Sydney plastic surgeon terrorised online by woman he never operated on
He’s the plastic surgeon behind some of Sydney’s famous ageless faces but a one-off encounter with a potential patient led to an obsessive campaign of online terror aimed at destroying Dr Warwick Nettle’s business and reputation.
NSW
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One late spring morning in 2018, Dr Warwick Nettle, Sydney’s plastic surgeon to the stars with an impeccable reputation as the very best, opened his computer to see a barrage of reviews about his handiwork.
“I have a huge scar on my face, can’t see out of my left eye” was one.
“Incompetent surgeon”, “unethical doctor”, “the devil himself” and “a quack” screamed the posts.
Dr Nettle knew these posts were not made by real patients. He knew the person behind the reviews was just one woman, a woman he had never put a scalpel to.
“It was all fictitious, stuff like ‘I can’t breathe’, ‘I’ve had to have six operations since he operated on me’, complete fictitious stuff. We knew they weren’t real patients because it did not fit the criteria of any of our patients we had operated on. If someone is having a bad time, I see them post operation and address the issues,” Dr Nettle said.
With a sinking feeling he knew Catherine Cruse was back online, armed with her venomous keyboard and ready for another round of toxic online terror.
In late 2017, Dr Nettle consulted with the then 32-year-old Cruse in his Bondi Junction rooms.
According to court documents, Cruse wanted cheek implants and had sought Dr Nettle out because she heard he was “the best”, but the consult took a very strange turn when she peeled off her cosmetic eyebrows to reveal scars where her real eyebrows had been surgically removed.
“They were fake eyebrows and she said ‘Will you fix up these eyebrow scars?’. She had her real eyebrows excised, cut off. She said she didn’t like them and she wanted to put hair transplants there. That is unusual, I’d never seen it before,” Dr Nettle recalls.
“She asked if I would fix them. I did not think the scars were that bad, but she said ‘No, I want them fixed’ so I said ‘Well, if you want to do it at the same time as the other procedure no problem’. It was $750 to do the scar revision and she agreed.”
Cruse then told Dr Nettle to get the money for the procedure from her former plastic surgeon Dr Peter Martin, a highly unusual move.
“She then asked me to write a letter saying what I was planning to do. I know Peter and explained what I was planning to do and left it at that.”
A month later, in January 2018, Dr Nettle and his wife were on holidays in Thailand. Dr Martin had received the letter and called Dr Nettle and warned him that Cruse had left a litany of negative reviews about him online.
Online reviews can make or break a reputation.
Dr Nettle had consistent 4 to 4.7 star reviews from his estimated 350 to 500 patients a year. He acknowledges the odd unhappy patient, because plastic surgery cannot fix everything, but he was rattled enough to seek counsel from his medical insurance company. He had scheduled Cruse for her surgery when he returned from holidays.
“I had a chat to Avant, my medical indemnity insurer, and explained and they said ‘You do not need to operate on this person, so don’t’. It was unfortunately timing three days out. Normally you have a meeting, have a chat, smooth it over, but we had to do it by email.”
He detailed in the email he felt uncomfortable about the eyebrow surgery and would not be going ahead as her surgeon, and he offered to repay any consult fees Cruse had already paid.
There was a cold silence to the email. But the reaction came online with a barrage of one-star reviews within days.
“My mouth is drooping lower on the left side after the facelift surgery,” was just one of dozens of one-star reviews of fictitious surgeries Dr Nettle had never performed.
In February 2018, Cruse emailed Dr Nettle and demanded $3000 so she could seek surgery elsewhere.
“I don’t expect you to agree to this, but you might want to consider if you want to be done dealing with me.”
She followed up the email, calling him a “dickhead”.
Dr Nettle, after much thought, agreed to pay Cruse the amount in a deed of release that included her ceasing her online campaign of abuse.
“It got to the stage of enough, can we pay her to basically stop writing stuff, so we offered her $3000 which was the cost of the surgery. It was a deed through Avant, basically a cease and desist and she took the money. We thought great, this is good, and it’s over.”
But it wasn’t — it was just the beginning.
On March 18, 2018, Cruse posted online a completely fictitious surgery under a bogus name purportedly performed by Dr Nettle.
“He performed, in my opinion, botched neck lift procedure that left me with bad scarring. I suffered hair loss and disfigured my earlobes. My earlobes were protruding and lifted away from my actual face,” it read.
“Then they just kept on coming and coming and coming and sometimes there were three a night and you’d wake up to them in the morning,” Dr Nettle said.
