By the time Brigitte Cleroux found herself apologizing to a Canadian court in 2024, she had already spent 30 years treating patients in hospitals and clinics across North America.
She worked as a registered nurse in Colorado, a dental assistant in Surrey, Canada, and a fertility care provider in Ottawa. During a year of employment at BC Women’s Hospital in 2020, she tended to at least 900 people as a sedation and general duty nurse.
Then, it was discovered that Cleroux was not a nurse at all. She had at least 67 convictions going back to 1988, outstanding warrants and a colorful rap sheet of deception across the continent.
‘I wish the victims to heal, and apologize for being involved in their care when I shouldn’t have… patients deserve to be cared for by licensed medical professionals. Only then can they feel safe,’ Cleroux, who’d worked under a long list of aliases, told the Vancouver court last December.
She was sentenced to seven years in prison, which is to be served concurrently with another seven-year sentence she’d already been given in Ontario after pleading guilty to impersonation, fraud, assault and other charges.
A trial psychiatric report found that Cleroux had no significant history of major mental health disorders but showed anti-social, narcissistic and histrionic personality traits, CBC reported.
‘She is persistently deceitful, lacks remorse or empathy, repeatedly engages in unlawful behavior, is entitled and grandiose… and is overly concerned with status and her appearance,’ the report said.
But she is far from the only fraudster to enter the medical profession. And many imposters, it seems, are repeat offenders who just cannot seem to help themselves.
Not even a year before Cleroux’s court apology, California authorities arrested an Anaheim man for impersonating a doctor and practicing medicine without a license – again. He was taken into custody two weeks after finishing a prison sentence for the same crimes committed on previous occasions.
Just a few months before that, another ‘nurse’, Amanda Porter, was arrested in California for operating without a license – it was nearly a decade after she had been charged over medical impersonations in Virginia.
And just this week, Florida’s Autumn Bardisa, 29, was arrested for allegedly treating more than 4,000 patients without a license after authorities say she stole the identity of a woman she attended college with.
Bardisa ‘potentially put thousands of lives at risk by pretending to be someone she was not and violating the trust of patients, their families, AdventHealth and an entire medical community,’ Flagler County Sheriff Rick Staly said. Staly called her alleged crimes ‘one of the most disturbing cases of medical fraud we’ve ever investigated’.
‘There is an increasing number of cases where people have been caught impersonating medical professionals,’ California-based psychiatrist Dr Carole Lieberman told the Daily Mail.
‘This may represent either more people daring to do it, or better detective work identifying them – or both.’
The psychology and motivations behind such impersonations, it seems, can vary – financial gain, hero-like aspirations and more – but there are often similar threads.
Medical impersonation goes hand-in-hand with other deceptive activities including forgery and theft.
Cleroux’s deceptions, for example, were not limited to medicine. She also forged qualifications as a teacher, and the Florida Department of Corrections alone had 11 aliases listed for her, according to CBC.
In one incredible case, imposter Adam Litwin was caught and pleaded guilty – he was sentenced to psychiatric care and served two months in jail. He later went on to graduate from medical school. Litwin admitted in an interview years later that his life of crime began in 1998 with shoplifting.
When his lawyer asked for a letter showing good character, he forged one, the Los Angeles Times reported.
‘In many cases, they don’t have a formal psychiatric diagnosis… but in most cases they have personality difficulties,’ -based forensic psychiatrist Danny Sullivan told Broadly. ‘The technical term we use to describe them is “fantasists.”’
Dr Lieberman said she would classify medical impersonators ‘in the general category of identity disorders’ adding that ‘they have a fluid identity, like chameleons.
‘Probably a lot of them have borderline personality [disorder], because that’s one of the traits in the borderline.’
And while these unqualified providers are undeniably doing harm as well as committing crimes, their own rationale may be misguidedly noble, according to experts.
‘Women typically impersonate nurses, whereas men impersonate doctors,’ Lieberman said. ‘These women have a driving need to help people. They often have had parents who were sick – either with physical problems or addiction – and they weren’t able to take care of them as children.
‘They are left with a need to take care of someone as a way of making it up. They want to be caretakers and often don’t have husbands or children who need them.’
In the case of Cleroux, she had wanted to pursue a legitimate career as a nurse, studying at third-level for up to two years. According to reports, previous convictions were standing in her way.
‘Men who impersonate doctors typically wanted to be doctors when they were growing up but weren’t able to get the grades needed to get into medical school,’ Lieberman said.
