A Milwaukee County judge has ordered Jessica Stewart, the woman behind Dr. J Dental Spa, to pay $144,000 to a customer who says Stewart posed as a dentist and left her with painful, gapped, and scarred teeth. Felisha Edwards paid nearly $6,000 for veneers in 2025, only to watch them fall out days later, according to her account of the ordeal.
Edwards said she first noticed Stewart wearing a white doctor jacket labeled Dr. J and later saw social media posts promoting her services on Milwaukee's north side, according to TMJ4 News. After the veneers failed, Edwards said her teeth hurt and were sensitive, and she was left with gaps and scarring. She filed a civil lawsuit against Stewart, and a Milwaukee County judge entered judgment in her favor, ordering Stewart to pay the $144,000 sum.
Stewart has 20 years to pay the judgment, and per the same account, any unpaid balance must be cleared before she can apply for a loan or a mortgage. Reached by TMJ4 investigative reporter Ben Jordan via text message, Stewart apologized to Edwards and said she takes accountability, though she called the amount requested outrageous. She did not answer calls placed to her on Wednesday, and Dr. J Dental Spa is now closed.
No Criminal Charges Despite Years of Complaints
Edwards' attorney, Christopher Stawski, said Stewart violated state law for fraudulent business practices and described her conduct as out and out fraud. He called the civil lawsuit the last legal option available to hold her accountable, noting that collecting the judgment could be the next challenge — Stawski said Stewart could ultimately receive no money from her if she has no assets to seize.
That civil route became necessary because the Milwaukee County District Attorney's Office chose not to pursue criminal charges in 2025, stating the case had never been investigated by a law enforcement agency. State records show Stewart had no professional license, and the Wisconsin Department of Safety and Professional Services had recorded multiple customer complaints against her dating back years. According to Becker's Dental Review, the agency issued a cease-and-desist letter warning of fines up to $10,000 a day as early as 2021, yet took no further action until reopening its investigation in 2024 — a three-year gap during which the unlicensed business kept operating.
That gap traces back to a structural quirk in how Wisconsin polices dental work. The state's 11-member Wisconsin Dentistry Examining Board oversees professional standards, but its enforcement powers are limited to administrative sanctions against existing license holders, leaving it without statutory authority to prosecute unlicensed individuals directly, according to a legal analysis from professionallicensedefensellc.com. The board can revoke licenses, but it has no path to bring charges against someone who was never licensed at all — leaving referrals like Stewart's case stuck between an agency that can only issue paperwork warnings and a prosecutor's office waiting for a police investigation that never came.
Dental Community Frustrated by the Case
Dr. Swathi Golla, president of the Greater Milwaukee Dental Association and a practitioner at Burleigh Dental, said the local dental community was frustrated by the situation. Edwards' claim that an unlicensed practitioner ruined her teeth fits a pattern the American Dental Association has been warning about since May 2024, when it issued a nationwide public health notice cautioning consumers against unlicensed “veneer technicians.” The ADA has said procedures performed by non-dentists risk causing permanent nerve damage, severe infections, choking hazards, and tooth loss.
Dental medical literature cited by The Daily Dot explains why the risks run so deep: applying cosmetic veneers over unaddressed decay, or without diagnostic X-rays, can trap bacteria inside a tooth and create conditions for deep infections, sepsis, endocarditis, and eventual tooth loss requiring extraction. Other jurisdictions have responded far more aggressively than Wisconsin did. A December 2025 Georgia indictment charged a self-proclaimed veneer tech with more than 100 criminal counts, according to the American Dental Association, and closer to home, Illinois officers arrested an Oakbrook Terrace practitioner in June after patients suffered broken dentures and dental damage.
A Wider Pattern of Unlicensed Operators
Milwaukee's case is one node in a national web of illegal cosmetic-dentistry setups that regulators and police have been scrambling to shut down. In March, Houston police raided an illegal dental office operating out of a residential living room, and Hoodline reported in April on a Pinellas Park veneer tech facing renewed court action over damaged clients' smiles. Better Business Bureau records show Dr. J Dental Spa Corp. was incorporated in October 2022 as a registered teeth-whitening business under agent Jessica E. Stewart — legally cleared for cosmetic whitening, but not for the invasive procedures Edwards says she received.
The financial pressure driving patients toward unauthorized providers has its own local backdrop. Milwaukee's safety-net clinics, including the Bread of Healing Clinic, reported expanding free dental and medical services this summer to keep up with a surge of low-income and uninsured patients grappling with rising healthcare costs, a trend Hoodline detailed in its coverage of the city's clinic system. For Edwards, none of that context softens the outcome: a $144,000 judgment that may take two decades to collect, if it is ever fully paid at all.
