The Journey, Episode 5: The Children

Previously on The Journey. I say this with all my heart, guys, like if I could give my fertility, just a sliver of it, to every mom out there who's struggling with fertility, I would do it in a heartbeat. I mean, I would, no questions asked. Police say while Sylvia Zhang and Guangzheng Chen were arrested and released, their investigation into them continues. What are the thoughts going through your head in terms of what's going to happen to baby girl? This is a lot. It was a whole lot. I just wanted to be safe. I wanted her to be safe. Yeah. We spent a lot of money. We want to be the family here. People see this as a surrogacy case, but they're real children, very real children that are involved. And they deserve security and stability and all of those things that normal, every normal child should have. Throughout my months of reporting, I'd been trying to find out what had happened to the children while they'd been living inside the mansion in Arcadia. But all I'd been able to gather were scattered details. There were the rare sightings from neighbors. I saw two little baby like this. Like two foot tall, like toddler? Yeah, toddler. There were the occasional baby videos the surrogates had been sent. She was big old cheek. Oh my God. I haven't seen the pictures of her face up close. No. I'd heard the underwhelming descriptions Sylvia had provided to the surrogates during calls. They are really horrible. They are very healthy and they are friendly, they're helping each other, they are independent and they know how to put the trash to the trash can. And I'd seen the shocking images from the police affidavit showing the two month old baby. The baby cries for a few seconds until a thud or a hit is heard and crying suddenly stops. But there was more information, a lot of it, hidden just out of sight. In the months since the kids were removed from their home, a social worker known as a dependency investigator had been compiling a detailed dossier on the family, a case file. It spanned hundreds and hundreds of pages. This investigator had conducted interviews with caregivers, medical staff, nannies, the few children who were old enough to speak, and Sylvia and Guojun themselves. He'd collected medical records, photographs, read through psychological evaluations, and notes from other social workers. He'd even interviewed some of the couple's surrogates. It was all this evidence that a judge would be looking at in L.A.'s juvenile dependency court. The proceeding was not a criminal trial. It was a civil one. And at its conclusion, the judge would decide whether or not to reunify the family. That decision would have ramifications far beyond California. Since Sylvia and Guojun's arrest in May of 2025, they'd had at least six more children, also through surrogates, bringing their tally to 27. In addition to the kids in L.A., two were in foster care in Pennsylvania, one was in Georgia, and one was still living with a surrogate who carried her in Farmville, Virginia. The fate of all these kids depended on what was in that case file. It's confidential, tightly guarded by the juvenile court. But then, one day, I had a reporting breakthrough. I got the chance to review it. I got the chance to find out what was in that case file. From In the Dark and The New Yorker, I'm Ava Kaufman, and this is the final installment of The Journey. Episode 5, The Children. I can't tell you how I was able to see the family's dependency case. And a lot of it, I'm not going to share here. Child welfare cases are kept secret in California to protect the privacy of kids. But that secrecy can also serve to shield the actions of adults. Not just the parents, but adults within the child welfare system. And that's the part of the file I want to tell you about. I'd always assumed the story had started around the time of the couple's arrest. After the two-month-old baby had been taken to the hospital with severe head injuries. But it turned out, long before that, long before Sylvia and Guojun created 27 children, and all these children ended up in foster homes around the country, the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, or DCFS, had been well aware of the family. Reading through the file, I saw that DCFS had been getting tips about Sylvia and Guojun for years. Social workers had received what are known as referrals about the family on at least six separate occasions. That's six opportunities when the child welfare system could have intervened. And it repeatedly failed to do so in any meaningful way. As far as I can tell, the first time the agency made contact, with the family, was in 2019, back when Guojun was still living in Roland Heights. Sylvia's daughter, then eight, was seen sitting alone in a parked car outside Guojun's house, for hours by some accounts. The daughter eventually called 911. DCFS decided there wasn't enough evidence to determine whether neglect had occurred, though Sylvia was charged with a misdemeanor, willful cruelty to a child. She completed a diversion program, and the criminal charge was dropped. The second referral came a few years later. It had to do with a set of twins who'd been born prematurely and ended up in the NICU in