‘I really don’t believe I was bad’: Inside a millionaire doctor’s lonely war with regulators
Four hours of shapes, words and memory drills was how Dr Jerry Schwartz says he was made to prove he was mentally fit to keep practising medicine.
One of the tasks was to list as many words as possible in five minutes beginning with the letter L.
“You just have to say ‘lemonade’ and ‘little’, and you just got to keep going,” he says. “I’m really bad at it.”
There were other exercises too. He had to put objects in the right square, then read a story and explain what it meant.
He passed. But the whole thing felt, to him, like a ritual of degradation. The neuropsychometric testing was at the orders of the Medical Council of NSW.
Dr Schwartz, who is currently suspended under emergency powers, says his troubles with the council first began in 2005 when a liposuction patient developed complications. He says she had not disclosed that she had scleroderma.
After the operation, the wound broke down and she required a skin graft. The matter was settled by his medical defence organisation, but he says the patient also reported him.
“That’s when they came and assessed me.”
At the time, he was working as a cosmetic surgeon at his Matraville Medical Complex. On the day the assessors came, it was quiet, so he saw several of his regular GP patients to keep the day moving.
“That was a mistake,” he says. “I should have just said, ‘Look, I’ve got no cosmetic patients today, you’ve got to wait.’”
After the assessors sat in on several patient consults, Dr Schwartz believes they saw it as an opportunity to track his general practice work, and when they did, they were not happy.
“They really harped on the GP thing, that I was not properly capable of handling different situations,” he says.
Soon, there was a subpoena to secure random samples of his patients’ records. And before long, he was having monthly, two-hour meetings with a GP mentor who was tasked with reporting back to the council on how Dr Schwartz was going.
“But they just wouldn’t stop laying down on me,” he says.
Dr Schwartz, as you will soon discover, has lived a vivid life, some of it veering into pulp fiction material.
We are sitting in a lounge room scattered with paperwork, kids’ toys lying on the floor (those of his children), and the debris of ongoing home renovation that seems to have been in progress for some time.
The workmen outside have excavated a hole in his driveway of such scale it looks like they are digging a tunnel to a new world, but all this ordered chaos comes with the spectacular backdrop of Sydney Harbour and its sparkling waters, the bridge itself framing the background.
It would be a euphemism to talk of this being prime real estate.
Although he has spent much of his life working as a doctor following his graduation from the University of Sydney medical school in 1979, Dr Schwartz is an extremely rich man.
The 35-storey five-star Sofitel Hotel in Darling Harbour? It has 590 rooms. He owns that. In fact, he owns 14 hotels and a brewery. He features regularly in those money-porn rich lists compiled by the Australian Financial Review, which estimates his fortune at around $670 million.
So the question at the heart of this article is a simple one for a doctor who has been subject to performance reviews, supervision orders, queries about his prescribing, concerns about his medical notes and claims (which he strenuously denies) that the level of his training was not always sufficient for some of the care he was providing.
“Why are you fighting the medical council? Why bother? Why don’t you walk away? You don’t need the money or the stress.”
He shuffles some of the paperwork in front of him that documents just a little of the complex chronology of his entanglements with the regulators over the last twenty years.
“As I’ve grown up, yes, it has been a wealthy family,” he says. “My father invested, he was a dentist, and he invested in real estate, and he always kept saying, ‘One day, you’ll inherit it all anyway, but you’ve got to do something that’s good for you and something that’s good for the community and do a worthwhile profession’.
“So he encouraged me to do medicine.”
His career has followed a path less travelled. He says he did specialist ophthalmology training in the UK before pursuing cosmetic medicine — including liposuction and blepharoplasty — tracing a time back to his days in Europe in the 1990s, where he worked under the medical pioneers of liposuction in France and Italy.
But he has also worked as a GP as well as in travel medicine. Before his suspension, his Matraville Medical Complex had six GPs, a practice nurse team and X-ray facilities. He insists it was never designed to maximise profit.
“It lost money because it was so ethical,” he says. “It was not about churning through patients… I didn’t tell the doctors to see patients as quick as they can. I said look after the patients properly.”
He says even while overseeing the family’s business affairs, the attraction to medicine has always been real.
“I’ve been groomed as a doctor from when I was at high school and went through uni and I wanted to provide medicine.”
He adds: “I’ve always had the passion. I still have the passion. It’s such an amazing profession.”
Unassuming in person, he looks genuine as he says this.
But for the regulators and the courts at least, what he says hasn’t always reflected in their view what he does.
In 2013, Dr Schwartz became headline news, finding himself embroiled in the sort of intrigue and scandal beloved by the tabloids because they get to peek behind the velvet drapes to see whether the rich really are different.
He had been brought before the Coroners Court of NSW as a key witness into the deaths of his mother, Eve Schwartz, and her close friend, Magda Wales.
