July 21, 2024 • 56 mins
Eve Wiley is one of the featured voices in the Netflix series The Man with 1000 Kids, but the story of how she came to be a fierce advocate for victims of fertility fraud is a deeply personal one…and one you have to hear to believe.
In this episode of No Filter, Eve Wiley tells Mia Freedman how she finally found out that she is the child of fertility fraud and how she discovered who her biological father was - a discovery that turned her world upside down and transformed her into a fearless fighter for the women and families who’ve been harmed by fraudulent and serial sperm donors.
Through her work she’s successfully lobbied for the creation of laws which criminalise conception deception - but as you’ll hear, her fight is only just beginning.
You can learn more about Eve Wiley here.
If you’ve been the victim of fertility fraud or have a story to share with us, you can contact us anonymously HERE.
If this story has brought up any hard emotions, please reach out to Lifeline on 13 11 14.
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Host: Mia Freedman
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Executive Producer: Naima Brown
Audio Producer: Leah Porges
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast. Mama Maya acknowledges
the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast
is recorded on from Mamma Maya. You're listening to No
Filter and I'm mea Friedman. How many times can you
find out life changing news about your dad? For Eve Wiley,
the answer is three times, and it was about three
(00:33):
different men. Eve Wiley has had three fathers in her lifetime.
One of them sadly passed away when she was seven.
One of them is a great guy, but he wasn't
who she thought he was, And one of them was
an egomaniacal monster. If you watch the Netflix series The
Man with a Thousand Kids that told the story of
(00:54):
cereal sperm donor Jonathan Meyer, you might recognize Eve's name.
She wasn't impregnated by Jonathan, but she helped try and
stop him from harming other women, more women, and from
doing more damage to the hundreds, probably thousands of children
he's already conceived. But Jonathan isn't the only guy who's
trying to superminate the world. There are more serial sperm
(01:16):
doners like him out there who, for whatever reason, I
obsessed with the idea of impregnating women under false pretenses
for their own twisted reasons, and nobody knows that better
than eight. If you were seven when your father died,
how old were you when you discovered that he wasn't
(01:37):
actually your biological father.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
I was sixteen years old when I was going through
my mom's emails. She was a school nurse at my school,
and so I kind of had this little habit where
I would go unto her emails and I would find
all the juicy gossip on my code words or if
you know, maybe a teacher sent an email that like
I had a bad grade or something. You know. It
(02:00):
was management for myself, was what it was. And that's
when I found the emails of my mom email in California,
Cara Bank, and I saw my birth date on it.
My thought was, you know, from a small town, my
grandpa has cows that my mom was doing something for
like artificial insemination for the bulls.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
That wouldn't have been most people's first thought, but I
see why that was relevant for you.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
It was very relevant. But as soon as I saw
my birth date, I knew in that exact moment that
I was the juicy gossip within the coport. So that's
when I found out that I was doing or conceived.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
When someone finds something life changing via snooping, there is
a dilemma because you've got to admit to the snooping
to be able to confront the person about the thing
you've discovered. What did you do next?
Speaker 2 (02:47):
It was late at night. What I did exactly was
I ended up playing SIMS and creating a lot of
babies in my son's game. Interesting kind of playing it
out there. But I went to bed and I woke
up the next morning and my mom was in the
bathroom getting ready, and I dis barged in and I
was like, mom, I know that Doug isn't my dad.
And I just remember her looking at me in the
reflection of the mirror, just turning around. She's like, what
(03:10):
are you talking about? And she starts bawling. And at
the time at this like, you know, it's just a
naive sixteen year old. I was excited, you know. For me,
I didn't understand the complexities of donor conception, you know,
in a social sense, but also in an ethical sense.
For me, I was like, I still have, you know,
a dad. I probably have half siblings and so it
(03:31):
was very like, you know, Pollyanna about this, and that's
how I kind of confronted her, and she did a
really good job of you know, Eve, you were seven
when your dad died. They told us not to ever
tell you and it wasn't going to be important. And
she brought up this green folder and it was every
print out from an email that she had ever spoken
to anyone on like Yahoo messenger boards, not to like
(03:55):
date myself. You know, it was before Facebook, and you know,
her medical records and you know, all of the things
to where she really was creating this breadcrumb trowel for me.
And for me that was really meaningful because I could
actually see it that that she really was going to
tell me. She just didn't know how to tell me.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
I imagine there were lots of different feelings. You say you
were quite Pollyanna about it, but I imagine you're losing Doug,
who you thought was your father, essentially your stepfather at
age seven. That must have been pretty traumatic for you
at that age. Did it feel a little bit like
a new phase of grief in terms of losing him
again at sixteen?
Speaker 2 (04:31):
You don't know if at sixteen I could wrap my
head around that part. You know, there definitely was a
lot of grief and there was a level of trauma
of not having you know, that father figure growing up
right eventually, But for me, I think it was just
trying to look at it in more of a positive sense. Now,
(04:53):
Remember at this time, I was not aware that the
donor could be like, no, I don't want to have
contact with you, because in my head that was never
a thing. It wasn't until later where I started to
realize that, you know, the social constructs of this could
be very different. With that new information. I think that
there was, you know, a sense of hesitancy on my
(05:13):
part and fear that I may be rejected, and so
it did kind of like snowball into other types of feelings.
But that morning, in that moment, I was excited, but
completely naive and completely unaware of what it even meant.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
Because I guess in a way, you lost Doug again,
but then also your father was alive again because you
hadn't even met him and he was out there somewhere right.
What a lot of emotions it is.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
And is I think it's one of those times too,
where you know, I was having opposite feelings about something.
You know. I was excited, but to your point, there
was a level of grief. But then, you know, growing
up in my nuclear family, I was this blonde hair,
blue green eyed little girl. My little sister, who was
fourteen months younger than me, had this olive skin complexion,
(06:02):
dark brown hair, dark brown eyes. I looked like no
one in my family. There was no familiarity, and so
I was constantly teased for being adopted. And so there
is something called the thought unknown, where I always knew
there was a secret. I just didn't know that I
was the secret until then. So then being able to
(06:23):
justify and everything makes sense to have an actual reason
for it instead of wondering what it was.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
Was your sister the biological child of Doug and your mom.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
She was When my parents initially went to their fertility doctor,
my dad had Verico's fans around his testes, and so
the recommendation was to get a surgery to get us
taken care of. So he did that they still aren'
getting pregnant. So then the next step was to do
artificial insemination by an anonymous ferm donor. When I was born,
my parents were pregnant four months later, and so it
(06:56):
could be that maybe there just wasn't enough time after
the surgery of the reversal of the surgery. So she
is the biological child of my dad, Doug.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
So how did things feel between you and her? Learning
that you were not actually sis, were you were half sisters?
You had different fathers.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
This one caught me by surprise. I didn't think that
it would impact her, and that was just you know,
me being shortsighted. But when we sat my sister down
and we told her, she started crying. And the only
thing she said before she ran out of the room
was well, least you have a dad, And that was
it that hurt, because then it was like, yeah, now
(07:34):
I feel guilt, and wow, this is getting really complicated.
And you know, there wasn't a book for me to
go read. There wasn't a blog yet. There wasn't anyone
that I even knew that was donor conceived except for
the cows at my grandma's house, And so I didn't
have a north star to be able to have some
sort of expectations of how this should go and how
(07:56):
this could go. Even when I called California Cryobank. At
this time, no one had made a connection with their donor,
so they didn't really have any good information for me
either on how to proceed with this, so it was
very lonely, and then it became a thing of what,
I don't want to talk about this in front of
my sister because it all make her sad, which only
reinforced that loneliness.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
In Australia, there are laws that came in a few
decades ago. I think that sperm donors could only be
anonymous up until the age of any donor children that
had been conceived were eighteen, and then those children had
a legal right to find them. What are the laws,
I imagine it probably differs state by state. But did
you know that you would be able to find your
(08:38):
the identity of your donor or? Was that tricky?
Speaker 2 (08:41):
It was tricky because it is literally the wild wild
West here in good old us of A. It's entirely
left up to the donors in the clinics, And so
at the time that I was conceived, the idea of
an open donor versus a closed donor wasn't even a
topic of conversation. The recommendation in the eighties was don't ask,
(09:02):
don't tell, like they don't need to know, it's not important.
You're the parent and that's it. So there wasn't a
level of education to educate on the donor be canceive
experience or about how important genetic identity is. And then
even now I just feel like in the last you know,
ten years, the sperm banks here in clinics are just
(09:23):
now starting to realize, you know, maybe anonymous donation isn't
great because here anonymity breaths fraud when you're able to
exist under the cloak of anonymity. And it wasn't until
the you know, invention of commercial dnate testing that is
really blowing the lid off of those So as far
as the being the laws here, there's just pure recommendations
(09:44):
per the American Society of Reproductive Medicine.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Will you angradate your mom that she hadn't told you
and that she had no intention of telling you?
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Yes and no. I was angry that I was live
to you, But when she pulled out the green folder,
all of that kind of melted away because I could
see the amount of hours that she poured into this,
and I believed her when she said I didn't know
how to tell you, I didn't when to tell you.
But I knew that if I did all of this
(10:13):
research and had all this information, that you would believe
me that I have been doing this for a very
long time. And so I think that that very much
helped bridge the gap between those emotions for me, because
I could very much empathize with not being able to
tell a seven year old whose father just passed away, well,
but that's not like your real dad, because let's go
talk about, you know, how babies are made now. I mean,
(10:35):
there's no way, like I totally.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
It's a lot of conversation, yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Being seven, being like like just understanding developmentally, you know,
abstract thinking. And it didn't seem as appropriate at that
time to explain grief, death and artificial insamination.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
And your mom must have felt protective of Doug and
his relationship with you, and I can say that I
can understand why she did it. How did you find
the identity of your Dina? What did you learn in
that green folder?
Speaker 2 (11:03):
So in the green folder I had my mom's medical records,
and in there it said the date that I was
conceived with Donor one oh six from California Crowdbank. And
this was in the doctor's handwriting. So that was confirmation
of my conception. And my mom had one sheet of
paper and it had California Crow Bank all the donors listed,
and it was just one line donor number, physical characteristics,
(11:27):
level of education, and interest, like just very limited, and
you could see like not this one, not this one,
maybe this one, and then she circled one and this one,
and then there were letters to like Wendy or emails
like Wendy Kramer Single Mothers by Choice organization. I think
at one point there was like maybe a Canadian donor
conception network, different professional organizations, and all of it was like,
(11:51):
I'm just trying to get more information. We knew his
religion was of I Made Butcher, this the Bahai faith,
and so my mom had all of these like communications
with that religious organization. So that was kind of what
was the bulk of the folder. There were also personal
emails and personal stories where she was asked, how do
I tell my daughter you're an adult?
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Now?
Speaker 2 (12:11):
What should I do? What should I not do? That
type of stuff.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
So she'd been trying to track down your donor secretly
all these years.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
Kind of I think that in her very limited way,
she was trying to understand you know what was the
network in the landscape. Donor Sibling registery was not quite
built yet, but that was the only pretty much formal
platform where you could put it in your donor number
and you would hope that the donor would register as
well as other half siblings.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
So ultimately, when she was choosing her donor, she chose
number one hundred and six because he had certain qualities.
He had an interest in film and politics, which she
thought was similar to her and to her husband. And
you tracked him down, you said about making contact with
number one hundred and six, Who did you find?
Speaker 2 (13:00):
I found Steve Shoal and I contacted the Crow Bank.
Their rules at the time were we need the medical
records from the doctor or to confirm, and they also
had their records that were purchasing records from the doctor,
so those things matched up, and they sent kind of
like a questionnaire that was like, let's update your medical records,
(13:21):
not saying like, hey, you have a daughter. And so
that process took about a year because I think eventually
Steve don one of six, who I also call Dad,
he was like, why do y'all need this? And they're like, oh,
because you have a daughter and he was like, I'm
sorry what you know, he was surprised by it. I
(13:41):
think in his head he was like, I'm just doing
this for research.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Well, had he forgotten that he donated spam? Like why
had he donated for money?