October of 2022. These were the babies Olympia Belmonte had carried. And I remember the phone call where they call me and they're like, "You know, we know that you're the surrogate, but we can't get ahold of the mom that's listed." The summary of the referral states that Sylvia, and Guojun only visited the newborns two or three times during their weeks-long hospitalization, and didn't call to check on them. When you started with the bed, they left the kid at the hospital, I thought you're going to say like, "Oh, they didn't come back for two days or something." You know, okay, well, great. Maybe they got in an auto accident, whatever, but two weeks? This is Bob Powell. His law firm routinely sues child welfare agencies on behalf of parents and children. He's one of 10 experts I consulted to help me make sense of what I was reading. Like everyone I spoke to, Bob told me the second referral with Olympia's twins was a warning sign. Really, really, that's like a red flag, like a big one. I think, yeah, they fly at the county fair size flag. A county fair size flag? Yeah, that's a huge red flag. But the agency deemed the second referral inconclusive. Just a month later, in December 2022, came the next referral, the third. A public health nurse visited the Arcadia mansion, presumably to check on the premature twins. And the nurse stumbled across a medical emergency involving a completely different child, a five-month-old baby with hydrocephalus, a buildup of fluid in the brain that causes the head to swell. If hydrocephalus is left untreated in infants, the condition can be fatal. The nurse later told a social worker the child's head was so huge, you couldn't miss it, and his gaze was to the side. The nurse told Sylvia she needed to take her son to the ER immediately. Two days later, the baby underwent emergency surgery to drain the excess fluid from his head. According to the dependency file, because of his parents' delay in seeking care, he has health issues that will last the rest of his life. In situations like this, DCFS has the option to take a family's case before a judge. If the judge decides to proceed, that means many more eyes on the children, and attorneys are appointed to advocate for them. And if necessary, the children will be placed into temporary foster care. But DCFS didn't do that here. Instead, the agency opted for a voluntary family maintenance plan, in which social workers observed Sylvia's parenting, and ensured the child was being taken to medical appointments. This period of supervision ended after just two weeks. for almost eight months. Not long after, Sylvia shipped her son off to central China to live with her sister, and she doesn't appear to have visited him since. I asked the attorney, Bob Powell, what he thought about DCFS's actions here. I was curious what you make of that decision, just given the fact pattern so far. That's insane. That is fucking insane. I mean, we're at insane already. I'm going to keep going, but I mean, we're at insane. I don't know what the next word will be. I'll have to go check my theosaurus or something. I then told Bob that during this brief period that DCFS was supervising Sylvia and Guojun, the agency received yet another call about yet another child. Someone seemingly at a school reported that a three-year-old had dark bruises on his lower back, left arm, and leg. The child said his mom hit him, though I saw notes in the case file suggesting it had been a nanny. DCFS determined the allegation was unfounded. Now I got to hear more. I mean, apparently that's four. That's four. That's the fourth referral. Yeah. What else have we got? The list goes on. Referral number five is about an entirely different set of twins, born in 2023, less than a year after the set Olympia had carried. These twins were also premature and hospitalized with complications. Sylvia and Guojun again failed to verify. They were also unable to visit them in the NICU and didn't attend their follow-up appointments. I read DCFS's conclusion to Bob. Disposition. Referral is evaluated out. No disposition. Ongoing referral investigation. Wow. That's the lowest of the low. What does lowest of the low mean? Evaluated out. Does not rise to the level of child abuse is basically what it means if you want to be more technical. Mm-hmm. Okay. Which it fucking does, but go ahead. The sixth referral came not long after the fifth, this time from an Arcadia police officer. He'd ended up at the house because Guojun had called the cops on Sylvia during one of their fights. According to Guojun, Sylvia had thrown things, pushed him into a chair, and unplugged the Wi-Fi router before storming out of the house. The officer noted that the home had multiple cribs and multiple kids, and when he'd asked Guojun for their names, and birthdates, Guojun had to look them up on his phone. So that's six different occasions in which DCFS made contact with a family. Each time, a caseworker would have been required to review the family's past referrals. But despite the pattern of medical neglect and signs of potential physical abuse, the agency never took the parents to court, even as the household continued to expand, year after year. So far, Sylvia and Guojun had evaded