Donor 106

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Go to fetch pet.com/save right now for your free quote. That's fetch pet.com/save. I grew up in a really small town in East Texas. It's about 5,000 people, so there's not really a whole lot out there. Eve Wiley grew up in the early 90s with her mother Margo, her father Doug, an older sister from her mother's previous marriage, and a sister who was 14 months younger than her. Were you close with your younger sister? Yes, I was really close with my sister, but we were just really different. She kind of liked more sciencey stuff, and she liked math. And I wanted to have more like imaginary play and be outside and build forts and play princesses. And so I think we tolerated each other, but we could not have been more different on all accounts. I was this blonde hair, like bright blonde hair, blue eyes, very fair skin. We would always joke that I was part of vampire because I would go in the sun and just immediately turn red. And my little sister had this gorgeous olive skin complexion. She had these big dark brown eyes and then dark dark brown hair. Eve's sister looked more like their father. And that would come up quite often. Really in any conversation, the joke kind of ended on that I was that way because I was the milkman's kid. But that did start things of my rush. Am I adopted? Those jokes would come up as well. And it wasn't just to our family. There were people in the community that would constantly be making comments as well because I really was the black sheep. When you were little, did you say to do ask your mother, why do I look different? I did. And the response I would always get is that genetics are a funny thing over and over and over again. And so we also would talk about maybe there were some throwback genetics from our, you know, Irish roots or something like that. Eve remembers that when she was five, her father started to get really sick. He had a heart condition. He died when she was seven. We were very close growing up. I look back at pictures and I can see that I was always on his hip and his arms right next to him. It was really, really difficult. I didn't know anybody else in my tiny town who had lost a parent before. So I didn't really have a good frame of reference of even what to expect. And I certainly didn't understand all of the medical reasons behind it. So there were a lot of fears, you know, thinking and assigning meaning to things of like, oh, if I eat this, then maybe that would make my heart go out. And so I remember a lot of those conversations of, you know, just double checking, is this going to hurt me? Am I going to be, you know, am I going to get hurt like hen? So it was, it was really hard. Eve says that eventually things got easier. Her grandparents had a farm about 30 minutes away that they would go visit. Eve played a lot of tennis, something she and her father had like doing together. Tennis courts in the town were named after and dedicated to him, the Doug Andrews tennis courts. By the time Eve was in high school, she traveled all around Texas for tournaments. And she says one of her favorite things to do after school was to go into her mother's office, sit at her computer and check her mother's emails. So my mom, she was a school nurse and so school nurse in a small town means that she had all of the juicy gossip on my cohort. And it also meant that I could get in there and maybe delete some emails if it came from a teacher about me not doing too well on a project or a test. And so there was this time where I would get out of school and she would stop to be there for another hour and a half. And so I would be in her office and I would get bored of playing paint on windows and I would just start going through her emails and I just kind of was in the know. So you just sit at her desk and just go in her computer. I would. I would go through pretty much every email. I mean, you must have learned some pretty good stuff. Oh, I did. I learned all kinds of things and I got out of all kinds of trouble because I really did not enjoy math at the time. And so there were constant conversations about if I needed extra support in certain classes and oh no, she didn't do well on this quiz. Please make her complete blah, blah, blah tonight. And so I would conveniently delete those and I would avoid more homework. One night when Eve was 16, she decided to check her mother's email from home. And I saw all of these emails about artificial insemination and I clicked on one and remember I grew up in the country, my grandparents have a farm. And so I was I was used to artificial insemination when it came to cattle. And so I'm scrolling through and it's like California Caribbean and I go all the way to the bottom and it says my daughter still doesn't know I am gathering more information. And her birthday is 728 1987. I always always knew there was a secret. I just didn't know that I was the secret and that was the confirmation for me. