Infertility doctor secretly fathered dozens of children: how strangers became family

Earlier this year, 8 siblings gathered at a beachfront resort in Fort Ladadale for a reunion.

“Like some families, this one makes t-shirts.”

Rina, a retired college professor, hands the mouse. The two-shirt features a photo of a sibling's father. He's a bald man with glasses. Brother Pleasant, picture. Hidden lips, of course.

This is Gil Brotsky, another sibling. He reads the speech bubble next to his father's mouth. His Gilbert was my favorite. The T-shirt is a joke, and more ways than one.

Gil never knew his biological father.

Neither did anyone else at the table, including his half-sister Dina Harris. I don't know him. I mean, I think he was a bit eccentric. So who knows?

I mean, it must have been sitting somewhere in his mind that what he did was odd. Until a decade ago, none of these siblings knew any of the others existed. And yet, here they are, out of family reunion. But not like one you've ever heard of. This is the story of a secret family.

A group of strangers who uncovered a decade-old deception. Then out of that, built genuine family connections. Turning what could have been a catastrophe into something of farming and meaningful. MPR's Frank Langfitt spent the last year interviewing 18 members of this unique family.

This is the first time they're telling their story.

This week on the Sunday Story, one family strange creation tale, and what it says about the bonds that unite us. And just a quick warning, this episode does mention thoughts of suicide. The last time Antonio May's senior heard from his son. It was in a note, the 16-year-old laughed in the family's garage.

He told me you've no make me proud. Antonio Jr. left home to join a protest in Seattle. A week later, he was shot and killed there. I need some arithmetic, just as for my son. Listen to we keep us safe on the embedded podcast from NPR.

One year after Congress eliminated federal funding for public media, NPR remains committed to informing the public. But a free press doesn't just happen, it's something we must protect. Without federal funding, we're relying on your support now. Please show your support today at plus.npr.org.

“After a DNA test revealed a family secret,”

questions started swirling. Where am I in the universe? And I had a desperate need to find out. The truth brought dozens of strangers together. The secret family of a fertility doctor.

Listen now to the Sunday Story from the up-first podcast on the NPRF. We're back with the Sunday Story with our episode about a family and its secret origins. I'm handing it off now to NPR-Rovie National correspondent, Frank Lengthett. Brianna is 65.

She grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs. Brianna, like some other people you'll hear from in this story, doesn't want NPR to use her full name to protect the privacy of family members. For Brianna, the discovery of her secret family began with a question. Who am I related to?

Brianna's mother was adopted. In 2014, when Brianna took a DNA test,

she expected to find relatives she'd never heard of on her mother's side.

And of course, to see some familiar names of relatives on her father's side. When the results came back, she didn't recognize a single name. I don't recognize anyone. Like no one. Where were her cousins on her father's side?

Why weren't they there? There was more.

“I think they're like four or five people who were listed as close relatives.”

Close enough to be half siblings. But neither of her parents had had other children. Brianna wondered who these people were. And thought could this be a scam in the making? I kept thinking this is really sophisticated.

And how much money do they actually think they're going to get from me? It's he knows it's crazy. Despite her initial distrust, Brianna connected with some of these supposed half siblings. They was baffled as she was. Brianna came to realize this wasn't a trick.

A number of the half siblings told Brianna that they were donor conceived. Could the same be true for her? Brianna and a half sibling named Kathy decided to share their raw DNA with an independent research geneticist to figure out how they were connected.

I hope I'm not waking you. There is no other possibility except that you and Kathy have the same father. I don't know who the father is, but I am 100% sure. Brianna was stunned. I went into a panic and I felt like I was thinking.

“And then the question was, where am I in the universe?”

And I had a desperate need to find out. As far as Brianna knew, she had two biological parents, her mother who had passed away and her father. So Brianna called her dad, who's then in his 80s. The question I asked is, did you and mom have any help with fertility treatment back when I was conceived? And my father's very good at, he was a master.

