fluid from their skin.

00:02:00.320 In one close-up of a patient's booty while undergoing surgery,

00:02:04.660 she actually tells the camera, 0.97

00:02:06.680 see how cute it makes her butt look already?

00:02:09.780 As I said, the journalist Judith Newman wrote about Dr. Roxy recently.

00:02:14.340 she wrote about her for The Cut, and she is the perfect person to talk to us about this story.

00:02:20.280 She began as a viewer of Dr. Roxy's videos, and then she reported on Dr. Roxy's case.

00:02:26.020 She's interviewed dozens, dozens of former patients of Dr. Roxy's and covered her hearing.

00:02:32.740 Judith has had this front row seat to the downfall of a TikTok plastic surgeon,

00:02:37.600 and this story, I have to tell you, is one of the most devastating and riveting that we've

00:02:42.820 talked about so far in this podcast.

00:02:44.340 um it's interesting because i just become kind of a aficionado of tiktok and but the kind of

00:02:59.360 things i like on tiktok you know the my for you page is like cursing cockatoos and uh uh you know

00:03:07.100 dogs looking guilty and that kind of thing but i also kind of liked uh plastic surgery before and

00:03:13.540 afters that's judith newman as she said she just kind of started out as a fan and one day about a 0.97

00:03:21.620 year and a half ago she tunes in and there's this pretty young blonde woman performing surgery

00:03:27.780 while she's talking to the camera and she's like very forcefully liposuctioning someone i'm like

00:03:37.420 this isn't good um and and i thought wow but you know how the algorithm is it kept returning me to 0.78

00:03:46.280 this woman and i i just began watching her kind of obsessively and i went and i looked she had a

00:03:54.120 hundreds of thousands of followers and she had more than that on instagram i preface this by

00:04:01.760 saying my own mother was a doctor. She was a radiologist. And one thing she always used to

00:04:08.500 say to me, which made me laugh, was you have to work really, really hard to lose your medical

00:04:19.180 license. And why is that? Because, you know, doctors have like that sort of thin blue line

00:04:25.580 thing they they protect each other so if you are in a state where you've had your license suspended

00:04:33.380 you are in real trouble and but when I wrote this story obviously based on the

00:04:43.200 plight of a bunch of women but I but it also became in my mind a real story about what happens

00:04:53.240 when you chase clout

00:04:54.400 and you're in a serious profession,

00:04:57.200 what happens on the internet?

00:04:59.620 You want your doctor

00:05:01.200 to feel that they're kind of playing God.

00:05:06.860 But when does that tip over

00:05:08.780 into something else, right?

00:05:11.180 And when does it tip over

00:05:13.400 into needing the adulation

00:05:15.740 of so many people

00:05:19.140 that that becomes your goal

00:05:21.140 more than an adequate purpose?

00:05:23.240 standard of care medically. And I think that's what happened.

00:05:28.060 By the time Judith began reporting this story, there had been hundreds of complaints filed 0.71

00:05:32.160 against Dr. Roxy. What finally happened was a series of awfulness. One woman being,

00:05:42.860 having her intestines perforated multiple times. Why? Because Dr. Graw is talking to women

00:05:51.680 uh talking to the audience while she's liposuctioning she's looking at a camera she's

00:05:58.740 not looking at what she's doing she's not looking at the operative field so at any rate this was

00:06:04.040 this was kind of the what i came interested in oh just there were over 2 000 people

00:06:11.520 uh talking about what had happened to them some of course were just onlookers but there was

00:06:17.660 one infection after the other, very serious infection, one story of disfigurement after the

00:06:26.120 other. The experts that Judith talked to believe that the rate of infection was so high because

00:06:32.940 there were always people filming in the room, and that means that the area isn't necessarily

00:06:39.340 sanitized. The people filming in the room could often be seen standing over the body of the

00:06:45.420 patient. And how sterile is that? So it's something of an open question of how well they were

00:06:52.580 maintaining the rules of sterility. Judith doesn't necessarily think that Dr. Roxy did any of this

00:06:58.440 on purpose. She doesn't believe she set out to harm patients. She thinks it might be what happens

00:07:04.540 when you're trying to do something like perform surgery, but also perform for an audience.

00:07:11.020 It's something that might just be impossible.

00:07:15.640 I don't think it was purposeful.

00:07:17.120 I don't think there was anything malicious about it.

00:07:19.900 But here she was, this lovely Midwestern doctor

00:07:26.140 who had TikTok videos of herself dancing,

00:07:32.600 twerking in the operating room,

00:07:35.980 hugging her patients before they went under, 0.58

00:07:38.460 talking about how cute their butts are going to be

00:07:40.880 when she's finished with them, you know, she felt that she was like being inspirational

00:07:47.500 while she was operating on them. But the problem was that this was, this was

00:07:56.960 here towards the eyes of an adoring public. I asked Judith to describe in a little bit more

00:08:04.600 detail exactly what some of the patients complained about when they brought a case

00:08:10.200 against Dr. Roxy. And I want to let you know that this gets pretty graphic here.

