Former President Donald Trump has always pitched himself as the ultimate New York businessman—brash, in-your-face, and all about flash and cash.

New York is trying to blow that image up. 

State officials have launched both a criminal case and a sweeping civil fraud lawsuit against Trump’s business that may soon eviscerate his status as a New York businessman. Victory would smash Trump’s golf-and-real-estate empire as it presently exists, leave him (and his children) ineligible to run a business in New York ever again, and brand his namesake company, the Trump Organization, a criminal enterprise. 

“The civil and criminal trials in New York are like a double-barrel shotgun to the financial infrastructure of Trump’s businesses,” said Gene Rossi, a former federal prosecutor for the Eastern District of Virginia. “The brand, assets, and the ability to obtain future revenues will be greatly at risk if both cases are successful. CPR may be needed in the end for what is left.”

“The civil and criminal trials in New York are like a double-barrel shotgun to the financial infrastructure of Trump’s businesses.”

In the criminal case, prosecutors accuse Trump’s company of paying employees in an off-the-books scheme to avoid taxes. Trial arguments start this week after the court spent last week selecting a jury. The civil case, unveiled in September and now rolling ahead in court, accuses Trump, his company, and his adult children of lying to banks and insurance providers about the value of Trump’s assets to score financial perks. 

Both cases threaten to isolate the Trump Organization by making other companies, banks, and the government reluctant to work with Trump’s business.  

They’re only part of the tsunami of legal jeopardy towering over Trump, which includes a criminal investigation in Georgia into his attempts to reverse his 2020 election defeat and a probe led by the Department of Justice into whether he violated the Espionage Act by taking sensitive, secret documents to his Palm Beach resort.

But unlike those other probes, New York’s legal assault cuts to the core of the brand Trump has spent a lifetime building: the appearance of wealth and success in the New York real estate game.

Trump’s company has pleaded not guilty in the criminal case and vowed to fight the civil lawsuit. Both James and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg are elected Democrats, and Trump has dismissed the cases they’ve brought as part of a wide-reaching Democrat-run witch hunt. 

The criminal trial is all about alleged “off the books” employee benefits. 

And that’s where the prosecution’s anticipated star witness comes in: Trump’s longtime chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg. 

In August, Weisselberg, 75, pleaded guilty to 15 felonies and admitted to evading taxes on $1.76 million of his income, while the company covered rent for a Manhattan apartment, the lease payments on multiple Mercedes Benzs, and private-school tuition for his grandchildren. 

Weisselberg refused to cooperate fully with the broad-reaching investigations against Trump. But he agreed to testify at this trial, in exchange for a much-reduced sentence of only five months. The judge has warned him he could face up to 15 years if he fails to keep up his end of the bargain and testify truthfully at trial—and Weisselberg won’t be formally sentenced until after the company’s trial ends.

The company is preparing to argue that Weisselberg is lying, a lawyer for the Trump Organization told a hearing last week, according to a transcript seen by Reuters. 

“Weisselberg will testify he believed everything he was doing was wrong,” Trump Org lawyer Susan Necheles said during a video conference. “We think he's lying, and we want to show that.”

The trial may now hinge on whether the jury believes Weisselberg or the company’s lawyers.  

If the company is found guilty, the firm may face a maximum fine of only $1.6 million—which would be peanuts for a company that reported earning hundreds of millions a year during Trump’s presidency. 

But the longer-term consequences of a criminal conviction could deal a lot more harm: Afterward, the government and other vendors may refuse to do business with the firm.

The Trump international hotel is seen in Washington, DC, on February 15, 2022. (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

To take just one example, a conviction could upend the lucrative Secret Service contracts Trump’s hotels have enjoyed for years. 

A Ccngressional investigation found that Trump charged “exorbitant” rates to Secret Service agents protecting him, including $1,185 per night at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. 

American taxpayers shelled out a minimum of $1.4 million to house Secret Service agents at Trump properties while protecting Trump and his family, the report found. 

Federal regulations, however, require public spending to be done with an “impeccable standard of conduct.” 

Banks, likewise, may balk at granting loans to a company with an official criminal history.

And all this criminal drama isn’t even the most dangerous legal threat facing Trump’s company. 

The New York Attorney General’s office is pursuing a sweeping, $250 million lawsuit that’s playing out now in the same court complex as the criminal proceedings. 