serious scrutiny. But reading through the case file, there was one other moment where it almost seemed like something was going to happen. It was a moment where it almost seemed like someone was going to take a closer look. This was in March 2024, around the same time as the sixth referral. A family court judge requested a home visit and psychological evaluation of the parents. This judge isn't connected to the dependency court. He was tasked with approving the orders of parentage, those documents used in surrogacies. And perhaps because of how many orders the family already had, he took this rare step of requesting a home study. The court appointed a psychologist for this job, a man named Keith Peterson. Peterson toured the Arcadia mansion and carried out his own welfare check on the children. And the report he produced was glowing. Peterson wrote that he came away, quote, impressed with his family and reported no concerns about Sylvia and Guojun's ability to provide a loving and stable home for even more children. As I read the report, I was so impressed. I was so impressed. I was so impressed. I was so impressed. As I read the report more closely, I noticed something. The interpreter Peterson used for nearly all his conversations with teachers, nannies, Guojun, and Sylvia's sister in China was Sylvia. He conducts all of those interviews using the mother as his translator. There's a genius. There's a genius. Have you ever seen that before? I'm surprised, no. Everyone I asked about this unusual methodology made the same kinds of noises. Here's Sean McMillan, another lawyer who specializes in suing child welfare agencies. That's awesome. Oh, what a guy. Okay. And tell me why you're laughing. Because that's just so dumb. I mean, come on. There's a bunch of problems with that. Okay. First of all, the subject of your evaluation can't be your interpreter. There's obvious conflicts there. Obvious conflicts. Secondarily, how do you know that she's interpreting correctly for you? How do you know you're really getting the information that you should be getting? I emailed, texted, and left voicemails for Peterson, the court-appointed psychologist, but I didn't hear back. A spokesperson for the Superior Court said that he could not comment on the specifics, but told me that court-appointed experts work independently and according to their own professional standards. As for DCFS, I sent the agency a detailed list of questions on two occasions, and both times, a spokesperson responded that while the agency understood the public's interest in the well-being of children, confidentiality laws prohibited it from commenting. Of course, I can't know what social workers and psychologists were thinking, but the experts I consulted about these referrals converged on two explanations for what they were thinking. One is just bureaucratic incompetence. DCFS was frequently described to me as understaffed and underfunded. A blistering state audit in 2018 found that social workers did not always accurately identify the threats present in children's homes. My sources also suggested there might have been another factor at play, money. There's extensive research showing that in the child welfare system, wealthy families are more likely to have children in their homes than in their families. I remembered how one of the social workers had noted how Guojun and Sylvia are rich, and how several times in that home study, Keith Peterson, the court-appointed psychologist, remarked on the spaciousness of the family's nine-bedroom home, which he said he was certain could readily accommodate future children and staff. So there were those six referrals and that home study in 2024. And then there was the seventh referral. And this was the incident that turned out differently. The seventh referral happened in May of 2025. It began when the two-month-old baby boy was taken to the hospital. The baby boy was taken to the hospital with severe head injuries. Police and social workers were sent to the Arcadia mansion. Sylvia and Guojun granted them permission to look around. Captain Collins Yadlow of the Arcadia Police Department told me the house had an institutional feel. Bedrooms were all divided up, you know, a couple cribs or a couple beds to a room. There was one large kind of communal sleeping area where there were a lot of toddler beds where the younger children were all put to sleep. As he and his colleagues walked through the house, they saw a large chef's kitchen with commercial-sized refrigerators, a lot of strollers, infant car seats, boxes of baby formula, and there were the classrooms. Picture your third-grade classroom. You know, you've got desks lined up in a row. You've got your teachers at the front of the class with, you know, a whiteboard. And in this case, there was a TV. And the children were put in chairs. And that's where some of them were when we got there that evening. This was all pretty unusual, but Yadlow said that everything generally looked okay. Kids were running around seemingly happy, doing kid things, playing with toys, you know, getting markers out and drawing on paper and things like that. There was nothing that made us take a step back and say, hey, we have to intervene immediately