'Love Under the Knife' Subject Paolo Macchiarini Had Two Children Before Fame

The Gist:

• Paolo Macchiarini had two children decades before he started scamming his way to the top of the medical industry.
• He was married for almost 30 years but got a divorce and started lying to his new fiancée.
• Paolo is currently serving more than two years in jail for endangering the life of a patient.

Netflix is incredibly good at finding fascinating, seedy stories and broadcasting them to an enormous audience. The streamer has done it again with Bad Surgeon: Love Under the Knife, a new docuseries that focuses on the life of Paolo Macchiarini. It was initially believed that Macchiarini had achieved a major medical breakthrough, but that entire story slowly began to crumble as he became more famous.

Now, following the arrival of the Netflix docuseries, which is sure to make Macchiarini even more well-known, many want to know whether the vaunted surgeon had any children. Here's what we know.

Macchiarini first came to widespread attention as a surgeon and claimed that he had managed to successfully create the first ever fully synthetic organs. Eventually, though, it turned out that Macchiarini had falsified research and his entire story began to unravel.

Macciarini has two children, a boy and a girl, with his first and only wife. Those children remain relatively anonymous, which is probably for the best given their father's reputation.

Long before Macchiarini was a well-known surgeon, he met and married an Italian woman named Emanuela Pecchia.

Although Macchiarini had been married for decades when he achieved widespread fame, that fame quickly led him to do some scamming in his romantic life as well.

As he was becoming more famous, Macchiarini met NBC producer Benita Alexander in 2013 for a documentary that would air the next year.

The two eventually struck up a relationship, and things got so serious that Macchiarini filed for divorce and proposed to Alexander. The two started planning their wedding. Macchiarini claimed that he had operated on Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and they were all likely to be guests at the wedding. He also claimed to have a relationship with the Pope, who would officiate the ceremony.

Like Macciarini's medical claims, though, the story he was telling about his eventual wedding also began to fall apart. When a friend sent Alexander a report showing that the Pope would be in South America when they were supposed to be married, Macchiarini tried to come up with an excuse for the scheduling mixup, but Alexander eventually saw through his game.

She canceled the wedding and wrote Macchiarini a furious note about how she had treated her: “I will never, ever understand how you could have done this to me, or to Jessie [her daughter]. Who the hell are you and what the hell is wrong with you?”

Now, he has been sentenced to two years and six months in prison for endangering the life of a patient.