The lawsuit accuses Trump and his company of including more than 200 false or misleading statements about the value of his properties in 11 statements of financial condition over a period of a decade. Those statements were submitted to banks and insurance companies to win benefits like lower interest rates and premiums. 

“The number of grossly inflated asset values is staggering, affecting most if not all of the real estate holdings in any given year,” the lawsuit states. 

“The number of grossly inflated asset values is staggering, affecting most if not all of the real estate holdings in any given year.”

In just one of many examples, the lawsuit says Trump claimed his Trump Tower penthouse was worth $327 million in 2015 based on its size of over 30,000 square feet. “In reality, the apartment was only 10,996 square feet,” the lawsuit says. 

The case resulted from a three-year probe of Trump’s business practices, during which Trump was personally hauled in for a deposition and forced to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination hundreds of times—a move he once said was only for guilty people and the mob. 

The civil case could likewise further isolate the company, said Daniel J. Horwitz, who investigated fraud cases as an assistant district attorney in the Manhattan DA’s office before becoming a partner at New York law firm McLaughlin and Stern.

“Any time a company is sued by a regulator over core aspects of its business, that’s really not good,” Horwitz said. “Obviously there are reputational issues for the brand, but more importantly, lenders and insurance companies may very well be reluctant to do business with you.”

The lawsuit seeks to permanently bar Trump and his adult children Don Jr., Eric, and Ivanka from serving as an officer or director of any company registered or licensed in New York State. The suit would ban Trump and the Trump Organization from entering into any New York real estate acquisitions for five years and seeks to claw back an estimated $250 million, which the AG’s office said was the approximate amount of financial benefits obtained through fraud.

Earlier this month, James’ office asked a judge to stop Trump and his company from transferring assets without approval from the court in order to protect the funds she said would be needed for the judgment if wins her lawsuit. 

She noted that on the same day in September that her lawsuit was announced, Trump’s company registered a new firm called “Trump Organization II LLC.”

“The Trump Organization has since refused to provide any assurance that it will not seek to move assets out of New York to evade legal accountability,” James’ office wrote in a press release. 

James asked the judge to appoint an independent monitor to oversee the company’s financial disclosures. 

A response filed by Trump attorney Alina Habba called the idea of a monitor “grossly punitive, inequitable, and completely unnecessary.”

But if the company loses the case, that kind of “punitive” measure will be just a first step.

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People Are Turning to Sex Work as Costs of Living Rise—and They’re Being Punished for It

In the spring of 2021, Allie Rae was on shift at the hospital where she worked as a nurse when her direct supervisors and their bosses called her into her manager’s office. There, she said, they opened a manila envelope full of Allie Rae’s nude photographs with sharpie marks covering parts of her body.

“My heart just stopped,” said Allie Rae, whose real name is being withheld for privacy reasons. 

She immediately recognized the images as photos that were only available behind her OnlyFans paywall. Someone at work had discovered her content and outed her. OnlyFans is an online, subscription-based platform for content creators, including sex workers. “I can’t even believe someone went to those great lengths to actually pay to get content from me,” she told VICE News.“ It was probably one of the hardest times of my life.”

This wasn’t the first time management called her in to discuss her social media presence. They had previously asked her about her Instagram, which featured no nudity but had some sexy pictures, and went viral after an NHL team shared a picture of Allie Rae in their jersey.  

“It was totally safe for work—it was me in a jersey with pigtails,” Allie Rae said. 

About two months after her bosses opened the manila envelope full of her pictures—and multiple discussions with HR and the nurses’ union— they told Allie Rae that she’d have to quit OnlyFans or she’d be fired. The ultimatum came at a time when she and her husband were earning tens of thousands of dollars per month on OnlyFans—significantly more than what she made at the hospital. So, she quit her hospital job and started working online full-time. 

Allie Rae is hardly the only person to lose a job because of racy content or sex work: In 2017, a Canadian train conductor lost her job in with Canadian Pacific Railway after her employer decided her Instagram pictures violated the company’s “code of ethics and its internet and email policy.” In 2020, a Honda mechanic in Indiana was fired because her colleagues had watched her OnlyFans content at work. In January, a police officer in Colorado was forced to resign after someone sent in an “anonymous tip” about her OnlyFans to her employer. Her colleagues allegedly gossiped about her content behind her back. 

