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Chameleon

The Mesh Mill: How Scammers Took Advantage of Women's Pain

4/2/202639 min

Shortly after Christmas, Sharon gets a terrifying call. A stranger tells her the pelvic mesh inside her body has been recalled. It's a “ticking time bomb," and she needs emergency surgery to remove it. So Sharon flies to Florida. What she’s walking into is a scam embedded in America’s mass tort machine: stolen medical data, a call center, and huge profits powered by the pain of women like Sharon.

To learn more about this story:

Book: The Pain Brokers, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch, Atria/One Signal, 2026 Article: How Profiteers Lure Women Into Often-Unneeded Surgery, New York T...

Clips

They butchered us
Fifteen-minute mesh removals
Settlement turned into debt
Mass torts are a parasite
‘Butchery’ behind the curtain
Why victims believed
Founder of fraud, admits it
Loss and reckoning

Transcript preview

First 90 seconds

  1. Ron Lasorsa· Guest0:00

    [crickets chirping] Campsite Media.

  2. Sharon Gore· Guest0:03

    Hello?

  3. Ron Lasorsa· Guest0:05

    What is this? So what do you want me to say? Yeah, what's going on here? Like, why- Oh, it's just a chameleon.

  4. Speaker 20:11

    Chameleon.

  5. Speaker 30:12

    Chameleon.

  6. Ron Lasorsa· Guest0:12

    Chameleon Weekly. Oh.

  7. Josh Dean· Host0:13

    [laughs] [phone beeping] In the waning days of 2013, Sharon Gore was in the throngs of Christmas preparation when her phone rang.

  8. Sharon Gore· Guest0:22

    That call was frightening. Well, it wasn't frightening on the front end. I shouldn't say that. On the front end, it was just, "Oh, wow, something's wrong."

  9. Josh Dean· Host0:32

    Sharon lives in South Carolina, not far from Myrtle Beach.

  10. Sharon Gore· Guest0:36

    Because this individual provided me with a great deal of detail about a surgery that I had had.

  11. Josh Dean· Host0:45

    [instrumental music plays] This was somewhat unnerving to hear all the details this person on the phone was relaying to her. The matters they were discussing had happened a long time ago.

  12. Sharon Gore· Guest0:55

    And I wasn't clear on all the details of my surgery because it, it's a surgery. You go to surgery, and you count on the doctor to do what they're supposed to do.

  13. Josh Dean· Host1:07

    Four or five years earlier, after having the last of her three cesarean sections and experiencing some side effects of those surgeries, Sharon had decided to have a partial hysterectomy.

  14. Sharon Gore· Guest1:17

    I had been having some issues, and as a result of the issues that I had had, he made a decision, talked with my husband about it, and they put what was

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