Plastic surgeon ‘played God’ says woman in £54m claim

Penny Johnson, 49, claims that Leeds-based Le Roux Fourie carried out experimental surgery during a facelift in August 2003 which caused nerve damage to the right side of her face and led to her financial and IT consultancy business going into administration.

She wants Mr Justice Owen to award her a proportion of the £54m she claims was her potential loss as a 50 per cent shareholder when the firm failed in 2009.

Mrs Johnson, of Godstone, Surrey, broke down when she told the judge at London’s High Court that the stress of the litigation had made her condition worse.

“My face is constantly contracting, I don’t sleep and I have a permanent buzzing around my eye which can be so intense that I can’t think about anything.”

Watched by her husband, Peter, she added: “I don’t want to do anything any more. My husband has a separate life with my son which I’m not included in. I can’t be a wife any more.”

Mrs Johnson said that after the surgery, she was in the business “but not in the way I should have been”.

She said that she had heard of another woman who had her life devastated by surgery with Leeds-based Mr Fourie in 1999.

“So, to know that he didn’t just pick me, he did it to someone else as well, and know he purposefully decided to play God with my life is not something that I think I can get past.”

Alain Choo Choy QC, for Mr Fourie, who admits liability but disputes the value of the claim –putting her potential business loss at £9m – asked Mrs Johnson if she believed the surgeon “deliberately” injured her.

She replied: “He did something which he did not discuss with me, get my consent for. He lied to me about it.

“It was not something which had been done before ever, and I was still not told the truth about it.”

Mr Choo Choy said it was not accepted that the surgery was experimental.

He argued that the claim that Mrs Johnson’s company lost out on a series of lucrative contracts was unrealistic and deluded.

It was accepted that her injuries restricted her ability to work to some extent but the business had failed for unrelated commercial and economic reasons.

Mrs Johnson’s counsel Lawrence West QC said the case was a “modern tale of a salutary lesson or modern day tragedy” for both Mrs Johnson and Mr Fourie.

She was a young woman allowing her vanity to lead her astray and he was a skilled plastic surgeon allowing his own self-regard to undertake “what was in effect experimental surgery which failed disastrously”.

He said that the procedure had a devastating effect on Mrs Johnson. “For most of the year afterwards, the right eye would not close and had to be taped closed at night. She dribbled from her mouth, her nose and eyes ran, her speech was impaired and she could not face seeing people – even her own children complained about her ‘monster eye’.”

The hearing continues.