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

I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and this is the Sunday Story from Up First. Earlier this year, 8 siblings gathered at a beachfront resort in Fort Lauderdale for a reunion.

Good to see you.

Like some families, this one makes t-shirts. For the reunion, Reina, a retired college professor, hands them out.

Can someone take a picture of Joe with his t-shirt?

The t-shirt features a photo of the siblings' father. He's a bald man with glasses.

Rather pleasant picture. Thin lips, of course.

This is Gil Brodsky, another sibling. He reads the speech bubble next to his father's mouth.

Says Gilbert was my favorite.

The t-shirt is a joke in 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 Yeah, was odd.

Until a decade ago, none of these siblings knew any of the others existed. And yet here they are at a 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 decades-old deception, then out of that built genuine family connections, turning what could have been a catastrophe into something affirming and meaningful. NPR'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's 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.

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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 roving national correspondent Frank Langfitt.

Bryna is 65. She grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs. Bryna, like some other people you'll hear from in this story, Bryna doesn't want NPR to use her full name to protect the privacy of family members. For Bryna, the discovery of her secret family began with a question: "Who am I related to?" Bryna's mother was adopted. In 2014, when Bryna 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 there were like 4 or 5 people who were listed as close relatives.

Close enough to be half-siblings. But neither of her parents had had other children. Rhonda 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, you know, this is crazy.

Despite her initial distrust, Bryna connected with some of these supposed half-siblings. They were as baffled as she was. Bryna came to realize this wasn't a trick. A number of the half-siblings told Bryna they were donor-conceived. Could the same be true for her? Bryna and a half-sibling named Kathy decided to share their raw DNA with an independent research geneticist to figure out how they were connected.

It was 3:00 in the morning when I received a text message from her. 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.

Bryna was stunned.

I went into a panic and I felt like I was sinking. And then the question was, where am I in the universe? And I had a desperate need to find out.

As far as Bryana knew, she had two biological parents, her mother who had passed away and her father. So Bryana called her dad, who was 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, "Oh, I— no, no, I don't know. Maybe your mother did something that I don't know about." And I just thought, okay, there it is.

Bryna now knew the man who had raised her, whom she'd called dad for 5 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 appeared through DNA websites such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com. David Staskin is a urological 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 the total number of siblings could be 400 or more. Bryna 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 the donor was a doctor. The cousin had a realization. Diane, another half-sibling, explains.

He had an uncle who was a world renowned male infertility specialist, and he just had a feeling that this could be the missing link.

The specialist's name was Dr. Charles Charney. Charney was an Ivy League-educated pioneering medical researcher. He'd served as the senior attending urological surgeon at what was then Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia. The 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 call the daughter. They say, "Hi, we think your 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.

They're so overthinking this. So I finally said, look, does this woman have any kids? Yeah.

Do you know their names?

Yeah.

I said, well, 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 grandsons. The law school grandson did not take a DNA test, but his brother did.

He did 23andMe, 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?

Charles Tarny 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 OB-GYNs inseminated their mothers. The next question: How much, if anything, did their parents know about Charney's role? Many of the siblings adored the dads who had raised them and didn't want to cause them pain. Bryan had briefly asked her father about her conception and gotten nowhere.

I really struggled very early on with the 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 semen was Charney's. Dina's mom was a painter. Pretty much painted all the time.

And she was good.

It was at a time when women had trouble getting attention in art circles. Sodina's mom began signing her paintings with what seemed a masculine name.

Charney Harris, which was, uh, kind of weird, and we didn't understand what that was about. So when my brothers found out the name of our biologic father, it was like, what? So if you ask me, did my mom know? Yes, of course she knew. Come on.

And also my brothers look like him. When David, the Boston urological 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, uh, 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 always said, "But Mom, the father is the father of 20-some, 30-some people at the time, 60 now." And, uh, 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 sibs are convinced that their parents had no idea they were conceived through artificial insemination. For instance, one sibling 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 their biological father. In conversations with parents and relatives, some siblings form theories about the mechanics behind their conception. Diane said 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 gonna 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's 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, Diane laid out the 3 theories the siblings have come up with.

Theory number 1 was he was just a research geek. He wanted to try doing this and see what happened and what takes and what doesn't take. And, you know, just to try to further the whole field of infertility. Theory number 2 was he was super compassionate, that 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 3 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 Lubeck, 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. End quote. 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 shame and psychological pain. Some of the siblings who are physicians are critical of Charney. Here's David, the urological surgeon.

If you said to me, was 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 because it wasn't a donor. It was the doctor himself.

Sip Stu 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 6 years older than me that had a disease called familial dysautonomia.

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 that if they had another child, there was a 25% chance that this 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, an 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, they would be— they 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 dysautonomia. There's another thing that bothers some of the sibs. 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 Borodsky is an amateur songwriter. Serial inseminator. He's blunt about his feelings toward Charney. Miracle impersonator.

Egotistic procreator. Medical fraud perpetrator.

