Anna Borgia of Florida was a Trump supporter until she learned the former president had granted last-minute clemency to the doctor who had left her blind while subjecting scores of other patients to unnecessary treatments—often involving injections directly into the eye—before being sentenced to 17 years in federal prison for the biggest Medicare fraud on record.
“I’m writing a letter to Trump,” Borgia told The Daily Beast this week. “I’m very disappointed in him, I’m going to tell him, ‘Why did you pardon this son of a bitch?’”
The son-of-bitch is Dr. Salomon Melgen, who was convicted of defrauding Medicare and insurance companies of as much as $73 million. Borgia repeated what she told Judge Kenneth Marra at Melgen’s sentencing in Palm Beach federal court in 2018.
“He should be in jail for the rest of his life because he ruined my life,” Borgia said.
That same sentiment was voiced by the son of another patient turned victim in a letter a family lawyer read aloud at the sentencing.
“She was… undergoing systematic torture and abuse at the hands of Dr. Melgen,” Randi Frick’s letter said of his mother, Sherie Frick.
The letter reported that Sherie Frick had seen Melgen over a three-year period, beginning in 2011.
“Dr. Melgen convinced both my mother and I that she was in serious danger of going blind,” the letter said. “He insisted that she was in need of frequent painful and very time-consuming treatments.”
Initially, the appointments were weekly. The son would drive her there and wait until she was done.
“My mother expressed to me how painful the treatments were,” the letter recounted. “She was getting injections into her eyes and laser treatments. She was not a complainer, and, in fact, very stoic, but I know my mother, and I know the treatments were very painful for her.”
The mother began to question whether the treatments were really necessary. The son wrote that he would always regret persuading her to continue.
“I have many feelings of guilt and grief over this, because I believed what Dr. Melgen had told us and thought we needed to follow his advice,” the letter said. “I trusted his professional advice because he was a specialist eye doctor. When my mother would voice opposition to continue with Dr. Melgen, I would actively encourage her and convince her to keep up the treatments. At the time, I thought I was helping preserve her eyesight in her elder years.”
The son did come to feel that weekly treatments were excessive.
“After the first couple of years until I finally complained, and then he reduced the visits to once a month,” the letter reported.
After Melgen was arrested on fraud charges in 2015, the son took his mother to another doctor.
“That doctor told me the treatments had been totally unnecessary,” the son wrote. “I can report that my mother has no eyesight problems at this time. Her eyes are fine.”
He experienced crushing regret for having such total faith in Melgen that he pushed his mother to keep going when she wanted to stop.
“I feel like I was helping a torturer,” the letter said. “I feel so guilty about this that I have nightmares, and it wakes me up at night.”
The torture was followed by the pain of having lost what could have been a good final three years together.
“That time period was a precious time for me, because I didn't know it at the time, but soon my mother would begin her journey into dementia,” the son’s letter said. “During those years she was still mentally and physically healthy. Those years should have been happy years for her to enjoy life and for me to enjoy still having my mother in my life. Instead, I look back at those years and feel intolerable guilt and grief.”
The letter closed with a plea for justice.
“I want Dr. Melgen punished to the fullest extent of the law,” the son declared. “He really hurt my mother and others. He is a menace to society.”
FBI agents carry boxes out of the medical-office complex of Dr. Salomon Melgen during a public corruption investigation.
Joe Raedle/GettyAt least Sheri Frick escaped Melgen physically unharmed. Others were not so lucky. Another patient-turned-victim described to the court the result of being treated over time by the doctor turned defendant.
“My eye is full of scar tissue from being overworked, from having lots of needles, from having unnecessary surgery,” Evelyn Cunningham said. “There’s nothing that can be done.”
She recounted the reaction of another eye doctor who examined her prolonged treatments by Melgen.
“He was really appalled when he saw my eye,” Cunningham told the judge. “He said I have what they call a dead eye now, that there's nothing that can be done to my eye.”
She said he had begun seeing Melgen in either 2007 or 2008.
“At the time I could see out of both of my eyes,” Cunningham noted. “I went to see Dr. Melgen. He diagnosed me with macular degeneration in the wet type.”
While only 15 percent of people with macular degeneration have the “wet” variety, Melgen reached this diagnosis 97.8 percent of the time, an incidence that prosecutors would term “remarkable.”
