Raffaele Di Paolo, 61, was a ‘charlatan with no insight or remorse’, judge says

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

A fake gynaecologist who passed himself off as a fertility specialist in Melbourne for 10 years despite having no tertiary qualifications, has been jailed for almost a decade.

Raffaele Di Paolo, 61, had pleaded guilty to or was found guilty of 51 offences of procuring sexual penetration by fraud, assault, indecent assault and obtaining and trying to obtain property by deception.

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In sentencing him on Friday to nine years and six months in jail, with a non-parole period of six and a half years, a Victorian county court judge, Bill Stuart, said Di Paolo was a “charlatan who has no insight and no remorse”.

During the lengthy sentencing hearing which spanned two days, the judge said the offender had a “profound” capacity for deception, with his web of lies stretching back decades to his work in Italy.

Di Paolo obtained forged medical qualifications to thwart Italian authorities in the 1990s but was caught and convicted.

After returning to Australia, he trotted out the same documents to suspicious health authorities. Between 2005 and 2015, Di Paolo amassed 30 victims, women and their partners desperate for children.

He presented himself as a fertility specialist who had worked overseas and at the Melbourne-based Monash IVF before turning to more natural therapies.

His treatments included taking blood which was never labelled, injecting homeopathic substances from Germany and conducting ultrasounds.

Some of Di Paolo’s offences were sexual. But Judge Stuart accepted the man was driven not by sexual gratification but by financial gain.

Di Paolo must spend six-and-a-half years in prison before being eligible for parole and will be placed on the sex offenders’ register for life.