Speaker 2 (13:50):
He was in college, easy way to make a bug, like,
you know.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
He'd sort of forgotten about it. He was probably stoned.
It was college, he was high.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
He wasn't exactly, he wasn't bad about it. He's like
Lodu's best life, Like I'm doing it anyways, Like what, oh, yeah,
I remember that vaguely, yeah exactly.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
And where was he in his life when he found
out that you existed.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
So he was a father of three children, and the
youngest one was pretty small, and the oldest one was
like maybe in middle school, So you know, he was
in a phase of life that you know, also was complicated.
He had every ability to be like, oh, he'll no,
this is not going to work, and he didn't. And
I had already written a letter, and I had asked
(14:35):
the sperm bank when he made contact to forward that letter.
I had in my mom's and her folder. I had
read so many stories of people who were just outright
rejected by their biological parent, and it ended up becoming
a fear of mine and I was like, if I
only have one chance, like I want to be able
to convey who I am through a letter, and if
(14:55):
that's all he ever sees and reads, like, maybe that'll
be enough. And we ended up connecting and then it
turned to email. I would forward an email to the
sperm bank, the sperm bank would forward him, and that
was it, and then we cut them out and then
ended up talking on the just like forever. And then
I was living in Austin and college at this time,
and he flew down to meet me for the first time.
(15:16):
What was that Like, Oh, I was amazing. I mean
I was. He came to my apartment and I just
I opened the door and it was just like a
huge hug and just we stayed for hours talking in
my living room and then went to dinner and live
music and it was just catching up on at this
point nineteen years. I think because I didn't I didn't
(15:38):
have any expectations. I didn't know how it was supposed
to go. And because he is who he is, which
is just this like amazing open person and I am
who I am, Like it just worked and it was
that weekend, the first weekend of meeting him, we ran
into a friend, one of my friends on the street,
and just for social clarity, I was like, oh, this
is my dad. And at the end of that he
(16:00):
was like, if you will call me that, I'm okay
with that. And then from that moment one.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
He was dad, and you had three new little siblings.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
I did, but they didn't know yet. They didn't know
until much later.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
Again, it's a tricky conversation with the little kids. So
her dad was high in college and he jumped off
into a cop one day for twenty bucks.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
Yeah, but for him, you know, it's also he had
to tell his wife and then I don't know if
it ever really came up, like you know, while they
were dating, it never really came up. So he had
to tell her. And I totally get this. You know,
as a mother of three myself, I would be pretty
protective too, So I really understood her desire to not
(16:43):
want to tell the kids right away, and so it
took multiple years for them to disclose me to them.
I feel like this is happens in donor conception a
lot with parents that disclose when when they're older and
everybody's nervous and like, oh my gosh, this is going
to go so bad. They're gonna like freak out and
never talk to us again. And they told the kids,
and my sister was like, oh my god, I have
(17:04):
a sister. And then the two boys were like, that's cool.
What's for dinner?
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Yea?
Speaker 2 (17:10):
And my dad's like that's it and they're like yeah,
I mean do we get to like meter or something
like that? Sounds cool? And they're like, oh my god.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
It never ceases to delight me how disinterested kids are
in their parents' lives.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
I know, right, it's all our social construct in projection.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
What was your relationship like with your dad's wife, Like,
and I imagine you have this experience as well with
the work that you do meeting a lot of donor kids.
The relationship with the partner of the donum must be
often fraud.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
Is it? You know? I think in this instance, like
I could recognize the level of protectiveness, and I was
really leaning on dad to kind of facilitate that relationship
because I didn't want obviously to push. But I think
that they did a really good job of keeping it separate.
I didn't really get to have a lot of interaction
with her until my wedding. I think that really kind
(18:05):
of changed our relationship. We really didn't have a lot
of interface, you know, geograph. We lived in different parts
of the country. It was always quite an effort to
visit on either one of our parts.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
After this short break, Eve makes another unsettling discovery that
will change her life forever. Your relationship with your dad progressed.
As you say, he officiated at your wedding. He did,
so you stayed in touch over the next few years.
The next installment of this story, and the plot twist
(18:40):
comes when you go on to have children of your
own and your son becomes sick. What happened to him?
Speaker 2 (18:47):
So my oldest when he was a baby, he was
vomiting a lot, and he wasn't eating real food, and
there were all of these things that all of our
doctors were like, you know, these allergies, and no one
could really figure out what it is. And about three
years of all of that, I was like, we got
to do something different. They recommended looking in more into
like genetics, and so I was working with this functional
(19:09):
in doctor and he was like, let's get some info
on your DNA. The easiest way to do that at
the time was the commercial DNA test twenty three and
ME plus health and he'd get what was called raw data.
So we did that and he called back and he said, hey, Eve,
it's Celiac disease. And I was like what. I had
no idea what Celiac disease was. I had no idea
(19:32):
what an autoimmune disorder was. And he's like, yeah, that's
what it is, and it's coming from you. And I
was like, what are you talking about. He's like, you
need to go get better family history from you know,
your biological father and biological mother. And so I'm in
my family, like, who has these stomach issues in coeliac
and allergies.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
No one, because it's hereditary.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Yeah, yeah, it's turn serious. So the bigger thing at
the time was like, Okay, now we know a diagnosis
is a prognosis, right, And so I was so focused
on just making my son healthy. The second part of
this is that there's an ancestry component to the commercial
DNA testing. And I don't know if you're familiar with
the platform, but a lot of my DNA connections were
(20:12):
saying things like close family to first cousins, and so
I wasn't really thinking half sibling because I guess I
just assumed it was a perfect science and would say
half sibling.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
So it was one of those like twenty three and
Me or ancestry dot Com that you do the test
and then they show you who all your relatives my bay.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
Right, those who have also taken the test and at
about you. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. And I
knew from talking with California cr ibink that dad was
a popular spirm downer, but they had told me that
I was one of the older ones, you know. I
was like, sure, I'm sure this will be happening, but
it was still newer at this time. This was like
two thousand and eighteen, and so you know, you just
(20:52):
don't know what you don't know. So we go on
vacation and my mom is actually with me and she's like, hey, Eve,
I actually think those are your half siblings. Like, you know,
look at like the degree in which you're related, and
it could be like a different each number is for
something different, and so then I was like, oh my gosh.
So then I'm like, you know, on social media, and
(21:14):
I'm sending the messages through the platform and I connected
with one and bless his sweet little heart. He is
from my area where I grew up, and he was like, no,
I know who you know our dad is and I
was like, no, no, no, that's our mom's doctor that
did the insemination, Steve Donner when I six from Oregon.
(21:34):
He's our biological father. But I don't want to project
my story onto you guys, so I'm going to have
him do that DNA test and then you guys can
figure out if y'all want a relationship. And honestly, I
just thought he was love you, Andrew, but a redneck
that just wasn't very smart. And so that was that one.
And then I kept going down, you know, the list
of connecting others siblings, and then I came up with
(21:57):
one who wasn't on social media, but I found him
on LinkedIn and it was late at night. I messaged
him and was like, hey, are you the Adam on
twenty three and me? And he's like yes. I was like,
I need to talk to you, and he's like, well,
I think it'd be kind of hard to explain to
my wife why I need to get out of bed
to call another woman. I was like, oh, to totally
(22:17):
get that. I just think I'm like, you're half sibling,
so just call me tomorrow and my phone immediately rain
and he's like, okay, you have my attention. Yeah, impulsivity
was not my future of that night, but yeah, he
is the one that I talked to you, and I
thought that you know so much of when you're donor
conceived or you're non parent expected result, there's always someone
(22:40):
that is delivering that news right or putting the pieces
together when it comes out of these platforms. I was like,
we're donor conceived and he's like, no, there's no way.
I look like my dad. That's our white story. I
have a brother. Okay, so we go this whole thing
and I'm like, all right, and you.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Just thought he was in denial.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
I thought he was in denial. I mean, and most
suppose people are right like this stream on the internet
and like this is weird. So I was like, okay,
so if you are my first cousin, and that means
that your uncle is my biological father, is your uncle
Steve Shoul And he said no, my uncle is Kim mcmaury's.
And my world stopped because Kim mcmaury's is doctor Kim
(23:21):
mcmoury's and was my mom's fertility doctor. And at that
time I knew it was like everything just kind of
made sense, even like the little red flags that I've
been seeing before, like the timeline's not matching up. And
then it was wow, like I know that people lie
and DNA doesn't lie, and it was just starting all
(23:42):
over again, and it was the truth.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
After you hung up the phone, What was going through
your head.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
A little bit like when I was sixteen years old,
of that moment of I am onto something very big
that is going to impact more than just myself. I
remember literally downing my glass of wine and deciding all
over again because my mom was upstairs watching a movie
with my in laws. And my choice was to pretend
(24:11):
like I never discovered this and continue to live a
fairy tale life with my dad and my mom and
just pretend like it never.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
Happens, your second dad stave yep, my.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
Second dad, or to go right upstairs, which is what
I did, like I was sixteen years old, and tell
her again that my real biological father was her fertility doctor.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
In that moment, did you think, oh, maybe there was
a mistake or straight away you knew that it had
been a deliberate.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Deceit straight away. I knew, how did you know one
of the half siblings I connected with was thirteen years older,
and that was kind of my big indicator. The one
that I had just spoken to was older. And so
it's kind of like piecing these things together of you know,
that timeline didn't work. And again, I mean people lie,
(25:02):
DNA doesn't lie. It's hard to have a level of
cognitive dissonance. Whenever the DNA is staring straight at you.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Your mom must have fained. I have stated, how did
Stave react? Because you had to break then you see him?
Speaker 2 (25:14):
So actually I didn't tell him until weeks later because
I think there was a small part of me that
was really hoping that it wasn't true. There was also
that I knew there was not going to be the
fairy tale, There was not going to be the relationship
because I was the one that was protecting the secret,
and without truth and transparency, there was never going to
(25:37):
be an authentic relationship with my real biological father if
I was keeping a secret. I waited until I knew
that that DNA test the result to ron was there
the commercial DNA test and then I called him and
I told him, and it was the hardest part of
this entire process. But it was like a daddy wound
just being like ripped open again. I was so afraid
of rejection. And even though I knew that nothing would
(25:59):
undo the thirteen years of his building this relationship, I
was still so worried because so much, you know, I
initiated this relationship and it was wrong. There was so
much guilt. And I told him and we just cried
and cried and cried, and at the very end of it,
he said, you know, it changes some things, but it
doesn't change the fact that you're my daughter, and it's
all I need to do, you know. That was it
(26:21):
was like, and I support you know, whatever you do,
but I think that you know, for me, I was
so shocked by it. But was more shocking is that
you know, in talking to my attorneys that it wasn't
a crime. And so how is it that we know
that this is morally wrong, but this is not legally wrong.
And so when morality doesn't equal legality, what do you
(26:42):
do with it?
Speaker 1 (26:43):
So hold on one second, it wasn't legally wrong for
your mother's fertility doctor to go into another room masturvating
a cup, come back and put the DNA of someone
she hasn't consented to being inseminated with into your mother's
(27:03):
body without ever telling her or getting her consent.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Correct, there was no civil laws of it, and there
was no criminal cause of action for this. Remember earlier
when I talked about anonymity breeds fraud. He can hide
behind an anonymous sperm donor, even though the informed consent
was for donor one oh six from California Crybank. And
the answer is because, quite frankly, we do not have
(27:28):
laws against it.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
So did you confront this doctor? What did you do?
Speaker 2 (27:33):
It? Did? So? I've also known this man of pretty
much my entire life. You know, he is a pillar
in our community. People love him, you know, he's one
of the very few doctors in East Texas that was
an OV. You know. Everybody loves him. And I did
everything by writing told him that I am his through
(27:54):
commercial study testing, I am his daughter, and he wrote
me back, just the smoke and mirror show. You know,
it appears that you would have inherited some of my genetics.