If he didn't want to deal with something, he would deny it.

And he basically said, you know, I don't know.

I don't know, maybe your mother did something that I don't know about. And I just thought, okay, there it is. Brianna and a new, the man who had raised her, whom she called dad for five decades, he wasn't her biological father. She became determined to find out who was.

And along this journey, she would get a lot of help. As the months and years passed, more half siblings appear through DNA websites. It's just 23 and me and ancestry.com. David Staskin is a neurological surgeon in Boston. He too took a DNA test and remembers reading his results.

I get up and I look at the thing, half brother, half sister, half brother, half sister, half brother. Eventually, they discovered 64 half siblings all with the same biological father. The actual number is probably much higher. Only a small percentage of Americans have taken a consumer DNA test. One of the siblings John Lowell is an actuary.

He estimates that total number of siblings could be 400 or more. Brianna created a private Facebook page for the growing group. Figuring out who their father was was tough. But there were clues. All the half siblings had been born in and around Philadelphia between 1945 and 1971.

Most grew up in Jewish families. A genetic cousin got in touch with the half siblings. More than a year of sleuthing and blind alleys followed. They learned that donor was a doctor. The cousin had a realization.

Brianna and other half sibling explains. He had an uncle who was a world renowned male infertility specialist. And he had just had a feeling that this could be the missing link. The specialist name was Dr. Charles Charney. Charney was an Ivy League educated pioneering medical researcher.

He'd served as the senior attending neurological surgeon.

“And what was then Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia?”

Half siblings needed to confirm it was Charney. The problem? He'd been dead for ages. But he had a living daughter. This is Diane again. So they called a daughter.

They say, "Hi, we think you're a father."

And she basically says, "I don't want to have anything to do with you guys.

This is ridiculous." I reached out to Charney's daughter several times. She never responded. After she turned them down, the half siblings brainstormed. How could they confirm it was Charney without his daughter's cooperation?

Time passed. So I finally said, "Look, does this woman have any kids?" "Yeah. Do you know their names?" "Yeah." I said, "Give us the names and let's all go on LinkedIn and see if we know anybody connected to these guys."

Diane found she had a friend who'd gone to law school with one of Charney's two grand sons. Law school grandson did not take a DNA test. But his brother did. He did 23 in me and he was connected to us. And that's kind of how it all got confirmed.

“I think there was some just plain old relief.”

I mean, this was a long process. And it was just the beginning. It was a mystery story. Okay. So we have a name now.

Who was this person? Charney was born in 1902 in an area of the Russian Empire, which is now part of Western Ukraine. His family fled the pogroms that targeted Jews and settled in Philadelphia. Charney graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in 1926. Calvin Coolidge was president.

Charney fathered his secret children between the end of World War II and the first Nixon administration,

a span of more than a quarter century. The Charney Sibs, as they began to refer to themselves, figured out that OBGYNs inseminated their mothers.

Many of the siblings adored the dads who had raised them and didn't want to cause them pain.

“Brian had briefly asked her father about her conception and got nowhere.”

I really struggled very early on with a question of, do I tell him about this discovery? I kept going back and forth, changing my mind about it. And I decided, you know what, I'm not going to say anything. This is his life story.

He chose to tell his life story in a way that worked for him. My father was in his later years. I didn't want to take that away from him. There was a strange clue that at least one mother knew the Seaman was Charney's. Dean's mom was a painter.

Pretty much painted all the time. And she was good. It was a time when women had trouble getting attention in art circles. So Dean's mom began signing her paintings with what seemed a masculine name. Charney Harris, which was kind of weird.

I mean, and I understand what that was about. So when my brother's found out the name of our biologic father, it was like, what? So if you asked me, did my mom know, yes, of course, you know, come on. And also, my brother's looked like him.

