Woman sentenced to prison for death of Kim Kardashian look-alike after cosmetic injection at Burlingame hotel

A Florida woman received a four-year prison sentence this month for administering an illegal cosmetic injection at a Burlingame hotel that ended in the death of a Kim-Kardashian look-alike.

Vivian Alexandra Gomez, 53, was sentenced on June 15 after being convicted of involuntary manslaughter and practicing medicine without a license in the April 2023 death of Christina Gourkani, according to the San Mateo County District Attorney’s Office. Gomez began her term having already accumulated nearly five months of credit for time served behind bars in the case.

Authorities accused Gomez of meeting Gourkani in a Burlingame hotel room and illegally administering a gluteal injection of a product called Biosil, a drug that’s “in the silicon family” and is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe previously told this news outlet.

Gourkani, who had nearly 140,000 followers on Instagram and more than 200,000 on Twitter, posted photos of herself as a Kardashian lookalike and was open about her passion for plastic surgery.

Shortly after her death, her father told Bay Area News Group that she had worked for a Walnut Creek-based cosmetic surgeon, where she underwent procedures to amplify her natural resemblance to the reality TV star. Gourkani fell ill shortly after the injection. She died a day later at a nearby hospital of a pulmonary embolism and respiratory failure.

Gomez’s attorney, Geoff Carr, previously said his client had learned to do the procedure in Colombia, where it is legal, and that she had been offering it on and off for about ten years. He argued at trial that there were “interesting issues about causation,” and questioned whether the product that was injected actually caused Gourkani’s death.

Yet prosecutors said other women treated by Gomez had complained of feeling poorly after similar injections, and that Gomez “had no license at all” to oversee the procedure. A resident of Palm Beach, Florida, Gomez ran an unlicensed cosmetology business in her home state and flew to the Bay Area to administer the injections, prosecutors said.

Wagstaffe said earlier that though this was the first case of this sort his office has prosecuted in the last half century, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office has a prosecutor whose assignment involves dealing with cases related to cosmetic procedures, due to the city’s proximity to the entertainment industry. One similar case prosecuted by the LA office involved charging a man in 2024 for allegedly performing cosmetic surgery on a woman without a license.

Jakob Rodgers is a senior breaking news reporter. Call, text or send him an encrypted message via Signal at 510-390-2351, or email him at [email protected].