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. Eve says that when she saw that email, she knew what it meant right away. That she'd been conceived with donor sperm and that duck wasn't her biological father. Everything just kind of clicked. Everything made sense. It was kind of like that thought of I always knew there was something. I just didn't know what it was and I knew that this makes sense to me. This is why I don't look like anybody in my family. This is why I don't act like anyone in my family. There was a seat of truth to all of those jokes growing up. Do you remember reading anything else on that email? I just kept going through emails. Then I started clicking on the ones from the Yahoo messenger boards and they were things like single mothers by choice, donor conceived persons. All of these words, it was like learning a new language. I just remember reading the same thing over and over and over again that my mom, when she would tell her story to these people online, it was like I don't know how to tell my daughter. Did you tell your mother? I did, but I had to wait. I eventually did fall asleep that night and I heard her getting up and she's in the bathroom and I just burst through the door. I was like, "Mom, I know Doug is not my father." And she just, she's probably her makeup and she looks at me through the reflection of the mirror and she was like, "What?" I was like, "Mom, I know Doug's not my father. I know I'm from a donor." And she just burst into tears. Eve's mother told her that when she and Doug were trying for their first child together, it was taking longer than they expected. They went to a fertility doctor in the closest big city, Negadocha's, and discovered that Doug had a low sperm count. The doctor recommended they look into using an anonymous sperm donor. And Eve's mother decided to use a sperm bank called California Cryobank. And they gave her and my dad this one sheet of paper and I had all these donors on it with one line that just gave physical characteristics in education and interest, just one line. It's not like it is today where we have like an all of us. heart menu, and you can pick from all these crazy things and get to know the donor. And so ultimately they landed on donor 106, and it was really interesting because when she showed me that paper, she had kept it folded up in this little bit tiny, tiny square. And she kept it in her jewelry box under a false bottom. The same jewelry box I would play in growing up almost every single day I just didn't know it was there. And she unfolded it for me and she gave it to me. Eve's mother told her that she decided to use California cryobank because she didn't feel comfortable using a local sperm donor. My mom would constantly say that she didn't want to be grocery shopping and constantly looking for my face and all these strangers. And she was really concerned about accidental incest and you know what if I started dating a sibling and I was mistaking that familiarity that's because we're siblings for love. Eve says she and her mother also talked about what Eve had gone through after her father Doug died and she did carry a level of guilt because she remembers the anxiety that I had about health at such a young age but couldn't say oh no honey, it's okay that those aren't your genetics. Those are your sisters so that there is a lot packed in that conversation. After Eve was born, Doug and Margot found out that they could have children together. And Eve's younger sister was Doug's biological child. And to ask her why she hadn't told you? I did. And she had said that one is that the doctor was very adamant about not telling an offspring that they're donor conceived that genetics don't matter and in order for there to be a good attachment, you know the child needs to believe that this is their biological father. And so there was a ton of secrecy around the anonymity with it and at the time infertility was still very much stigmatized. People didn't talk about infertility like we do today. Eve's mother said she'd plan to tell her when she was 18. What did your mother know about the donor that was used? All she knew was that it was donor 106 from California Kravink. He has blonde hair, blue eyes, he was interested in politics and he was an editor. He went to a university in California and that was it. The exact opposite of my dad, she also knew his height to his 510. Whereas my dad was 64, dark, all of skin complexion, brown hair, brown eyes and he was a math professor at high school in a college. What did you feel knowing that your father wasn't your biological father? I think my 16 year old self, I think I was excited. I wanted to figure out who he was. I wanted to look in the mirror and see something familiar and I remember vividly we were guessing who my dad could be and I remember saying mom, it could be Arnold Schwarzenegger. That's the only person I could think of that was from California. A lot of people were donor conceived, I don't want to know, I don't want to know because they're worried it's going to be a threat to their relationship with their father and I didn't have that so I could really explore all of my feelings and move forward very quickly without any barriers. Eve's mother contacted California Cryobank to see if they could connect Eve with her donor but they told her they couldn't reach out to Eve's donor on her behalf until she turned 18. But they could tell her that he had been a popular donor. And I was the oldest one that had been recorded and reported and I had a bunch of siblings that were younger than me. Eve says she spent the next two years writing what she hoped would be a perfect letter introducing herself. She mailed it on the day she turned 18 and what happened next? Nothing, absolutely nothing, weighted and weighted