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Briquelet, Kate . The Daily Beast ; New York [New York]23 Mar 2017.
FULL TEXT
A Louisiana plastic surgeon was accused of snapping naked pics and video of female patients-including cancer
survivors-while they were under anesthesia in his raucous operating room.
Still, on Wednesday, a jury ruled the nude pictures didn’t constitute video voyeurism, sparing him from the state’s
sex offender registry.
New Orleans prosecutors said Dr. Ali Sadeghi snapped photo and video of four women while they were
unconscious and on operating tables in 2015 while nurses danced and made obscene gestures next to them. The
surgeon, a 41-year-old father of three, then allegedly sent those images to his girlfriend via text message.
Two of Sadeghi’s alleged victims were cancer survivors, authorities said.
But it took only 90 minutes for a jury of six men and six women to find the breast reconstruction specialist not
guilty on all four counts of video voyeurism.
The millionaire doctor faced a minimum of one year behind bars for the charges, which state law defines as
recording someone without their consent “for a lewd and lascivious purpose.”
Jurors apparently did not believe Sadeghi’s recordings were sexual in nature.
Yet Sadeghi’s patients testified Tuesday that they were traumatized when informed by prosecutors of the videos.
One operating-room clip showed a woman being prepped for surgery as the song “Fun” by Pitbull and Chris Brown
played. The camera “shows a sports car on a flat-screen TV, then pans over to show her entirely nude body with
her face exposed,” prosecutor Laura Rodrigue told jurors, according to the Times-Picayune.
Then the doc’s cellphone camera flashed to a nurse dancing next to the 35-year-old mother-of-two, before the
nearly 30-second clip ended. Sadeghi sent the video to his lady friend in July 2015, prosecutors said.
“This is how we do surgery,” Sadeghi allegedly wrote in the message to his girlfriend, a medical sales professional.
She replied, “Hahaha.”
The victim, whose identity was not published by local media, was receiving hernia and “tummy tuck” procedures,
the New Orleans Advocate reported.
“The idea that there is this video of my body floating around is just difficult to deal with. There’s not a day I don’t
go into the shower and spend about 10 or 15 minutes crying,” the woman testified, according to the Times-
Picayune.
The Algiers woman was the first of four patients to testify on Tuesday. She turned away as her video was played in
court.
She said she was “mortified, horrified, just in disbelief,” when she learned of the sleazy footage. “I went to instantly
wondering: How many people are going to see this video?”
Sadeghi’s patients were naked or half-naked as he filmed nurses around them and sent the pictures to his
girlfriend, Rodrigue said during her opening statement.
“This case is about the rights of these four women, what they agreed to, and how this will affect the rest of their
lives,” the Orleans Parish prosecutor said. “These women were under anesthesia in an operating room with a
heightened sense of privacy.
“They didn’t ask for this,” she added. “Nobody would ever ask for this.”
At one point, Rodrigue told jurors, “They were going in fighting cancer, or getting their breasts reconstructed.”
DETAILS
Subject: Cancer; Patients; Juries; Sex offenders; Cameras; Surgeons; Photographs; Surgery;
Attorneys; Divorce; Trials; Rape; Social networks; Voyeurism; Women; Search
warrants; Manslaughter; Nurses; Breasts
Identifier / keyword: Louisiana, crime, plastic surgery, Legal, New Orleans,Louisiana,United States, U.S.
News-Crime, Health, United States, U.S. News,
Section: us-news
Copyright: Copyright The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC Mar 23, 2017