00:08:15.800 They were called patient one, two, and three. Patient one was in her late 40s. She had an

00:08:22.440 abdominoplasty and a Brazilian butt lift and liposuction of the upper and lower back under

00:08:29.120 general anesthesia. I should add that this was all done in an office setting. And one of the things

00:08:35.440 that Dr. Roxy was brought up on was the fact that she was doing very, very long procedures

00:08:44.200 in an office setting, a quote-unquote operating theater that hadn't been credited.

00:08:53.280 But that aside, so patient one, unfortunately, she was the person who had six punctures of her

00:09:02.900 bowel and the video that accompanied this showed the video that the doctor took showed that she

00:09:10.180 was looking at the camera not at the fields of surgery so that was that was put it mildly

00:09:16.780 problematic then there were the two other patients uh had a series of things happen another one of

00:09:25.680 them had other bowel perforations. A third one had her tissue, her breast tissue, bled 0.95

00:09:37.340 after a lift. And also, I believe it was the nipples as well as other tissue went necrotic, 0.73

00:09:44.280 meaning that blood supply just died. And what happens when that happens is that your

00:09:52.800 uh, nipples become black and they fall off. So these were the cases that she was brought up on, 0.96

00:10:04.500 but there are right now, I believe there were 10 or 11, uh, additional lawsuits, uh, that are

00:10:12.580 pending. Um, so, and there, there were others that were settled by her insurance company.

00:10:18.140 There were others that weren't. I do want to emphasize that this was a horrible, horrible situation. This is not an evil person. This is a person who is careless. And this is what happens, I think, when there's this chasing of clout.

00:10:38.280 We're going to take a quick break here. Be right back.

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00:13:40.020 outside of the office dr roxy was a mom like a lot of us she had three kids like me she was 0.94

00:13:53.640 a soccer mom and she also worked all the time by her own admission she had i believe she said

00:14:01.160 she did something like 1200 different surgeries in the course of a year think about that think

00:14:08.880 about what it is to do 1200 surgeries over 365 days that just that's almost inconceivable it 0.99

00:14:18.520 makes your place a factory um she had people running interference for her one doctor in

00:14:26.760 particular who would tell all of the people who were coming to her when they came with complaints

00:14:33.420 uh they never got to see her almost never she she didn't respond she would just have this

00:14:38.380 doctor, who was himself a general surgeon, not a plastic surgeon, who worked for him,

00:14:44.940 say, you're not eating enough protein. You're not drinking enough water. This is going to be fine.

00:14:50.160 And this is when people were coming with, literally, because I've seen the pictures,

00:14:55.260 people sent me all sorts of photos of their stitches coming apart, both under their breasts

00:15:01.680 and on their stomachs.

00:15:04.740 So, but for all of the horror of this,

00:15:10.100 I could say that she was clearly in denial

00:15:16.560 about much of it.

00:15:19.600 I don't want to be an armchair psychologist here,

00:15:25.140 but I just think that there were some,

00:15:28.140 well, I will be, I mean,

00:15:29.200 I think there were some issues of grandiosity.

00:15:31.680 Um, and that's only my personal opinion, obviously.

00:15:39.020 The level of damage done in Dr. Roxy's cases was extraordinary, but her behavior wasn't.

00:15:47.860 The way she behaved on social media is the way that most people behave on social media

00:15:53.840 when they want attention, doctors included. 1.00

00:15:57.500 And there's like all of the technicians in the office are dancing with breast

00:16:01.680 implants over their heads they're dancing to like rihanna or something um there are doctors

00:16:07.640 in new york city too which like the entire neurology team of a very well-known hospital

00:16:15.820 they're doing tiktok dances so it's like i i was joking with someone it's like god you know

00:16:22.340 you don't really want your brain surgeons to be to be uh doing like a conga line and i thought i

00:16:29.980 was kidding about brain surgeons doing it. And there are brain surgeons doing this. So you have

00:16:35.680 to say that the way people attract attention to themselves, I think it is problematic for

00:16:43.540 something as serious as surgery. It gets you acolytes. It gets you business. But what's the

00:16:51.860 price you're paying? She's paid the ultimate price with losing her medical license. Lots of 0.99

00:16:59.060 other people don't. But because, I mean, she was doing something that others aren't doing. It's

00:17:05.440 one thing to be dancing in an operating room or twerking or, you know, as she's doing, talking

00:17:11.340 about surgery sometimes. She has a whole video talking about labioplasty using a ham sandwich. 0.87

00:17:20.740 That's an example. My recording actually got distorted here while I was talking to Judith,

00:17:26.020 but I told her that my labia probably looks like a ham sandwich,

00:17:30.600 but I don't know because I haven't gone down there in a while.