When David, the boss in yourological surgeon saw all the half siblings in his DNA results, he picked up the phone. I called my mother. Now, she's at that time 90, living independently in Florida. And I said to her, mom, I said,

Dad didn't have any other children, whether he was married or not. And you could not have possibly had 20. So what's going on? And my mother's response was interesting because she answered right away, Daddy and I went to a doctor in Philadelphia,

and they processed something in Daddy's sperm, and then we had you.

“Now, she didn't say you must be the doctor's kid, right?”

I was a, but mom, the father is the father of 20, some 30, some people at the time, 60 now. And the interesting thing that she said was,

no, we never thought about it.

We were just so happy to have you. David's mother declined to speak with me. Some cibs are convinced that their parents had no idea. They were conceived through artificial insemination, for instance. One cibling said when she was growing up, her dad expressed a concern

that he'd been afraid that he might have passed on diabetes and other genetic traits to his daughters. He apparently had no idea. He wasn't thereby a logical father. In conversations with parents and relatives, some ciblings form theories about the mechanics behind their conception.

They answered the process, probably went something like this. There was a couple. She was going to a gynecologist. They were having a really hard time getting pregnant. The gynecologist sent them into Philadelphia to a specialist.

And, you know, they would do what you would do today. Take sperm samples, check things out. American medicine was very different back then. There were no sperm banks, patients respected and trusted physicians. And they didn't have much medical literacy.

In those days, there were a lot of men who had fertility issues. It was a source of shame at the time. What they were told was, "We are going to take your sperm and we're going to give it a boost." With the sperm of someone else, I think, a doctor.

We'll get the sample. We'll shake it up. We'll insert it back into you and let see what happens.

“And before this entire procedure, you should have sex before and after.”

This is a real thing that used to happen. And then these women would get pregnant. And I think, because of the way it was a boost rather than a replacement because of the fact that, you know, they had sex before and after.

I think these people got pregnant and said, "You never know."

Maybe it finally worked because we just needed a little boost. The Charney Sibs still have questions. Why did Dr. Charney father so many children? And over such a long time, a little more than a quarter century. No one knows for sure, but at the mini reunion in Fort Lauderdale,

I hand laid out the three theories the siblings have come up with. Theory number one was, he was just a research geek.

You know, just to try to further the whole field of infertility.

“Theory number two was he was super compassionate.”

But he just saw all of these couples like my parents who were incredibly desperate to have children and who couldn't. And decided that he could help solve the problem because he understood a lot about how fertilization worked. Theory number three was that he thought he had really phenomenal genes and wanted to spread his sperm throughout the world. So it was more of an ego thing than anything else.

Joe Lubek, another Charney Sib, is a Philadelphia neurologist. In May, he sent some of his fellow siblings a law review article. It noted that in the early decades of the last century many practitioners of artificial insemination were explicit in their support of eugenics. A Minnesota doctor suggested in 1938 that quote, "We should use this procedure to practice good eugenics and encourage the procedure only in those who are apt to improve society." eugenics encourages reproduction by people based on wealth, race, and physical traits.

The article also said that would be parents were kept ignorant of the identity of the donor. And that the doctors tried to create the illusion of paternity by the husband to spare the family's shame and psychological pain.

Some of the siblings who are physicians are critical of Charney.

You're David, the neurological surgeon. If you say to me, "What's this ethical?" I'd say, "No."

“I'd say by today's standards, it's not ethical, but I think by any standards, it's not ethical.”

'Cause it wasn't a donor, it was the doctor himself. Sips to Friedman is certain his parents had no idea Charney was the donor. That's because they specifically asked for a man who was not Jewish. I grew up Jewish, both parents Jewish. I had an older brother that was six years older than me that had a disease called familial disorder nomia.

It's a disease carried almost exclusively by Eastern European Jews. After my brother was diagnosed, my parents realized that they were both carriers. And then if they had another child, there was a 25% chance that the child would have the same disease and probably not live to their 20th birthday. His parents wanted to make sure their next child, Stu, didn't get it. The major reason they needed a sperm donor was to avoid Jewish genes.