And I was like, yeah, dumb ass, fifty percent of
them like kind of know that works, and then he
went on this whole thing of like, oh, I used
a mylex cup in this syringe, and in my donor program,
you know, there were five successful pregnancies, three ended with
(28:17):
you know, spontaneous miscarriage, and two offspring. And I was like, well,
that's funny because I'm looking at commercial DNA testing and
I can see that I have five half siblings. So
immediately I knew he was lying yeah. And then I
was like, okay, well you want to play, let's go.
So it just became more correspondence where he would say
something and then I would poke a hole in it.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
He fucked with the wrong woman.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
He fucked with the wrong woman. He did, and he
knows that now and it was a hard lesson for
him to learn, but by god, did he learn it.
And I really think that he thought I would just
buy as bullshit, and like maybe I wasn't smart enough,
or you know, I think he so used to being
the authority and where he lives that you know, my god,
no woman would challenge him.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
There was one line that was so cringe, you know,
it was it was a pleasure to be able to
deliver a baby girl to my mother and my father,
and you know I should just be grateful. Well then
I'm like, okay, well I want medical information because now, like,
not only did you fuck with me, but it's now
it's my kid. Now Mama Bear is mad. There's medical information.
I would have made different medical decisions on my child.
(29:21):
He didn't need all of those exploratory surgeries had we
have known what it was in the first place. So
then he sends me this response of like, my I
call him social kids. He says, his kids, his known kids.
You know, they're all iron men and they're doctors. And
it was just a brag list. And I was like, well,
you forgot the fact that you had cancer like melanoma,
or that my brother had a brain tumor, like it
(29:42):
was nothing a substance. So we just kind of kept going,
and I'm pissed, right, but there was still part of me,
like I still wanted to know him. I still Pollyanna
was like, you know what, we could totally work through this,
and your dad the doctor the doctor. I was like,
we could totally work through this, and the only way
to do that was to level the playing field. So
(30:02):
I told him, I said, I am going to be
going to the Texas Legislature and I'm going to be
lobbying to make this a crime because if this is
the thinking at the time, it was wrong and it
needs to be criminalized. So let's make this bigger than ourselves.
What a beautiful way for us to do this together
and to be able to share that message. And we
could and we could do it like if you really cared.
(30:24):
And then, of course I never heard from them.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
So did he try to claim that your mom knew
about it and that it was his sperm? Or he
admitted that, yeah, I just used mine, Because why did
he ever tell you why?
Speaker 2 (30:38):
So he said that he was mixing it. And he
said that he was a sperm donor when he was
in college, so that would have been about twelve thirteen
years before I was conceived. And so he went to
his former medical school and he got his old Dustys
sperm vials, drove them to his clinic in East Texas,
(30:59):
and that is what he used because Donor one oh
six wasn't performing like it should have been.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
How many children did he father this way? Or you
don't know the.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Truth is we don't know. I currently have fourteen half siblings,
three of those are his social children.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
When you say social children, you mean children that he
can saved with his partner.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
Correct, that are known socially as.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
His And how did the rest feel about it? How
did they all find out.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
Same way commercial DNA testing. Several of them saw me
on TV and saw his picture and saw me, and
I was like, whoa, I kind of look like that.
The mcmory's features are pretty defining. I am like kind
of outlier in the sense that I'm not over six
feet tall, but all of my siblings are between like
(31:48):
six feet and like six six even the women are
like six to six two, very tall. I'm just like
the little, like five seven short chihuahua. I'm just really loud.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
You were the rumpt.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
It literally like you have those like this and pictures
and there's I'm.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
Seven is not that small, but if everyone else is
six foot two, then it's see.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
Us hall in a few we actually found So I
connected with some former people that worked with him during
the time, and I was able to get a pretty
accurate historical context of just how large his program was.
So he was seeing between fifty to sixty women a day,
and they couldn't determine the percentage of those that were
(32:31):
infertility patients, but they said that it was a lot.
One of them found out what he was doing and quit.
So yeah, they kind of pieced together a lot of it.
I went through yearbooks in the area and, like I said,
defining features, and then people would send me names like hey,
this person kind of looks like you. And that's how
we found several of them, is me reaching out to
(32:53):
them saying, this is kind of weird, but I think
maybe my sibling, can I send you a DNA test?
And so that's what I ultimately did.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
When you were in public, you did an interview with
the Kinnifas Program twenty twenty. What was the reaction in
your community? Where was this pillar of the community. He's
a religious man, I.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
Believe very religious.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
Did he stop practicing? Was he shunned? What happened?
Speaker 2 (33:18):
His preacher called me that was the first thing that happened. Wow, No,
he wasn't. There was a big service where you know,
he was just doing the Lord's work. And I should
just be grateful because I have his wonderful genetics, and
I have a duty to honor my mother and my father.
Except that only fits in that context. Because also you said,
(33:40):
you're not my father, and I was the devil. I
was the one that was spitting in the eye of
the proverbial monster, and his tribe circled around him to
protect him, and he was just doing the lord's work
and that was it. And it was honestly the most
disappointing thing to see my community come out and support
(34:03):
this man in that capacity when not only do you
have evidence of it, I am the evidence that for
people to actually tell me that I should just be
grateful to be alive, and me to continuously say over
and over again, I am not talking about being grateful
to be alive. I am talking about the deception around
my conception. And that's what happens so much is people
(34:26):
just immediately go to the end result, you know, they
want that silver lining and that projection of their uncomfortableness
back on to me. Most of the community, I would
say ninety percent was behind him. He did not retire,
he continued to practice very successfully. With my half brother.
I ended up filing a medical board complaint and it
(34:48):
took the Texas Medical Board years to even hear this complaint,
and they ultimately and of course Abrad Blank's COVID for everything.
They ultimately ended up voting to take his license. He
immediately filed a restraining order against the Medical Board and
a lawsuit, and the lawsuit stated they did not have
jurisdiction to revoke his license because of a statute of
(35:08):
limitation understandard level of care. The Medical Board and the
Attorney General were saying that this is not standard level
of care, this is unethical conduct and behavior which does
not carry a seven year statute of limitations, and so
the judge is not going to hear details of the case.
All they are deciding is whether the Medical Board has
jurisdiction to do this or not. It is still in
(35:32):
the court system. He has lost twice, but he keeps
appealing it. So it will go up to the Supreme
Court of Texas. They will send it back down to
the Thirteenth Court of Appeal, and that judge has already
told him from day one that her ruling still stands
and it is a very expensive and long journey for
him to get his license revoked. So at this point,
(35:53):
his only accountability as attorney fees.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
So he's still practicing.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
He has since retired within the last year, but has
a forced early retirement for a seventy something year old man.
His license is intact.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
Well, of your other siblings and their mothers who were
all de saved, were they as pissed as you or
did they want you to let it go?
Speaker 2 (36:18):
Both? So it's interesting. In my sibling pod, I feel
like we kind of have this difference between the females
and the males. Most of the males are like whatever,
Like you know, it could have been so rude, like
could have been like the janitor or someone off the street.
The women are not okay with it. But also he
(36:38):
was some of their doctor, and so he delivered their kids. Oh,
he did their passengers, he did their breast exams. One
of our sisters we sent a DNA test to she
had an emergency surgery that our brother did on her.
She woke up to the email confirming the DNA results.
(36:59):
She was our sister, and then she had to when
our brother came in for the follow up, tell him, hey,
you know what, you have to transfer my care because
you're my brother.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
So one of your brothers is a door.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
With my biological father. He took over the practice.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
Is that one of his social kids, that's.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
One of the social kids. For them, they obviously feel
very strongly about it. But then also they are living
in that community that supports him, so they are not
known because of the social implications that it has, and
to have that level of feedback all of the time
is difficult for them. But then you also have the
(37:36):
different dynamics that's in their nuclear family. For them, they
have the infertile recipient parent who is still alive, so
they are also protective of that relationship. So they don't
want to socially come out and say that not only
their donor deceived, but to reveal the secret of infertility
of their fathers.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
So there's you know, it's a real spectrum of different
situations and different emotions and different probably points on that
journey of understanding and acceptance. I like that you just
went straight to rage such a mood.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
Yeah, oh yes, no, it was you a fucket.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
After this shortbreak, you'll discover how Eve intersected with cereal
sperm donor Jonathan Meyer from the Netflix series The Man
with a Thousand Kids. The place that I obviously learned
about you, and even this idea of fertility fraud is
from the Netflix documentary The Man with a Thousand Children
(38:34):
can you briefly for people who haven't seen that, because
when things changed for another group of women who'd been
the victim of fertility fraud, they found you and you
really helped them bring this person to justice. Can you
tell the story of Jonathan Mayer?
Speaker 2 (38:49):
So, I guess I should preface it with how they
found me. I have been a part of changing eleven
of the thirteen state laws in the United States that
criminalize and offers civil causes of actions for fertility fraud.
And so there was this lovely Australian couple who read
an article about me, and so they connected with me
(39:10):
and then got me connected with the other moms, and
that was I believe at the end of twenty nineteen,
maybe early twenty twenty, and they just wanted information of
you know, what can we do, what is the legal landscape?
Is there something we can do?
Speaker 1 (39:23):
Because they had also been desaved, They.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
Had also been deceived by serial sperm donor, and so
Jonathan had infiltrated one of the largest sperm banks and
eleven of the sperm banks, and he was also donating
on the private market and doing freelance, and so you know,
they were having hundreds of house siblings and they just
wanted him to stop.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
And why did they want him to stop? Can you
explain the danger with unregulation and fertility fraud? What's the
danger for them?
Speaker 2 (39:53):
In particular is the biodiversity concern. What happens when you
don't know that your donor conceived, you hook up with
a half sibling, and the level of accidental incest that
is the concern, especially when you're working in a demographic
like Maingley the Netherlands where it's smaller and you're more
populous with his children and they don't know.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
And how many children Haddie fathered and in the Netherlands
for example, I don't remember.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
Exactly what it was in the Netherlands, but.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
It was like one hundred. It was like close to hundreds,
up to one thousand all over the world, maybe more right.
Speaker 2 (40:26):
Because you know, I mean the math with it, which
I feel like is what a lot of the media
is like really latched onto you. We can look at
just Cryo salone where he's going to Copenhagen once a
month for four.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
Days is a sperm bank in the sperm Yeah in demok.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
So that's roughly two hundred donations and for him as
he is brags, you know, fifteen strawls of sperm per ejaculation,
and if every straw makes a baby, that's the potential
three thousand. Now, he has also come out and said
that he has spent fifty thousand hours donating. So like
(41:03):
the math, ain't math in here, because if he spent
fifty thousand hours donating, then is it potentially fifty thousand
children and not every single one's going to make a baby?
The math and math and I either way. So when
he says, you know, I only have five hundred and fifty.
Speaker 1 (41:19):
Children, there are laws about this right to prevent accidental
incest and birth defects that could result from that, as
well as the moral implications of accidentally hooking up with
a half sibling. And I think in the Netherlands there's
a limit on you're only allowed twenty five and then
you can't donate anymore.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
Per the banks. But that's not including freelance.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
Private market, or different countries or.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
Different countries, because what ultimately ends up happening is, let's
you know, he hits his limit in one country, they
export it to another country and the number goes to zero.
And so that is not something that is transparent in
this process, because that may change how you think about this. Right,
Like my assumption would be when I have a sperm
donor and you say that it's twenty five is the limit?
(42:05):
I would think twenty five worldwide. It's like, yeah, read
the fine print part, except there's no fine print. But
every time it is to zero. So when he does that,
and he does it as an alias, or he's doing
it on the private market, they're not counting those. It's
just deidentified sperm. It's just you know, going to clinic
to clinic to clinic to clinic.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
And why Eve, why do these men do it?