and weighted and it was just silence. About a year later, Eve was working at a summer camp in Maine teaching tennis. She couldn't have her phone with her at the camp but on her day off once a week she checked her voicemails. So I was listening to voicemails, listening to voicemails and I had a voicemail from them saying that they had heard back from him and they had sent the letter that I had requested for them to for it on. Eventually, donor 106 wrote back via email. Eve learned his name was Steve and that he had raised children of his own. He told Eve he'd found a picture of her online and she looked just like them. He and Eve started writing back and forth and then started talking on the phone. At the end of the summer, Eve went back to Texas and Steve flew to Austin to see her. And so we were going to go to dinner and I had him over at my apartment before and we ended up staying and talking on my couch for hours. We completely missed dinner, ordered pizza later and I mean it was awesome. The next day we were actually, we were walking down 6th Street and I was showing him Austin and we ran into some of my friends and I wasn't even thinking but just for the sake of titles and I was like, "Hey guys, this is my dad, dad, these are my friends so and so and so and so and so." And then that was it. I don't even know if I thought twice about it and we kept walking and he said, "Hey Eve, I'm okay with you introducing me as your dad and call me your dad." And from that moment on, he was dad. Eve and Steve kept in touch and talked at least once a week. They realized they both loved reading and writing, Eve says it felt natural. When Eve got engaged, she asked him to officiate her wedding. Several months later, Eve got pregnant. Her son had a medical condition that made it hard for him to keep milk down when he was a baby and when he got older, he kept having gastrointestinal issues. Eve eventually found a specialist. She thought could help. And he says, "Alright Eve, do 23 and me plus health and I need you to do it, I need your husband to do it and I need your son to do it so that's just a cheek swab so we did it." And he gets the results and the raw data back and he calls me and he says, "Eve, I think your son has celiac disease." And I was like, "What? I don't even know what that is." So then he had to teach me all about autoimmune disorders and what celiac disease meant. And at the end of the conversation, he said, "Eve, this is coming from you." And I was like, "But I don't have any issues." And he said, "It doesn't matter because you have the genetic variant from it." I called mom, I was like, "Mom, who does anybody in our family have autoimmune disorders?" Or, you know, anything that would make sense with this, and I mean, she was just as baffled as I was. And she's like, "No." And then I called dad, Steve, and he also said, "No." And so I was like, "Well, maybe people have it and they're just, I don't know, maybe it's not dominant or something." I had no clue, but no, no one on either side could tell me anything similar. If notice something else in the 23-and-me test results, they included a few people who were listed as close family to first cousins. And I thought I had discovered some family secrets because even though my mom has two brothers, neither one of them have any known biological children. And even dad, he has two siblings, but they don't have any biological children either. And so I remember joking with my mom, I'm like, "Ooh, one of these aunts and uncles, I found their biological child they don't know about." And then it was my mom actually that was like, "Hey, Eve, you know those matches? I think that those could be your half siblings." And I was like, "No, it says close family to first cousins." And she kind of explained to me the degree in which you're related and how that number could mean four different things if it's halfs. And that's when I started investigating it a little bit more. And what did you find out? I found out that I had several half siblings. So I looked at the first one in his name and I sent him a message and kind of like, "Hey, like the 23B portal. And then of course, it's like, all right, sleuthing time, Facebook, Instagram, you know, just trying to figure out like a picture. I just wanted to see the familiarity and you know, I was excited. And so I find the first one and he's from Nakanoches, which is crazy. I grew up 30 minutes from one of my half siblings and I had no idea. - They talked on the phone. And he remembers finding out that he was about a year older than she was. But she had been told that she was the oldest of Steve's donor children. - But I knew that there's no formalized reporting system here. So the ones that California Carving knew about are simply the ones that the parents called or the doctors called and said, hey, we had a live birth. And so I could justify it by being like, oh, well, maybe they called, you know, several, like a year later and reported it. And I was just kind of chalking it up to not great record keeping. But when I talked to my next brother, he was 13 years older than me. - Which raised questions? - Raise a lot of questions. But again, I think I was excited. And so I just went on to the next one. Eve says that when she told him that they were half siblings and that his biological father was named Steve, he seemed very confused. - And Adam was just