Back in late July, I shared the story of Neil Hopper with you. Hopper is a highly respected vascular surgeon from Cornwall, England, despite needing both of his legs amputated after they had rotted away due to sepsis.

He was something of a popular public figure in England—one of those inspirational everyday heroes that nations love to single out as their best.

And then it turned out he was allegedly a fraud and used a website called “the unit can make her” to buy videos of limb removals while encouraging other amputation-loving freaks to amputate other people’s body parts. It’s gruesome and disturbing.

It now appears that we can remove the “allegedly” tag from any mention of his crimes. He has been found guilty and is now going to be jailed for two years and eight months for insurance fraud and possessing extreme pornography.

Surgeon He Amputated His Legs to Fulfill a Fetish
Hopper, it turns out, froze his own feet using ice and dry ice in 2019, deliberately causing irreparable damage. He then told doctors he was in severe pain, letting them believe it was sepsis, and agreed to the double amputation.

This is all a part of Hopper’s long-standing sexual fascination with amputation and body modification. As the court later heard, his own feet were, to him, an “unwelcome extra.”

It gets even grosser: some of the videos he had in his possession included men voluntarily undergoing genital mutilation. His fraudulent insurance claims netted him more than £466,000—money he told a friend he planned to “milk.”

But it wasn’t just about the cash. Hopper “enjoyed” the attention his story received, playing the role of the brave surgeon-turned-patient in media appearances, all while hiding the disturbing mutilation fetish that drove him to this point.

The Royal Cornwall Hospitals Trust, where Hopper worked for a decade, insists no patients were harmed and that an external review found no misconduct in his surgical decisions. A South West-based law firm has reported that several former patients are now questioning whether their life-altering surgeries were vital or if they were all part of one surgeon’s grotesque fetish.

Though Hopper regrets the fraud, he doesn’t regret the amputations. To him, life without legs was the dream. Kids, dreams don’t just come true. You have to make them come true.