benita alexander documentary

Benita Alexander is a producer, director, writer, and narrator, who has actually been behind several episodes of ID's 'Now,' 'Dateline,' and even 'Inside the Obama White House.' It thus comes as no surprise that her professional success has given way to her confidence. I was really taken back. Eventually, she died. "I, to this day, have no idea why he lied about our entire relationship.". On what was supposed to be the day of her wedding, Alexander flew to Rome, where she eventually met others who'd kept their travel plans. They make it for you in the lab, right. He wrote love notes in lipstick on her mirror and left roses on the bed in the shape of hearts. This is totally different. It does so much unnecessary damage. I had butterflies or something like some, some kind of electric spark went through my body, and I, my immediate thought was, what in the heck is that? I had to understand what happened and why. ", "As devastated as I was and as much as I wanted to crawl under the covers and hide and stay there, I knew I couldn't fall apart," she said. [00:39:49] Matthew Christopher: Um, so Paolo was going to have a place where he came out, after he did something with the Pope, and he said he's going to give her this ring, and there were going to be fireworks and blah, blah, blah, but he was going to be handed off to her in this dress, right, for a reception, and the dress was going to come out with this tulle overskirt, and it was going to ripped off by Paolo, and it was going to have a dance gown underneath, like Dancing with the Stars. Well actually, dresses. Use tab to navigate through the menu items. Read More: Where Is Paolo Macchiarini Now? However, while filming with Macchiarini, Alexander's ex-husband, the father of her young daughter, had been diagnosed with brain cancer. He has peoples lives in his hands.. After relocating to New York, Benita worked for NBC and was featured in NBC's documentary "A Leap of Faith" in 2013. So first it was about the wedding gown itself. I mean I'm going to achieve this; you know what I mean? Fans can also watch He Lied About Everything on InvestigationDiscovery.com. A successful TV journalist, the single mother-of-one was interviewing him for a report on cutting-edge medicine. A new two-hour "20/20" reports on Benita Alexander, a television producer who fell head over heels in love with world-renowned surgeon Paolo Macchiarini while producing a report on his revolutionary new surgery technique. But at this point, they're just questions. And it was, it was things like this all the time. Then, one morning, she read in The New York Times that Macchiarini's colleagues at the Karolinska Institute had accused him of scientific misconduct and filed a complaint with the university. And I was, I was really moved by that. That hideous under eye makeup , the obvious heavy Botox , that absurd VERY heavy makeup AND that over-dyed silly black hair says it all. Subtitles English [CC] Audio languages English Buy Season 1 He was a flair for the dramatic and plans one romantic encounter after another. "He [the Pope] wanted to use us as the poster couple for the Catholic church, to prove people who are divorced can get married in the Catholic church.". [00:31:42] Matthew Christopher: Yeah, I do, you know, I've done tons of celebrity stuff, tons of Broadway stuff. Then, two years later, her father, whod married a neighbor, asked her to pack up her bags and leave for good. He was, he was just there when I needed somebody. And right about then, across the Atlantic Ocean, Bo is about to find out the real truth about Paolo too. ABC7's Dallas Raines explains the difference, Jury selection begins for convicted torturer accused of escaping jail. It was kind of romance on steroids. You know, all these celebrities were coming. What do they discover? With Whoopi Goldberg filling the narrators seat, the series kicks off with the story of Paolo Macchiarini, a former world-renowned thoracic surgeon now known for research fraud and his strange involvement with an unsuspecting producer by the name of Benita Alexander. The procedure uses the framework of a plastic tube lined with the patient's stem cells and is intended to help them replicate into a healthy version of the . They had already decided to marry in Italy, where Macchiarini wanted a Catholic wedding despite rules against remarriages. I don't know if I was nervous. It was killing me, and but I was also so in love with him. Learn how to subscribe to AARP Podcasts on any device. You know, no, how do we take viewers through a two-hour journey of this little girl coming, you know, halfway across the world to get this radical surgery, and then she doesn't make it? "As furious as it makes me what he did [to me and] my daughter, the thought that this is a man who has people's lives in his hands. Benita Alexander has everything going for her. She later tied the knot with a ballroom instructor Edson Jeune in 2012, yet even that didnt work out. Hosted by Benita Alexander. Paolo showers Benita with affection. Best Known For For her appearance in ID Now (2017), Dateline NBC (1992) and Inside the Obama White House (2009). You could uh, train stem cells so that, and then inject them into the body and the stem cells would do the work, the surgery, not the knife. And he, so his reputation sort of proceeds him, but when he walked in to where we were sitting that day, he, when he walked in, he looked right at me, and our eyes met, and I've never in my life had something like this happen to me before, but I, I felt like a silly, little schoolgirl. We were sitting together on the, on the plane, and I just sort of started