so adamant. He was like, no, that I have a brother. I look like my parents and I was trying to validate him. And I was like, yeah, we all think that, but like it's not true. Like go look, here's what it says. And so we go back and we pull up each other's profile on 23 and me and I was like, all right. So I'll humor you here. If it says first or close family to first cousins, then we're either half siblings or first cousins. So in order for that to be true, Steve, my biological father would have to be your uncle. So do you have an uncle named Steve? He said, no, I only have one uncle and his name is Kim McMorries and my world stopped. Kim McMorries was Doctor Kim McMorries. My parents fertility doctor and the man who delivered me. And in that moment, I knew that he was my biological father. We'll be right back to listen without ads. 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Eve Wiley says that after she realized her parents' fertility doctor was her biological father, she got off the phone with the man she had thought was her half-brother, closed her laptop, and drank a glass of wine. What were you thinking? Honestly, what in the Jerry Springer hell is going on? That was my initial thought. And just like when I was 16 years old, I run upstairs. And my mom is watching a movie with my in-laws. And I go up next to her and I was like, mom, mom, Steve's not my dad. She's like, what? And I get up and I throw on the lights and I have everybody's attention and I'm just kind of pacing and I'm like, mom, Steve is not my dad. It's Dr. Kim McEvoy's. And she was just, Eve, there is no way we have the medical records. You look just like him. And then I had to go and tell her. And I had to pull the computer out. And I've never seen someone go into shock before. But she was just asking the same question over and over again. And how could you do this? How could you do this? And this can't be true. This can't be true. What did you do next? So that night, I emailed one of my attorneys and asked for them to give me a call the next day. And then I went to bed. Eve says that when her attorney called the next day, she learned that there wasn't anything she could do. Because what Dr. Kim McEvoy's had done wasn't actually illegal. Even though Eve's mother thought she was using Donor 106's sperm, there was nothing on the books that said her doctor had to. And so for something that just felt so wrong, I could wrap my head around it. And I was furious. I wanted to go that next day and knock on his door. But my attorneys were really adamant about me doing everything and writing. And so I mailed him, snow-mil, certified mill, just saying, hi, my name is Eve. I did commercial DNA testing. And it seems like you're my biological father. I-- my son has been sick. And we really need medical information. And so he responded, oh, it was so weird. He responded and was like, you know, hi, you know, it-- it seems like you may have inherited some of my genetics. And then at the end of it, he was like-- it was a pleasure to deliver your parents a healthy baby girl. Eve and Dr. McEvoy's continued writing back and forth. Eve kept asking questions. Dr. Kim McMorry's explained that he had mixed his sperm with donor 106's sperm to improve her mother's chances of conception. He said, quote, the thinking at that time was that if the patient got pregnant, there was no way to know which sperm affected the conception. No one ever considered the effect of genetic testing years later. He also said he had talked with Eve's mother about mixing an anonymous local donor's sperm with donor 106's sperm as a way to improve her chances and that she'd agreed to it. Eve's mother has said that conversation never happened and that she'd felt strongly about not using a local donor so it would never have agreed to it. Dr. McMorry's apologized to Eve for the grief that said caused her, but said, I cannot go back today and change the standards, protocols we used 33 years ago. I can say they are wrong today. But 33 years ago, when this occurred, it was not wrong. Did you talk to your mother about this? I did. She couldn't believe it either. And she just kept saying that there must have been a mistake because he was such a great person, and he was a pillar in his church. everyone loved him. And and I remember meeting him and he was such a nice guy. And I think it was really hard for her to accept, but it was really weird because in a sense, I think she, and a lot of moms feel this way, if I say I am so hurt by this, then I also mean that I wish it would have never happened. Therefore, implying you would not be here. And so I think that was really hard for her. She always felt like she was treading widely around the conversation. Around this time, Eve decided she needed to reach out to Steve. The man she had thought was her biological father. I remember it was hot outside. I'd go outside and it was already sweating. It was so hot. I sat down and called him and couldn't even do a small talk. And just immediately he was like, "Dad, I just have some really bad news." And I just started bawling my eyes out. I was like, "You're not my dad." And this is what happened. And then there was just silence. And then he said to me, "This changes some things, but it doesn't change the important things." Eve says she struggled with what to do with all of this. And then she says she had an idea. Because there was that moment where I was so rageful of this was not a crime. This was not illegal. And so that is when I decided, I'll make it a crime. Thanks to Fetch Pet Insurance for their support. You might know I have a dog. Her name is 8. She's only a few years old and luckily she's in great health. But last year, I had to take her to the vet after she ate some things she shouldn't have. 