Speaker 2 (42:27):
Million dollar question. I'm going to put my therapist Haat
on for a second, and you know, like I do
psycho educational evaluations, and if we look at these group
of men as a whole, I definitely think that, you know,
we could consider a personality disorder on the DSM somewhere
in access to you. Isn't narcissism. This desire is an addiction.
(42:51):
You know, the way that they talk about their successes
and it's a number and it's a competition, and the
way that they just work in general, like making the
fake profiles look really bad. So their real profiles with
an alias look really really good. Like it's very manipulative.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
Wait, explain. What the documentary discovered is that there's a
group of Jonathan was part of these group of men
who were almost gamified. Oh they were. They were gamifying
this idea of who can make the most babies in
the world. Yes, and so they would compete with each other.
They would keep score and what do you mean about
they would make fake profiles.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
So there's lots of different platforms when we're talking about
the private market or freelance, known donors, you know, there's
lots of different names for it. These men would make
a Facebook group and they were the admin and the moderators.
They'll let recipients in, but they won't let competition in,
and so the other ones like make a baby now
(43:49):
or you know, every country has kind of like a
different platform. Think of it as like Craigslist, backpage ads,
kind of like that type of thing, and it's like
it's for this, and so they would make profiles that
would be all aliases, but one profile would be like,
you know, their best that picture of Jonathan, you know,
looking cute as.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
A baby or as an adult.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
Yeah, that one, but then they would make fake ones
that are really really bad, like you know, misspelled and
all the characteristics, so that they knew that they weren't
looking for it. Because when you are going through these
profiles and you go through twenty really bad ones and
then you see Jonathan, you're like.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
Oh, oh my gosh, all right, and that's why so
many women would choose him.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
But all of them did this, and so you know,
I think of like Simon Watson, Joe Donor, these aren't
even these guys real names, except well Jonathan obviously. Then
they compete, then they have their moderators of the group,
and then it's just successes. They post pregnancy tests and
they brag about someone that they got pregnant, and then
they create their own little mom group. But they don't
(44:49):
have any of the responsibilities of being, you know, a
father figure. Very few of them had donor contracts, and
if anybody would speak out of turn, all they do
is threaten and say, well, I'm just going to sue
you for custody and then you use your kid happy time.
So women, you know, are like, well, okay, I I
definitely don't want you to now, you know, be co
(45:13):
parenting with me, and so it's it's really manipulative in
that sense, but it's dangerous.
Speaker 1 (45:18):
How do you stop him?
Speaker 2 (45:19):
It was hard in the Netherlands. The moms were very
much feeling was what I felt, the duty to inform,
because how can you possibly consent or assent and if
there's information that would change the way in which you
made an informed decision, you need to know about it.
(45:40):
So this duty to warn and inform, how can you
do that when in the Netherlands you can't name him?
It was just Dutch donor, Dutch done or Dutch donor.
Speaker 1 (45:49):
Why couldn't he be named.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
Because that's part of some policy, like you can't out
them in the media for some reason.
Speaker 1 (45:57):
So how can anyone avoid using him again if they
don't know his name?
Speaker 2 (46:02):
And wow, you cannot make an informed decision because no
one's going to think, oh, let me google Dutch donor? Well,
which Dutch donor?
Speaker 1 (46:10):
And also, how do you make a lure in one
country that applies to every country.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
And the answer is you don't. So for us, the
very first thing was, and this was my experience with everything,
what do you do when you are existing in a
legal landscape that has literally nothing. You don't have sperm
banks that are required to talk to each other. Every
country is so different. You have some countries that really
(46:35):
have this buttoned up, but because of their stricter laws,
it actually pushes people to go underground to these known
donors and makes them more susceptible to the predatory behavior
of these serial donors just out of necessity. Right then
you have the wild wild West like us in America,
where it's like what laws. My first thing was we
got to start really small, and the first thing that
(46:56):
we can do to meet the first goal is to
get his name out there. That was, let's talk to
the New York Times and you guys come forward, because
in America you can name him. And that's what we did.
As soon as he was named, than he was linked
with all of you know, Dutch donor and it was
all put together and then notifying Cryos International and hoping
(47:18):
that they could somehow remove all of his straws that
they had sent all over the world. So that was
the first part. The second part was the moms had
been working with Donor Kind in the Netherlands since like
twenty seventeen, which is an organization there, and the moms
ended up coming up with this group called Moms on
a Mission, and that was kind of like you know,
our mission and you know, having all of these pieces
(47:40):
fit together to figure out how to stop him. So
the Brave Moms took him to court and he represented himself.
The argument was like listen, he's it's kind of like
a danger to society at this point, like he has
this amount of kids that we know of. Our kids
go to school together, they live, right, we're neighbors all
the time. Like this is wild. So he comes in
(48:01):
and like you seeing the documentary with the story, like
it's a oh judge, you don't understand. It's a new concepts,
like they just need a special symbol to be branded
stood their name, and like my children are so smart,
like they won't hook up with each other, blah blah.
But me, he just ran his mouth like an idiot.
Speaker 1 (48:16):
That was chilling when he said they should be marked
on social media.
Speaker 2 (48:20):
Yep, that it would be like this pride like verification. Yeah, exactly,
it's a new concept.
Speaker 1 (48:26):
Oh my god. So he's like a cult leader, but
it's also eugenics. It's terrifying.
Speaker 2 (48:32):
It is terrifying. And then he has years of these
YouTube videos of like him basically seems like he's like
parenting his children.
Speaker 1 (48:39):
Talking about his philosophies on everything from politics to the environment,
to being anti woke, to listening to your ancestors and
being grateful to your biological parents.
Speaker 2 (48:51):
Brainwashing cool like right, the judge was he was selling bullshit,
but she wasn't buying, and so she was like, you know,
you do this again and you're going to get fined
one hundred thousand euro.
Speaker 1 (49:03):
It's what it was per donation.
Speaker 2 (49:06):
Yes, you know. My favorite part was when you know
his like what, I'm a good father, Like I show
up at birthdays, I show up at this and she's like,
it's not possible for you to attend every graduation and
every birthday and every life Like when you have this many.
Speaker 1 (49:20):
Children, you have hundreds and hundreds of thousands and thousands
of children.
Speaker 2 (49:23):
I mean, the reality is like he's only gonna admit
to what we know, right, And it's just like my
biological father, he only admitted to what I said. And
so it's like every time anyone comes up, it's going
to keep going and keep climbing and keep climbing, keep climbing,
and we saw this with the Netflix documentary Our Father,
where the number of those half siblings from Donald Climb
(49:44):
kept climbing climbing after the duty to inform and warn
had been out there and people recognize, Oh my god,
I think that I may have been victimized to you.
And that is exactly what we will be seeing.
Speaker 1 (49:56):
What's Jonathan doing now? What's happened since the documentary came out?
Do you know is he still trying to donate? I
kind of imagine he'd just go, oh okay, I'll stop.
Speaker 2 (50:04):
Who knows well, he has been giving me some shout
outs on his YouTube channel. He thinks I am the mastermind,
so you know, I'll put on my best Taylor Swift,
I'll take that. Yeah, that crown. You know, he's threatening
a lawsuit for slander and just he's spiraling, is what.
I think. He had an opportunity to participate and to
(50:27):
you know, give his side of the story, but he didn't.
So I think he's just sitting in the woods making
YouTube videos right now. That's all from what I can see.
Speaker 1 (50:36):
Kamer is my boyfriend.
Speaker 2 (50:37):
Yeah, exactly, that's right.
Speaker 1 (50:39):
Eve. You are a warrior for women. I wanted to
ask you one more question when I was watching you
and the other donor deceived people fighting going to Capitol Hill,
trying to get national legislation, trying to get people to
understand what this medical rape is. Essentially women being impregnated
(50:59):
with sperm without their consent or being defrauded. You're essentially
arguing against your own existence, and I imagine a lot
of people use that as a way to try and
shut you up, like the preacher did and those people
in your community. How do you feel about that? How
do you reconcile that?
Speaker 2 (51:16):
Well? Usually what I say is I am not talking
about being grateful to be alive or my existence in general.
Speaker 1 (51:23):
Life, Oh, wishing you'd never been born.
Speaker 2 (51:25):
Which I would never be born. I'm not debating the
facts of that. I am talking about the deception around conception,
the lack of enforcing informed consent, and how in this
particular instance, morality does not equate legality, And so separating
those two things I think are very important because it
(51:46):
is very easy to conflate those two things. What is
it like, the end to the means means to the end, right, Yeah,
it's hard to not be able to look at that
and say, but you're here and I am so grateful
to be alive, but I can have opposite feelings about
this and hold space for that. I'm grateful to be alive,
but I am very upset about the deception around my conception.
(52:07):
And if I truly believe that we need to leave
this world better than we found it, I need to
find the purpose in my pain, and I need to
do it not only for the rest of the people
and the women who have been deceived, but also, you know,
at a very basic level, just to be an example
from my girls, that it's not always the tragedy that
happens to you, it's what you do with it, and
(52:29):
that is empowerment.
Speaker 1 (52:30):
What a note to end on. You're amazing. It is
amazing to me that Eve might have got her whole
life not knowing the truth about her conception if she
hadn't done that thing that teenagers do, which is snoop.
I guess she probably would have found out when she
did some of those DNA tests after her son got sick.
(52:52):
But the fact that that snooping led her to Steve,
who for years she believed was her birth father, only
to have another grenade launched into her life and her
heart when her son became ill and she found out
that he actually wasn't her father. It reminded me of
that story about Tony Abbott. It came out that an
old girlfriend of his had had a son and had
(53:13):
adopted him out and had never told Tony Abbott that
she was pregnant. And then this guy who turned out
to be a cameraman at Parliament House who'd filmed Tony
Abbot many times in his political career, turned out to
be this child, and he tracked down his biological mother,
who explained who his biological father was, and it was
(53:34):
in the press at the time. You know, Tony Abbot
handled it really well, and it was quite a beautiful
story and everyone loved, you know, the coincidence of the
fact that they'd been working in the same workplace without
even realizing they were father and son. And then a
little while later it turned out that actually Tony Abbot
wasn't the father. There was a different biological father, and
the mother had actually just got it wrong. I really
(53:57):
remember feeling how poignant that situation was, because they'd done
interviews and spoken about how they were sort of forging
this relationship, and Tony Abbott had three daughters and then
he had this son, and it was just a really interesting,
quite beautiful story at a time when Tony Abbott was
not a very popular guy. And then I remember wondering,
how do you unpack that? How do you even find
(54:20):
a place to file that in your heart when you
thought someone was maybe your biological parent and then they weren't.
I was so relieved that Eve has stayed friends with Steve,
but then what do you do about the fact that
your actual biological father is an asshole. I'll be honest,
I've never really thought about fertility fraud before the Netflix series,
(54:42):
but now I cannot look away. I'm thinking about it
a lot, and it turns out there are a lot
of men out there who were, I don't know, narcissistic psychopaths,
men who are doing this to women and families every day,
and it's really struck a nerve. I think that's why
this show on Netflix became number one all over the world,
because there's this idea about bodily autonomy, the fact that
(55:04):
someone can either give you their sperm under false pretenses
or put their sperm in your body without you consenting
to it, and it's not even a crime in many
states in America. It's just wild. You know. MoMA MIA's
entire core purpose as a business and as a media
company is to make the world a better place for
women and girls, and we're going to look into fertility
(55:26):
fraud some more so. If you have a story about
fertility fraud or conception deception, please reach out and let
us know. We'll put a link in the show notes
to an email address that you can reach out, either
anonymously if you want to tell us your story under
a pseudonym, or under your own name. We want to
continue shining a light and exploring this crime. We'll also
(55:47):
put a link to Eve's website where you can learn
more about her and all the amazing work she does.
I love her. I know she's a therapist. I think
I want her to be my therapist. Is that unethical?
I'm a little bit obsessed with her. Thank you for listening.
No Filter's executive producer is niam A Brown, another woman
I'm obsessed with, and our audio producer is Leah Porges,
(56:08):
who you know I'm obsessed with. I may have Friedman.
