Brazilian celebrity plastic surgeon Denis Furtado, also known as "Dr. Bumbum," has been charged for the death of one of his patients after a butt injection went fatally wrong, the Guardian reports.Furtado—who has almost 650,000 followers on Instagram, where he routinely posts before and after shots of his butt lifts—was performing the cosmetic surgery on 46-year-old Lilian Calixto on July 14 in his Rio de Janeiro apartment when she started feeling sick. Furtado took her to a nearby hospital to get checked out, but the woman died later that day of cardiac arrest.According to prosecutors, Furtado injected an unsafe amount of a synthetic resin called polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) into her butt during the deadly procedure, putting Calixto's life in danger "under the false promise of immediate beauty, selfishly motivated by greed and an easy profit," they wrote. Furtado's mother and sister, who assisted Furtado during the injection, have also been arrested in connection to Calixto's death.
Illegal butt injections have become increasingly more common in Brazil and the US, but the black market ass shots can inadvertently lead to in everything from boils to necrosis to, in cases like this, death. "People are seduced by the promise of cheap, immediate results," Brazil's Society of Plastic Surgery president, Dr. Níveo Steffen, told the New York Times. "They see ads claiming they’ll walk out of a one-hour consultation with a new backside. But it’s a lie, and they end up paying the price."Furtado is now facing up to 30 years in prison if his case goes to trial. He still maintains that he is innocent of any wrongdoing, saying in a series of Instagram videos last July that he hasn't "committed any crime," according to the Times. He also claimed that he's safely performed the same procedure thousands of times before and this time was a "fatal accident," but this is coming from a guy with sketchy medical credentials whose Instagram feed is made up entirely of asses, FaceApp photos, and posts about how well the cast of The Expendables has aged, so take it as you will.Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.Follow VICE on Twitter.
Advertisement
Aside from the dangerous amount of PMMA and the fact that the procedure was done in a makeshift home clinic, the whole thing was also illegal, prosecutors say, since Furtado isn't licensed to practice medicine in Rio.