Stigma around sex, and specifically, selling sex is likely driving employers to fire staff who engage in sex work. Last month, a police officer in Detroit was forced to resign after her police chief learned about her OnlyFans and Instagram accounts. And while the force acknowledged that her OnlyFans page wasn’t illegal, a spokesperson for Detroit police said, “one of the bedrocks of DPD is you have to keep your private life unsullied as well.”

“Chief White takes these things very seriously because it represents not just DPD but all of the city of Detroit,” the spokesperson told Fox 2. 

But with the recent astronomic rise of the cost of living coupled with a looming recession, more people are turning to sex work supplement their income. This took off during the early days of the pandemic, even though making money on OnlyFans is a lot harder than most people realize. And now, those teachers, nurses, and others who are creating content online risk losing their primary jobs because they’re being outed or targeted at their workplaces. 

“Working class people have seen decades of wage stagnation, have debt in many cases that previous generations didn’t have, [and] we’re facing inflation and a possible recession,” said PJ Patella-Rey, a visiting University of Pittsburgh professor of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies. “People are dealing with really extreme and difficult financial conditions and social conditions and are just trying to survive—and we’re just punishing them for their efforts… It’s really, really unconscionable.”

Like most nurses who worked through the pandemic, Allie Rae was pulling a lot of overtime in the early days. Colleagues were frequently calling in sick, and her short-staffed unit was consistently overworked. Allie Rae was on call for 16-hour shifts, instead of her previous 12, and face masks and other PPE were in short supply. “It was very hard,” Allie Rae said. On top of all that, her husband had been furloughed from his airline job when travel all but collapsed. “We had lost a significant income in the household and that was hard on our family,” she added.

Allie Rae had started her OnlyFans account in 2020, when she decided to film beer reviews on Instagram as a way to “do something fun” after her tiring, pandemic-weary, hospital shifts. In the comment section, viewers, mostly men, suggested that she start an OnlyFans. 

She hadn’t heard of the site before. “It wasn’t until a lot of these stories started circulating about people making quite a bit of money on the platform and we thought, ‘Oh my gosh,’” Allie Rae said. 

In September 2020, Allie Rae set up an account with her husband. They posted a few photos of Allie Rae without nudity, and let the account sit. When they signed back into the account two weeks later, they saw they had already earned $7,000. That’s when they decided to take it more seriously, she said. 

Management first found out about her Instagram, which contained zero nudity, and then her OnlyFans. Allie Rae said she had “no idea” who had reported her content in the first place: Her managers told her that other nurses were “uncomfortable,” with the content, but none of her colleagues, Allie Rae said, spoke with her directly about her online presence. 

“That’s what made me the most mad, like, ‘Oh my God, everybody is so nice to me. Who’s doing this?” she said.

It wasn’t until the Daily Beast published a story about her that one of her colleagues apologized to Allie Rae and admitted that she was part of a group that had outed her. 

“People are so quick to judge us doing this, but it's like I had $130,000 in student loans. I have three children in hockey. Until they’re left with the pressures of that… it's very easy for someone to judge what they would or wouldn't do,” Allie Rae said.

“It is very hard. The cost of living is very expensive and nurses are vastly underpaid as well as teachers and a lot of professions,” she added.

Fast forward to 2022 and Sarah Juree, a teacher and single mom of two, also launched her OnlyFans in June to boost her income. Her teaching job, which paid a modest $55,000 salary, also didn’t offer health insurance. Juree  was struggling to make ends meet—health insurance and rent alone ate up half of her pay, and rising costs only made matters worse. 

A friend who had made $10,000 on OnlyFans in a single month inspired Juree to give the platform a try. But less than a month after Juree’s account went live, a local blogger wrote about her account and sent images to Juree’s employer. Juree lost her job about a day later.

“It was humiliating,” she told VICE News last month. 

Juree told VICE News that she still doesn’t understand why she was punished for her side hustle. 

“It’s just interesting what people pick and choose to approve in their mind as far as sex and sexuality goes,” Juree said. “There is nothing I was doing on OnlyFans that I wasn’t doing as a single woman except that I found a way to monetize it.”

“There is nothing I was doing on OnlyFans that I wasn’t doing as a single woman except that I found a way to monetize it.”

The irony is obvious. Studies show that many people with internet access watch porn, meaning they consume the content sex workers produce. But they’re not the ones being punished—sex workers are. “People have a remarkable capacity for double standards,” said Patella-Rey. This hypocrisy is also likely gendered: society tends to assume that sex work consumers are men and sex workers themselves are women, they added. 

