Where Is Benita Alexander From 'Dr. Death' Season 2 Now?
Mandy Moore as Benita Alexander in 'Dr. Death' Season 2.
Season 2 of Peacock’s Dr. Death focuses on the truly bizarre story of Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, an Italian thoracic surgeon who was hailed as a genius and a visionary in his field. Macchiarini was the first doctor in the world to create and successfully transplant a manmade organ, and the apparent success of his surgeries in the early 2010s drew headlines across the world. The horrifying truth about those procedures was concealed for years, and only came to light thanks to several fellow doctors who raised the alarm.
Another key whistleblower in this saga was Benita Alexander, a journalist who became romantically involved with Macchiarini after reporting a story on his so-called miraculous breakthroughs. Read on for her true story.
Related: How to Watch 'Dr. Death' Season 2
Who is Benita Alexander?
Netflix
Benita Alexander graduated from Wayne State University in 1987, and went on to build a career in journalism. According to her LinkedIn page, she began in print, working for local newspapers in Michigan and People magazine, before moving into radio and ultimately television reporting.
In 1998, she was hired as a producer at NBC News, where she remained for close to two decades. It was thanks to that job that she crossed paths with Macchiarini.
When did Benita Alexander meet Paolo Macchiarini?
By 2013, Alexander had won multiple awards for her work in the past, and was considered to be “one of her most seasoned and levelheaded producers” at NBC News, per Vanity Fair. Host Meredith Vieira enlisted Alexander to report a story about Macchiarini’s seemingly miraculous medical breakthroughs.
At the time, Macchiarini was being lauded across the world for inventing and successfully transplanting the world’s first synthetic windpipe, an innovation that would revolutionize the field of regenerative medicine (which deals with repairing and rebuilding damaged tissue and organs). Alexander’s task was to research and report out the story, ahead of a two-hour sit-down interview between Macchiarini and Vieira for an NBC special titled A Leap of Faith.
The two met in February of 2013, at the bar of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Boston. In an interview with ABC News, she described their first meeting in vivid detail. "It was the weirdest thing," she said. "He comes around the corner, he looks right at me, and in that second something happened. 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?'"
Alexander was going through some emotional upheaval at the time—her ex-husband, and the father of her young daughter, was dying from an aggressive form of brain cancer. “Having worked with so many patients who are terminally ill, Paolo was immensely helpful as far as helping me navigate my complicated emotions,” she told Vanity Fair, explaining that she and Macchiarini began to meet regularly for dinners where she would pour her heart out to him. “He was an amazing friend to me during that time, and a solid, reliable pillar of strength.”
Later that year, their friendship turned into a whirlwind romance. Macchiarini began whisking Alexander away for luxurious, over-the-top vacations in Europe, and showered her with flowers, gifts and love notes. "Her life suddenly went from very down to earth to this kind of glamorous, almost celebrity lifestyle,” Alexander’s friend Marian Fontana told ABC News. “I was like, 'What is happening to Benita?’”
Related: 50 True Crime Podcasts Worthy of an Immediate Binge
Was Benita Alexander engaged to Paolo Macchiarini?
Netflix
Macchiarini proposed to Alexander on Christmas Day of 2013. Although he was married at the time, he had told her that he and his wife were separating and in the process of formally divorcing. That summer, they traveled all around Europe on a series of romantic getaways, and Macchiarini finally presented Alexander with an engagement ring on a dinner cruise, telling her that his divorce was finally official.
The couple set a date for July of 2015 and soon began planning a lavish wedding, and Macchiarini had a grand vision for the day. He promised Alexander that the ceremony would be a star-studded affair, attended by a number of his celebrity patients—a list which he claimed including Barack Obama, Bill and Hilary Clinton and Pope Francis.
One problem arose, however. Macchiarini wanted them to marry in the Catholic Church, but the fact that they were both divorced made this impossible. But Macchiarini claimed that he had a solution—he would simply ask the Pope to perform the ceremony himself at the Vatican. According to ABC News, Alexander was skeptical when he told her that the Pope had agreed to officiate at the ceremony, but when she researched the subject, she discovered that the Pope had recently married 20 couples in the Vatican. And so she believed him. "From that moment on, it felt like my head was spinning," she recalled, "and it didn't stop spinning."
How did Benita Alexander catch Paolo Macchiarini in his lies?
In the end, the Pope story did catch up to Macchiarini. In the spring of 2015, Alexander quit her job at NBC News, withdrew her daughter from school and prepared to move to Europe to live with Macchiarini full-time. She was all in. But the very next day, according to Vanity Fair, she received an email from a friend titled “The Pope.” It was a link to an article which said that the Pope would be spending that July in South Africa. Clearly, he was not planning to officiate any weddings at the Vatican.
When Alexander confronted Macchiarini about the lie, he initially gave her a cover story about a scheduling mix-up. But this time, she saw the tall tale for exactly what it was, and she realized that their entire relationship had been a manipulation. She cancelled the wedding, and wrote Macchiarini an email in which she said: “Congratulations. You charmed me, and all of us, into la la land. I will never, ever understand how you could have done this to me.”
Alexander subsequently hired private investigators to look into Macchiarini, and they discovered several more alarming red flags which extended into his professional life, including numerous fabrications on his resume. She ultimately contacted his employer, the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, to share her concerns. But little did she know, an investigation was already underway, and would ultimately end in Macchiarini being sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison for assault. It transpired that most of the patients he had transplanted his synthetic tracheas into had died, many of them after years of painful and ultimately futile medical treatments.
“I was very vulnerable and that’s when men like him pounce,” Alexander told The Telegraph, reflecting on how Macchiarini manipulated her when she opened up about her ex-husband’s illness. She also suspects, in retrospect, that there was a reason he chose her in particular. “I think it was partly the thrill—the smarter the woman and the bigger the institution he conned, the greater the rush. But he also might have guessed what was brewing in Sweden and thought I could one day help him.”
Is Benita Alexander still a journalist?
Alexander no longer works as a journalist. According to her LinkedIn page, she is a “love con expert” and uses her experience as a survivor of love fraud to raise awareness and help other women who have been through similar experiences. She currently serves as producer and showrunner on the Investigation Discovery shows Road Rage and Crime Goes Viral. Furthermore, she's the CEO of Berraca Productions, “a company she founded to further her advocacy work empowering women who are the survivors of fraud” and hosts the podcast "Benita & The Berracas," where she features the stories of other women who fell victim to love fraud.
