In an Internet chat room called Wannabe Models, a television news reporter pretending she was “Keri,” a 14-year-old girl, said she would do anything for a chance to meet a talent scout.

On Saturday, a West Palm Beach emergency-room doctor with stellar credentials gave up his license to practice medicine in Florida, and promised never to reapply here again, because of an online tryst with that reporter.

It was December 1997, and unbeknownst to West Palm Beach emergency physician Dr. Alan Sisson, “Keri” was helping produce an investigative report for a Fox Files tabloid television segment called “Stalking the Stalkers.”

During the sting, shown on the prime-time news show, Sisson exchanged sexually explicit chat and photographs with the woman, state records show. According to a transcript of the program, which aired in 1998, Sisson told her how to evade her parents and eventually sent her a phone card to use at a pay phone so her calls to him could not be traced.

“He told me how to de-magnetize my hard drive so there would be no traces of any photographs or chats that we’d had on the Internet,” the reporter posing as Keri said during the report.

Sisson sent her a plane ticket to meet him in Chicago.

“You made it, huh?” Sisson asked on camera, as the reporter came off the plane.

“Yeah, where are we going to go?” she asked.

Suddenly the police appeared, and Sisson was under arrest.

The dramatic television moment led to Sisson pleading guilty in Illinois to solicitation. He was sentenced to one year’s court supervision and psychiatric counseling. The Illinois licensing board put Sisson on probation and notified Florida’s health agency about the discipline. He has not practiced medicine since.

Until the incident, Sisson had a distinguished career. He earned a medical degree in 1977 from Northwestern University, near Chicago. He saved many lives as an ER physician at Palms West Hospital in Loxahatchee.

In the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration’s investigation of Sisson’s case in January, the agency said that Sisson had hoped that by pleading guilty to a solicitation charge, he would avoid further publicity. If he meets the requirements of his plea agreement with Illinois, his record there will show no conviction.

Sisson’s attorney, Dr. Rob Wortelboer of Jacksonville, appearing before the Board of Medicine, would not comment on the case afterward.

But West Palm Beach psychologist George Rahaim, in November 1998, wrote a letter to authorities that he had met with the physician 36 times, and he felt Sisson was “not likely to cause harm to any member of the public.”

“Over the past months, Dr. Sisson has gradually learned to accept reality for and adjust to what appears to me to be a single period of … inappropriate behavior,” Rahaim wrote.Contacted at their home in West Palm Beach, Sisson and his wife declined to discuss the incident, saying they had gone through a terrible time and endured vicious insults from neighbors and strangers.

Stacey Singer can be reached at or 561-243-6616.