Be safe out their friends and watch out for each other. Okay,
You're listening to a MoMA Mia podcast. Mama Maya acknowledges
the traditional owners of land and waters that this podcast
is recorded on from Mamma Maya. You're listening to No
Filter and I'm mea Friedman. How many times can you
find out life changing news about your dad? For Eve Wiley,
the answer is three times, and it was about three
(00:33):
different men. Eve Wiley has had three fathers in her lifetime.
One of them sadly passed away when she was seven.
One of them is a great guy, but he wasn't
who she thought he was, And one of them was
an egomaniacal monster. If you watch the Netflix series The
Man with a Thousand Kids that told the story of
(00:54):
cereal sperm donor Jonathan Meyer, you might recognize Eve's name.
She wasn't impregnated by Jonathan, but she helped try and
stop him from harming other women, more women, and from
doing more damage to the hundreds, probably thousands of children
he's already conceived. But Jonathan isn't the only guy who's
trying to superminate the world. There are more serial sperm
(01:16):
doners like him out there who, for whatever reason, I
obsessed with the idea of impregnating women under false pretenses
for their own twisted reasons, and nobody knows that better
than eight. If you were seven when your father died,
how old were you when you discovered that he wasn't
(01:37):
actually your biological father.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
I was sixteen years old when I was going through
my mom's emails. She was a school nurse at my school,
and so I kind of had this little habit where
I would go unto her emails and I would find
all the juicy gossip on my code words or if
you know, maybe a teacher sent an email that like
I had a bad grade or something. You know. It
(02:00):
was management for myself, was what it was. And that's
when I found the emails of my mom email in California,
Cara Bank, and I saw my birth date on it.
My thought was, you know, from a small town, my
grandpa has cows that my mom was doing something for
like artificial insemination for the bulls.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
That wouldn't have been most people's first thought, but I
see why that was relevant for you.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
It was very relevant. But as soon as I saw
my birth date, I knew in that exact moment that
I was the juicy gossip within the coport. So that's
when I found out that I was doing or conceived.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
When someone finds something life changing via snooping, there is
a dilemma because you've got to admit to the snooping
to be able to confront the person about the thing
you've discovered. What did you do next?
Speaker 2 (02:47):
It was late at night. What I did exactly was
I ended up playing SIMS and creating a lot of
babies in my son's game. Interesting kind of playing it
out there. But I went to bed and I woke
up the next morning and my mom was in the
bathroom getting ready, and I dis barged in and I
was like, mom, I know that Doug isn't my dad.
And I just remember her looking at me in the
reflection of the mirror, just turning around. She's like, what
(03:10):
are you talking about? And she starts bawling. And at
the time at this like, you know, it's just a
naive sixteen year old. I was excited, you know. For me,
I didn't understand the complexities of donor conception, you know,
in a social sense, but also in an ethical sense.
For me, I was like, I still have, you know,
a dad. I probably have half siblings and so it
(03:31):
was very like, you know, Pollyanna about this, and that's
how I kind of confronted her, and she did a
really good job of you know, Eve, you were seven
when your dad died. They told us not to ever
tell you and it wasn't going to be important. And
she brought up this green folder and it was every
print out from an email that she had ever spoken
to anyone on like Yahoo messenger boards, not to like
(03:55):
date myself. You know, it was before Facebook, and you know,
her medical records and you know, all of the things
to where she really was creating this breadcrumb trowel for me.
And for me that was really meaningful because I could
actually see it that that she really was going to
tell me. She just didn't know how to tell me.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
I imagine there were lots of different feelings. You say you
were quite Pollyanna about it, but I imagine you're losing Doug,
who you thought was your father, essentially your stepfather at
age seven. That must have been pretty traumatic for you
at that age. Did it feel a little bit like
a new phase of grief in terms of losing him
again at sixteen?
Speaker 2 (04:31):
You don't know if at sixteen I could wrap my
head around that part. You know, there definitely was a
lot of grief and there was a level of trauma
of not having you know, that father figure growing up
right eventually, But for me, I think it was just
trying to look at it in more of a positive sense. Now,
(04:53):
Remember at this time, I was not aware that the
donor could be like, no, I don't want to have
contact with you, because in my head that was never
a thing. It wasn't until later where I started to
realize that, you know, the social constructs of this could
be very different. With that new information. I think that
there was, you know, a sense of hesitancy on my
(05:13):
part and fear that I may be rejected, and so
it did kind of like snowball into other types of feelings.
But that morning, in that moment, I was excited, but
completely naive and completely unaware of what it even meant.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
Because I guess in a way, you lost Doug again,
but then also your father was alive again because you
hadn't even met him and he was out there somewhere right.
What a lot of emotions it is.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
And is I think it's one of those times too,
where you know, I was having opposite feelings about something.
You know. I was excited, but to your point, there
was a level of grief. But then, you know, growing
up in my nuclear family, I was this blonde hair,
blue green eyed little girl. My little sister, who was
fourteen months younger than me, had this olive skin complexion,
(06:02):
dark brown hair, dark brown eyes. I looked like no
one in my family. There was no familiarity, and so
I was constantly teased for being adopted. And so there
is something called the thought unknown, where I always knew
there was a secret. I just didn't know that I
was the secret until then. So then being able to
(06:23):
justify and everything makes sense to have an actual reason
for it instead of wondering what it was.
Speaker 1 (06:29):
Was your sister the biological child of Doug and your mom.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
She was When my parents initially went to their fertility doctor,
my dad had Verico's fans around his testes, and so
the recommendation was to get a surgery to get us
taken care of. So he did that they still aren'
getting pregnant. So then the next step was to do
artificial insemination by an anonymous ferm donor. When I was born,
my parents were pregnant four months later, and so it
(06:56):
could be that maybe there just wasn't enough time after
the surgery of the reversal of the surgery. So she
is the biological child of my dad, Doug.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
So how did things feel between you and her? Learning
that you were not actually sis, were you were half sisters?
You had different fathers.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
This one caught me by surprise. I didn't think that
it would impact her, and that was just you know,
me being shortsighted. But when we sat my sister down
and we told her, she started crying. And the only
thing she said before she ran out of the room
was well, least you have a dad, And that was
it that hurt, because then it was like, yeah, now
(07:34):
I feel guilt, and wow, this is getting really complicated.
And you know, there wasn't a book for me to
go read. There wasn't a blog yet. There wasn't anyone
that I even knew that was donor conceived except for
the cows at my grandma's house, And so I didn't
have a north star to be able to have some
sort of expectations of how this should go and how
(07:56):
this could go. Even when I called California Cryobank. At
this time, no one had made a connection with their donor,
so they didn't really have any good information for me
either on how to proceed with this, so it was
very lonely, and then it became a thing of what,
I don't want to talk about this in front of
my sister because it all make her sad, which only
reinforced that loneliness.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
In Australia, there are laws that came in a few
decades ago. I think that sperm donors could only be
anonymous up until the age of any donor children that
had been conceived were eighteen, and then those children had
a legal right to find them. What are the laws,
I imagine it probably differs state by state. But did
you know that you would be able to find your
(08:38):
the identity of your donor or? Was that tricky?
Speaker 2 (08:41):
It was tricky because it is literally the wild wild
West here in good old us of A. It's entirely
left up to the donors in the clinics, And so
at the time that I was conceived, the idea of
an open donor versus a closed donor wasn't even a
topic of conversation. The recommendation in the eighties was don't ask,
(09:02):
don't tell, like they don't need to know, it's not important.
You're the parent and that's it. So there wasn't a
level of education to educate on the donor be canceive
experience or about how important genetic identity is. And then
even now I just feel like in the last you know,
ten years, the sperm banks here in clinics are just
(09:23):
now starting to realize, you know, maybe anonymous donation isn't
great because here anonymity breaths fraud when you're able to
exist under the cloak of anonymity. And it wasn't until
the you know, invention of commercial dnate testing that is
really blowing the lid off of those So as far
as the being the laws here, there's just pure recommendations
(09:44):
per the American Society of Reproductive Medicine.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Will you angradate your mom that she hadn't told you
and that she had no intention of telling you?
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Yes and no. I was angry that I was live
to you, But when she pulled out the green folder,
all of that kind of melted away because I could
see the amount of hours that she poured into this,
and I believed her when she said I didn't know
how to tell you, I didn't when to tell you.
But I knew that if I did all of this
(10:13):
research and had all this information, that you would believe
me that I have been doing this for a very
long time. And so I think that that very much
helped bridge the gap between those emotions for me, because
I could very much empathize with not being able to
tell a seven year old whose father just passed away, well,
but that's not like your real dad, because let's go
talk about, you know, how babies are made now. I mean,
(10:35):
there's no way, like I totally.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
It's a lot of conversation, yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
Being seven, being like like just understanding developmentally, you know,
abstract thinking. And it didn't seem as appropriate at that
time to explain grief, death and artificial insamination.
Speaker 1 (10:50):
And your mom must have felt protective of Doug and
his relationship with you, and I can say that I
can understand why she did it. How did you find
the identity of your Dina? What did you learn in
that green folder?
Speaker 2 (11:03):
So in the green folder I had my mom's medical records,
and in there it said the date that I was
conceived with Donor one oh six from California Crowdbank. And
this was in the doctor's handwriting. So that was confirmation
of my conception. And my mom had one sheet of
paper and it had California Crow Bank all the donors listed,
and it was just one line donor number, physical characteristics,
(11:27):
level of education, and interest, like just very limited, and
you could see like not this one, not this one,
maybe this one, and then she circled one and this one,
and then there were letters to like Wendy or emails
like Wendy Kramer Single Mothers by Choice organization. I think
at one point there was like maybe a Canadian donor
conception network, different professional organizations, and all of it was like,
(11:51):
I'm just trying to get more information. We knew his
religion was of I Made Butcher, this the Bahai faith,
and so my mom had all of these like communications
with that religious organization. So that was kind of what
was the bulk of the folder. There were also personal
emails and personal stories where she was asked, how do
I tell my daughter you're an adult?
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Now?
Speaker 2 (12:11):
What should I do? What should I not do? That
type of stuff.
Speaker 1 (12:16):
So she'd been trying to track down your donor secretly
all these years.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
Kind of I think that in her very limited way,
she was trying to understand you know what was the
network in the landscape. Donor Sibling registery was not quite
built yet, but that was the only pretty much formal
platform where you could put it in your donor number
and you would hope that the donor would register as
well as other half siblings.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
So ultimately, when she was choosing her donor, she chose
number one hundred and six because he had certain qualities.
He had an interest in film and politics, which she
thought was similar to her and to her husband. And
you tracked him down, you said about making contact with
number one hundred and six, Who did you find?
Speaker 2 (13:00):
I found Steve Shoal and I contacted the Crow Bank.
Their rules at the time were we need the medical
records from the doctor or to confirm, and they also
had their records that were purchasing records from the doctor,
so those things matched up, and they sent kind of
like a questionnaire that was like, let's update your medical records,
(13:21):
not saying like, hey, you have a daughter. And so
that process took about a year because I think eventually
Steve don one of six, who I also call Dad,
he was like, why do y'all need this? And they're like, oh,
because you have a daughter and he was like, I'm
sorry what you know, he was surprised by it. I
(13:41):
think in his head he was like, I'm just doing
this for research.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Well, had he forgotten that he donated spam? Like why
had he donated for money?
Speaker 2 (13:50):
He was in college, easy way to make a bug, like,
you know.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
He'd sort of forgotten about it. He was probably stoned.
It was college, he was high.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
He wasn't exactly, he wasn't bad about it. He's like
Lodu's best life, Like I'm doing it anyways, Like what, oh, yeah,
I remember that vaguely, yeah exactly.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
And where was he in his life when he found
out that you existed.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
So he was a father of three children, and the
youngest one was pretty small, and the oldest one was
like maybe in middle school, So you know, he was
in a phase of life that you know, also was complicated.