Ms Schwartz’s body had been found in her Point Piper apartment in August 2005. She had had lung cancer. Three weeks later, Ms Wales’ body was found by a neighbour. He was called.
Dr Schwartz signed the death certificates for both of them. Nothing was seen as too unusual, although signing death certificates of friends and family is certainly a no-no for most.
He attributed his mother’s death to “a lack of oxygen to her vital organs” due to a collapsed lung and the lung cancer itself, and the death of Ms Wales to “an acute coronary event”. They were then cremated.
But five years after filling the paperwork, Dr Schwartz’s former lover, Liliane Viselle, went to the police with bombshell allegations. She said he had confessed to killing both women, claiming that he had told her: “My mother was in the way, Magda knew too much, I had to get rid of them.”
And then when she asked him whether he had killed them, he was alleged to have said: “Prove it. I have had them both cremated. It will cost me less than $10,000 to get rid of you.”
Over five days of hearings, the coroner examined conflicting accounts of what happened. The media loved it. Dr Schwartz denied being a killer, describing Ms Viselle’s claims as ludicrous, motivated by “revenge and monetary greed” linked to various personal and financial disputes between them.
He maintained that he had been the treating doctor for both women, and that he had acted appropriately in certifying their deaths and arranging their cremations.
The alleged twist was that although he had recorded lung cancer complications as the cause of his mother’s death, there was apparently photographic evidence of wrist injuries that he did not disclose.
Sounding like she had spent the night reading Jorge Luis Borges, NSW Coroner Mary Jerram recorded an open verdict.
“There are many aspects of the evidence in this inquest which are impossible to unravel,” she said. “There are stark contradictions of evidence… There were pathways which never reached an ending.”
She did not accept Ms Viselle’s account in full, noting inconsistencies and her involvement in civil disputes with Dr Schwartz. And she questioned the provenance of the photos indicating cuts to his mother’s wrists.
But she was also critical of Dr Schwartz, describing him as “not a satisfactory witness”, whose answers were often “unbelievable, vague or evasive”.
“I do not accept that the causes of death given by him… were either accurate, or based on proper medical investigation,” she said.
She referred him to the Medical Council of NSW for investigation for possible misconduct over the death certificates.
AusDoc has seen no documents about happened next but Dr Schwartz said the council approached him, told him that signing family death certificates was not good practice, but found no reason to apply sanctions.
The police didn’t pursue his ex-lover’s murder allegations either. The coroner stressed in her judgement that there was not sufficient evidence for a referral to the Department of Public Prosecution.
Looking back on what happened to him, what does he think now?
“It was upsetting… I was upset about the ex-girlfriend. How could she come up with such an allegation like that? And it just brought out again the fact that my mother died. You go to a coroner’s court about your dead mother, it’s not the most pleasant thing.”
But as we sit and talk, it seems he is now nearing the endgame when it comes to his life as a doctor.
Late last year, he was found guilty of professional misconduct by the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal (NCAT).
The case against him had a long and complex history, covering everything from his treatment of family members, to poor clinical judgements, to bad record keeping, to breaches of his practice conditions.
But the origins can be found in the months after he had fronted the inquest into his mother’s death: the medical council decided to conduct a performance review amid concerns about his clinical judgement and prescribing records.
This eventually led to a series of supervision conditions on his practice, as well as demands for further education, including from a specialist in anaesthesia.
Then as part of a review in 2015, he underwent assessment and training at the Sydney Clinical Skills and Simulation Centre, where further deficiencies were identified in his anaesthetic knowledge and skills.
In particular, the review noted he was regularly administering conscious sedation without having gone through what it dubbed formal relevant training — something Dr Schwartz rejected.
During an Section 150 emergency hearing, he was banned from administering “conscious (intravenous) sedation” as well as monitoring any sedated patients.
Later, following yet more assessments, the concerns remained. Another emergency hearing was convened but this time the ban on conscious (intravenous) sedation was extended to “by any route”.
The assessments and reviews continued, but the council by then is suspecting that he may have breached his conditions because he is offering conscious sedation intramuscularly.
The last emergency hearing is held to consider the evidence and in June 2021 he is suspended under the council’s emergency powers to protect the public.
Dr Schwartz describes this period as traumatic.
Amid a series of legal appeals challenging the suspension, it was five years before he was brought before a tribunal where he could defend himself.
The central allegation made by the medical council was that he had administered between 75μg and 100μg IM fentanyl to eight patients during various liposuction or blepharoplasty procedures between August 2019 and February 2021 at his accredited operating rooms in Matraville.
One of these patients was also given 50mg of promethazine.
You get a very vivid sense of the tribunal’s view of Dr Schwartz just a few pages into the judgement, even before it gets into the nuts and bolts of his alleged failings.