“He said he could treat me; that he would give me needles, injections in my eye once a month, and that this should help the macular degeneration,” Cunningham told the judge. “ So I said okay.”
The ”wet” diagnosis enabled Melgen to bill Medicaid and insurance companies for such injections, which are supposed to be administered from a single-use vial. Melgen routinely treated as many as four parents with one vial. But he charged as if he had used four, thereby quadrupling a $2,000 bill to $8,000. That would have been just theft if the repeated insertion of needles in a single use vial did not greatly increase the chance of infections such as Cuningham began to suffer in her right eye.
“On the fourth month I started having trouble with my eye,” she recounted “My eye started hurting really bad like it was going to blow up. My whole head felt bad... I had a severe infection in my eye from I'm assuming the needle that had gone in. ”
She sought help at Melgen’s office.
“He had to tip my chair up—it was really traumatic—my chair upside down while he withdrew the fluid,” she said. “[It] took the pain away, and I went home and I continued seeing him.”
Cunnigham soon after suffered a detached retina.
“I guess it detached from the infection,” she continued. “I'm not sure. But he did surgery, but then that didn't work. He put the oil in my eye again. That didn't work. He did another operation. And in the meantime I'm still getting needles in my eye every month.”
She went on, “Then he put mineral oil in my eye and left it in my eye for a little over a year, maybe close to a year and a half, and when it come out, my eye then really looked real funky really bad. I couldn't see out of it at all anymore.”
But Melgen still was a prominent Harvard-educated doctor.
“I still continued. I still had, you know, faith in the man. I -- my eye just kept getting worse, and I kept getting -- I got another infection.”
In the meantime, he would periodically administer laser treatments.
“Sometimes, I swear I don't know if it was my imagination or not, but sometimes I'd swear I could smell my eye burning from the laser,” she recalled. “And then I would go back the following month and have the injections, and I began to wonder why I was continuing doing this, because it wasn't working. Nothing was going to work anymore. I knew that deep down never going to see out of my right eye again.”
She went to see Melgen shortly before he was arrested and the clinic was shut down.
“I got a needle, and I got a really bad infection,” she recalled “I called him again that night, and he told me not to worry.”
Melgen sent a car for her and again drained her eye. But she was finally prompted to see another doctor, named Katz, the one who told her she had a “dead eye.”
“The best thing that we could do, in Dr. Katz's opinion, was to keep my eye as infection-clear as possible and to try to keep my eye so that I don't have to lose it,” she reported.
Melgen had initially been charged on April 1, 2015 with allegedly bribing U.S. Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey to assist him in a Medicare billing matter and other matters. Melgen was arrested 14 days later for Medicare fraud. The corruption charges against Melgen and Menendez ended in a mistrial. But Melgen was convicted of the massive fraud in a separate trial.
Cunningham continued to suffer the effects of Melgen's treatments.
“I got a really bad infection again.” she told the judge at the sentencing. “I got one so bad that I went into a coma for two days.
She briefed the court on her condition.
“They got the infection out, the pain went away, and now I have to go back and see this doctor to make an appointment to get my eye out.” she said. “And to be honest with you, I'm putting it off, because I'm afraid. I don't want to lose my eye, even though I can't see out of it.”
She added, “I'm devastated over what has happened to me, especially with a man that I put all my trust into... The infections and everything that I had ever gotten, I've only gotten after I have left his office. And it's not only me. I've heard stories from other people…”
She wished aloud she could go back and undo what happened.
“But I can’t,” she said. “I do think that some sort of justice should be done for the ones of us who did not come out of this very well.”
She allowed that the doctor had treated some people successfully.
“I am just unfortunately not one of those,” she said.
She recalled something one of Melgen’s own staffers had said in the clinic.
“[The staff member] said, ‘I don't understand why he's continuing to go on doing the injections and the laser treatments to your eye. There is no helping your eye. There is nothing that can be done for you. You're not going to see again out of this eye. And I can't even count the surgeries that he did to it,’” she remembered.
She went on, “It sounds like it's no big deal, because it's only one eye, but it is a big deal. It's a big deal to me.”