Notably, several sex workers who’ve gone viral for losing their day jobs because of their online content had caretaking jobs such as nursing or teaching that are statistically staffed primarily by women. 

“The obscene thing isn’t that nurses and teachers are doing sex work to pay their bills,” Patella-Rey said. “The obscene thing is that nurses and teachers make so little that they have to do sex work to pay their bills.”

Many university students have also turned to various forms of sex work to make extra money. “Sex work is a field that particularly can be friendly to caretakers, mothers, and others, as well as people with disabilities and folks who are not only not paid enough, but struggle to find jobs that accommodate the rest of their lives,” said Heather Berg, a Washington University in St. Louis professor and author of Porn Work. Which is why, Berg added, that punishing sex workers and content creators is “additionally so cruel.”

And legal protections for sex workers are nonexistent. “In the US, sex worker status, whether current or former, is not a protected category, so you can be legally fired for doing sex work, but not for other sorts of things,” Berg said. 

Last month, 22-year-old Jaelyn went viral after she shared how her employer allegedly fired her from her nursing job because fellow nurses were watching and gossiping about OnlyFans content at work.

“While I am always doing care on somebody, they’re at the nurse’s station looking at my Instagram, looking at my Twitter, looking at my site—they paid for my site,” Jaelyn said on TikTok. 

Jaelyn hired a lawyer, and recently said the nursing home offered her her job back with a settlement. Jaelyn declined the offer and said, “I’ll see you in court.” 

Even Jaelyn, who earns enough on OnlyFans to forgo a nine-to-five, told her TikTok followers that she kept her nursing job in part because “you never know what you’re going to make on OnlyFans.”

“One month you could make $600, and then one month you can make $50,000. It just really, really depends,” Jaelyn said. 

“The obscene thing isn’t that nurses and teachers are doing sex work to pay their bills. The obscene thing is that nurses and teachers make so little that they have to do sex work to pay their bills.”

Today, Allie Rae is a full-time content creator making about $150,000 to $200,000 per month. She boasts 149,000 followers on Instagram and more than 50,000 on Twitter. She told VICE News she didn’t try to sue her employer when she lost her job, and she isn’t considering going back into nursing at the moment.

But while creators like Allie Rae and Jaelyn make enough on OnlyFans to make ends meet even after being forced out of their nursing jobs, most performers don’t make hundreds of thousands of dollars online, so the loss of a day job could be financially catastrophic. 

“Top 0.01 percent of OnlyFans—those models are making really good money… The average person on OnlyFans is making, like, $200 a month,” Patella-Rey said. They added that because online sex work on sites like OnlyFans is so “oversaturated,” many sex workers have also moved from online work to in-person work post-pandemic. 

Trans sex workers and sex workers of color face even more barriers.

“Trans folks, queer folks, people of color are already facing all kinds of disccrimination at their work places regardless of whether or not theyre engaged in sex work—and they’re often not getting hired into those positions,” Patella-Rey said.

Even though Allie Rae is a full-time content creator today, she didn’t initially see herself leaving nursing, she said, adding that workplaces risk losing some of their best employees by penalizing those who create adult content. 

“They’re willing to lose great nurses or great teachers,” Allie Rae said. “We’re hurting so bad for nurses, but because I was doing that you want to lose your most senior nurse on the unit?”

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How Turkey Became a Go-To Plastic Surgery Destination

In the days following her gastric sleeve surgery, Lucy Marshall, 28, has been dreaming about cheese. “I don’t even want to think about food,” Marshall says via video call from a hospital bed in Mersin, Turkey. “Although, I have had some lovely dreams about cheese.” When I spoke with her, she was struggling to even drink water. Her stomach capacity has been reduced to the size of an egg, although it will expand to hold about four times as much over the year. The surgery entails removing around 80 percent of the stomach to reduce the amount a person can eat. For the first four weeks post-op, Marshall is only allowed to consume liquids and pureed foods.

Marshall arrived in Turkey only hours before her surgery, one of an increasing number of people who are choosing to travel to the country for medical treatment. It is now one of the most popular destinations, alongside Eastern European countries, such as Lithuania, Poland and Latvia, for Brits seeking weight loss surgery owing to its low prices – up to 50 percent cheaper than costs in the UK – and accessibility. Marshall decided against the NHS because of wait times that could stretch to several years and the tight eligibility criteria.

“At first, I was like there's no way I'm going to Turkey, I'm not crazy,” she says. But the more research she did, the more she became certain it was the country for her.