“Much of the practitioner’s evidence about what he did in particular circumstances with particular patients is not documented, and the weight to be placed on his version relies heavily upon us accepting that he is a reliable historian,” it said.
“Important parts of his evidence lead us to have considerable difficulty in generally accepting what he says.”
As a result of this assessment, it decided to reject any uncorroborated assertions or opinion offered by Dr Schwartz unless they were “uncontroversial, inherently likely or accompanied by corroborated evidence”.
The medical council’s case focused largely on the extent to which his patients’ consciousness had been depressed by the fentanyl doses.
Was he performing conscious sedation as defined in the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists (ANZCA) guidelines — a drug-induced depression of consciousness during which patients are able to respond purposefully to verbal commands or light tactile stimulation?
Or was he, as he argued, simply offering these patients pain relief?
In this debate, he was pitted against a big-name clinician in the form of Associate Professor Joanna Sutherland, a former chair of ANZCA’s quality and safety committee.
The tribunal noted that she had an “impressive career in practice and an extensive CV in relation to the contributions she has made to research and publications, including the subject of procedural sedation”.
She reviewed the records of the 10 procedures Dr Schwartz had performed on the eight patients — including upper skin blepharoplasty, chin liposuction, lower lip blepharoplasty, liposuction of the hips and abdominal liposuction.
Professor Sutherland said his administration of the fentanyl met the definitions laid out for conscious sedation.
Dr Schwartz’s lawyers said this was wrong. They told the tribunal that Professor Sutherland did not explicitly say that the levels of fentanyl used would depress the patient’s level of consciousness.
The tribunal wasn’t keen to hear this. It said that she had “unequivocally opined” that the use of fentanyl for each patient fell within the definition of conscious sedation. The lawyers weren’t happy.
The lawyers said Professor Sutherland had no details in six of the eight patients about their actual weight.
The tribunal said it was appropriate that, without the information, she would assume that “each person was an adult and did not require any dosage adjustment”.
The lawyers argued that Professor Sutherland’s views should be discounted because she had no personal experience of administering fentanyl intramuscularly as an anaesthetist and therefore would not know what the effect of administering 100μg of fentanyl would do to the patients in the cases before the tribunal.
The tribunal said she could appropriately draw on her “skill, experience and expertise to give an expert opinion”.
In his defence, Dr Schwartz had at one point argued he had been advised that administering IM fentanyl would not breach his conditions.
But the tribunal said that he was unable to “elaborate on the circumstances of that inquiry, including when and to whom he had made that inquiry and who had provided him with that information”.
“We are comfortably satisfied he just made this up,” it added.
There were also accusations about Dr Schwartz treating four family members and an employee. In this area, the expert witness was GP Dr Simon Young.
He said he was not critical of his management of Close Family Member A’s acute problems, such as skin infections, UTIs, skin rashes and otitis externa, nor the administration of flu vaccinations — although he did question 11 prescriptions of diazepam for their sleep issues.
However, Dr Young was concerned about the various investigations Dr Schwartz had made, which involved imaging, blood tests for moodiness, ultrasounds and X-rays, as well as direct referrals to specialists.
None of this was copied to the family member’s GP, Dr Young said.
“He was even not attempting to work together with this GP,” he added. “In fact, I believe this shows blatant contempt for colleagues.”
There was also a dig at his billings which strictly speaking wasn’t within the tribunal’s remit.
“He also charges Medicare for his care of Close Family Member A,” Dr Young wrote. “Many GPs, when unavoidably prescribing medication or managing acute care issues, would not do so. [They] believe it is a moral issue.”
“[But the practitioner] has no qualms as the Medicare records show.”
Dr Schwartz, then as now, denied the treatment was regular, given the dates of the tests ordered as well as the nature of the issues he was dealing with.
“I was not [their] general practitioner. It is only nature [sic] for [Close Family Member A] to have mentioned ailments and problems to me. Sometimes out of necessity, I would treat [Close Family Member A], including because [Close Family Member A] desired it.
“I was the first port of call and not regularly involved in [Close Family Member A’s] care.”
The tribunal rejected this claim, saying he had consulted with them 48 times over a four-year period.
It concluded that he showed very little insight into the “inappropriateness” of what he was doing.
Taking all matters together — the alleged sedation breaches, the treatment of family, concerns about his clinical decision making — the tribunal found Dr Schwartz’s conduct met the threshold for professional misconduct of a “sufficiently serious nature to justify suspension or cancellation”.
By now, there should have been another tribunal hearing to work out whether suspension or cancellation was necessary and if so, for how long.
But Dr Schwartz has lodged an appeal. There is a stay on his execution.
