Trust Me, I'm a Doctor

Los Angeles physician Sandeep Kapoor sees his life collapse when he is blamed in the overdose death of his famous patient, Anna Nicole Smith, and has to fight criminal charges in front of the tabloid press.

Trust Me, I'm a Doctor is adapted from Kapoor's own 2017 memoir and written and directed by Thane Economou. Kal Penn plays Kapoor, a doctor who wins notice after performing CPR on an elderly woman who collapses at lunch. Through her physician, Victor Kovner, he later buys an established practice. Kovner introduces him to Anna Nicole Smith, played by Abbie Cornish, who becomes his patient. Kapoor treats her under a pseudonym to protect her privacy. He is uneasy about the unusually heavy painkiller regimen she relies on, especially a large dose of methadone, but he keeps prescribing it.

When Smith dies of a prescription drug overdose in Florida, the media frenzy that follows lands on Kapoor. Paparazzi surround his office, investigators raid his home and practice, and his private journals are leaked to the press. Prosecutors charge him, Smith's partner Howard K. Stern and her psychiatrist with conspiring to supply her drugs. Kapoor hires veteran attorney Ellyn Garofalo, played by Linda Hamilton, to run his defense and manage the public fallout. The film jumps around in time and uses Kapoor's own narration to tell the story of his trial and his fight to clear his name. It is set against the early-2000s tabloid culture that turned a medical case into national entertainment.