Who is Charlie Teo, the surgeon making headlines?

“It’s my dream that you would suck my dick while I’m doing this operation” is not a phrase one expects to see on the front page of august publications like The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. But on Thursday, there it was, attributed by an anonymous third party as a direct quote from famed Sydney brain surgeon Charlie Teo.

The piece, “Brilliant, adored, flawed: Dr Charlie Teo unmasked” by equally famed investigative reporter Kate McClymont, painted a fairly sordid picture of a technically brilliant but allegedly narcissistic man, “charging financially-stressed people exorbitant fees when some surgeries could be done for free in public hospitals”, prone to bad-mouthing some colleagues and behaving “inappropriately” around others.

The surgeon

Teo has been in the media for decades. In 2003, a rather more generous portrait in the SMH established many of the themes that would feature in McClymont’s piece. The “charismatic and controversial” surgeon — at that point director of the Centre for Minimally Invasive Neurosurgery at Prince of Wales — already had “a growing international reputation for doing radical surgery on tumours that other neurosurgeons consider inoperable”.

He was already getting criticism for “offering false hope” to patients who had rightly been advised against surgery. “I’m pushing the envelope in terms of the surgical approach to tumours and the more I push the envelope the more flak I get,” he said at the time.

He had already taken on many high-profile cases of patients who had been told there was no hope of success. Notably, his successful surgery on pianist Aaron McMillan became the subject of a book — Life in His Hands by Susan Wyndham. A review notes the “complex” Teo. “He flirts with nurses, sometimes too much. He is ‘boastful in a specialty full of large egos’.”

That may be a reference to sexual harassment allegations leveled against Teo in 1996, while he was working in Arkansas. But Teo’s lawyers have told McClymont no formal complaint was filed in Arkansas that Teo had been informed of.

During his early fame, he cut a Dr Michael Hfuhruhurr-type figure, saying his all-time favourite book was Principles and Practice of Keyhole Brain Surgery, which he co-wrote, and auctioning off tickets to watch him perform surgery.

Also ongoing were concerns from about his charging practices that flared up again in May. Henry Woo, a professor of Surgery at the University of Sydney, wrote on Twitter about the “really disturbing” number of crowdfunding efforts — some of which had raised $120,000 — trying to access Teo. Woo was backed by the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons and the Australian Medical Association. Teo defended his prices, and described governing bodies as “the enemy”, accusing the College of Surgeons of trying to “purge him” from the profession.

“When the distractions become too great and I can’t give my patients what they deserve, I will call it quits,” Teo said of the controversy.

The piece

Along with re-raising the issues regarding Teo’s practices and prices — alleging he refuses to operate in public hospitals “where he would be paid a fraction of what he can charge in the private system” — McClymont shares a series of allegations of “grossly inappropriate” behaviour from Teo:

For years Dr Teo insisted on wearing to operations his lucky socks, which read ‘World’s Greatest F–k.’ One neurosurgeon recalled Dr Teo wearing nothing but white Y-front underpants the entire time he hosted her and several other young trainees at a lunch at his Queens Park house while his wife was in Perth. A second doctor who attended the lunch confirmed that Dr Teo, wearing only his underpants, sat a teenage friend of his daughter’s on his lap.

The piece also notes his relationship with “underworld figure” Mick Gatto.

The response 

Charlieteo.com.au is a slickly produced piece of marketing — featuring shots of Teo in his scrubs and in suits, smiling reassuringly next to a list of his achievements. You half expect to see a shot of him mid surgery, looking up and smiling at the camera like it’s the world’s most ghoulish cookbook.

At the top of the site is Teo’s response to the piece, stating his surprise and disappointment with it.

He also criticises the “the use of nameless sources, the staggering number of inaccuracies and ultimate failure to provide a fair and balanced story”, though he doesn’t specify what those inaccuracies are. The article is being reviewed by his legal team, we are told.

Of course, Teo has other people to defend him as well — not even counting the “associate” of Mick Gatto who allegedly contacted the SMH offices with “specific knowledge of certain questions Dr Teo had been sent” (Teo’s people deny contacting Gatto). We can almost certainly count on many families and patients coming forward, as they always do when Teo is under fire, to describe Teo as a “genuine hero”.

McClymont has another story up today, regarding Teo’s relationship with Gatto and the role that allegedly played in Teo’s split from his charity — and the NSW Health Care Complaints Commission is now investigating Teo over his practices. Watch this space.