This theory was evident in Litwin’s case – he had spent his whole life dreaming of a career in the field before being sent to prison.
Experts say many imposters are craving approval and admiration.
‘What they tend to have in common is that they choose occupations that give them some form of prestige or recognition, a situation where they get positive feedback and validation for their skills and abilities,’ Dr Sullivan told Broadly.
One psychologist – who began studying imposters after being duped by a fellow academic – said ‘there’s clearly some Machiavellian kinds of deceptions where you’re doing this for money or prestige’.
Dr Chris Wetzel, psychology professor emeritus at Rhodes College, said, like con artists, such medical impersonators could hold so-called ‘dark triad’ traits – ‘a combination of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathology.’
‘They’re pathological in what they’re doing, and they’re narcissistic,’ he said.
At least one medical imposter has admitted to getting a high from her crimes.
Porter – the fake nurse arrested in California – told the arresting officer in 2016 that ‘she steals money because it gives her a high like a drug,’ NBC reported.
She confessed ‘she wants to give [money] back after stealing it, but spends it instead’.
Porter allegedly used another nurse’s name, date of birth and Social Security number to open bank accounts and obtain loans totaling more than $100,000 – buying a Mercedes Benz, diamond bracelets, a Ford Mustang for her son and other items.
In a separate case, prosecutors claimed Elias Renteria Segoviano, 63, marketed himself as a doctor and charged to perform ‘invasive procedures’ that included injecting victims with Botox, fillers and other drugs. He landed a four-year prison sentence, of which he only served a year and four months, KCAL reported.
When he got out of prison last year, he almost immediately tried to sublet a space at another salon using a fake name, prosecutors said, again allegedly claiming to perform Botox injections and face thread lifting procedures.
‘This man walked the walk and talked the talk of being a licensed medical professional, but he was anything but what he pretended to be,’ Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer said at the time.
‘The fact that he was out of prison less than two weeks – and while under supervision – when he returned right back to a life of crime makes it painfully obvious that he has no intention of changing his behavior and he will continue to try to make money off unsuspecting women every chance that he gets.’
But there are varying reasons why these imposters keep getting away with it, Dr Wetzel said.
The first, he said, is truth bias: ‘an assumption we make automatically that, when people are talking to us, they are telling us the truth’.
It’s a particular danger in the medical profession, where so many are inclined to trust whatever doctors and nurses are saying.
Dr Wetzel said that if someone purports to have a qualification – especially from a renowned institution – and ‘uses a bunch of lingo that I don’t quite understand, and he’s got a prestigious medical degree’, even he would ‘write it off as I’m too dumb to follow this’.
He called it ‘the gobbledygook idea’.
‘You can espouse gobbledygook as long as you have the “credentials” and the charisma and personal presence to sound convincing.’
He said good con artists know how to ‘take control of the room’, adding, ‘that charisma really helps hide what they’re doing. And when you hear something that doesn’t quite make sense, you either, in retrospect, say, “Oh, I misheard that”, or “I’m confused”, or “He was referring to something else”’.
The damage, however, can become far more devastating than criminal charges.
In Ohio, for example, a husband-and-wife team set up a clinic to treat patients with cognitive disorders. Sherry-Ann Jenkins ordered and interpreted scans and diagnosed people despite having a PhD and no license to practice medicine.
The clinic told scores of patients they had Alzheimer’s or dementia, and those diagnoses were often later determined to be false. Jenkins and her husband were both sentenced to prison in 2023 after being convicted of conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud and health care fraud.
But a lawsuit by more than 50 former patients exposed the true tragedy of their crimes.
Kay Taynor and her husband of 48 years, Gary, were both told they had Alzheimer’s.
‘He’s got a smile that just lights up the room, and I never saw it again,’ Kay Taynor told the Associated Press. ‘He just sunk in his chair. To me, he never stood up again. He was never tall again. He gave up.’
Her husband died by suicide, and an autopsy determined he had shown no signs of the disease in the first place.
Steven Jay Lynn, the late professor of psychology at SUNY Binghamton, summed up his thoughts on medical imposters’ psychology in 2017. He labeled them ‘likely not much different from conmen and women… who try to pull off scams in the business world, law and psychology.’
‘Many could probably be described as callous, lacking in empathy, narcissistic, antisocial and even psychopathic,’ he told The Guardian. ‘Such that they can exploit people and treat them as objects without guilt or remorse.’