He had every ability to be like, oh, he'll no,
this is not going to work, and he didn't. And
I had already written a letter, and I had asked
(14:35):
the sperm bank when he made contact to forward that letter.
I had in my mom's and her folder. I had
read so many stories of people who were just outright
rejected by their biological parent, and it ended up becoming
a fear of mine and I was like, if I
only have one chance, like I want to be able
to convey who I am through a letter, and if
(14:55):
that's all he ever sees and reads, like, maybe that'll
be enough. And we ended up connecting and then it
turned to email. I would forward an email to the
sperm bank, the sperm bank would forward him, and that
was it, and then we cut them out and then
ended up talking on the just like forever. And then
I was living in Austin and college at this time,
and he flew down to meet me for the first time.
(15:16):
What was that Like, Oh, I was amazing. I mean
I was. He came to my apartment and I just
I opened the door and it was just like a
huge hug and just we stayed for hours talking in
my living room and then went to dinner and live
music and it was just catching up on at this
point nineteen years. I think because I didn't I didn't
(15:38):
have any expectations. I didn't know how it was supposed
to go. And because he is who he is, which
is just this like amazing open person and I am
who I am, Like it just worked and it was
that weekend, the first weekend of meeting him, we ran
into a friend, one of my friends on the street,
and just for social clarity, I was like, oh, this
is my dad. And at the end of that he
(16:00):
was like, if you will call me that, I'm okay
with that. And then from that moment one.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
He was dad, and you had three new little siblings.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
I did, but they didn't know yet. They didn't know
until much later.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
Again, it's a tricky conversation with the little kids. So
her dad was high in college and he jumped off
into a cop one day for twenty bucks.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
Yeah, but for him, you know, it's also he had
to tell his wife and then I don't know if
it ever really came up, like you know, while they
were dating, it never really came up. So he had
to tell her. And I totally get this. You know,
as a mother of three myself, I would be pretty
protective too, So I really understood her desire to not
(16:43):
want to tell the kids right away, and so it
took multiple years for them to disclose me to them.
I feel like this is happens in donor conception a
lot with parents that disclose when when they're older and
everybody's nervous and like, oh my gosh, this is going
to go so bad. They're gonna like freak out and
never talk to us again. And they told the kids,
and my sister was like, oh my god, I have
(17:04):
a sister. And then the two boys were like, that's cool.
What's for dinner?
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Yea?
Speaker 2 (17:10):
And my dad's like that's it and they're like yeah,
I mean do we get to like meter or something
like that? Sounds cool? And they're like, oh my god.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
It never ceases to delight me how disinterested kids are
in their parents' lives.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
I know, right, it's all our social construct in projection.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
What was your relationship like with your dad's wife, Like,
and I imagine you have this experience as well with
the work that you do meeting a lot of donor kids.
The relationship with the partner of the donum must be
often fraud.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
Is it? You know? I think in this instance, like
I could recognize the level of protectiveness, and I was
really leaning on dad to kind of facilitate that relationship
because I didn't want obviously to push. But I think
that they did a really good job of keeping it separate.
I didn't really get to have a lot of interaction
with her until my wedding. I think that really kind
(18:05):
of changed our relationship. We really didn't have a lot
of interface, you know, geograph. We lived in different parts
of the country. It was always quite an effort to
visit on either one of our parts.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
After this short break, Eve makes another unsettling discovery that
will change her life forever. Your relationship with your dad progressed.
As you say, he officiated at your wedding. He did,
so you stayed in touch over the next few years.
The next installment of this story, and the plot twist
(18:40):
comes when you go on to have children of your
own and your son becomes sick. What happened to him?
Speaker 2 (18:47):
So my oldest when he was a baby, he was
vomiting a lot, and he wasn't eating real food, and
there were all of these things that all of our
doctors were like, you know, these allergies, and no one
could really figure out what it is. And about three
years of all of that, I was like, we got
to do something different. They recommended looking in more into
like genetics, and so I was working with this functional
(19:09):
in doctor and he was like, let's get some info
on your DNA. The easiest way to do that at
the time was the commercial DNA test twenty three and
ME plus health and he'd get what was called raw data.
So we did that and he called back and he said, hey, Eve,
it's Celiac disease. And I was like what. I had
no idea what Celiac disease was. I had no idea
(19:32):
what an autoimmune disorder was. And he's like, yeah, that's
what it is, and it's coming from you. And I
was like, what are you talking about. He's like, you
need to go get better family history from you know,
your biological father and biological mother. And so I'm in
my family, like, who has these stomach issues in coeliac
and allergies.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
No one, because it's hereditary.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Yeah, yeah, it's turn serious. So the bigger thing at
the time was like, Okay, now we know a diagnosis
is a prognosis, right, And so I was so focused
on just making my son healthy. The second part of
this is that there's an ancestry component to the commercial
DNA testing. And I don't know if you're familiar with
the platform, but a lot of my DNA connections were
(20:12):
saying things like close family to first cousins, and so
I wasn't really thinking half sibling because I guess I
just assumed it was a perfect science and would say
half sibling.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
So it was one of those like twenty three and
Me or ancestry dot Com that you do the test
and then they show you who all your relatives my bay.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
Right, those who have also taken the test and at
about you. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. And I
knew from talking with California cr ibink that dad was
a popular spirm downer, but they had told me that
I was one of the older ones, you know. I
was like, sure, I'm sure this will be happening, but
it was still newer at this time. This was like
two thousand and eighteen, and so you know, you just
(20:52):
don't know what you don't know. So we go on
vacation and my mom is actually with me and she's like, hey, Eve,
I actually think those are your half siblings. Like, you know,
look at like the degree in which you're related, and
it could be like a different each number is for
something different, and so then I was like, oh my gosh.
So then I'm like, you know, on social media, and
(21:14):
I'm sending the messages through the platform and I connected
with one and bless his sweet little heart. He is
from my area where I grew up, and he was like, no,
I know who you know our dad is and I
was like, no, no, no, that's our mom's doctor that
did the insemination, Steve Donner when I six from Oregon.
(21:34):
He's our biological father. But I don't want to project
my story onto you guys, so I'm going to have
him do that DNA test and then you guys can
figure out if y'all want a relationship. And honestly, I
just thought he was love you, Andrew, but a redneck
that just wasn't very smart. And so that was that one.
And then I kept going down, you know, the list
of connecting others siblings, and then I came up with
(21:57):
one who wasn't on social media, but I found him
on LinkedIn and it was late at night. I messaged
him and was like, hey, are you the Adam on
twenty three and me? And he's like yes. I was like,
I need to talk to you, and he's like, well,
I think it'd be kind of hard to explain to
my wife why I need to get out of bed
to call another woman. I was like, oh, to totally
(22:17):
get that. I just think I'm like, you're half sibling,
so just call me tomorrow and my phone immediately rain
and he's like, okay, you have my attention. Yeah, impulsivity
was not my future of that night, but yeah, he
is the one that I talked to you, and I
thought that you know so much of when you're donor
conceived or you're non parent expected result, there's always someone
(22:40):
that is delivering that news right or putting the pieces
together when it comes out of these platforms. I was like,
we're donor conceived and he's like, no, there's no way.
I look like my dad. That's our white story. I
have a brother. Okay, so we go this whole thing
and I'm like, all right, and you.
Speaker 1 (22:56):
Just thought he was in denial.
Speaker 2 (22:57):
I thought he was in denial. I mean, and most
suppose people are right like this stream on the internet
and like this is weird. So I was like, okay,
so if you are my first cousin, and that means
that your uncle is my biological father, is your uncle
Steve Shoul And he said no, my uncle is Kim mcmaury's.
And my world stopped because Kim mcmaury's is doctor Kim
(23:21):
mcmoury's and was my mom's fertility doctor. And at that
time I knew it was like everything just kind of
made sense, even like the little red flags that I've
been seeing before, like the timeline's not matching up. And
then it was wow, like I know that people lie
and DNA doesn't lie, and it was just starting all
(23:42):
over again, and it was the truth.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
After you hung up the phone, What was going through
your head.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
A little bit like when I was sixteen years old,
of that moment of I am onto something very big
that is going to impact more than just myself. I
remember literally downing my glass of wine and deciding all
over again because my mom was upstairs watching a movie
with my in laws. And my choice was to pretend
(24:11):
like I never discovered this and continue to live a
fairy tale life with my dad and my mom and
just pretend like it never.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
Happens, your second dad stave yep, my.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
Second dad, or to go right upstairs, which is what
I did, like I was sixteen years old, and tell
her again that my real biological father was her fertility doctor.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
In that moment, did you think, oh, maybe there was
a mistake or straight away you knew that it had
been a deliberate.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Deceit straight away. I knew, how did you know one
of the half siblings I connected with was thirteen years older,
and that was kind of my big indicator. The one
that I had just spoken to was older. And so
it's kind of like piecing these things together of you know,
that timeline didn't work. And again, I mean people lie,
(25:02):
DNA doesn't lie. It's hard to have a level of
cognitive dissonance. Whenever the DNA is staring straight at you.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Your mom must have fained. I have stated, how did
Stave react? Because you had to break then you see him?
Speaker 2 (25:14):
So actually I didn't tell him until weeks later because
I think there was a small part of me that
was really hoping that it wasn't true. There was also
that I knew there was not going to be the
fairy tale, There was not going to be the relationship
because I was the one that was protecting the secret,
and without truth and transparency, there was never going to
(25:37):
be an authentic relationship with my real biological father if
I was keeping a secret. I waited until I knew
that that DNA test the result to ron was there
the commercial DNA test and then I called him and
I told him, and it was the hardest part of
this entire process. But it was like a daddy wound
just being like ripped open again. I was so afraid
of rejection. And even though I knew that nothing would
(25:59):
undo the thirteen years of his building this relationship, I
was still so worried because so much, you know, I
initiated this relationship and it was wrong. There was so
much guilt. And I told him and we just cried
and cried and cried, and at the very end of it,
he said, you know, it changes some things, but it
doesn't change the fact that you're my daughter, and it's
all I need to do, you know. That was it
(26:21):
was like, and I support you know, whatever you do,
but I think that you know, for me, I was
so shocked by it. But was more shocking is that
you know, in talking to my attorneys that it wasn't
a crime. And so how is it that we know
that this is morally wrong, but this is not legally wrong.
And so when morality doesn't equal legality, what do you
(26:42):
do with it?
Speaker 1 (26:43):
So hold on one second, it wasn't legally wrong for
your mother's fertility doctor to go into another room masturvating
a cup, come back and put the DNA of someone
she hasn't consented to being inseminated with into your mother's
(27:03):
body without ever telling her or getting her consent.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Correct, there was no civil laws of it, and there
was no criminal cause of action for this. Remember earlier
when I talked about anonymity breeds fraud. He can hide
behind an anonymous sperm donor, even though the informed consent
was for donor one oh six from California Crybank. And
the answer is because, quite frankly, we do not have
(27:28):
laws against it.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
So did you confront this doctor? What did you do?
Speaker 2 (27:33):
It? Did? So? I've also known this man of pretty
much my entire life. You know, he is a pillar
in our community. People love him, you know, he's one
of the very few doctors in East Texas that was
an OV. You know. Everybody loves him. And I did
everything by writing told him that I am his through
(27:54):
commercial study testing, I am his daughter, and he wrote
me back, just the smoke and mirror show. You know,
it appears that you would have inherited some of my genetics.
And I was like, yeah, dumb ass, fifty percent of
them like kind of know that works, and then he
went on this whole thing of like, oh, I used
a mylex cup in this syringe, and in my donor program,
you know, there were five successful pregnancies, three ended with
(28:17):
you know, spontaneous miscarriage, and two offspring. And I was like, well,
that's funny because I'm looking at commercial DNA testing and
I can see that I have five half siblings. So
immediately I knew he was lying yeah. And then I
was like, okay, well you want to play, let's go.
So it just became more correspondence where he would say
something and then I would poke a hole in it.
