Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Getty Images, Pinellas County Sheriff and Facebook
It was a routine civil lawsuit that criminal defense lawyer Jake Pillsbury figured he could make fairly short work of.
The complaint had been filed in 2019 by a South Florida plastic surgeon who claimed that errors by his former employer’s insurance biller had prompted damaging online reviews—and at least one in-person protest—by an enraged cancer patient who called him a “butcher.”
As a result, Tomasz Kosowski, a Polish-born U.S. citizen with an impressive array of advanced degrees, claimed his reputation had been “obliterated” and his income dropped off by some $50,000 a month. He had since gotten a new job in Miami, working alongside physicians known as “Dr. Magic Mike” and “Dr. Level Up,” and lived in a $1.3 million waterfront home once used as a backdrop for a music video starring Patricia Krentcil, the briefly-tabloid-famous “Tan Mom.”