But Alec Burlakoff was not a lonely customer propositioning her for sex: in reality he was recruiting her to push doctors to over-prescribe highly-addictive opioids. Within weeks she was the manager of mid-Atlantic sales for Insys Therapeutics β and part of a brazen bribery ring pushing doctors to prescribe a fentanyl spray in dangerous quantities, and far beyond its intended use. Blunt plays Liza Drake, a blue-collar single mom who just lost her job and is trying to make ends meet. She lands a job at a failing pharmaceutical company following a chance meeting with sales rep Pete Brenner Evans who lures her down a morally-bankrupt path as she becomes a cog in a dangerous racketeering scheme that involves bribing doctors to give out a fentanyl-based drug β a story based on Insys.
But Insys bribed doctors to give it to people who did not have cancer, and then defrauded health insurers who did not want to cover it for non-cancer patients. Lee went to prison for more than a year for her part in the plot, with a jury hearing that she gave a doctor a lap dance as part of the scheme β although she still protests her innocence.
She told him she was saving money for a new life as a Michigan State University student. It definitely makes sense that he was scouting. She was hired in September after Burlakoff helped her prepare for the interview for the Scottsdale, Arizona, company.
Insys, led by founder John Kapoor, was desperate to join the gold rush unleashed by opioids, and willing to break the law to do it. It wanted doctors to hand out more and more of its spray at higher and higher doses. In reality the events were shams. It was at a drunken nightclub trip in Chicago, after one of the dinners in , that a witness told the trial of Lee, Kapoor and three other Insys executives that the former stripper gave Dr. Paul Madison a lap dance. The scheme was busted by feds in and Lee, who managed a third of the sales team, was one of a series of executives charged with RICO offenses.
Kapoor got 66 months, his CEO Michael Babich got 30 months, and three other executives also went to prison. In , Lee was sentenced to a year and a day and served eight months in prison in Kentucky. Lee, now working in security tech sales in Grand Rapids, MI, said she felt she was also a victim of Insys executives.
