When Santina Rizzi sat down to film the first installment of what would become a five-part TikTok series, she wasn’t launching a campaign — she says she was finally telling the truth about a job she’d stayed quiet about for years. Posting under @sanrizzle, Rizzi described her time working for Dr. Michael Salzhauer, the Miami-based plastic surgeon known worldwide as “Dr. Miami,” and the videos didn’t stay small for long. Within days, the series had racked up millions of views, and the surgeon himself had stepped in front of a camera to respond.
According to Rizzi, she joined the practice at 22 years old in a hybrid role, splitting her time between administrative work and social media management for $25 an hour. Her content, she says, took off — and so did her hours and responsibilities. She says her pay was eventually set at $40,000 a year with no raise despite what she describes as a significant jump in the practice’s follower counts and engagement under her direction.
Rizzi alleges that when a raise finally did arrive, it came with a catch: her schedule was restructured to three days a week while her workload stayed the same, and she lost her full-time benefits, including health insurance and a 401(k). She claims she was told by practice management to keep the new arrangement quiet because it exceeded what employees with a decade of tenure were making. She also alleges that while other doctors were reportedly paid $5,000 to $15,000 a day to film content, she was offered only a percentage if her own ideas were sold to competing practices.
The most personal allegation in Rizzi’s series centers on her body. She says Dr. Miami repeatedly pressured her to get arm liposuction despite her resistance, and that after she eventually underwent the procedure, he asked her to travel for work within 48 hours while she was still in pain, without overtime pay or accommodation for her recovery. She has described his demeanor on set as “erratic,” saying his focus seemed to be squarely on attention and revenue rather than the people working for him.
Dr. Miami’s Response
Dr. Miami didn’t stay silent. In his own videos responding to Rizzi’s allegations, he pushed back hard on the idea that he ran his practice as a typical employer-employee operation, saying he viewed Rizzi “as a daughter, not an employee.” He pointed to her presence at Shabbat dinners and a family trip to Israel as evidence of how close their relationship had been, adding, “Everyone that works here is family.”
On the pay allegations specifically, he disputed her characterization, saying his staff is “happy and paid well,” while also saying he was saddened by her departure. Regarding the liposuction claim, he rejected her framing of events, stating that “the surgery went beautifully” and denying that he would ever push a patient or employee into a procedure to create insecurity. He said he didn’t recall the specific post-operative complications she described, though he acknowledged she had received drainage treatment elsewhere following the surgery.
Notably, Dr. Miami did not respond with hostility. He closed his remarks by expressing gratitude for the social media work Rizzi had done for the practice, said he held no animosity toward her, and indicated he would be open to bringing her back — a conciliatory note that stood in contrast to the intensity of the online reaction to her series.
What makes this dispute harder to file into a simple hero-and-villain narrative is that both accounts share real overlap — neither side disputes that Rizzi worked closely with Dr. Miami for years, that her content contributed meaningfully to the practice’s visibility, or that the liposuction procedure happened. What’s contested is the interpretation: was the arrangement generous, as Dr. Miami frames it, or exploitative, as Rizzi describes it? Was the pressure around the procedure encouragement, or something closer to coercion? Those are the questions viewers have been debating in the comments of both creators’ videos, and neither side has produced documentation — pay stubs, contracts, texts — that would settle it definitively in public.
What To Know If You’re In A Similar Spot
Whatever really happened behind the scenes at one Miami practice, Rizzi’s story has resonated with a lot of viewers navigating blurry lines between employment and personal relationships at work — particularly in small businesses, medical practices, and influencer-adjacent jobs where the boundary between “like family” and “employee” can get murky fast. A few things worth knowing if you find yourself in a similar situation:
- Get compensation changes in writing. A verbal “raise” that quietly cuts your hours or benefits is worth documenting in an email, even a simple confirmation message, so there’s a paper trail if terms are later disputed.
- Know your state’s rules on reclassifying full-time staff as part-time. Losing benefits like health insurance can trigger separate protections depending on where you live and how your employer is structured.
- Medical or cosmetic procedures suggested by an employer — especially one who also performs them — deserve the same scrutiny as any other major health decision. It’s reasonable to seek an outside opinion before agreeing.
- If an employer asks you to keep compensation details confidential from coworkers, that request itself is worth researching; pay transparency laws vary by state and don’t always allow employers to enforce secrecy.
For now, Rizzi’s series remains up, Dr. Miami’s response videos remain up, and the internet has largely split into camps. What’s clear is that both a young employee’s account of her own working conditions and a well-known surgeon’s account of how he treats his staff are now part of the same public record — and it’s a reminder that workplace disputes involving public figures rarely resolve as cleanly online as they might in a courtroom or an HR office.
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