The charming and urbane TV doctor was also said to have a violent streak: In November 2006, his then-wife, Susan Field, filed for a restraining order after an argument during Thanksgiving dinner. She claimed that Adams yelled, “I’m going to rip your face off!” and hit her because she wouldn’t let him speak to a friend who had called her. A year earlier, she charged, Adams had choked her in a New York hotel room because he suspected that someone was hitting on her at a club.

Adams turns out to not even be an official Harvard graduate. When this magazine tried to check his year of graduation, the Harvard College registrar confirmed that Adams never received a diploma despite completing the credits for a degree in psychology in 1977, possibly because he owed Harvard money.

There was more: anger management training, a patient who claimed that Adams got her drunk and pregnant, another girlfriend who won a restraining order against him. But the specifics, almost overwhelming in their seedy detail, mattered less than the big picture: Once considered a successful, reputable surgeon—a role model, even—Jan Adams was now portrayed as a smooth-talking charlatan whose luck had run out. Stories about the plastic surgeon whose work had preceded West’s death quickly appeared in People, Us Weekly, and other tabloids.

Adams insisted that he was innocent of wrongdoing. He told People that the malpractice suits were filed by people who “represent a bad choice in terms of patient.” He confided to the Los Angeles Times that he thought West might have overdosed on Vicodin, had a heart attack, or suffered a pulmonary embolism.

On November 20, Adams appeared on Larry King Live just hours after West’s funeral in Oklahoma City, an affair attended by over 1500, including the reigning couple of hip-hop, Jay-Z and Beyoncé. Wearing a brown zip-front top and black T-shirt, Adams said that the Wests had asked that he not speak—the family had threatened to try to have his medical license revoked if he commented on Donda’s death. Then Adams apologized for wasting King’s time, unwound an earpiece from around his head, stood up, and walked off the set. And then he went underground, ceasing to talk with the press for weeks. Through his then-spokesperson, Kevin Williams, Adams declined to speak to 02138, saying he was waiting for the right time to address the “conjecture and rumors” swirling around him. "The one time I talked to him, I said, 'This is awful.' He said, 'No, this is going to pass,'" recalls Adams’ uncle and mentor, Pearlman Hicks, a prominent plastic surgeon himself. "I thought, he just doesn’t realize … "

Born April 21, 1954, Jan Adams was raised by his mother, Gwen Adams, after his father left when he was four. Gwen worked as a secretary at Wright-Patterson Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio. Their house was next door to a church and across the street from the field where Jan would later run track and play football for the Middletown High Middies, an enterprise Gwen Adams encouraged as much as she pushed him to excel academically.

“His mother would never accept anything less than excellence,” says Karl Gaston, a Middletown fireman who was a childhood friend of Adams. Full of books, the Adams house was a gathering place for friends and neighbors. “They had this wraparound porch, and everyone had to turn that corner to go down the street,” Gaston says, “so it was a good spot where everyone would be talking and laughing.”

Adams was elected class president and went to Boys State, but he got his first taste of renown as the Middies’ starting quarterback; he threw for more than 1,100 yards and 25 touchdowns over two seasons. His mother never missed a game. “She is my inspiration,” Adams later told the Baltimore AfroAmerican.

Adams said that he wanted to be a doctor, and his 1972 acceptance to Harvard seemed proof that this was a young man on the rise. “We were all happy we knew someone who was going to Harvard,” Gaston recalls, “even though we didn’t even know what it was about, except that it was prestigious and validated how smart this guy was.”

Adams played football and basketball as a Harvard freshman, but quit, telling friends that he had a heart condition. Nevertheless, he enjoyed his time in Cambridge. “He wasn’t an introverted Harvard student,” Hicks says. “He was out and about.” After Adams’ residency at UCLA, Hicks welcomed his nephew into his own practice in Long Beach, south of L.A. “He was a good guy, a relative, a good surgeon,” says Hicks. “You can’t ask for more than that.” He hoped that, one day, Adams would take over the practice. But Adams didn’t seem happy working in his uncle’s business, and Hicks says that he began neglecting to pay his share of the office expenses, prompting a falling out that landed them in small claims court. (Hicks sued Adams for $250,000, but later dropped the suit.) “I don’t think he really wanted to be in Long Beach,” Hicks says. “He wanted other things. He wanted to be a celebrity doctor.”

In the early 1990s, Adams went to work with Dr. John Williams, a well-known surgeon in the city of Palm Desert who was once married to Eva Gabor. At some point, Adams traveled to Stanford University to take the written portion of his medical board exam, only to withdraw. While some who knew Adams wondered if he had failed, he told colleagues that he did not take the test for medical reasons that he did not specify; he did not try again to pass his boards before his qualification window expired. “It’s a mystery to me why he never took the boards,” says Dr. Anthony Griffin, a Brown graduate who took the first part of the medical exams with Adams.

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