at this point. According to the notes I saw, a social worker from DCFS, conducted a visual inspection of the children that evening and agreed with the police assessment, writing, quote, The police and social workers left the home. And it seemed like this referral might turn out like all the others. Just some confidential notes shoved into a folder that no one outside the child welfare system would ever see. Except this visit. something was different. Remember those cameras that Guojun had all over his home? This time, the officers decided to take a look at that surveillance footage. That afternoon, in May 2025, when police visited the house, they seized hours of surveillance footage, two weeks' worth of it, from all 32 of the cameras throughout the mansion. Social workers involved in the dependency case watched some of the footage, and included in the files I reviewed are pages of their meticulous, time-stamped notes. Among the materials they looked over were videos of the incident involving Sylvia and Guojun's two-month-old son, the one who'd been hospitalized with head injuries. The details may be hard to hear, but I think they're important to share, because Sylvia and Guojun, their lawyers, and those close to them, often said that the nannies were solely to blame, and that the parents had no knowledge of any wrongdoing taking place in their home. But according to notes I'd reviewed, this footage shows that Sylvia and Guojun were fully aware of what had happened to their two-month-old son. A camera installed in Guojun's office recorded the couple as they replayed the video of the entire incident, just a few hours after, after it happened. In the video they're watching, a nanny picks up the two-month-old boy and carries him to another part of the room, off-camera. She tells him to stop crying. Several muffled thuds are heard. The baby's cry changes, and then stops. The nanny places the baby back into the crib in view of the camera. He now appears to be unconscious. She begins to rub his sternum, and then, an attempt to wake him up. Watching this footage in Guojun's office, Sylvia stands up and points at the screen. She seems shocked. Later that same day, the nanny enters the office where the camera then captures her confrontation with Sylvia and Guojun. All of them watch the incident together on a monitor. The yelling, the thuds, the whimper, the silence. Sylvia appears enraged and yells at the nanny, that she could go to jail for this. The nanny eventually admits that she hit the baby twice. Guojun corrects her that it was actually four times. He replays the footage again. Then, Sylvia gives the nanny $600 in cash and a hug. After the nanny leaves the office, Sylvia and Guojun don't discuss their son's medical care or call the police. Instead, Sylvia immediately tells Guojun that they will need to hire more nannies for all the babies who will be arriving soon. The next night, Sylvia takes the two-month-old boy to the hospital, but later says that the wait is too long. So another day passes before the baby is seen by a doctor. It's not as though Sylvia is unaware of the severity of her son's injuries. In other videos taken from inside the house, during this time, Sylvia says something is wrong. Her son isn't feeding properly. His cry is deep and low. According to notes from the police, the nanny tells Sylvia the baby is vomiting and even texts her two videos of the child shaking. He looks as if he is having a seizure. When Sylvia does finally get the baby seen by a doctor, she conceals the cause of his injuries, telling hospital staff, police, and social workers that her son is in a coma. Her son accidentally fell off the bed. I talked to someone who'd watched a lot of this footage, a professor of neuroscience and pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. His son's name is Charles Nelson. I'm no novice to this. I've been involved in other child protection cases, but this is the first time I had to watch it. Charles has spent decades studying how early deprivation shapes the developing brain, and he'd been tapped as an expert witness in this case by the lawyers for L.A. County. They'd asked him to watch the videos and to testify during the trial about what he saw. The scale of this was mind-boggling. There was unspeakable, unspeakable abuse of a large number of kids. And then it was just the heartlessness of the whole thing, that these nannies showed not one bit of love or affection towards these kids, nor did the parents. You expect people responsible for the welfare of young children to invest in those young kids, and there's just not a shred of evidence that I saw of that. The nanny allegedly hitting the two-month-old baby wasn't the only violent victim. It was a violent incident captured by Sylvia and Guojun's cameras. The very same day, the cameras had filmed other nannies appearing to abuse the couple's other children, hitting them, and forcing them to hold a squatting pose for several minutes on end. And the parents were aware of all of this, too. Charles said he saw Guojun participating. Did you see the moment on the video where the father comes into the classroom? Yeah, multiple times. Multiple times. Where, you know, the father would