Legal scholar Elizabeth Chamblee Burch focuses on three women with mesh implants who were targeted, manipulated, and violated—at their own expense. Through the searing stories of Sharon Gore, Barbara Shepard, and Jerri Plummer—middle-aged women separated by geography, education, and socioeconomic factors—Burch sheds light on not only the injustices of mass torts, which she describes as “personal-injury litigation on steroids,” but also the indignities endemic in women’s healthcare. Drawing on more than 150 interviews conducted over two years, backed by 209,000 pages of documentation, THE PAIN BROKERS is at once a critical work of public service journalism and a real-life thriller. As Burch unfolds each level of the scheme, readers meet: Vincent Chhabra, a Versace-clad entrepreneur and architect of Alpha Law, LLC—which, despite its name and partnerships with some actual lawyers, was a call center. Headquartered at 1000 Corporate Drive in south Florida, Alpha Law employed nearly two hundred operators in headsets who capitalized on patients’ private medical records, obtained through a data breach in India, to make unsolicited calls to vulnerable women with mesh implants, including Sharon, Barbara, and Jerri. Blake Barber, a hulking ex-paralegal with a flamingo pink goatee who turned women’s medical fears into cash for third-party funders by orchestrating a ruthless “concierge service” that flew terrified patients to Florida chop shops to have their mesh removed. Dr. Christopher Walker, a Jamaican-born urogynecologist known by his Instagram handle @Dr.Downtown who, after losing his savings in a Ponzi scheme, went from inserting mesh to extracting it at breakneck speed for seven times his normal fee—a feat made possible by refusing to accept women’s insurance and forcing them to sign liens against their future settlement proceeds. J.R. Baxter, a newly minted small-town Arkansas lawyer and passionate crusader for justice who, against daunting odds, represented Sharon, Barbara, and Jerri, as well as 180 other women.And finally, J.R. 's unlikely ally, Barbara Binis, a seasoned Philadelphia defense attorney hired to do financial damage control for a mesh manufacturer who devoted nearly four years to uncovering the mass-tort scheme. Centered on three women who went through the mesh mill, THE PAIN BROKERS exposes the profit-hungry scammers and unscrupulous doctors whom they trusted.
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4 min