Speaker 1 (28:37):
He fucked with the wrong woman.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
He fucked with the wrong woman. He did, and he
knows that now and it was a hard lesson for
him to learn, but by god, did he learn it.
And I really think that he thought I would just
buy as bullshit, and like maybe I wasn't smart enough,
or you know, I think he so used to being
the authority and where he lives that you know, my god,
no woman would challenge him.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
There was one line that was so cringe, you know,
it was it was a pleasure to be able to
deliver a baby girl to my mother and my father,
and you know I should just be grateful. Well then
I'm like, okay, well I want medical information because now, like,
not only did you fuck with me, but it's now
it's my kid. Now Mama Bear is mad. There's medical information.
I would have made different medical decisions on my child.
(29:21):
He didn't need all of those exploratory surgeries had we
have known what it was in the first place. So
then he sends me this response of like, my I
call him social kids. He says, his kids, his known kids.
You know, they're all iron men and they're doctors. And
it was just a brag list. And I was like, well,
you forgot the fact that you had cancer like melanoma,
or that my brother had a brain tumor, like it
(29:42):
was nothing a substance. So we just kind of kept going,
and I'm pissed, right, but there was still part of me,
like I still wanted to know him. I still Pollyanna
was like, you know what, we could totally work through this,
and your dad the doctor the doctor. I was like,
we could totally work through this, and the only way
to do that was to level the playing field. So
(30:02):
I told him, I said, I am going to be
going to the Texas Legislature and I'm going to be
lobbying to make this a crime because if this is
the thinking at the time, it was wrong and it
needs to be criminalized. So let's make this bigger than ourselves.
What a beautiful way for us to do this together
and to be able to share that message. And we
could and we could do it like if you really cared.
(30:24):
And then, of course I never heard from them.
Speaker 1 (30:26):
So did he try to claim that your mom knew
about it and that it was his sperm? Or he
admitted that, yeah, I just used mine, Because why did
he ever tell you why?
Speaker 2 (30:38):
So he said that he was mixing it. And he
said that he was a sperm donor when he was
in college, so that would have been about twelve thirteen
years before I was conceived. And so he went to
his former medical school and he got his old Dustys
sperm vials, drove them to his clinic in East Texas,
(30:59):
and that is what he used because Donor one oh
six wasn't performing like it should have been.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
How many children did he father this way? Or you
don't know the.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Truth is we don't know. I currently have fourteen half siblings,
three of those are his social children.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
When you say social children, you mean children that he
can saved with his partner.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
Correct, that are known socially as.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
His And how did the rest feel about it? How
did they all find out.
Speaker 2 (31:28):
Same way commercial DNA testing. Several of them saw me
on TV and saw his picture and saw me, and
I was like, whoa, I kind of look like that.
The mcmory's features are pretty defining. I am like kind
of outlier in the sense that I'm not over six
feet tall, but all of my siblings are between like
(31:48):
six feet and like six six even the women are
like six to six two, very tall. I'm just like
the little, like five seven short chihuahua. I'm just really loud.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
You were the rumpt.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
It literally like you have those like this and pictures
and there's I'm.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
Seven is not that small, but if everyone else is
six foot two, then it's see.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
Us hall in a few we actually found So I
connected with some former people that worked with him during
the time, and I was able to get a pretty
accurate historical context of just how large his program was.
So he was seeing between fifty to sixty women a day,
and they couldn't determine the percentage of those that were
(32:31):
infertility patients, but they said that it was a lot.
One of them found out what he was doing and quit.
So yeah, they kind of pieced together a lot of it.
I went through yearbooks in the area and, like I said,
defining features, and then people would send me names like hey,
this person kind of looks like you. And that's how
we found several of them, is me reaching out to
(32:53):
them saying, this is kind of weird, but I think
maybe my sibling, can I send you a DNA test?
And so that's what I ultimately did.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
When you were in public, you did an interview with
the Kinnifas Program twenty twenty. What was the reaction in
your community? Where was this pillar of the community. He's
a religious man, I.
Speaker 2 (33:13):
Believe very religious.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
Did he stop practicing? Was he shunned? What happened?
Speaker 2 (33:18):
His preacher called me that was the first thing that happened. Wow, No,
he wasn't. There was a big service where you know,
he was just doing the Lord's work. And I should
just be grateful because I have his wonderful genetics, and
I have a duty to honor my mother and my father.
Except that only fits in that context. Because also you said,
(33:40):
you're not my father, and I was the devil. I
was the one that was spitting in the eye of
the proverbial monster, and his tribe circled around him to
protect him, and he was just doing the lord's work
and that was it. And it was honestly the most
disappointing thing to see my community come out and support
(34:03):
this man in that capacity when not only do you
have evidence of it, I am the evidence that for
people to actually tell me that I should just be
grateful to be alive, and me to continuously say over
and over again, I am not talking about being grateful
to be alive. I am talking about the deception around
my conception. And that's what happens so much is people
(34:26):
just immediately go to the end result, you know, they
want that silver lining and that projection of their uncomfortableness
back on to me. Most of the community, I would
say ninety percent was behind him. He did not retire,
he continued to practice very successfully. With my half brother.
I ended up filing a medical board complaint and it
(34:48):
took the Texas Medical Board years to even hear this complaint,
and they ultimately and of course Abrad Blank's COVID for everything.
They ultimately ended up voting to take his license. He
immediately filed a restraining order against the Medical Board and
a lawsuit, and the lawsuit stated they did not have
jurisdiction to revoke his license because of a statute of
(35:08):
limitation understandard level of care. The Medical Board and the
Attorney General were saying that this is not standard level
of care, this is unethical conduct and behavior which does
not carry a seven year statute of limitations, and so
the judge is not going to hear details of the case.
All they are deciding is whether the Medical Board has
jurisdiction to do this or not. It is still in
(35:32):
the court system. He has lost twice, but he keeps
appealing it. So it will go up to the Supreme
Court of Texas. They will send it back down to
the Thirteenth Court of Appeal, and that judge has already
told him from day one that her ruling still stands
and it is a very expensive and long journey for
him to get his license revoked. So at this point,
(35:53):
his only accountability as attorney fees.
Speaker 1 (35:57):
So he's still practicing.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
He has since retired within the last year, but has
a forced early retirement for a seventy something year old man.
His license is intact.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
Well, of your other siblings and their mothers who were
all de saved, were they as pissed as you or
did they want you to let it go?
Speaker 2 (36:18):
Both? So it's interesting. In my sibling pod, I feel
like we kind of have this difference between the females
and the males. Most of the males are like whatever,
Like you know, it could have been so rude, like
could have been like the janitor or someone off the street.
The women are not okay with it. But also he
(36:38):
was some of their doctor, and so he delivered their kids. Oh,
he did their passengers, he did their breast exams. One
of our sisters we sent a DNA test to she
had an emergency surgery that our brother did on her.
She woke up to the email confirming the DNA results.
(36:59):
She was our sister, and then she had to when
our brother came in for the follow up, tell him, hey,
you know what, you have to transfer my care because
you're my brother.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
So one of your brothers is a door.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
With my biological father. He took over the practice.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
Is that one of his social kids, that's.
Speaker 2 (37:15):
One of the social kids. For them, they obviously feel
very strongly about it. But then also they are living
in that community that supports him, so they are not
known because of the social implications that it has, and
to have that level of feedback all of the time
is difficult for them. But then you also have the
(37:36):
different dynamics that's in their nuclear family. For them, they
have the infertile recipient parent who is still alive, so
they are also protective of that relationship. So they don't
want to socially come out and say that not only
their donor deceived, but to reveal the secret of infertility
of their fathers.
Speaker 1 (37:54):
So there's you know, it's a real spectrum of different
situations and different emotions and different probably points on that
journey of understanding and acceptance. I like that you just
went straight to rage such a mood.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
Yeah, oh yes, no, it was you a fucket.
Speaker 1 (38:11):
After this shortbreak, you'll discover how Eve intersected with cereal
sperm donor Jonathan Meyer from the Netflix series The Man
with a Thousand Kids. The place that I obviously learned
about you, and even this idea of fertility fraud is
from the Netflix documentary The Man with a Thousand Children
(38:34):
can you briefly for people who haven't seen that, because
when things changed for another group of women who'd been
the victim of fertility fraud, they found you and you
really helped them bring this person to justice. Can you
tell the story of Jonathan Mayer?
Speaker 2 (38:49):
So, I guess I should preface it with how they
found me. I have been a part of changing eleven
of the thirteen state laws in the United States that
criminalize and offers civil causes of actions for fertility fraud.
And so there was this lovely Australian couple who read
an article about me, and so they connected with me
(39:10):
and then got me connected with the other moms, and
that was I believe at the end of twenty nineteen,
maybe early twenty twenty, and they just wanted information of
you know, what can we do, what is the legal landscape?
Is there something we can do?
Speaker 1 (39:23):
Because they had also been desaved, They.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
Had also been deceived by serial sperm donor, and so
Jonathan had infiltrated one of the largest sperm banks and
eleven of the sperm banks, and he was also donating
on the private market and doing freelance, and so you know,
they were having hundreds of house siblings and they just
wanted him to stop.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
And why did they want him to stop? Can you
explain the danger with unregulation and fertility fraud? What's the
danger for them?
Speaker 2 (39:53):
In particular is the biodiversity concern. What happens when you
don't know that your donor conceived, you hook up with
a half sibling, and the level of accidental incest that
is the concern, especially when you're working in a demographic
like Maingley the Netherlands where it's smaller and you're more
populous with his children and they don't know.
Speaker 1 (40:14):
And how many children Haddie fathered and in the Netherlands
for example, I don't remember.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
Exactly what it was in the Netherlands, but.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
It was like one hundred. It was like close to hundreds,
up to one thousand all over the world, maybe more right.
Speaker 2 (40:26):
Because you know, I mean the math with it, which
I feel like is what a lot of the media
is like really latched onto you. We can look at
just Cryo salone where he's going to Copenhagen once a
month for four.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
Days is a sperm bank in the sperm Yeah in demok.
Speaker 2 (40:42):
So that's roughly two hundred donations and for him as
he is brags, you know, fifteen strawls of sperm per ejaculation,
and if every straw makes a baby, that's the potential
three thousand. Now, he has also come out and said
that he has spent fifty thousand hours donating. So like
(41:03):
the math, ain't math in here, because if he spent
fifty thousand hours donating, then is it potentially fifty thousand
children and not every single one's going to make a baby?
The math and math and I either way. So when
he says, you know, I only have five hundred and fifty.
Speaker 1 (41:19):
Children, there are laws about this right to prevent accidental
incest and birth defects that could result from that, as
well as the moral implications of accidentally hooking up with
a half sibling. And I think in the Netherlands there's
a limit on you're only allowed twenty five and then
you can't donate anymore.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
Per the banks. But that's not including freelance.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
Private market, or different countries or.
Speaker 2 (41:43):
Different countries, because what ultimately ends up happening is, let's
you know, he hits his limit in one country, they
export it to another country and the number goes to zero.
And so that is not something that is transparent in
this process, because that may change how you think about this. Right,
Like my assumption would be when I have a sperm
donor and you say that it's twenty five is the limit?
(42:05):
I would think twenty five worldwide. It's like, yeah, read
the fine print part, except there's no fine print. But
every time it is to zero. So when he does that,
and he does it as an alias, or he's doing
it on the private market, they're not counting those. It's
just deidentified sperm. It's just you know, going to clinic
to clinic to clinic to clinic.
Speaker 1 (42:23):
And why Eve, why do these men do it?
Speaker 2 (42:27):
Million dollar question. I'm going to put my therapist Haat
on for a second, and you know, like I do
psycho educational evaluations, and if we look at these group
of men as a whole, I definitely think that, you know,
we could consider a personality disorder on the DSM somewhere
in access to you. Isn't narcissism. This desire is an addiction.