00:17:35.260 I haven't looked down there like with the compact in the mirror thing.

00:17:39.380 Probably in a really freaking long time.

00:17:43.360 This led Judith and I to start a conversation about how

00:17:46.640 we are not at all judgmental of people who have plastic surgery,

00:17:51.180 not even a little bit.

00:17:52.420 longtime listeners of the show know that I had a nose job about 12, 13 years ago. I love my nose

00:18:00.680 job. I'm so much happier with my new nose. I just freaking love it. I want a boob lift. I want a

00:18:06.600 tummy tuck. I want all the things. I mean, people should do what they want to do to feel good about

00:18:11.640 their bodies. I don't care what that is. And due to the grease, I'm not a stranger to plastic

00:18:17.440 surgery. I had twins. I had an abdominoplasty afterwards. I think people should do exactly

00:18:25.820 what they want to do with their bodies, almost without exception. Not to mention my, you know,

00:18:35.120 probably paying half my child's college tuition in Botox every year, that kind of thing.

00:18:41.540 This has nothing to do, in my mind anyway, with a disparagement of plastic surgery in any way.

00:18:54.360 I think you have to really go and talk to people.

00:18:57.480 You have to go see a doctor, do the consult, see the doctor's work, and of course try to talk to patients of theirs.

00:19:07.180 And not just the one or two that they give.

00:19:09.740 so uh in many ways this story is fascinating because it's gruesome but i hope i don't hope

00:19:20.200 it's also a cautionary tale you know i kind of hope that it'll make people stop and think

00:19:26.360 when they're very enthusiastic and when they're following somebody uh on instagram or on tiktok

00:19:34.120 who they think, I have to have that doctor, that, that, I need the celebrity doctor.

00:19:39.480 Not to say that sometimes celebrity doctors aren't good, but really be careful. That's

00:19:46.500 the only thing I'd like people to be left with. One question I had was why people, why patients

00:19:53.940 agreed to be filmed in the first place. And I, I don't think that I would want someone

00:20:00.500 live streaming my plastic surgery. And Judith agreed, personally. But what she said was that

00:20:08.080 a lot of people she talked to were actually very excited about being filmed.

00:20:14.060 People love their videos, by the way. I mean, it was like a little gift to have a video of

00:20:21.260 your surgery for some people. You know, I personally don't think I would really love

00:20:25.700 that but people not only liked being filmed for the most part um they think sometimes when it was

00:20:33.500 when it was live streamed um they would invite like family and friends to watch this so that

00:20:42.020 that's you know something i don't quite understand i don't understand having it

00:20:50.020 displayed to the entire world and i'm fairly you know public right it's kind of an open book

00:20:55.700 I am also pretty much an open book, and yet there is so much about this that I still don't

00:21:02.120 understand. Everyone should go and read Judith Newman's piece in the cut. It is riveting.

00:21:09.460 I'm just going to read a couple of the last paragraphs from the piece to you.

00:21:13.800 In the months following Judith's reporting of this, Roxy's plastic surgery business Instagram

00:21:19.040 page has been wiped. Her TikTok is now private. The most recent post on her Instagram page was

00:21:25.260 published the day that her license was revoked. And it is just an image of a man walking barefoot

00:21:31.000 through a desert with a quote across it. You don't always have to tell your side of the story.

00:21:36.180 Time will. Dr. Roxy told her followers, right now I'm just focusing on taking great care of my kids

00:21:43.820 and that means staying here for them. One commenter wrote, why do you think they went

00:21:49.620 really hard on you. Dr. Roxy's response was, witch hunt. That is all we've got for today,

00:22:02.060 my friends. This was, like I said in the beginning of the episode, it was a doozy. A real doozy.

00:22:10.440 If you love this podcast and you want to hear more episodes, leave us a review. Tell us you

00:22:16.640 love us on all of the podcast places on the Apple Podcasts. It helps. It helps them to show the

00:22:20.700 episodes to more people because we're all governed by the algorithm overlords. And as always, I'm

00:22:27.120 just going to say it. I'm going to say it at the end of an episode about botched liposuction.

00:22:32.700 You can preorder the Sicilian Inheritance today wherever books are sold so that I could get a

00:22:38.020 tummy tuck and a boob lift. I mean, I probably won't, but I want one. I want one. Okay, go have

00:22:45.320 a day. Go have a good day. You deserve it.

Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - November 15, 2023

Botched Liposuction on TikTok

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