Cruse came back for more money in May 2018.
“Then she got back in contact and said you are still meant to be the best, will you reconsider doing my operation and we said no. Then she said she was going to the US to have the operation and how dare I force a patient to go to America to get an operation because she could not find anyone here to do it and the risk, etc. ‘You should pay me $12,550’ and we said ‘no’, and then it started again,” Dr Nettle said.
In July 2018, she demanded even more: “Hello Dr Nettle. Last week I had surgery with Dr Sherrell Aston in New York. You owe me the difference between the amount I would have spent in Sydney with you, and the amount I ended up paying … I have attached a spreadsheet which details the costs. I have spent an additional $16,260.42. You owe me this amount.”
Dr Nettle refused to be extorted so the one-star reviews kept coming:
“Dr Nettle has to be the absolute worst plastic surgeon for men.”
“I do not recommend Dr Nettle for rhinoplasty. I hate the result, it’s upturned like a PIG.”
“Botched _ Wires sticking out of head.”
Dr Nettle took out an apprehended violence order against Cruse. It did nothing. With no end of Cruse’s relentless campaign in sight, Dr Nettle tried to approach the publishers of the fake online reviews.
“After trying to get Google and various other places to remove reviews, and this is part of the bigger story, they were reluctant to help.
“The reviews were mostly on Google, but ones on a cheaters hotline and a couple of others, you have to actually pay to have them removed, it’s their business model,” he said.
When Google was alerted to one of the more outrageous posts, its response was “this review was found to be in line with our review policies … what could be deduced from the content was an experience that the customer had with the business in concern”.
Seemingly unstoppable, Cruse then obtained website names under Dr Nettle’s name, and an Instagram and Pinterest account also under his name.
“Make sure to Google ‘Warwick Nettle WordPress’ for the TRUTH about this horrible surgeon,” a review said, directing people to the website that had bogus faces of botched surgery and a photo of Dr Nettle with “the devil himself” scrawled in red across his face.
“The reviews got going again and at that stage, she got the Pinterest site Dr Warwick Nettle and we had been seeking it for years and she got it, and she got a Dr Nettle website,” Dr Nettle said.
“We approached WordPress whose website she was using with and their response was ‘If you don’t like it, create one to counter it’, and that was their response.”
Around this time, the reviews were starting to bite into his business. His 4.5 star reputation was diving.
“Business was definitely affected, but I have been around long enough that I could weather a storm,” he said.
“It was definitely negatively affected, there were patients who were going to have operations that pulled out, and you never know who didn’t call you who might have called you had they not seen that, you don’t know.”
At a loss as to how he could stop Catherine Cruse, Dr Nettle launched a costly defamation suit.
Cruse never showed up to court, or filed a defence. In fact no one could find her.
“She effectively disappeared,” Judge Michael Wigney in the Federal Court found.
“Despite extensive efforts by his solicitors and private investigators who had been retained to locate and serve her. It would appear that she deliberately evaded service and deliberately concealed her whereabouts,” he said before agreeing she had been effectively served via email and the hearing proceeded in her absence.
In August last year, Justice Wigney found Cruse had launched an “appalling and entirely unjustified and unjustifiable negative internet campaign” on Dr Nettle in finding she did defame him.
“Ms Cruse’s internet attacks on Dr Nettle were sustained, far-reaching and virulent,” he said.
“They were also full of falsehoods, gross misrepresentations of the facts, entirely unjustified criticisms of Dr Nettle and the publication of statements, and in some cases images, that appear to have been calculated to inflict maximum damage on Dr Nettle’s professional reputation.”
Cruse was ordered to remove the posts and pay damages of $450,000, money Dr Nettle never expects to see.
“No, I’ll never see it. If we did we would put it to charitable use. But this isn’t about poor old Warwick Nettle but when this happens to you, people of lesser means might not have the ability to defend themselves. It’s horrible,” he said.
The personal stress and impact on his family is a factor he can’t put a price on. But every day he is left wondering how and why someone would go to so much effort to inflict so much pain.
“Perhaps it’s a particular personality type who has possibly always got everything they wanted in life and then I said no.”
His reviews online are back up to 4.8 out of 5 stars, but it is an experience he wouldn’t wish on anyone.
“I’m dedicated to my craft, you are only as good as your last operation and I have never done an operation where I have not tried 100 per cent.”
Cruse was contacted at her last known email for comment. She did not respond.
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