come in, and he might hit the kid, and then his job was to get the kid to pose, and then he'd leave. He was rarely in the room for more than a few minutes. But he would come in when there would be a real big blow-up, and probably he heard the nanny screaming and beating this kid. Then he would come in to sort of lay down the law. Basically, by getting the kid to pose, he'd hit the kid sometimes, too. And then the dad would leave again. Charles told me the trauma to these children was likely a result of the fact that he was a child. It was likely compounded by the fact that they were constantly watching each other endure the abuse. The other kids would be looking away. Sometimes they'd be laughing. It was odd to watch, and it made me think that they're behaving this way because they had sort of become a nerd to this whole situation, which is, like, really depressing. The only one heartwarming moment was this kid was being beaten, and he was right. He was right on the table, right in front of another kid. And at one point during the beating, that kid reached out and grabbed his hand. And that was really touching. Two days after police seized this footage, they arrested Sylvia and Guojun. Guojun was pulled over while driving, and police found $10,000 in cash in the trunk of his car. The police were unable to arrest the nanny who'd allegedly beaten the two-month-old because she'd fled. I tried to find her at what appeared to be an old address in L.A., but couldn't reach her for comment. Sylvia and Guojun were jailed for four days, those same four days Sylvia had mentioned to one of the surrogates on the phone. They put my husband and me all in the jail for four days. But they were released without charges, and police said, they were continuing their investigation. Meanwhile, social workers from DCFS returned to the house, this time to remove all the children. This was the moment when they were placed into foster care. As the children arrived at their new homes, many had visible scratches, scars, bruises, and marks, some of which appeared to be from the child's body. Some of them appeared to have been made with a ruler or stick. And during medical exams that night, and at doctor's appointments in the following weeks, the children were diagnosed with illnesses, conditions, and developmental delays, which, in some cases, might have been prevented with timely medical attention. One toddler was missing the nails on his right thumb and left pinky. He also had to be immediately hospitalized for pneumonia. Another toddler was missing the nails on his right thumb and left pinky. The other had a misshapen head that could no longer be corrected. Remember how, just 48 hours earlier, a social worker had determined that everything seemed fine at the home, writing, it is evident there is no neglect and abuse at this time? I couldn't stop thinking about how the agency had missed all of these bruises and scratches, marks that would have been clearly visible, and what they would have done if it wasn't for the social worker. I asked Sean McMillan about this. He's one of the attorneys whose practice specializes in suing DCFS. And what does it mean that the social workers conducted a full visual inspection and missed everything that then other social workers and doctors at the intake centers that Friday night when the children were all removed? It means they're lying. You think they must have not conducted a visual inspection two days earlier? Dude, dude, this happens all the time. Nobody wants to believe that social workers lie, but I'll tell you right now, they do. I reached out to DCFS one more time, to see if it wanted to respond to this specific allegation that its employees had been dishonest. I also asked the agency when it made of my growing suspicion that some of this might have been prevented if, at any of these earlier points, social workers had decided to intervene. This time, a spokesperson for the agency responded with an additional statement. She wrote that the field of child protection is deeply complex, and that when children are seriously injured or fatality occurs, DCFS rigorously examines its response to determine whether practices can be improved. In the face of all this evidence, I wondered how Sylvia and Guojun would defend themselves in dependency court. So one evening, during the trial, I called Mitchell Krems. He's Guojun's lawyer in the case. I asked him, I asked him about the allegations the couple was facing. They're totally blown out of proportion. False. All of the allegations in court? Blown out of proportion, yes. And do you expect that the family will get their children back? I can't comment too much because it's a, you know, juvenile dependency proceedings are closed. Yeah. But since, you know, the general public is aware of them, I will just say that, you know, these are good parents. They're doing everything. They're doing everything to act in a protective capacity. Obviously, it's a unique situation that people are not used to seeing so many kids. I asked about the other parts of this unique situation. That there were videos also showing the parents were aware of the abuse. That Sylvia had known her son was injured, but waited two days before getting