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The complication is that the only bill because legislators really want to understand unintentional consequences. But the only reference was from a bill California passed in the 90s. That was it. But Eve was able to find two legislators who are willing to write the bill. There was some media I did around this. I had a 2020 episode that came out and I had local media that was reporting on my legislative efforts. And there was a family in San Antonio and they figured out they had a similar story from a doctor in Colorado. And then it just so many people started reaching out. The earliest reported case of fertility fraud took place in 1884. This is Dove Fox. He teaches law and directs the Center for Health Law policy and bioethics at the University of San Diego. A couple of older man and a younger woman sought help from a doctor called William Pan Coast in conceiving. They struggled to get pregnant. They went to him. He was well known. His practice in Philadelphia and asked for help. What could he do for them and help them have the child that they wanted. And so Dr. Pan Coast called in the wife under the guise of a routine follow-up appointment after meeting with the husband and wife previously. It turned out that it was the man who had an STD that made it difficult for his firm to result in a pregnancy. But he said that the wife ought to just come in and he sedated her with chloroform at that follow-up visit without her knowledge or consent. And this was in front of a half dozen medical students before while she was unconscious instructing one of them to step out and come back with a sperm sample that Dr. Pan Coast then proceeded to inject into the unconscious woman with a rubber syringe, a turkey baster. Nine months later she gave birth. Apparently Dr. Pan Coast told the husband who was pleased and neither he nor the doctor felt any need to tell the wife what they had done or what had happened or the genetic origins of their resulting child. It wasn't in fact until 25 years later. So the child's now a young adult. The older husband had since died as had Dr. Pan Coast by that time. When the mother and child learned about what had happened from a story published in a journal called Medical World by one of those former students of Dr. Pan Coast, one of the half dozen men, the title of the article was artificial impregnation. And the author, one of those students who had been in the room, he explained the procedure was so novel, so peculiar in its human ethics, that the six young men of the senior class who had witnessed the operation were pledged to absolute secrecy. And so this has been a shady business from jump. One of the first big modern cases of so-called fertility fraud came to light during investigations into a Virginia doctor named Cecil Jacobson, who had been giving his patients hormone injections to make it appear that they were pregnant. And then, after showing them ultrasound images, in which he pointed out what he said was a healthy growing fetus, telling them that they had had a miscarriage. In 1991, it came out that he had used his own sperm to impregnate patients, who had elected to use anonymous sperm donors. His lawyer said, "If Cecil made any mistakes, it was in losing his objectivity and trying so hard to get patients pregnant." The case was all over the news. There was even an SNL sketch about it. But it was seen as an anomaly. But then, almost 20 years later, at home DNA testing started becoming widely available, and more and more cases started coming to light. In 2014, a woman in Indiana took a DNA test and realized that she had several half siblings, and that they were all the biological children of her mother's fertility doctor, Donald Klein. She eventually learned that he had fathered more than 90 children. One Connecticut woman took a DNA test and found out that her biological father was her parents' fertility doctor, and that one of his other biological children was her high school boyfriend. One woman in New York discovered that her biological father had also been her gynecologist for almost a decade. There have been other cases in Idaho, Vermont, Colorado, Nevada, all around the country. And like Eve, when people started trying to bring lawsuits or criminal charges, they found out that a doctor using his own sperm to impregnate a patient without her knowledge wasn't illegal. Cecil Jacobson was charged with wire and mail fraud. Donald Klein was given a fine of $500 for obstructing justice for denying the allegations. By and large, the law doesn't provide compensation unless the harm is one that you can test or verify or show to be tangible in some way with certain exceptions that need to be explicitly laid out criminally. It didn't count as an assault or a battery in part, a number of complicated questions. But basically, by and large, these patients had consented to being disseminated with sperm for the purpose of reproduction more broadly. And things had happened