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Massachusetts
Woman gave fake Botox injections at her Mass. beauty spas for years, feds say
A woman posing as a nurse has given thousands of injections of counterfeit Botox and fillers at her Massachusetts beauty spas, federal prosecutors said Friday.
Rebecca Fadanelli, 38, was arrested Friday on suspicion of importing fake Botox and the fillers Sculptra and Juvederm from Brazil and China, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Massachusetts said. The Stoughton woman continued offering counterfeit beauty treatments through Skin Beaute Med Spa up through this week, according to the criminal complaint filed in court, despite her offices in Randolph and South Easton having been searched.
Fadanelli was due in federal court in Worcester Friday afternoon to face charges of importing and and selling counterfeit drugs and devices, which bring the possibility of decades in prison and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines for a conviction, prosecutors said. It wasn’t immediately clear if she had an attorney who could speak to the charges.
“For years, Ms. Fadanelli allegedly put unsuspecting patients at risk by representing herself to be a nurse and then administering thousands of illegal, counterfeit injections,” acting U.S. Attorney Joshua Levy said in a statement, saying she “ignored safety regulations against bringing unapproved, counterfeit drugs and devices into our country and endangered the health of hundreds of her clients.”
His office asked anyone who believes they may have gotten a counterfeit treatment at Skin Beaute Med Spa or through Fadanelli since 2021 to reach out — see the link below.
If you or a family member believe you received services involving a counterfeit drug or counterfeit device from Fadanelli and/or Skin Beaute Med Spa between 2021- present date, please complete the questionnaire located on the FDA’s website: https://t.co/dMMCHu0S65.
— U.S. Attorney Massachusetts (@DMAnews1) November 1, 2024
Fadanelli an aesthetician who isn’t licensed or certified to give prescription drugs, collected more than half a million dollars from Botox appointments and more than $400,000 from filler appointments between March 2021 and March 2024, prosecutors said.
Federal customs investigators had already been looking into whether Fadanelli, who also goes by Rebecca Daley and Rebecca Hawthorne, when a client filed a complaint to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration saying she had “bumps” in her lips and forehead tingling after receiving a filler treatment from Fadanelli in Randolph and never received a copy of the prescription for the substance that Fadanelli had injected despite asking for it, according to the court documents.
Over the next few years, investigators seized packages with apparently counterfeit injectable prescription drugs labeled Botox, Sculptra and Juvederm, and found her entering the country at Boston’s Logan International Airport with prescription drugs and vials of liquid, the documents said. A search turned up no record of Fadanelli buying the real prescription drugs through the companies that make them.
When agents searched the Skin Beaute Med Spa businesses in late June, Fadanelli allegedly told them a certified nurse is the only person who administers the drugs, but a former employee told investigators that Fadanelli administered the drugs, saying she was a nurse.
The former employee also said that she’d been told the Botox cost $50 through a China-based ecommerce platform, according to the criminal complain, which noted that authentic Botox costs more than 10 times as much. The employee also claimed that when her packages started to be intercepted, Fadanelli began shipping them to different addresses, including to an acquaintance in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood.
A confidential source had an April consultation with Fadanelli in which she quoted $450 for a Botox treatment, according to the complaint. That same source called and made an appointment for a treatment with Fadanelli last week.
Massachusetts
In final days of N.H. governor’s race, GOP’s Ayotte leans into anti-Massachusetts pitch. Is it working? – The Boston Globe
The former US senator has built her campaign on a pitch of “Don’t Mass. Up New Hampshire,” a derogatory nod to Massachusetts’ reputation as a tax-and-spend state, implying it’s a “model” Craig wants to emulate. Craig disputes that, saying she opposes an income or sales tax for New Hampshire, though does support keeping a tax on interest and dividends that’s scheduled to phase out in January.
But Craig has offered Ayotte’s campaign regular fodder in her public embrace of Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey. Healey has repeatedly appeared alongside, fund-raised with, and stumped for Craig, even following her across the country last month to raise money in Berkeley, Calif.
Just this week, Healey campaigned twice with Craig in the span of three days, with plans to return Saturday to Hanover and Dover.
The criticism of the Commonwealth — and Healey’s repeated visits north in spite of it — has at times created an uncomfortable narrative for Craig and Healey, who’ve appeared to try to justify Healey’s presence on the campaign trail.
“At the end of the day, we are all New Englanders, and we’re all Americans, we’re all playing for the same team,” Healey said Tuesday while she rallied volunteers at a canvassing kickoff for Craig in Manchester, N.H.
Healey touted Craig as a protector of abortion rights who would stand up to former president Donald Trump, should he be elected. She also pointedly noted she is a New Hampshire native — growing up in Hampton Falls and graduating from Winnacunnet High School — and that her mother, Tracy Healey-Beattie, still lives in the state.
“I get to see my mom a lot more,” she joked of campaigning there.
Standing side-by-side with Healey and other elected officials in Manchester, Craig said Ayotte’s messaging about Massachusetts’ influence on New Hampshire “is wrong,” and characterized it as a divisive tactic “pitting one community against another.” Craig recalled a recent campaign stop in Conway, N.H., where she claimed business owners told her Massachusetts residents would sometimes come in wondering if they were still welcome to visit.
“New Hampshire is a small part of New England,” Craig said. “We shouldn’t be making enemies.”
Her regular appearances with Healey have nonetheless put Craig on the defensive. During a debate hosted by New Hampshire Public Radio last week, moderator Josh Rogers pressed Craig on her repeated appearances with Healey, asking what voters should take from her choosing to “spend day upon day after day” with the Massachusetts governor.
