MIAMI — For the second time in the last five years, the death of a Brazilian butt-lift patient at Coral Gables’ Seduction Cosmetic Surgery has led to the doctor being banned from performing such procedures.
Dr. John Sampson, whose seventh illegal surgery patient died on June 16, 2021, keeps his medical license.
Sampson’s punishment from the Florida Board of Medicine was handed down Friday. Additionally, he was fined $20,000; charged $5,626 for investigation and prosecution costs; ordered to perform five hours of continuing medical education in medical records keeping; must present a one-hour lecture on liposuction and gluteal fat grafting (BBL surgeries are a form of each); and can’t be the Designated Physician at any office surgery center.
That’s what Sampson was supposed to be at Seduction, according to the administrative complaint filed against his license in 2021. Seduction and Sampson told the Florida Department of Health in separate letters that he would be the Designated Physician and would not be performing surgeries at Seduction, 4950 SW Eighth St.
Instead, Sampson not only cut on numerous patients from April 2021 to June 2021 — an allegation in the administrative complaint also made by several emails to the Miami Herald from Seduction patients — but he had seven surgeries on June 16, 2021.
(In June, the Florida Board of Medicine made an emergency ruling limiting doctors to three BBL surgeries per day and require they be done with an ultrasound machine. A seven-doctor group called Surgeons for Safety filed to block the order in Florida’s Third District Court of Appeal, arguing neither requirement would help patient safety. The court rejected the group’s argument.
The first Surgeons for Safety doctor listed on the filing, Sergio Alvarez, was put on a no-BBL, one-year probation in June in a punitive action after a 2019 BBL death at Mia Aesthetics in West Miami-Dade.)
The administrative complaint says Sampson punctured patient E.R.’s liver, intestines and injected the fat removed from the abdomen into her gluteal muscles (prohibited in Florida since 2019).
“E.R.” died that night at the age of 33. The administrative complaint also alleged paperwork lies and shenanigans by Seduction and Sampson.
As of Sunday, Sampson’s page on Seduction’s website still listed him as a “board certified surgeon.” The only board certification Sampson’s Florida Department of Health profile claims, the American Board of Plastic Surgery, lists Sampson’s certification as “suspended.”
This is the first disciplinary action for Sampson, but not the first involving Seduction. In 2017, Osakatukei “Osak” Omulepu got stripped of the right to perform Brazilian butt-lifts after a death of one of his patients at Seduction, which operated in Doral as Seduction by Jardon back then. Gretel Jardon was Seduction’s president, then and now.
———