Instead, they got the genes of Charney and Eastern European Jew. They went through this thing with my brother and they went through a lot of energy to make sure it didn't happen again. So yeah, there would be very, very, very angry. So I'm kind of glad they went to their graves without knowing given the fact that everything worked out okay. Stu did not get familial disorder nomia.

There's another thing that bothers some of the sips. Charney continued to father children until he was 69. Most sperm banks won't take sperm from men 40 and older. That's because as men age, genetic mutations in their sperm increase, which can lead to rare diseases in offspring. Gil Brotsky is an amateur songwriter.

He's blunt about his feelings toward Charney. [music] Despite the questions around ethics and Charney's motivations, some siblings' main response is gratitude. I thank him for his genetic material. This is Ken Lasky, a retired nuclear and aerospace engineer.

“I think that he saw himself as a scientist and I was one of the experiments.”

I mean, if he wasn't doing that experiments, I wouldn't be here. Ken also says it was easier to accept the revelations about Charney. Because by the time he found out, he'd already lived most of his life and had a firm identity. Well, I'm glad that I found out when I was 65 rather than when I was 15. I don't know if I was mature enough that I could have handled it.

There have been revelations about other doctors using their own semen to artificially inseminate women without their knowledge. The most notorious case in the US involved a specialist in Indianapolis. He secretly fathered dozens of children between the 1970s and 1980s, pleaded guilty to two felonies in a similar case in Colorado,

family sued the doctor and won a nearly $9 million verdict.

Those cases were marked by anger and recriminations.

After they figured out who their father was, they decided to go beyond emails and phone calls and meet in person.

They organized their first reunion in 2017.

Here's Brian. We came together in Philadelphia.

“We decided, well, it's the one place that we all -- we know how to get there, you know?”

When we arrived on Friday, you could tell people were nervous. All the women had their hair done. Fresh manicures. I'll tell you, Frank, I went shopping for what I was going to wear so many times. I would buy an outfit, bring it home.

It's not good enough I'd go out again. 14 sips and a cousin showed each told their own story. Everyone had five minutes and I literally made a list of here at the bullet points. This is what I want to cover. This is what I want to tell people about.

Then Brian says, came a pivotal moment. But one of our brothers said something that I really think changed things for us. He talked about problems in his family history and what are the chances that he would be here that he would have a life. And he said, what are the chances any of us would be here. We are miracles.

And by defining it as such, the temperature in the room changed. We'll be right back. This is our glass of the American life. Do you know our show? Okay.

“We'll be the way I'm going to tell you about it.”

We make stories. Hopefully you pull you into the beginning with funny moments and feelings and people in surprising situations. And then you just want to find out what is going to happen and cannot stop listening. That's right. I'm talking about stories to make you miss appointments.

This American life. Where you get your podcasts. On the latest MPR politics podcast, we separate fact from fiction. In President Trump's prime time address on election security. Two things can be true at the same time.

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Hi, it's Terry Gross, host of fresh air.

“Hey, take a break from the 24 hour news cycle with us.”

And listen to long form interviews with your favorite authors, actors, filmmakers, comedians and musicians. The people making the art that nourishes us and speaks to our times. So listen to the fresh air podcasts from NPR and W-H-Y-Y. We're back with a Sunday story. Frank Langfib picks up the tale of the Charney Sibs, a group of biological half siblings.

One of the first things siblings bonded over was shared physical traits. Prior to listed some of their distinct features. You know, like Peggy and Paul, and I guess also Larry. There's a few who have like really high cheekbones. And then you have the Frank and Stein forehead.

A lot of us have like these huge foreheads.

Some also connected over the profession they shared with the father they never knew.

Medicine. Charney was a renowned neurologist. Gil, a doctor himself, explains. We've got, you know, 13 docs among us. And none of us of the 13 of us grew up in a family where either parent was a doctor.