Turkey has become a hotspot for medical tourism in recent years, attracting nearly 600,000 people for health services in the first half of 2022, according to the website of USHAŞ, a Turkish state owned healthcare company. The International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery ranks Turkey among the top ten countries performing the most popular aesthetic surgeries, including breast augmentation, eyelid surgery, tummy tuck procedures, liposuction and rhinoplasty. Turkey also ranks fifth for the total number of aesthetic procedures carried out in 2020, at just short of 950,000. 

But the country has also started to garner a bad reputation: Earlier this year, the British government updated its travel advice to say they were aware of 20 British nationals who had died following medical visits to Turkey since January 2019. The medical tourism industry is not internationally regulated, so there is little comparative data available on the rates of post-procedure complications in different countries.

During the months prior to her surgery, Marshall joined a Facebook group for victims of botched surgeries in Turkey. “I wanted to hear all the good, bad and the ugly,” she says. She zig-zagged between excitement and fear – impatient to get closer to achieving her weight loss goals, but terrified of what to expect. But Marshall knew she wanted to go ahead with the surgery. “I'm desperate for the help now,” she told me. “Seeing the successes of other ladies has really spurred me on and I want that to be me next.”

Scrolling through Facebook pages catering to people considering surgery abroad, Marshall became enamoured with people’s transformation journeys and the speed with which they dropped clothes sizes. 

Social media has become a stomping ground for Turkey’s medical tourism industry, which relies greatly on word of mouth marketing. Companies set up private groups for prospective patients where they share success stories. In public advice groups, people – mostly women – share their progress, or recommend what clothes to pack when planning for Brazilian Butt Lift (BBL) recovery. Others seek recommendations for specific surgeries,  knowing precisely what they want, down to their preferred incision for a breast augmentation. 

From all her scouring, two names stood out to Marshall. One was a surgeon based in Egypt, the other was Dr Tuna Bilecik - known across many Facebook pages as Dr Tuna - in Mersin, Turkey.

When Rachel Kibble, 34, flew to Turkey in 2017 to have weight loss surgery with Dr Bilecik, she never expected to become his business partner. Like most prospective medical tourists, Kibble discovered her surgeon online. She messaged Bilecik on Facebook and bombarded him with questions to make sure he was right for her. “He said ‘just trust me’ and I did,” she says. She was his first British patient.

After the surgery, Kibble kept in touch with Bilecik, who would connect her with British patients seeking support. “It put them at ease to know that I had been through the surgery and was English,” she says. In 2020, Kibble set up The Mediterranean Weight Loss Clinic, with Bilecik becoming the company’s in-house surgeon.

Turkey’s healthcare system has steadily become more privatised over the past 20 years, enticing surgeons to leave the public health service after serving up to 600 days of compulsory service. 

As the medical tourism sector has developed, surgeons have started their own clinics, hiring booking assistants, chauffeurs and translators, while agencies have started to hire their own in-house surgeons. Other companies function as agencies, intermediary platforms between private surgeons and patients, helping to organise their trips. 

 When prospective patients contact a company, often via WhatsApp, an assistant or rep – usually a past patient – will get in touch to find out what the person is looking for, their availability and to give a phone consultation.

“Absolutely everything is done via WhatsApp,” says Marshall. “[A coordinator] called and gave me a consultation, which I also find quite strange because these aren't medical professionals, these are just ladies who have gone through the same things as me.”

Kibble said that Dr Bilecik reviews patients’ medical consultation forms and may come back with further questions before recommending which surgery is best. He only speaks to patients before they arrive in Turkey if he needs to, Kibble confirmed.

For many patients, the first time they see or speak to a medical professional is when they arrive at the hospital the day before their surgery. Chrissy Forster, 38, who had weight loss surgery with Get Slim in Turkey in April 2021, says within a month and a half of her first messaging the company over Facebook, she was on her way to Turkey for surgery. She had by that stage only filled out a medical questionnaire.

“I feel really sad for myself that I was so desperate that I was willing to take such risks,” she says. She says she still thinks about those risks, despite that the surgery went well and she is happy with her decision.

Forster, like Marshall, felt willing to overlook what didn’t sit well with her during the booking process because she was desperate, and Turkey offered what she wanted both quickly and cheaply. She paid £3,250 for her flights, accommodation and surgery with Get Slim. They also threw in free teeth whitening and Botox as part of the package.