him seen by a doctor. Well, that's just patently false, that they knew and didn't respond in time. You know, the mother was very diligent in taking the child to the hospital. And, you know, any sort of allegation that she failed to protect this child is just it's it's disproven by the records. But when I asked him what those records were, Mitchell Krem said he couldn't comment on the specifics because the entire case file was confidential. In terms of the affidavit that was that is in the public record that has the video of the classroom and the video of the nanny going off screen. And children being spanked and slapped in the face. I'm in a very precarious situation because I can't describe, you know, the exonerating evidence to you because it's all confidential. But I will say that, you know, it's patently false that my client incited any sort of torture, not torture, but any sort of abuse of the child. He doesn't believe in abusing children. He actually believes in enriching them and giving them the best opportunity to succeed. That's part of his ideology as a successful Chinese. His business man is that he's very educationally driven. I spoke with someone close to Guojun and Sylvia who said something similar. Guojun really did want his kids to be successful. She admitted their parenting style was less than ideal. But in her view, that was because they didn't know any better. As she understood it, the parents thought they were doing a really good job. Earlier this year, I published an investigation in The New Yorker about Sylvia, Guojun, and their many surrogates. At that point, the dependency court proceedings had been completed. And the case had been going on for a few weeks, which was longer than usual. But there were so many kids, and there was so much evidence. It was yet to be decided whether or not the children would be reunified with their parents. Weeks passed. Then months. And then one day this spring. Um, what's up? You have some news for me? Yeah, I have an update about the case. I called our producer, Natalie. The dependency court? The dependency court issued a decision on whether or not the parents are going to get to keep their kids. Oh, my God. Like, the decision? Like, the big thing we've been waiting for? Yeah. Nearly a year after the kids had been taken away, the court had ruled that Sylvia and Guojun would not have the opportunity to get them back. In technical terms, the judge had bypassed the possibility for family reunification services. And eventually, Sylvia and Guojun are likely to have their parental rights terminated. Although I'd been told Sylvia and Guojun are challenging the rulings, people familiar with the child welfare system told me that appeals in these kinds of cases rarely succeed. I should note that Sylvia's older daughter from her previous relationship was dismissed from the case. That child, then 14 years old, had already been sent home to Sylvia. On the basis that she was a child, she was not a child. The fact that her age and closeness to her mother set her apart from the safety risks faced by her younger siblings. As for the rest of the children, they would not be returning to the Arcadia mansion. Some would likely stay with the foster families they'd been with for the past year. Others might end up with different guardians. I was pinging you. I was blowing up your phone because I have a big update, finally. I started calling all the surrogates who, for nearly a year, had been anxiously waiting. Oh, thank God. Thank the Lord. I'm relieved, you know, I'm relieved because I felt really guilty for my part in it, you know, as far as. I mean, it's good news. It's good to hear that. With the relief came more complicated emotions, too. I recently caught up with Amber Applegarth, the couple's very first surrogate. The son that she'd carried for the family was now seven. And in his eyes, I can only imagine, he probably thinks, like, that's my mom, that's my dad. He thinks that that's probably normal, you know what I mean? And now he's, you know, put somewhere where I hope he's being treated far better, so now he's experiencing a better life. But I was, I was relieved. While the question of what would happen to the children seemed at last to have been decided, there was another question that still hadn't been resolved. There was another question that still hadn't been resolved. Regarding what would happen to the parents. It came up in almost all my calls with the surrogates, whenever I trekked in with them. Are they still pursuing the criminal charges, the Arcadia PD, if they filed it? What about, like, the child abuse and all of that, where they found guilty and all of that? I want to know, is Sylvia going to go, you know, is she going to go to jail for any of this? Like, those are the things I'm like, she needs to. I mean, I'm no one, I shouldn't be judging, but I'm like, she kind of needs to. She kind of needs to pay the price for all of this. Ever since the parents' arrest on suspicion of child endangerment in May of 2025, they've been under investigation by police and by the FBI. Though, police told me that the feds no longer seemed to be looking into the parents for human trafficking. That there wasn't a there there. The