It's one of the interesting mysteries of the family. Some of the parallels with their biological father are striking. It's something you'll reflect it on in an earlier conversation. I have to tell you one thing which is kind of a spooky almost, you know, a chimic connection. Charney was one of the first yourologists in America to do testicular biopsies on infernal men.

It's not that common as specimen. When Gil worked as a surgical pathologist, he took a special interest in testicular biopsies as well. I like to think that maybe something they're more than just random coincidence. Charney held medical residencies in Vienna, Paris and Edinburgh. Like their biological father, many of the civs excelled academically.

Gil studied medicine at Harvard as it is half sibling Scott. When Gil attended the sibling get together in 2018, he was surprised to run into Scott.

When we went to my first reunion, Scott said,

"I know you." I said, "Yeah, we were in medical school. It was here behind you. We were friends in Vanderbilt." So we talked about who our friend, various friends were. And then he said, "Who'd you go out with?" And there were a few that we hadn't common.

Another Charney sips studied in a combined MIT Harvard program. She attended a lecture which covered, among other things, the pathology of male infertility, Charney's expertise. The professor, Big Brother Gil, whose 12 years are senior. So there I am teaching this to somebody who I had no idea

was actually my half sister. In addition to Harvard and MIT,

Gil says the collective academic and professional achievement is a source of pride. We were very distinguished family. But X number of doctors and authors and heads of academic departments and things like that. And it's like, "Wow, that's my family." As more half siblings popped up on DNA websites,

someone had to give them an orientation. Over dinner at the Florida reunion, Gil explained that he came to serve as an ambassador of sorts, to ease new siblings into the big news. Well, what was it like?

Hey, I got to tell you this something fell us. We tried to be sensitive about this and there's no shame. You know, we're proud to be who we are.

But first contact can be tricky.

“How do you tell someone their father isn't who they think he is?”

When Joe, the Philadelphia neurologist, popped up on a website as a half sibling, Gil contacted him. Joe had known that he'd been conceived with the help of a sperm donor, but did not yet know who his father was.

For the subspo, Joe found an old medical staff photo of Gil online. The resemblance was striking. It looked like my college yearbook picture. I couldn't believe it. And I showed this to my wife and it was like,

"A holy ****." Joe got on the line with Gil. Joe was on edge. I got angry because I thought that Gil was going to tell me that his father, the one that raised him,

that he had the privilege of growing up in the same household with, was my sperm donor. And I was actually relieved when he told me otherwise. Why? Well, there was nothing that Gil had that I was really deprived of.

Gil explained to Joe that he wasn't alone,

“and that he was part of something much larger.”

Joe says that after hearing this, he went from trepidation to excitement. He was relieved that some of his siblings had already formed relationships and were welcoming him into a community. But some conversations with siblings backfired. Breiner recalls reaching out to a half sister

after seeing her listed as a close relative on a DNA site. Before she spoke to Breiner, the woman had no idea the man who had raised her wasn't her biological father. She was very angry.

My other siblings told me that I better lawyer up that I'm going to get sued. And I'm like, "What can I be sued for?" Like, "What would she angry about?" Then I told her she was donor consent.

She had four cousins on the phone, drilling me and trying to poke holes in my story to figure out where I was not telling the truth. The woman confronted Breiner,

the second sibling reunion in Washington, D.C.

She attacked me in front of everyone and told me that by telling her, I could be responsible for suicides.

“The woman never attended another reunion.”

Breiner says the episode underscores just how difficult it is to share a revelation like this with a stranger. She's absolutely correct. I do not know. At the time I'm talking to someone.

I don't know who they are. What's happening in their life? Whether or not this is a good moment to talk or not. Diane says, "Other half siblings rejected this idea of a new family as well."