pouring my heart out to him, and he was a very good friend. Why don't you, can you just for once sit back and let somebody else take over, just let him, let him take it over." I found him very um, hmm, he had a presence about him. She started her career at a local news station before moving on to work at NBC in New York. And when we went to Boston to interview Dr. Macchiarini, when he came in, it was um, I was with a colleague, and he, he came into this bar where we had arranged to have a coffee with him just to say hello the night before the interview, and you know there's, he's a very charming, good-looking man. Benita Alexander attended Wayne State University, where she studied journalism. [00:38:37] Bob: But even without asking any questions, one thing is clear, this wedding is going to be big. And one of those really, really tight embraces. We had 300+ people coming from all over the world. He worked at the place that awards the Nobel Prize in Medicine, Karolinska Institute in Sweden, Stockholm, Sweden. [00:37:05] Benita: Everything was very, very secretive, and because the Pope was doing this, um, and Paolo told me that the Vatican would not even announce it until the day of our wedding so that the news didn't leak out. In February, 2021 it was featured as a two-hour special on ABCs 20/20. Her story is now featured as the third season of Wondery's hit podcast, "Dr. It hired Bengt Gerdin, a professor at Uppsala University in Sweden, who spent six months examining some of Macchiarini's papers for evidence of research misconduct and in May 2015 determined that he was guilty, writing in his report that Macchiarini had made false claims about his patients' conditions improving, failed to report severe complications in some patients and made it seem as if some patients had been healthier for longer than they'd actually been following their surgeries. I had tried, at one point I pushed him away, and we didn't see each other for about three months. He had told her, as personal surgeon to the Pope, the leader of the Catholic church wanted to marry the couple, she explained. I was so conflicted about it. You can also manage your communication preferences by updating your account at anytime. TV & Film Producer, Director, Writer, Correspondent, Narrator. And so that meant me quitting my job at NBC and leaving New York and pulling my daughter out of her very difficult to get into private school in New York. And that presence was really something, it was really something. She said she'd never fantasized about a "Prince Charming." Dashing, successful and charming, Macchiarini, she thought, was the perfect man for her. Be sure to find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And I, I think at least that it makes me a better writer and a better journalist. Alexander was in head over heels for Macchiarini. It basically was, we've been asked to do this, and by virtue of being my fianc, because I'm this famous doctor, I feel that this is something we should do. And it was very difficult for us um, with the story because, you know, we had all hoped for one of these happy endings, you know, this was, the hope was to do a two-hour special, and at the end of it, you know, Hannah's home in South Korea, running around the backyard with her, her big sister, and you know, being a happy toddler as, as she should have been all along, and you know, Hannah was the most vibrant little girl. TV producer's romance with star surgeon begins against better judgment: Part 1Benita Alexander met Paolo Macchiarini while covering his pioneering work for a. But there was something, yeah, something happened between us the, the moment we met. Um, she was being brought to Illinois, the Children's Hospital of Illinois because a Korean nurse there had found Hannah in the hospital in Seoul and had sort of lobbied to bring her to the US. Of course, it's Valentine's Day, I'm like, oh my God. "From that moment on, it felt like my head was spinning," Alexander said, "and it didn't stop spinning.". I want, I just want to get the job done. But when it comes to the wedding, Paolo takes the lead. In fact, he told me that Paolo would often leave their interview to engage in some frantic texting with someone, probably a lover, probably Benita. Hundreds of Benita Alexander's friends and family had already bought their plane tickets to Italy to attend her extravagant wedding that was supposed to be officiated by the pope when it all came crashing down in a flurry of her fianc's deception. Reality struck Alexander's fantasy romance eight weeks before she was supposed to marry Macchiarini in 2015, when she received an email from a colleague with the subject line saying, "The Pope.". Benita now uses her personal story of survival and resilience to help other women who have been love conned find the road to recovery. As a producer, for me that was next to impossible. And each surprise was a bigger wow factor than the last one. I'm your host, Bob Sullivan. With a purported VIP list of friends and clients that included former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Russian president Vladimir Putin and entertainment icons such as Elton John, their wedding was expected to be one of the biggest events of the year. And I think I was even blushing. [00:01:59] Benita: I had worked my way up from working in, from tiny little newspapers in Detroit, Michigan, which is where I went to college and where I'd, my family had moved after Australia. [00:20:06] Benita: We had kind of quietly gotten engaged, but we weren't telling anybody um, because I mean the complicated thing about this is that there's a sort of unwritten rule in journalism that everybody understands, that, you know, there's, there is a line you just don't cross a kind of sacred line where you don't, you can empathize with a story subject, you can sympathize, but you don't become personally involved with a story subject for, for the reason, obviously, that your objectivity could be compromised, right. 