possibility of state charges for child abuse, however, remained. Police told me that the feds no longer seemed to be looking into the parents for human trafficking. Police had seized two weeks' worth of surveillance footage from the Arcadia mansion and submitted their findings to the L.A. District Attorney's Office. Twice. Both times, the D.A.'s office asked the police to do more investigation. In July, the nanny, Chunmei Li, was charged for allegedly hitting the two-month-old baby. But as of this writing, prosecutors have yet to file criminal charges against Sylvia or Guojun. In the meantime, some of the surrogates were considering their own legal action. A few weeks after I published the story, I got a call from Kayla Elliott, the surrogate I'd visited in Corpus Christi, the one who'd posted the TikTok video and inadvertently become a whistleblower. We finally found an attorney to help us sue Sylvia and Guojun. You did? That's huge news, Kayla. The lawsuit wasn't about getting custody. The surrogates understood that many of the kids had now been with their foster families for almost a year. My surrogate baby has been, you know, with her foster family since all this happened, and she doesn't know me, you know what I mean? Like, so much time has gone by. Like, yes, I carried her, but, like, I don't— I mean, I highly doubt she would remember my voice or my face, you know what I mean? She has no idea who I am. So, like, if I was given the opportunity to take her, obviously I would. But, like, I'm more focused. I'm not just about, like, the baby. Also, so much as I am, like, it sounds horrible to say, but, like, getting revenge on these people, you know what I mean? Like, I want them to know that what they did was unacceptable. And even though they might be prosecuted, like, under the eyes of the law, I want them to know and hear from me out of my own mouth how much pain they caused me and these women. In August, Kayla, Stacey King, and three of the couple's other surrogates sued Sylvia and Guojun for fraud, among other claims. Shortly before the complaint was filed, I spoke to their lawyer, Jamie Majore. Jairus. Surrogacy, it asks a woman to place the most private and vulnerable parts of her body in the trust of another. So each plaintiff in this case surrendered her body to what we're saying is basically the couple's enterprise. Jamie typically represents survivors of sexual abuse, but she told me she saw parallels in the harms suffered by the surrogates. In fact, they were making an unusual legal argument, alleging sexual battery. You know, they each submitted their sexual and reproductive organs to weeks of hormonal manipulation, to repeated invasive procedures, to the insertion of, you know, instruments and catheters into her body, to implementation of the embryos and her uterus, and to this physical ordeal of pregnancy and childbirth. And she did so only because they deceived her into believing she was helping a single loving family conceive this one child. And obviously that was a lie. The consent, it was obtained by fraud, which that's not consent under the law. The couple did not respond to requests for comment for this series. Previously, one of their lawyers told me that, since the surrogates had entered into their contracts voluntarily, they had no claim that they were taken advantage of. It was, he wrote, a legal impossibility. The surrogates wanted to know how the children they'd carried were actually doing, but they didn't have any way of finding out. For my reading of the dependency file and talking to experts, it seemed evident that some of the children would experience psychological and developmental challenges, which would last into adulthood. But I'd also seen in the file some hopeful signs. As time passed, some of the caregivers had told social workers that the children seemed to be growing more comfortable in their foster homes. One set of twins initially engaged in food hoarding, storing bites of meals in their cheeks, and the other set of twins initially engaged in food hoarding, but now they were eating normally. A nine-month-old put off by cuddling, quote, as if affection was foreign, soon started indicating that he wanted to be held, and would crawl towards his caregivers to ask to be picked up. One toddler was so terrified when she was first taken to a playground that her caregiver wondered if she'd ever been to one before. Now she loved going to the park, where she smiled, played, plucked flowers, and played with her friends. As for the two-month-old baby, who'd allegedly been hit by the nanny, he spent weeks in the hospital before he was discharged to a foster home. According to notes in the file, he needed to be woken up every three hours to get food through a feeding tube, and was prone to seizures. But his foster parent and a medical evaluator described him as a very resilient baby, who showed interest in the toys and people around him, and wiggled his little fingers. There was one kid I was still hearing updates about. That was the baby in Farmville, Virginia, the only one still living with a surrogate who'd carried her. That surrogate, Melissa Epps, had declined to be interviewed for the podcast, but I was still in touch with the