He’s been sued by patients, targeted by the district attorney, and had his license suspended—but is still recruiting patients.
Judy had known Dr. Arian Mowlavi for years, but at her appointment in November 2020, she sensed something was off. The 60-year-old preschool teacher had frequented the Instagram-famous’s Laguna Beach office multiple times over the last five years and was returning that fall for a small, discrete amount of liposuction around her bra line. But this time, she says, the doctor pressured her to give him free rein, cajoling her into letting him remove skin as well as fat.
A December 2021 class action lawsuit by more than 30 former patients alleges that Mowlavi groped them in the exam room, made lewd comments about their bodies, permanently altered their bodies without their consent, and gave some of them life-threatening infections. The Orange County District Attorney’s Office filed a lengthy civil case against him this summer, seeking millions in damages. In one case, according to court filings, a patient died shortly after being released from his care.
“I wanted to know how they felt,” he said at the time. “Just think: they know they’re about to save someone’s life. That’s unbelievable.” “At first, I thought maybe this was how plastic surgery was,” Williams told The Daily Beast. “But it didn’t take me very long to figure out, no, this doesn’t feel right. This isn’t right. This is not normal.”
The women allege Mowlavi would use these consultations to upsell them on procedures, pointing out their flaws and evangelizing his quick fixes. According to Williams, the staff often looked up patients’ home values on Redfin before appointments to determine how much they could spend. “I just kind of went numb. I felt like I was having an out of body experience, and like, I wasn’t even there,” Johnson said. “I wanted to run.”
“His care for the patients was just so fake—the way he would talk about them behind their backs,” Valencia told The Daily Beast. “I honestly thought at the end that he just had no humility or humanity left in him.”The complaints against the plastic surgeon also contain more serious allegations of jeopardizing patient health, including one instance in which the “Mowlavi magic” proved fatal.
Martini’s story starts similarly to many of the other complainants’ accounts: a rushed appointment that she left feeling unheard and pressured into signing up for a “mommy makeover” that included a breast lift and the removal of her implants. Martini went to her local hospital days later, where her lawsuit states doctors diagnosed her with acute sepsis, left leg cellulitis, and acute blood loss anemia. She said doctors also told her she would have died if she’d waited another 24 hours to seek care. She underwent a third surgery to remove the compromised breast tissue and breast implants and insert chest expanders in their place.
Jason Vance, a former OR nurse at the clinic, said in a declaration in Martini’s lawsuit that he witnessed Mowlavi “rip out” a patient’s endotracheal tube during surgery and “throw it across the room.” He said the incident was so terrifying that he refused to work in the operating room with Mowlavi again. In a text to Mowlavi’s wife, attached as an exhibit in Martini’s lawsuit, Vance wrote that the doctor’s actions “show a complete and total disregard for patient safety.
The doctor also denied several of Johnson’s allegations, noting that it is “standard medical practice” for a patient to undress during a consultation and that he did not “grope” or “parade” her naked. This knowledge outraged patients, many of whom said they had vetted him extensively before their procedures—including checking the medical board website.
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