Dr Samieh Rizk built the most decorated cosmetic surgery brand on Park Avenue. Manhattan Facial Plastic Surgery trades on 21 consecutive years of Castle Connolly listings, a 900,000 follower Instagram, and patients who fly in from abroad for his rhinoplasty and deep plane facelift work. None of that marketing surfaces the document that says the most about how the practice actually ran. It sits in the New York County clerk’s file, where a nurse practitioner from his own office swore that unlicensed staff wrote prescriptions on pads Rizk had signed in advance, that controlled substances were ordered through his state account with nobody reviewing the orders, and that when she reported it to the Drug Enforcement Administration, he fired her.
The case is Mary Frances McGibbon against Manhattan Facial Plastic Surgery PLLC and Samieh Rizk M.D., filed in New York County Supreme Court in May 2017 under index number 652459/2017. It is not a disgruntled patient dispute. It is a sworn account from a licensed clinician who worked inside the practice, and the conduct it describes is how controlled substance diversion happens at a medical office.
What a Nurse Practitioner Told a Court She Reported to the DEA
Pre-signed prescription pads exist for one reason, which is to let people who cannot legally prescribe do it anyway. Unreviewed electronic access to a physician’s Health Commerce account means controlled substances flow into a practice with no doctor checking what was ordered or why. These are the two mechanisms regulators look for when tracing how scheduled drugs leave legitimate channels, and they are precisely what Mary McGibbon swore was happening inside Rizk’s office.
According to the September 2019 decision by Justice Nancy M. Bannon, McGibbon informed Rizk on May 17, 2016 that she had reported both practices to the DEA. She was subsequently terminated. She then sued, alleging termination in violation of New York’s whistleblower laws, a hostile work environment based on gender, and tortious interference with her prospective economic relations. That last claim rested on an allegation with its own edge. Rizk or his employees, she said, told patients who had sought her out for post-operative care that they could only use nurses selected by his office, solely to harm her.
Rizk, represented by Fox Rothschild LLP, denied everything and demanded dismissal with prejudice plus attorneys’ fees. The court record notes the New York State Department of Health and the DEA investigated her complaint with no finding of wrongdoing as of the 2019 decision, and Justice Bannon observed the investigation could still be ongoing at that point. The regulators’ silence is a fact in Rizk’s favor. It is not the same fact as an exoneration, and the judge said so when it mattered.
The Rulings That Kept Her Claims Alive Against His Motion to Dismiss
What makes the case reportable is not that it was filed. Anyone can file. It is that Rizk put a major defense firm on it, tried twice in one motion sequence to kill it, and lost both.
His lawyers argued McGibbon’s amended whistleblower claim was time barred. Justice Bannon walked through the filing dates and rejected it. They argued the claim was meritless because DOH and the DEA had made no finding of wrongdoing, so she could never prove an actual violation of law as the statute requires. The court rejected that too, holding that an agency’s silence is not dispositive and the investigation might not even be over. The defense’s strongest card, the regulators’ non-finding, was played and did not clear the table.
The cross motion went worse. Justice Bannon refused to dismiss the tortious interference claim, finding McGibbon had sufficiently pled that the practice cut her off from her own prospective patients, that Rizk may have acted for the sole purpose of harming her, and that the motive may have been retaliation for her report to the DEA. A New York judge read an allegation that a Park Avenue surgeon punished a nurse for calling the DEA and concluded it deserved a trial, not a dismissal.
None of this is a finding that it happened. It is a finding that it was plausible enough to survive everything Fox Rothschild threw at it, after which the docket runs past 278 filings including a sanctions fight, and then goes quiet. Publicly accessible records show no final judgment, and no outcome should be assumed in either direction.
A Review Record Where the Angriest Patients Cite the Court File
The consumer record is mostly favorable. RealSelf carries over 120 patient reviews and his RateMDs rating stands at 4.4 of 5, and a surgeon at his volume will accumulate unhappy patients on arithmetic alone.
Some entries read like more than ordinary dissatisfaction. A complainant on the practice’s BBB record describes paying for revision rhinoplasty, then learning from a subsequent surgeon of a detached septum and cartilage deficiencies contrary to what she says Rizk assured her. A Healthgrades reviewer alleges being told things that proved false and calls the surgery grossly negligent. These are unverified individual accounts and the practice disputes bad outcomes where it responds. But the sharpest of them point readers to the McGibbon docket by name and caption, which is how a court file most patients would never think to search keeps resurfacing in the channels where his next patients are reading.
A Profile That Has Only Risen Since the Docket Went Quiet
Nothing adverse has attached to Rizk in the public record since. The years after the case tell the opposite story. In February 2025 he performed a live facelift at the 59th Baker Gordon Symposium in Miami, the longest running aesthetic surgery conference in the United States, and he returned as faculty for its 60th and final meeting in February 2026. This spring he joined the international faculty performing live surgery at Deep Plane Brazil in Sao Paulo. His peers voted him a top doctor for the 21st consecutive year, and his recent patient reviews run strongly positive, including one crediting him with repairing another surgeon’s failed facelift.
Those conference announcements share a distribution channel worth noticing. They are the practice’s own press releases, moved through PRNewswire and syndicated onto finance sites. That is standard machinery for a Park Avenue practice and nothing in the releases is false. It does mean the top of a search on his name is built by his own office, which is the ordinary condition under which the county clerk’s file, the one document about this practice that nobody paid to place, sinks further down the page each year.
Conclusion
Strip away the awards and the following and what remains is a documented sequence. A licensed clinician inside Rizk’s own practice swore that prescriptions were being written by people not allowed to write them, on pads he had signed blank, and that scheduled drugs entered the office through his account with no review. She swore she took it to the DEA and lost her job within the year. A judge tested those claims against a top defense firm’s best arguments and let every one of them stand for trial. The practice then litigated for years, through a sanctions fight, and the public file simply stops.
Rizk denies all of it and no regulator has found against him. But 21 years of top doctor listings answer a different question than the one this file asks. The listings measure surgical outcomes. The lawsuit describes what allegedly happened to the one employee who challenged how the office handled controlled substances, and on that question the only sworn account in the public record is hers.