(42:51):
You know, the way that they talk about their successes
and it's a number and it's a competition, and the
way that they just work in general, like making the
fake profiles look really bad. So their real profiles with
an alias look really really good. Like it's very manipulative.
Speaker 1 (43:08):
Wait, explain. What the documentary discovered is that there's a
group of Jonathan was part of these group of men
who were almost gamified. Oh they were. They were gamifying
this idea of who can make the most babies in
the world. Yes, and so they would compete with each other.
They would keep score and what do you mean about
they would make fake profiles.
Speaker 2 (43:28):
So there's lots of different platforms when we're talking about
the private market or freelance, known donors, you know, there's
lots of different names for it. These men would make
a Facebook group and they were the admin and the moderators.
They'll let recipients in, but they won't let competition in,
and so the other ones like make a baby now
(43:49):
or you know, every country has kind of like a
different platform. Think of it as like Craigslist, backpage ads,
kind of like that type of thing, and it's like
it's for this, and so they would make profiles that
would be all aliases, but one profile would be like,
you know, their best that picture of Jonathan, you know,
looking cute as.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
A baby or as an adult.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
Yeah, that one, but then they would make fake ones
that are really really bad, like you know, misspelled and
all the characteristics, so that they knew that they weren't
looking for it. Because when you are going through these
profiles and you go through twenty really bad ones and
then you see Jonathan, you're like.
Speaker 1 (44:23):
Oh, oh my gosh, all right, and that's why so
many women would choose him.
Speaker 2 (44:28):
But all of them did this, and so you know,
I think of like Simon Watson, Joe Donor, these aren't
even these guys real names, except well Jonathan obviously. Then
they compete, then they have their moderators of the group,
and then it's just successes. They post pregnancy tests and
they brag about someone that they got pregnant, and then
they create their own little mom group. But they don't
(44:49):
have any of the responsibilities of being, you know, a
father figure. Very few of them had donor contracts, and
if anybody would speak out of turn, all they do
is threaten and say, well, I'm just going to sue
you for custody and then you use your kid happy time.
So women, you know, are like, well, okay, I I
definitely don't want you to now, you know, be co
(45:13):
parenting with me, and so it's it's really manipulative in
that sense, but it's dangerous.
Speaker 1 (45:18):
How do you stop him?
Speaker 2 (45:19):
It was hard in the Netherlands. The moms were very
much feeling was what I felt, the duty to inform,
because how can you possibly consent or assent and if
there's information that would change the way in which you
made an informed decision, you need to know about it.
(45:40):
So this duty to warn and inform, how can you
do that when in the Netherlands you can't name him?
It was just Dutch donor, Dutch done or Dutch donor.
Speaker 1 (45:49):
Why couldn't he be named.
Speaker 2 (45:51):
Because that's part of some policy, like you can't out
them in the media for some reason.
Speaker 1 (45:57):
So how can anyone avoid using him again if they
don't know his name?
Speaker 2 (46:02):
And wow, you cannot make an informed decision because no
one's going to think, oh, let me google Dutch donor? Well,
which Dutch donor?
Speaker 1 (46:10):
And also, how do you make a lure in one
country that applies to every country.
Speaker 2 (46:15):
And the answer is you don't. So for us, the
very first thing was, and this was my experience with everything,
what do you do when you are existing in a
legal landscape that has literally nothing. You don't have sperm
banks that are required to talk to each other. Every
country is so different. You have some countries that really
(46:35):
have this buttoned up, but because of their stricter laws,
it actually pushes people to go underground to these known
donors and makes them more susceptible to the predatory behavior
of these serial donors just out of necessity. Right then
you have the wild wild West like us in America,
where it's like what laws. My first thing was we
got to start really small, and the first thing that
(46:56):
we can do to meet the first goal is to
get his name out there. That was, let's talk to
the New York Times and you guys come forward, because
in America you can name him. And that's what we did.
As soon as he was named, than he was linked
with all of you know, Dutch donor and it was
all put together and then notifying Cryos International and hoping
(47:18):
that they could somehow remove all of his straws that
they had sent all over the world. So that was
the first part. The second part was the moms had
been working with Donor Kind in the Netherlands since like
twenty seventeen, which is an organization there, and the moms
ended up coming up with this group called Moms on
a Mission, and that was kind of like you know,
our mission and you know, having all of these pieces
(47:40):
fit together to figure out how to stop him. So
the Brave Moms took him to court and he represented himself.
The argument was like listen, he's it's kind of like
a danger to society at this point, like he has
this amount of kids that we know of. Our kids
go to school together, they live, right, we're neighbors all
the time. Like this is wild. So he comes in
(48:01):
and like you seeing the documentary with the story, like
it's a oh judge, you don't understand. It's a new concepts,
like they just need a special symbol to be branded
stood their name, and like my children are so smart,
like they won't hook up with each other, blah blah.
But me, he just ran his mouth like an idiot.
Speaker 1 (48:16):
That was chilling when he said they should be marked
on social media.
Speaker 2 (48:20):
Yep, that it would be like this pride like verification. Yeah, exactly,
it's a new concept.
Speaker 1 (48:26):
Oh my god. So he's like a cult leader, but
it's also eugenics. It's terrifying.
Speaker 2 (48:32):
It is terrifying. And then he has years of these
YouTube videos of like him basically seems like he's like
parenting his children.
Speaker 1 (48:39):
Talking about his philosophies on everything from politics to the environment,
to being anti woke, to listening to your ancestors and
being grateful to your biological parents.
Speaker 2 (48:51):
Brainwashing cool like right, the judge was he was selling bullshit,
but she wasn't buying, and so she was like, you know,
you do this again and you're going to get fined
one hundred thousand euro.
Speaker 1 (49:03):
It's what it was per donation.
Speaker 2 (49:06):
Yes, you know. My favorite part was when you know
his like what, I'm a good father, Like I show
up at birthdays, I show up at this and she's like,
it's not possible for you to attend every graduation and
every birthday and every life Like when you have this many.
Speaker 1 (49:20):
Children, you have hundreds and hundreds of thousands and thousands
of children.
Speaker 2 (49:23):
I mean, the reality is like he's only gonna admit
to what we know, right, And it's just like my
biological father, he only admitted to what I said. And
so it's like every time anyone comes up, it's going
to keep going and keep climbing and keep climbing, keep climbing,
and we saw this with the Netflix documentary Our Father,
where the number of those half siblings from Donald Climb
(49:44):
kept climbing climbing after the duty to inform and warn
had been out there and people recognize, Oh my god,
I think that I may have been victimized to you.
And that is exactly what we will be seeing.
Speaker 1 (49:56):
What's Jonathan doing now? What's happened since the documentary came out?
Do you know is he still trying to donate? I
kind of imagine he'd just go, oh okay, I'll stop.
Speaker 2 (50:04):
Who knows well, he has been giving me some shout
outs on his YouTube channel. He thinks I am the mastermind,
so you know, I'll put on my best Taylor Swift,
I'll take that. Yeah, that crown. You know, he's threatening
a lawsuit for slander and just he's spiraling, is what.
I think. He had an opportunity to participate and to
(50:27):
you know, give his side of the story, but he didn't.
So I think he's just sitting in the woods making
YouTube videos right now. That's all from what I can see.
Speaker 1 (50:36):
Kamer is my boyfriend.
Speaker 2 (50:37):
Yeah, exactly, that's right.
Speaker 1 (50:39):
Eve. You are a warrior for women. I wanted to
ask you one more question when I was watching you
and the other donor deceived people fighting going to Capitol Hill,
trying to get national legislation, trying to get people to
understand what this medical rape is. Essentially women being impregnated
(50:59):
with sperm without their consent or being defrauded. You're essentially
arguing against your own existence, and I imagine a lot
of people use that as a way to try and
shut you up, like the preacher did and those people
in your community. How do you feel about that? How
do you reconcile that?
Speaker 2 (51:16):
Well? Usually what I say is I am not talking
about being grateful to be alive or my existence in general.
Speaker 1 (51:23):
Life, Oh, wishing you'd never been born.
Speaker 2 (51:25):
Which I would never be born. I'm not debating the
facts of that. I am talking about the deception around conception,
the lack of enforcing informed consent, and how in this
particular instance, morality does not equate legality, And so separating
those two things I think are very important because it
(51:46):
is very easy to conflate those two things. What is
it like, the end to the means means to the end, right, Yeah,
it's hard to not be able to look at that
and say, but you're here and I am so grateful
to be alive, but I can have opposite feelings about
this and hold space for that. I'm grateful to be alive,
but I am very upset about the deception around my conception.
(52:07):
And if I truly believe that we need to leave
this world better than we found it, I need to
find the purpose in my pain, and I need to
do it not only for the rest of the people
and the women who have been deceived, but also, you know,
at a very basic level, just to be an example
from my girls, that it's not always the tragedy that
happens to you, it's what you do with it, and
(52:29):
that is empowerment.
Speaker 1 (52:30):
What a note to end on. You're amazing. It is
amazing to me that Eve might have got her whole
life not knowing the truth about her conception if she
hadn't done that thing that teenagers do, which is snoop.
I guess she probably would have found out when she
did some of those DNA tests after her son got sick.
(52:52):
But the fact that that snooping led her to Steve,
who for years she believed was her birth father, only
to have another grenade launched into her life and her
heart when her son became ill and she found out
that he actually wasn't her father. It reminded me of
that story about Tony Abbott. It came out that an
old girlfriend of his had had a son and had
(53:13):
adopted him out and had never told Tony Abbott that
she was pregnant. And then this guy who turned out
to be a cameraman at Parliament House who'd filmed Tony
Abbot many times in his political career, turned out to
be this child, and he tracked down his biological mother,
who explained who his biological father was, and it was
(53:34):
in the press at the time. You know, Tony Abbot
handled it really well, and it was quite a beautiful
story and everyone loved, you know, the coincidence of the
fact that they'd been working in the same workplace without
even realizing they were father and son. And then a
little while later it turned out that actually Tony Abbot
wasn't the father. There was a different biological father, and
the mother had actually just got it wrong. I really
(53:57):
remember feeling how poignant that situation was, because they'd done
interviews and spoken about how they were sort of forging
this relationship, and Tony Abbott had three daughters and then
he had this son, and it was just a really interesting,
quite beautiful story at a time when Tony Abbott was
not a very popular guy. And then I remember wondering,
how do you unpack that? How do you even find
(54:20):
a place to file that in your heart when you
thought someone was maybe your biological parent and then they weren't.
I was so relieved that Eve has stayed friends with Steve,
but then what do you do about the fact that
your actual biological father is an asshole. I'll be honest,
I've never really thought about fertility fraud before the Netflix series,
(54:42):
but now I cannot look away. I'm thinking about it
a lot, and it turns out there are a lot
of men out there who were, I don't know, narcissistic psychopaths,
men who are doing this to women and families every day,
and it's really struck a nerve. I think that's why
this show on Netflix became number one all over the world,
because there's this idea about bodily autonomy, the fact that
(55:04):
someone can either give you their sperm under false pretenses
or put their sperm in your body without you consenting
to it, and it's not even a crime in many
states in America. It's just wild. You know. MoMA MIA's
entire core purpose as a business and as a media
company is to make the world a better place for
women and girls, and we're going to look into fertility
(55:26):
fraud some more so. If you have a story about
fertility fraud or conception deception, please reach out and let
us know. We'll put a link in the show notes
to an email address that you can reach out, either
anonymously if you want to tell us your story under
a pseudonym, or under your own name. We want to
continue shining a light and exploring this crime. We'll also
(55:47):
put a link to Eve's website where you can learn
more about her and all the amazing work she does.
I love her. I know she's a therapist. I think
I want her to be my therapist. Is that unethical?
I'm a little bit obsessed with her. Thank you for listening.
No Filter's executive producer is niam A Brown, another woman
I'm obsessed with, and our audio producer is Leah Porges,
(56:08):
who you know I'm obsessed with. I may have Friedman.
Be safe out their friends and watch out for each other. Okay,
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