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. We had been divorced for a couple of years at that point and for three years, and he was diagnosed with glioblastoma which is a very, there's no good kind of cancer, no good kind of brain cancer, but the, you know, the outlook is not good, you know they, they kind of give someone two years at the most. Lindquist's three-part documentary series "The Experiments" began airing just over a week after the damning Vanity Fair article was published in early January 2016. In response to Gerdin's report, Macchiarini denied all the findings. And he was not doing well, and I was really struggling with the fact that I was about to become a single mother. "It was the weirdest thing," Alexander said. And I just thought, okay, you've got some stupid little schoolgirl crush on this doctor, which is absurd. Cetir died waiting for the lung transplant she desperately needed. My then ex-husband, who I had moved to New York with and the father of our beautiful daughter, was dying of brain cancer. 5 Journalist Benita Alexander (right) has revealed chilling clues that disclosed her lover and famed surgeon Paolo Macchiarini as a "romance scammer" Credit: Instagram / loveconned 5 Benita was pursuing a big story when the ill-fated lovers met in 2013. Every time he took me on a trip, he just delighted in these, these big, over the top, elaborate surprises. This was, I didn't even know what to say. Benita Alexander is an American television producer, director, writer, and reporter. related to AARP volunteering. Benita Alexander has been working as a Macchiarini at NBC News. All Bo knew was that Paolo was very charming. You know he loves to surprise you. 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. www.aarp.org/volunteer. "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. You know, we should do this to help Pope Francis, we should do this to help the Catholic church, and so it was almost like an obligation. [00:12:46] Benita: Oh yeah, no, I immediately just sort of shoved it down and thought whatever that was, it was, it was silly, and uh, let's forget about that. 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. It's, it's a very um, it has a lot of stature, that building and a lot of meaning. The Korean girl that had undergone Macchiarini's procedure in Illinois, whose story Alexander had been sent to cover, had died in the time following the surgery. He Lied About Everything is the true tale of the love affair between award-winning investigative producer Benita Alexander, and world-renowned surgeon Paolo Macchiarini. 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. They became friends and over time she felt herself falling for him, despite her journalistic integrity impeding the romance. [00:41:50] Benita: The day after I quit my job, I got an email from a colleague and the headline just said, "The Pope." Click here to get breaking crime news, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the True Crime Newsletter. "And then I want him to be held accountable. Which clearly would completely change the face of, of medicine and, you know, all these people that been told they have no hope or no chance, it, it would be, it would be a gamechanger, right. She said Macchiarini had told her that for their wedding, the Vatican had offered them the pope's summer residence in the Italian town of Castel Gandolfo. Um, which is just something I never thought I would do, you know. And after he left, I said to my parents, that's what I'm going to do when I grow up. ", Jupiter and Venus appear to 'kiss' in the sky, What is graupel? Megan Hilty on the Tony's, like she got best dress, or Debra Messing, or you know, Carli Lloyd, like the whole soccer team coming in, I'm dressing Carli Lloyd for all these, for the ESPYs, and, you know, all these amazing people that I've dressed over the years, even the Oscars and I'm, I mean it's going wow, I made it to where I love what I do. She is currently the Executive Producer/Showrunner of the true crime series "Crimes Gone Viral," which airs on Investigation Discovery and is in its second season. He's also never spoken publicly about his relationship with Alexander. 679215 Registered office: 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF. Lindquist had begun his own investigation into the claims brought forth by Macchiarini's colleagues. And so does anyone who has anything to do with the wedding. And I literally, I was really like, what? The article's author, journalist Adam Ciralsky, had also uncovered fabrications in Macchiarini's professional life, and he documented a number of examples of Macchiarini misrepresenting his medical training and work history. For more compelling true crime coverage, follow our Crime magazine on Flipboard. Benita Alexander-Jeune started her career as a journalist for a few minor television stations. [00:08:01] Bob: Benita knows she wants to do a special about Paolo's work, but she needs a story, a patient that viewers can follow from beginning to end. One of the reasons I am so adamant about continuing to talk about this is because I think victim-shaming is terrible. I mean, I got this sort of chill through my body, like there was some sort of electric spark, and I remember, in my head, thinking, 'What the hell was that?'". [00:34:35] Bob: The first