child's court appointed attorney, Brooke Teefey. She's just growing and just getting so big, and she's just, she's in a home that has extended family members that are, that are taking care of the child too, and it's a farm. She'll be raised with chickens and all kinds of farm animals. Brooke visited the little girl regularly at Melissa's house, just outside of Farmville. One time, the child was sleeping, and Ms. Epps brought me back to see the child, and she had that motherly pride in that she was, she had, this child, she birthed this child, and she's taking care of her, and, you know, it goes to show you that, you know, biology's not everything, and that parental bond is formed so early, and she definitely has that, and this child sees her as, as mom, and it's, it's, it's good to, to see. I mean, that's the only mother she's known. As for whether the baby will ultimately get to stay with Melissa, it's going to be a while. until anything in Virginia is decided. The custody case is still playing out there. Brooke told me she was planning to save all her paperwork, so that one day, when the girl was older, she could learn more about where she came from, and maybe get in touch with her siblings. See, it's a mix of these new builds. Yeah, it looks like newer ones, and then I saw one recently. It's a mix of these new builds. Yeah, it looks like newer ones, and then I saw one really teeny tiny, tiny little house, and these houses are real nice. Three-car garage, oh man. One afternoon earlier this year, I gave Kayla Elliott a tour of Arcadia. Kayla had recently decided to undertake another surrogacy journey. She was calling it her redemption journey. A journey is an understatement, for sure. It's an adventure. Her new intended parents also decided to take her on a tour of Arcadia. Kayla's parents also lived in Texas, but they happened to have stored their embryo at a fertility clinic in LA, so they'd flown her out from Corpus Christi for a medical screening. I'd accompanied her to her appointment, and afterward, we decided to go for a drive. There was one house in Arcadia that Kayla was particularly curious to see. We pulled up to a Neo-Mediterranean-style mansion with castle-like turrets, a stone facade, and arched entryways. A white Tesla was parked on the street, just outside the gate. And this time, someone was in the car. That's her. That's Sylvia. Did you see? She's in the car right there. I'm driving around. That's her in the white Tesla. Oh my god. No way. Oh my god, it is her. Sylvia pulled the Tesla into the driveway, beside Guojun's black Mercedes. Then she walked inside the mansion and shut the door. Kayla thought about texting Sylvia, but she didn't think she'd get a response to the question she really wanted to ask her. I just want to know why. Like, just, like, if anything, she owes us at the very least that explanation. You know, like, why did you do it? One of the credos of surrogate motherhood is that the baby is a gift, a treasure, a labor of love. Kayla no longer suspected the couple was trying to sell these children. But she still couldn't make sense of why Sylvia and Guojun had seemed indifferent to the gift of life they'd been given. After Sylvia went inside, Kayla and I sat parked on the street for a few more minutes. How many bedrooms is this house again? I forget. It's like a. Nine to ten. Nine to ten. Wow. It's just so crazy because, like, can you imagine, like, if these were decent people, like, this would be such a beautiful home to raise kids at. Like, it has so much potential, you know what I mean, to be just such a pretty place. Looking up at the mansion, Kayla thought about the life the baby girl she carried might have had growing up there. Oh, my God. Oh, my gosh. She's going to be one next month. I was just thinking about that. Wow. Wow. I would die to see pictures of her now, her big old cheeks. Kayla still has a photograph from the night of the birth on her fridge. In it, she's cradling the baby to her chest while her boyfriend, Blake, bends over to take a closer look. She told me she sometimes found herself wondering if the baby's foster parents might one day reach out to her. More than anything, she was hoping they might send her a photo. Some sign that the baby was now okay. The journey is written and produced by me, Ava Kaufman, senior producer Natalie Jablonski, and producer Raymond Tungakar. Samara Fremark is the managing producer for the series. It's edited by Allison McAdam. Additional editing by Willing Davidson and Madeline Barron. Theme and original music by Alex Weston. Additional music by Samara Fremark. And music by Gary Meister. This episode was mixed by Corey Schreppel. Our art is by. Artika Sharma. Art direction by Aviva Michaelov and Ben Kothi. Fact-checking by Inwo Shi and Amon Hossam. Our summer research assistant is Ethan Kahn. Legal review by Fabio Bertoni and Ben Murray. Our managing editor is Julia Rothschild, with additional support from Kiara Ortiz. Thanks also to Parker Yesko. The editor of The New Yorker is David Remnick. If you have any comments or story tips, please send them to the team at inthedarkatnewyorker.com. And please make sure to follow In the Dark wherever you get your podcasts. In the Dark.