We have 10 that really don't want anything to do with this. They're angry with their parents. They don't like us. They don't want to engage. For Dina, who's now 75,

the news came at a terrible time. She opened her DNA test results that day after her mother's funeral. You know, suddenly all of these little things about my family started to come into my head

and I realized, "Oh, my God, this is real." And that was very painful, especially because I was also awarding. In another way, the timing was for two of us. Dina found out just before the second reunion in 2018.

She says meeting other sips in the same boat helped her start to process the news and feel less alone. The discovery of so many half siblings has been especially meaningful for those raised as only children. Larry Brock, 81, is a retired CPA.

There are negatives to being an only child. The biggest negative is you have nobody to talk to. You have nobody to play with. I wanted siblings growing up. Much more than some.

I mean, I always wanted a sister.

I now have 30. What has it been like to have all these siblings? It's been fabulous. Tell me, I think the older you get, the more you have need.

Need for what, Larry. Just somebody, even if it's just a call them on the phone and talk to them. [music] The reunions have now gone on for a decade.

The January's mini reunion in Fort Lauderdale has simply seemed like old friends or family

One day, the sips in their spouses shared lunch on a terrace.

“Gilles shared an inside family joke with Brian about”

Dr. Charney's cause of death. I don't know the joke. Do you know the joke? He died. He died of carpal tunnel syndrome. I finally got it. [laughter]

After lunch, Dean had caught up with me by an artificial waterfall by the hotel pool. She reflected on how the reunions and relationships have changed over the years. It's evolving into a different kind of meeting

where we just want to have fun with each other. That's all. And you could see, we really do like each other or forget along really well. It's very bizarre. The siblings I spoke with insisted,

they also are Charney as their biological father. As opposed to the men they called their dads, those who cared for them and raised them. But during a reunion dinner in Fort Lauderdale,

some wondered about the father they never knew.

Here's Dean again. I did have a fantasy for a while

“that he was following us, following our childhood”

and we were... These were several Charney kids in her family. Parents wanted, and with Charney's help, they got three children. My brothers and I had were very successful

children, and they were... We had had sometimes we were in the papers, the local papers for winning chess tournaments. One of Dean's brothers won the National Junior chess championship for kids under 16.

I thought she maybe he watched us winning these tournaments, but that was great. But I probably not. So that was a small fantasy.

The Charney Sibs had had time to ponder the meaning

behind their extraordinary experience. Diane frames it like this. At the end of the day, this entire story is about what is family. Diane Nelson's parrothood and family

is defined by love and nurture, not biology. I have no questions about who my father was. My father was not my sperm donor. My father was the guy who taught me how to ride a bike and who took me out

for Chinese food on Sundays. That's my dad. Brian draws a broader lesson. My entire life, the way that I've coped with things that are difficult

or challenging, is to look at it and say, "How can I make this work as something positive in my life?" I'm a big believer that we have choices in how we may look at things.

And if one way of thinking about something isn't working, you have a choice. That was NPR Reporter, Frank Linkfit. This episode of the Sunday Story was produced by Sharon Maschihey,

with help from Ben Rappaport, an edited by Jenny Schmidt. Fact checking by Will Chase, an engineering by Robert Rodriguez. The rest of the Sunday Story team

includes Andrew Mambo, and Liana Simstrom. Irene Nagucci, is our executive producer. Special thanks to David Linkfit, Katherine Ladelaw,

Sasha Fyfer, Michael Ratner, Brian Reed, and Joe Shapiro. I'm Ay Shirazko, and up firsts is back tomorrow

“with all the news you need to start your week”

until then have a great rest of your weekend. Our hopeful parents came to you because they were desperate to conceive who worked miracles, so they were eager to believe.

And so you helped them have that time, which would have been more than enough. But why did you decide each time that you would just use your own stuff? Your just serial inseminator

miracle, impersonator, ego-tastic trophy-aver, and a cold front perpetrator. When I think about what you think and how it makes me feel so sad.

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