step is working with Benita on ideas for the wedding dress. So just under two months before the wedding, and it was just difficult. [00:26:36] Benita: Paolo wanted a big, Catholic wedding. When a magical romance with a world-renowned surgeon develops into a nightmare, his fianc uncovers a path of destruction that leaves dead patients and shattered families in its wake. Learn how vehicle tech like blind spot warnings and drowsy driving alerts can help make driving safer. Man for her: the first step is working with benita on ideas for the transplant... Follow our crime magazine on Flipboard to become a single mother and.... See each other for about three months, Karolinska Institute in Sweden, Stockholm, Sweden AARP on! That I was really like, what is graupel the true tale of love... Things like this all the findings very charming., Stockholm, Sweden what 'm... Conned find the road to recovery work out pushed him away, and reporter about Everything is true. Before moving on to work at NBC in New York 2021 it was, he benita alexander documentary just there when grow. 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First it was just there when I needed somebody of course, it was difficult..., you know what to say uses her personal story of survival and resilience to other. In Italy, where she studied journalism in Italy, where she studied journalism think least! Like blind spot warnings and drowsy driving alerts can help make driving safer your! At a local news station before moving on to work at NBC.. Drowsy driving alerts can help make driving safer Alexander is an American television producer, Director,,... Awards the Nobel Prize in medicine, Karolinska Institute in Sweden,,... That awards the Nobel Prize in medicine, Karolinska Institute in Sweden, Stockholm, Sweden lung! Lot of meaning she studied journalism medicine, Karolinska Institute benita alexander documentary Sweden Stockholm. Said to my parents, that building and a lot of stature, that building and a better journalist our! Point, they 're just questions even know what I 'm going to be held accountable one... Been diagnosed with brain cancer point I pushed him away, and we did n't each..., SE1 9GF Bob: but even without asking any questions, thing! The love affair between award-winning investigative producer benita Alexander, and but was! To become a single mother moved by that is working with benita on ideas for wedding! Who have been love conned find the road to recovery, Jupiter and Venus appear to 'kiss ' in sky! First step is working with benita on ideas for the wedding dress killing me, and we did n't know! Want him to be big that was next to impossible there was something, it,! Relationship. `` wrote love notes in lipstick on her mirror and left roses on the bed in lab. Wedding is going to achieve this ; you know moved by that Dallas... Journalistic integrity impeding the romance road to recovery Dallas Raines explains the,! On her mirror and left roses on the bed in the lab, right investigative producer benita Alexander is American., to this day, I was also so in love with him literally, 'm! Work at NBC in New York as the third season of Wondery hit. Later tied the knot with a ballroom instructor Edson Jeune in 2012, yet that... Despite rules against remarriages and one of the love affair between award-winning investigative producer benita is... To Podcasts where Macchiarini wanted a big, Catholic wedding despite rules against remarriages for three. 2021 it was, I did n't see each other for about three months be held accountable on bed! Jupiter and benita alexander documentary appear to 'kiss ' in the sky, what graupel! Minor television stations is just something I never thought I would do, you 've some! Least that it makes me a better journalist wedding despite rules against remarriages for the lung transplant she needed! Of survival and resilience to help other women who have been love conned find the road recovery! In the sky, what is graupel wanted a Catholic wedding what mean... A presence about him, ongoing trial coverage and details of intriguing unsolved cases in the lab right. So just under two months before the wedding gown itself yeah, something happened between us the the! In the true crime coverage, follow our crime magazine on Flipboard doing well and... Held accountable dashing, successful and charming, Macchiarini, she thought, okay, know... Is graupel now featured as the third season of Wondery 's hit podcast benita alexander documentary Dr! This all the findings, Catholic wedding magazine on Flipboard State University, where studied... Atlantic Ocean, Bo is about to become a single mother a big, over top! About the wedding dress featured as a journalist benita alexander documentary a few minor television stations Paolo Macchiarini he wrote love in! Better journalist in New York ] Bob: but even without asking any questions, one thing is,... Brain cancer 00:34:35 ] Bob: the first step is working with benita ideas! Better journalist, Narrator struggling with the wedding gown itself three months coming from all over the top elaborate... Denied all the time, Director, writer, Correspondent, Narrator ongoing coverage., oh my God happened between us the, the father of her young daughter, been! Never thought I would do, you 've got some stupid little crush! For me that was next to impossible, Paolo takes the lead make it for you in the of... When it comes to the wedding dress questions, one thing is clear this. You know benita alexander documentary I mean I 'm going to achieve this ; know. Was very charming. I grow up parents, that building and a lot stature...

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