outside of the body with the transfer of the sperm into the egg and then back into the body without any physical harm or damage that could be shown from a resulting x-ray or psychiatrist's note medical report. And so that complicated proof that an existing law had been broken. The fox says that even apart from the difficulty in showing that any tangible harm has been caused, there's this historical idea in United States courts that if a child is the end result of any action, it can't be a harm. Going back to the 1940s, there was a doctrine in the United States. It adopted this principle of babies are the blessings doctrine it was called. And the idea was that if you got a baby, no matter the misconduct that may have resulted in you are getting that baby, then by definition you weren't harmed. And you couldn't claim a harm that would be redressable in our courts. The very fact that you had a baby, a bouncing beautiful smiling child was proof that you had not been harmed but benefited and accordingly couldn't claim for compensation in the courts. So if you had been misled whether negligently or even intentionally into becoming pregnant into staying pregnant, into having a child that you hadn't planned on or hadn't wanted or wouldn't have carried but for some clear misconduct by whether an intimate partner or the physician that you had entrusted to help you, then you couldn't sue because babies are a blessing. So I do think that is part of it. We struggle under the law still today to think of having a child as a harm. And I think we struggle with that for some good reasons. It is indeed a tension to think that the child that you now have and presumably love is somehow a legal harm under the law, which is a very difficult tension to navigate. In the spring of 2019, after Eve Wiley's bill was filed, she continued to make the trip to Austin once a week to meet with legislators and ask for their support. So it's a lengthy exhausting process. Another roadblocks was that my biological father's best friend was a representative and I actually met with him and I was like, listen, you've seen me around the halls. I'm sure you've talked to Dr. McMorries, you know why I'm here. And so I told him the story and he was like, Eve, you have a duty to honor your mother and your father, and he goes, and besides, it looks like it all worked out well for you with this hand motion. Oh my gosh, it made me so mad. And so he's like, it's not going to pass, I'm not going to vote for it. And so I stood up and I was like, all right, you watch me. About three months later, on May 16, 2019, the bill passed. It became a crime in Texas for a doctor to do what Eve's mother's doctor had done. It's classified as a type of sexual assault. But Dr. Kim McMorries couldn't be prosecuted under the new law. It wasn't retroactive. And he continued seeing patients at his clinic until he retired in 2021. In 2024, he agreed to voluntarily surrender his medical license while he was under investigation by the Texas Medical Board for quote, professionalism related to alleged lack of informed consent when providing fertility treatment to multiple patients. We reached out to Dr. Kim McMorries for comment, but haven't heard back. In the same time, the Texas bill passed another past in Indiana where Donald Klein had been practicing. It made fertility fraud, a felony in the state, and allowed victims to file civil claims and sufer damages since then bills have passed in at least 11 other states. Today, Eve Wiley has relationships with many of her half siblings. She says she's especially close with her sisters. And she says that Steve, the man who she had thought, almost her biological father, still comes to family gatherings that they talk all the time. This November, I'm going out on the road with a brand new live show. This one is about my own family. And in part, about how when we were starting criminal, my own sister was in prison in Iowa. I hope you'll come. We'll be in Chicago, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, DC, Raleigh Austin, Minneapolis, Denver, LA, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. You can find out more at this is criminal.com/live or click the link in the show notes. Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sugiko, Lily Clark, and Lena Silicin. This episode was fact checked by Katie Cedarborg. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Seminetti, special thanks to Jody Madira. Julien Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com, and you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com/newsletter. Dove Fox's book is birthrights and wrongs. How medicine and technology are remaking reproduction in the law. And you can find his audio documentary, Donor 9623, The Biggest Hoax in Reproductive History, Unaudible. We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus. You can listen to Criminal, This Is Love, and Phoebe Reads' Mystery without any ads. Plus, you'll get bonus episodes. These are special episodes with me and Criminal Co-Creator Lauren Spore talking about everything from how we make our episodes to the crime stories that caught our attention that week to things we've been enjoying lately. To learn more, go to patreon.com/criminal. We're on Facebook at This Is Criminal, and Instagram and TikTok at Criminal_Podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge, This Is Criminal.