Nothing, Craig replied.
Healey “is a friend of mine, you know, just like other people have friends from out of state,” said Craig, who called herself a fourth-generation New Hampshire resident. “I haven’t spent an excessive amount of time with her. It has nothing to do with who I am, or what I’m running for.”
Ayotte seized on the appearance, writing in a Wednesday post on X that Craig and Healey campaigning together was “otherwise known as a day that ends in ‘y’.” Her campaign then included a slideshow of photos of the two campaigning together set to the tune of the Randy Newman song, “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.”
Massachusetts is not a novel foil for New Hampshire. About one-third of New Hampshire GOP primary voters said last year they believed too many Massachusetts residents were moving to their side of the border, with some bristling at the idea of them importing more progressive viewpoints. “Don’t . . . bring your liberal [expletive] to my state,” one told the Globe at the time.
To be sure, the states share some economic similarities — and frankly people, too. Roughly 82,000 New Hampshire residents make the commute to Massachusetts for work, according to state records. New Hampshire has a lower unemployment rate than Massachusetts and both states have a median household income above the national average, though the Bay State skews higher.
For some New Hampshire voters, Ayotte’s message has resonated. Angela Johnson, a 50-year-old independent backing Ayotte, said the anti-Massachusetts pitch is rooted in taxes. Unlike Massachusetts, New Hampshire has no tax on income, sales, or estates. However, New Hampshire has the second-highest property tax rate in the country, according to the right-leaning think tank the Pioneer Institute.
“We want ‘Live free or die,’” she told the Globe at a fair in Fryeburg, Maine, on the New Hampshire border, referring to the New Hampshire state motto. A resident of Milan in Coös County, Johnson said those living in the state’s north country would feel the pain of any tax increase. Craig “has got some big city ideas that won’t fit in the North Country.”
Still, Ayotte is running to govern a state where more than half of the residents were born elsewhere. Fergus Cullen, a Republican strategist in New Hampshire and an Ayotte supporter, said given that, he’s surprised she continues to use Massachusetts as a proxy.
“I don’t know who it appeals to, I really don’t,” he said. “It doesn’t seem to me to be her strongest argument.” Emphasizing as she has in some ads that she’s a natural successor to Chris Sununu, the state’s popular outgoing four-term Republican governor, is more powerful, he said.
(To be fair, Sununu rarely passed up a chance to jab at Massachusetts, too.)
Others are also mystified at Ayotte casting Massachusetts as the villain. At a visit to a Caribbean restaurant in Manchester Tuesday, Pat Long, a Democrat and 18-year veteran of the New Hampshire House, stood in the back of the restaurant as he watched Craig and Healey address a small crowd and hand out “Latinos con Joyce” campaign signs.
Long, who is currently running for state Senate, said Ayotte’s jabs at Massachusetts don’t make sense for people, like himself, who envy Massachusetts’ strong education system, among other strengths.
“I’d be proud to be walking around with Maura Healey. She’s done some great things in Mass.,” Long said. “New Hampshire needs a little taste of that.”
K.J. Ames, a 73-year-old Republican from Claremont, said the migration of people into New Hampshire, particularly during the pandemic, means the state is “already Massachusetts. And New Jersey. And Philadelphia.”
“A lot of people moved in,” he told the Globe in Fryeburg. But Ames said he couldn’t vote for Ayotte for another reason: “She stood for Trump. And if there’s a baby in the bathwater, I’m sorry, it’s gone.”
That leaves Craig, who “may be a little too liberal for my blood, but I’ll give her a chance,” Ames said.
Plus, he added: “She’s only governor for two years.”
Samantha J. Gross can be reached at samantha.gross@globe.com. Follow her @samanthajgross. Matt Stout can be reached at matt.stout@globe.com. Follow him @mattpstout.
Massachusetts
An unorthodox general election battle in Mass.
The race for state representative in Massachusetts’ 13th Norfolk District, representing parts of Needham, Medfield and Dover, comes with a political novelty attached.
Josh Tarsky won the Democratic primary in September against three other candidates, but will still face a challenger, after Bill Dermody made it to the general election ballot as an unenrolled candidate.
“When I decided to get in the race, it was past the primary time where I had to sign up with one of the parties to run in the primaries,” explained Dermody. “So I found out you could run as unenrolled so I moved forward with that path.”
Asked if that was savvy political posturing, Dermody replied, “No! I wish I was that smart! I would’ve run in the Democratic primary, it was just timing.”
But Tarsky isn’t upset about the late entry, seeing it as part of the democratic process.
“I’ve taken it in stride,” he said.
On the issues themselves, the pair share similarities and differences.
Ballot Question 2 brings out different opinions. Dermody thinks the MCAS should stay, as a “benchmark,” while Tarsky said the test “needs improvement. I just don’t think we should do it the way we are.”
Ballot Question 1, which would allow the state auditor to audit the Legislature, also drew a contrast.
“It makes me have to defend my decisions, which I think actually helps refine my decisions. I would support that,” Tarsky said.
“The Legislature has to be held accountable,” Dermody said, but he’s “not sure on the constitutionality” of the proposal.
Other issues, like the MBTA Communities Law and housing needs, bring forward agreement.
“We need more housing, and even if you rezone, it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen,” Dermody said.
“Just because zoning is passed in these areas, doesn’t mean we get the type of building we want. Locally I want to empower local leaders,” Tarsky said.
Those are priorities they hope to champion on Beacon Hill.
“I feel I have Democratic values but an independent voice,” Dermody said.
“As a Democrat, if elected, that will allow me to caucus with leadership,” Tarsky said.
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