A sales representative pitching a potentially deadly fentanyl pain reliever to reluctant physicians testified Tuesday that Insys Therapeutics sales efforts included the time she said her “sexually suggestive” boss treated a doctor to a lap dance.
“She was sitting on his lap, kind of bouncing around, and he had his hands all over her, kind of inappropriately,” Holly Brown said of Sunrise Lee, an ex-stripper and her former sales manager at Insys, the progressive pharmaceutical company founded by billionaire John Kapoor.
Kapoor, 75, and his white-collar lieutenants Lee, Michael Gurry, Richard Simon and Joseph Rowan are on trial in U.S. District Court in Boston for racketeering and fraud in connection with what prosecutors said was a nationwide scheme to drive up demand for their new fentanyl-based mouth spray, Subsys, by persuading health care providers to push prescriptions on patients who didn’t need it.
In the fall of 2012, following dinner at Kapoor’s Chicago restaurant, Brown said she, Lee and another female sales representative from Insys took Dr. Paul Madison to the Chicago nightclub The Underground, settled in at a private table and ordered hundreds of dollars’ worth of bottle service.
Madison, a pain-management specialist whose license is currently suspended, according to the Illinois Board of Registration in Medicine, was being groomed to help Insys sell Subsys, a drug whose warnings included the possibility of death if misused.
Insys paid Madison fees for pro-Subsys speaking engagements Brown said were less about education and more about picking up the tab for a meal out for him and his friends. “It was a tit-for-tat relationship,” she explained.
Madison is not on the government’s witness list. He was convicted in the U.S. District Court of Northern Illinois last year in an unrelated health care fraud case and faces sentencing March 25.
Brown, 36, testified her superiors trained her to “drop the word cancer and talk about breakthrough pain in general.” But after “struggling” to persuade skeptical doctors to buy into Subsys, Brown said Madison became her full-time project, targeted to be a “whale” for Insys because of his history of prescribing opioids.
She said she was dancing with her colleague at The Underground when she spotted Lee and Madison allegedly using body language to talk business.
“It was disappointing,” she recalled of the lap dance from the witness stand in Judge Allison D. Burroughs’ courtroom. “Certainly something I as an employee was not willing to engage in.”
“Do you feel like you were getting a message about what tactics to use to market this product?” assistant U.S. Attorney Fred Wyshak Jr. asked before Burroughs stopped Brown from answering.
Brown said all she ever got out of Lee about her suitability for her job was that she’d worked in massage therapy and, “At some point she said she had a degree in biochemistry.” Lee, she said, was “sexually suggestive” when it came to wooing clients for Insys. “There was a lot of cleavage.”