Marshall had her gastric sleeve operation at the Mediterranean Weight Loss Clinic for £3,100. She was quoted £10,500 with a private practice in the UK.

“Turkey is a leader in medical tourism because they have the cheapest prices, almost in the world,” says Jonathan Edelheit, the CEO of the Medical Tourism Association. But he shares concerns about the integrity of the industry that have proliferated in recent months. “It’s a little bit of a Wild West and that’s why you have to be careful,” he says. 

“I’m not saying I’m botched, by any means,” says Dawn Benham, 43. “But the attention to detail wasn’t there and I’m asymmetric.” After having a mummy makeover – a combination of post-pregnancy procedures to the abdomen and breasts – at Irmet Hospital in April 2019, Benham realised one of her nipples was higher than the other, her areolas were different shapes and the liposuction on her stomach was uneven.

Benham is part of a 2,000 member-strong Facebook group for sharing claims against the hospital. Alongside the social media pages where patients give recommendations and advice, there are also numerous "botched" groups, where people share negative reviews. Their complaints range from concerns about gruesome scarring to claims of poor bedside manner. In more serious instances, people claim they have contracted sepsis and accuse hospitals of poor hygiene or tell stories about ending up in intensive care with post-surgical complications.

“I couldn't fault the care that I had when I was there,” Benham says. “But I feel let down and that they're not professional and that they just want your money and then don't care what happens.”

When Benham got in touch with the hospital about a revision, she says she was told she needed to wait a year for the surgery to settle. A year later, she was told the surgeon who did her surgery no longer worked with Irmet and the hospital would consider people for revision at a later date. The pandemic came and Benham heard nothing. She got in touch with the hospital again and was told it may be too late for a revision but to send pictures nonetheless. That was in November. She hasn’t heard back since. Irmet Hospital did not respond to a request for comment.

“Perhaps they would have done a revision and been better at responding, but there's so much demand they can't keep on top of it,” says Benham. “It's almost like, pile them high and get them through the conveyor belt.”

Mert Karakuzu, owner of medical travel agency Estetica Istanbul, says the industry is oversaturated. “When you are dealing with so many patients, you don't focus on individual patients, you focus on the big number,” he says.

Estetica sees about 50 patients a month. Others, like Get Slim in Turkey, see hundreds of people a month. The Mediterranean Weight Loss Clinic saw 110 in June alone. Kibble says the number of procedures Bilecik does each day depends on which surgeries he is performing. The day we spoke he was doing eight. Kibble could not confirm if that was the maximum he would do in a day.

The Mediterranean Weight Loss Clinic has not escaped scrutiny from anxious patients hoping to leave no stone unturned before going for surgery. The company was forcibly struck off from the UK’s registry of companies in December 2021, prompting patients to ask why. Kibble says the company was struck off for the failure to submit a document on time and has now registered the company under a different name, MWLC Ltd.

As the medical tourism industry has grown, the Turkish government has introduced measures both to regulate the industry and encourage its expansion, including VAT exemptions for foreign medical patients. The country has set a target of attracting 1.5 million health tourists in 2023, aiming to generate £10bn in annual income from the industry.

In 2017, the ministry for health introduced regulations to try and standardise medical tourism that make it compulsory for hospitals, clinics and agencies to obtain an International Health Tourism Authorisation Certificate, in addition to regulating prices, promotion and requirements for surgeons who lead health tourism units where they work.

Kibble thinks the industry is heavily regulated, but Karakuzu disagrees. “It is not enough,” he says. According to Karakuzu, the government fail to closely implement regulations and close down illegitimate companies.

But it’s too soon to tell where things are going wrong in the industry, says Cheryl Palmer-Hughes, a solicitor with English firm Irwin Mitchell who is working on multiple claims arising from surgery abroad. “This [industry] has picked up massively over the past few years, so it's only relatively recently that we've begun to see outcomes of inquests, for example, trying to establish what happened.”

She says cases range from allegations about surgical technique to the suitability of the patient for surgery or the ability of a hospital to respond to emergencies. These are issues that arise in medical practices around the world, she adds, but the firm sees a high proportion of inquiries related to surgery in Turkey.

One month post surgery, Marshall is starting to eat solids again. The recovery has been smooth and she’s nearly lost two stone. “Looking back, I think wow that's crazy, I can't believe I did that,” she says. But Marshall has no regrets: “I would do it again in a heartbeat.”

@bea_trid