A Brighton man who posed as a gynaecologist and fertility specialist by forging his medical qualification has lost his bid for less jail time. Raffaele Di Paolo was jailed by the County Court for 51 criminal offences after fleecing patients out of more than $385,000 over 10 years. Di Paolo, who has narcissistic personality disorder, passed himself off as an IVF doctor between 2005 and 2015, originally working from his Bay St home and later an office in St Kilda Rd, Melbourne. Patients were generally referred to the fraudster by word of mouth from alternative health practitioners, the court heard. A jury last year found Di Paolo guilty of a raft of charges relating to a range of predatory behaviours, including inserting medical probes into patients’ vaginas and extracting semen from a man’s testicles without anaesthetic. He also injected patients with homoeopathic treatments and conducted examinations without wearing gloves. Di Paolo took “substantial sums of money” to help patients conceive, claiming he practised a “more natural and successful” form of IVF. He last month appealed against his 15 jury convictions, including procuring sexual penetration by fraud, indecent assault and assault. Lawyers for Di Paolo challenged his six-and-a-half year minimum prison sentence, arguing it was manifestly excessive as he had been suffering from a mental illness at the time. The fake medic also argued he should not have been registered as a sex offender for life because his crimes were not motivated by sexual gratification. But Court of Appeal judges Phillip Priest, Richard Niall and Lex Lasry last Friday refused Di Paolo’s appeal. They said he had a personality disorder rather than a mental illness. “In (Di Paolo’s) case, a level of grandiosity may be consistent with a narcissistic personality disorder, but it did not any way diminish the applicant’s moral culpability,” they said. And they ruled he posed a risk to “the sexual safety of the community seeking fertility treatment” and ordered he stay on the sex offender registry. Di Paolo forged his qualifications in Italy during the 1990s and has also been convicted there for pretending to be a medical practitioner, obstetrician and gynaecologist. He must spend at least six-and-a-half years of his nine-and-a-half-year sentence behind bars.