“The worst part is to wake up every morning and not see and walk into the side of the door frame because I didn't see part of it, or not to be able to look and see faces.”
Borgia also addressed the court. She had cataract surgery by another doctor, who had retired when she began having minor trouble with the eye. A woman at a nearby table at Bingo had suggested she try Melgen.
“So I went to Dr. Melgen, which was the sorriest day of my life,” Borgia told the court. “He says, ‘I’ll help you, I’ll help you.’”
Her husband, Andrew Borgia, came along to the first visit just to keep her company. Melgen began giving them both treatments, injections and laser. The husband had received a Purple Heart in World War II and was hardly a complainer.
“One day he gave so much laser treatment to my husband that my husband cried,” Borgia recalled. “[He] said, ‘Doctor, please stop.... the back of my head is blowing out’... And [Melgen] kept saying, ‘A little more, a little more.’”
The day then came when Melgen announced she had a tear in the retina of the eye that had been giving her no trouble..
“I said, ‘Doc, I don't know how it happened,’” she told the court. “He said, ‘I have to operate.’”
Salomon Melgen arrives at federal court on April 2, 2015.
Eduardo Munoz/ReutersShe ended up blind in that eye. The once-minor trouble in the other eye turned major.
“[Melgen] said, don't worry about it, my dear,” she told the court. “I had three surgeries in that eye.”
She ended blind in that one as well. The referral she got at a Bingo game ended with her unable even to see the numbers and letters. And, with her husband’s death in May 2012 from causes unrelated to the treatments, she was on her own.
“Thanks to [Melgen], I lost my independence,” she told the court. “I can't go nowhere. I have to depend on people to take me places and have to pay. I love to go dancing. I can't go dancing. What man wants to take a blind woman dancing?”
She said she now spent much of her time in her condo in Century Village, listening to the television whose screen is unable to see
“I call my television my idiot box,” she told the judge. “That's all I do, because I can't do nothing.”
She was afraid she might burn herself on the electric stove and she spilled when she did try to cook.
“So I order frozen—I get frozen food and put it in my microwave to heat up and eat,” she said. “And I had to give my car away, after driving 63 years.”
A neighbor had driven her to court so she could give her statement.
“I paid her to take me,” Borgia said. “When she's up to it, she'll take me to the store, and I'll do a little shopping and buy my frozen stuff. Other than that, I'm in the house day and night, from morning to noon, seven days a week or 30 days a month, whatever you want to call it, and this is my life. He ruined me.”
Borgia ended with a plea.
“And I hope the Dear Lord hears me when I say my prayers at night that he gets life in jail and suffers the way I'm suffering, Your Honor. Thank you.”
The defense called people to that same hearing to attest Melgen was an “angel” who had helped them without charge. The judge went ahead and sentenced him to 17 years.
Medicare and the insurance companies moved to recover their losses first. What was left was divided among the doctor’s many victims. Borgia got $2,900.
“In two payments,” she told The Daily Beast.
Borgia continued to live the life that was left to her. She managed to vacuum by remembering the layout. Friends who cooked extra sometimes dropped by a dish.
“Spaghetti or whatever,” she told the Daily Beast.
And like many who live in Century Village, she was a big Trump supporter.
Then on Wednesday, two days after her 92nd birthday, she heard the doctor’s name on the idiot box as she sat in her apartment. A newscaster said Trump had granted Melgen clemency.
“I said WHAT?” she later told The Daily Beast.
The idiot box later reported that Melgen had released a statement thanking Trump for “recognizing the injustice” of his imprisonment.
“Throughout this ordeal, I have come to realize the very deep flaws in our justice system and how people are at the complete mercy of prosecutors and judges,” Melgen said. “As of today, I am committed to fighting for unjustly incarcerated people.”
Bureau of Prison records show that Melgen—previously scheduled to remain inmate 67276-050 for another 13 years—was released on Wednesday. He was free to head home to his residence in West Palm Beach, not far from Trump's Mar-a-Lago and a few minutes from Borgia’s Century Village for those who have the eyesight to drive.
Borgia was feeling betrayed and angry and in her condo on Thursday. She recalled Melgen’s response when she told him she was completely blind.
“I says to him, ‘Doc, I can’t see,” she remembered. “He says, ‘Oh, it takes time.’”