Back at his house, in his quiet, understated way, he picks his way through the tribunal’s judgement. The tribunals findings that the fentanyl doses he administered amounted to conscious sedation were based on sophistry, he seems to suggest.
“I’d like to add that the protocol [of using fentanyl for pain relief] is common to all cosmetic surgeons.
“When you go to conferences and you talk about how you do the procedure, giving fentanyl or pethidine is standard practice for pain relief on patients that you operate on that are not under general anaesthetic.”
And he insists the treatment of family members, particularly Close Family Member A, was appropriate, given the low-grade nature of the care he was offering.
“[Close Family Member A] has millions of ailments. She wakes up in the morning, she’s got a bit of pain and all that. What do you expect to do, make an appointment for the doctor and not talk to me? Or do you talk to me and say, ‘Listen, my elbow hurts,’ and I have a look at it and say, ‘Oh, it’s nothing, darling’.”
But we return to the reasons why after all these years he continues to fight the power.
“If I didn’t appeal, it means it sort of implies maybe I was bad,” he says. “I really don’t believe I was bad.”
“Yes, I have walked along the edge both in business and life in general. And in this circumstance, [my work as a doctor] I have walked along the edge. But I haven’t broken any regulation, any law. And I’ve never put patients at risk of harm.”
The other reason he offers for being in the fight is that he has the material means, and that is something that most doctors who find themselves in similar predicaments lack. He says he wants to do it on their behalf.
Concerns about medical regulators have mushroomed; much of it is rooted in the colossal time lapse of the process — doctors stuck in suspended animation for years while the machine goes through the gears.
There is also the emotional toll of the notifications and the investigations in cases where it’s quickly apparent there have been no failings on the doctor’s side.
But there has also emerged a group of doctors who have become political, claiming that the system is responsible for persistent miscarriages of justice, that it’s a vindictive process designed to punish.
Some have a certain celebrity. Dr Charlie Teo is the best known — he says he is being deliberately crushed. But there are others, practitioners like the paediatric surgeon Dr Paddy Dewan and orthopaedic surgeon Dr Gary Fettke, both of whom claim to have been victim of the AHPRA combine.
So it’s surprising to hear how isolated Dr Schwartz appears.
When asked directly whether he is part of the network, he is unequivocal.
“I’m just on my own,” he says.
His understanding of those broader campaigns comes only from what he has read in AusDoc, not from any direct involvement.
If anything, his experience with the profession has been one of distance.
He describes the support he gets from colleagues he works with, his fellow doctors and practice staff who know him.
But beyond his immediate professional family, he says, “It’s less than a handful. Most just go on their own business.
“[The cosmetic surgeons] have a forum where they present interesting cases. Okay, so I presented the original liposuction case and the sequela. They couldn’t care less.
“And there is a cosmetic medical association — what do you call them? The college, they couldn’t care less. They never helped. They couldn’t care less. They just kept sending me the reminder every year… you’ve got to pay $3000 fees.”
At one point, they agreed to suspend those fees while his case was unresolved — but that was the extent of their involvement.
As he talks about this, there is a visible shift.
The frustration that runs through much of his account gives way, briefly, to something quieter — a kind of resignation. He pauses, and for a moment looks less combative than simply disappointed.
But what sort of money are we talking about in this fight, I ask. What sort of money has he spent?
He says his MDO bailed early on. Now the money comes out of his own pocket.
Each major tribunal hearing cost him about $50,000, he says, once the solicitor, the barrister and preparation time are factored in.
The recent NCAT matter, he says, cost him “double easy” — around $100,000. One postponed hearing added another $50,000.
Then there was a rehearing.
“I had taken a photograph of one of the jurors [on the tribunal] outside the courthouse chit-chatting with an anaesthetic consultant, one of the witnesses against me. There was going to be a potential bias against me, but that rehearing cost me another $100,000.
“So you add all that together, that is why you’re looking at half a million dollars.”
Dr Schwartz says it excludes the years of administrative labour — the photocopying of notes, the written responses, the monthly reporting, the time spent satisfying conditions rather than practising medicine.
“Instead of practising medicine, I’m wasting my time,” he says.
That sense of abandonment has hardened his view of the profession around him. Others keep their heads down. Others protect themselves. Others cannot afford a barrister, a rehearing, a QC’s opinion, or the emotional scar tissue risked by another round of appeals.
He says his current appeal will centre on the argument that the regulator’s only truly legitimate claim against him is the sedation issue — and that even there, they got it badly wrong.
“I still maintain, I gave minimal sedation and not conscious sedation.”
But if he loses, he expects the worst.
“They will take away my licence,” he says. “I really feel they will take away my licence.”
And if that happens, the hurt will not be about the money, obviously. It will be, at least in his own mind, because his identity as a doctor has been unfairly stripped away.