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, you know, I was one of the experiments. I mean, if he wasn't doing that experiments, you know, 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, you know, 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 U.S. involved a specialist in Indianapolis. He secretly fathered dozens of children between the 1970s and 1980s. Pleaded guilty to 2 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. The story of the Charney sibs is different. 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 Bryna.

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 gonna wear so many times. I would buy an outfit, bring it home, it's not good enough, I'd go out again.

14 sibs and a cousin showed.

Each told their own story. Everyone had 5 minutes and I literally made a list of here are the bullet points, this is what I wanna cover, this is what I wanna tell. People about.

Then, Bryna says, came a pivotal moment.

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, the temperature in the room Change.

We'll be right back.

This is Ira Glass of This American Life. Do you know our show? Okay, well, either way, I'm gonna tell you about it. We make stories that hopefully pull you in at the beginning with funny moments and feelings and people in surprising situations, and then you just want to find out what is gonna happen and cannot stop listening. That's right. I'm talking about stories that make you miss appointments. This American Life, wherever you get your podcasts.

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 podcasts on the NPR app.

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 podcast from NPR and WHYY.

We're back with the Sunday Story. Frank Langfitt 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. Bryna 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, um, the Frankensibs, Einstein 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 urologist. Gil, a doctor himself, explains.

We've got, you know, 13 docs among us, and none of us, of, 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 Gil reflected on in an earlier conversation.

I have to tell you one thing which is kind of a spooky, almost, uh, you know, a karmic connection.

Charney was one of the first urologists in America to do testicular biopsies on infertile men.

It's not that common a 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 there more than just random coincidence.

Charney held medical residencies in Vienna, Paris, and Edinburgh. Like their biological father, many of the Sivs excelled academically. Gil studied medicine at Harvard, as did his half-sibling Scott. When Gil attended the sibling get-together in 2018, he was surprised to run into Scott.

When we went to the fir— my first reunion, Scott said, I know you. I said, huh? He says, yeah, we, we were in medical school. He was a year 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 had in common.

Another, Charney Sibb, 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, who's 12 years her 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, other Charney sibs attended Yale, Penn, and Johns Hopkins. Gil says the collective academic and professional achievement is a source of pride.

We're a very distinguished family. We've got 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, Gill explained that he came to serve as an ambassador of sorts to ease new siblings into the big news.

It wasn't like, "Hey, I gotta tell you this somethin', fella." We tried to be sensitive about it. 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, Gill 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. Before the sibs spoke, Joe found an old medical staff photo of Gill 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 shit!" 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. Bryna recalls reaching out to a half-sister after seeing her listed as a close relative on a DNA site. Before she spoke to Bryna, 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 was she angry about? That I told her she was donor conceived. She had 4 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 Bryna at 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. Bryna 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 at 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 the 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 in mourning.

In another way, the timing was fortuitous. Dina found out just before the second reunion in 2018. She says meeting other sibs 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 Brook, 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, even if it's just to call them on a, on the phone and, and, and, and talk to them.

The reunions have now gone on for a decade. At January's mini reunion in Fort Lauderdale, the siblings seemed like old friends or family, if an unconventional one. One day, the sibs and their spouses shared lunch on a terrace. Gil shared an inside family joke with Bryna about Dr. Charney's cause of death. I don't know the joke.

Do you know the joke?

But did he die? How did he die?

He died of carpal tunnel syndrome. Oh, oh, I finally got it.

It turned out.

After lunch, Dina 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.

Now it's evolving into a different kind of meeting where we just want to have fun with each other, that's all. So, and you could see we really do. Like each other, if we get along really well.

It's very bizarre. The siblings I spoke with insisted they all saw 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 Dina again.

I did have a fantasy for a while that, that he was following us, following our childhood and who we were.

Dina is one of several Charney kids in her family. Her parents wanted, and with Charney's help, they got 3 children.

My brothers and I had— were very successful children, and, um, there we had— sometimes there were— we were in the papers, the local papers, for winning chess tournaments.

One of Dina's brothers won the National Junior Chess Championship for kids under 16.

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

The Charney sibs have 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 now sees parenthood and family as 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, that's my dad.

Bryna 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 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 Langfitt. This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Sharon Mashihi, with help from Ben Rapoport and edited by Jenny Schmidt. Fact-checking by Will Chase and engineering by Robert Rodriguez. The rest of the Sunday Story team includes Andrew Mambo and Liana Simstrom. Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. Special thanks to David Langford, Katherine Laidlaw, Sasha Pfeiffer, Micah Ratner, Brian Reed, and Joe Shapiro. I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and Up First 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 'cause they were desperate to conceive. You worked miracles, so they heard, so they were eager to believe. And so you helped them have that child, which would have been more than enough. But why did you decide each time that you would just use your own stuff? You're just a serial inseminator, miracle impersonator, egotistic procreator. Medical fraud perpetrator. When I think about what you did, you know, it makes me feel so sad.

On Consider This!, NPR's afternoon news podcast, we cover everything from politics to the economy to the world. But every story starts with a question. At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious. To make sense of the biggest story of the day and what it means for you. Follow Consider This wherever you get your podcasts.

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These are two countries full of these crazy hustlers.

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