A Colorado jury on Wednesday awarded $ 8.75 million to civil plaintiffs who accused a former fertility doctor of using his own semen to fertilize at least a dozen women through artificial insemination for more than two decades.
The verdict was handed down to Cheryl Emmons, her husband and two of her daughters, who their lawyer Patrick Fitz-Gerald said were secretly the father of Dr. Paul B. Jones.
The Emmons family and seven other families filed a lawsuit in October 2019 against Dr. Jones and the clinic where he worked, Women’s Health Care of Western Colorado, on allegations of medical negligence, lack of informed consent, fraud, misrepresentation by negligence, breach of contract, battery and extreme and outrageous conduct, according to the case.
Five of the families came to terms with an undisclosed amount before the case went to court, Mr Fitz-Gerald said. Two other lawsuits against Dr. Jones are still pending.
As the Emans have filed more lawsuits against Dr. Jones than against the clinic, he is expected to pay most of the $ 8.75 million in prize money, Mr Fitz-Gerald said.
Dr. Jones’ attorneys, Nicole Marie Black and Nancy L. Cohen, did not immediately respond to emails or phone calls Thursday asking for comment. But in 2019, at the time the lawsuit was filed, Dr. Jones declined to tell a KUSA reporter in Denver if he was the father of the children named in the lawsuit.
“I do not deny it; I don’t admit it, “he said at the time.
He relinquished his doctor’s license in November 2019, days after the families filed a lawsuit, according to state records.
Ivan Sargsyan, an attorney for women’s health in Western Colorado where Dr. Jones worked, did not respond immediately to emails or phone calls Thursday.
Dr. Jones, Ms. Emmons’ former obstetrician and gynecologist in Grand Junction, Colorado, is believed to have given birth to at least 17 children with 12 women from 1975 to 1997, Maya Emmons-Boring, a from the daughters of Mrs. Emmons.
In 1979 and 1984, Dr. Jones fertilized Ms. Emmans through artificial insemination after offering to find a doctor or medical student to be her sperm donor, Ms. Emmons-Boring said.
He never told the family that he was the one to provide the semen sample, Ms Emmons-Boring said. Dr. Jones, now 83, even helped give birth to both Ms. Emmons-Boring and her sister Tanny Scott.
Ms. Emmons-Boring has never questioned that the man who raised her was not her father until a series of events began after she underwent a DNA test from Ancestry.com.
In 2018, after Ms. Emmons-Boring took the test, she said she received a message from a woman who believes they are half-brothers and sisters. At first he didn’t believe the woman, but then he dug.
Then her parents said for the first time that she and her sister were conceived by artificial insemination. She spent weeks building a family tree, “until she came across Dr. Jones,” she said.
She sent a message to five other half-brothers she found online, who “were all shocked and disgusted” by the news, said 41-year-old Emmons-Boring.
Maya Emmons-Bored with her sister Tanny Scott. Credit … The Emmons family
A few weeks later, they called Mr. Fitz-Gerald, Driskell, Fitz-Gerald & Ray. Eight families eventually filed a lawsuit against him and the clinic, Mr Fitz-Gerald said.
Dr. Jones has never been charged with an artificial insemination crime, according to Daniel P. Rubinstein, a district attorney with the 21st District Attorney’s Office in Mesa County, Colorado. Mr Rubinstein said at the time that it was not a crime in Colorado for a doctor not to reveal the identity of a sperm donor.
After news of Dr. Jones’ actions spread through Colorado, the state passed a law in 2020 that made it a crime if a health care provider “knowingly uses gametes” from a donor without the patient’s consent.
At least 50 fertility doctors in the United States have been accused of donating sperm in recent years as commercial DNA testing became more common.
Ms. Emmons-Boring said she was working with Colorado lawmakers on one of the first laws in the country to offer certain protections to children conceived as a result of fertility fraud.
So far, she said, she is “dealing with a lot of guilt” due to the fact that she once did a DNA test.
“It turned so many lives upside down because I did this test,” she said.
She is also concerned that because Dr. Jones is the father of so many children in one area, some may go out or marry each other.
Ms. Emmons-Boring said some of her half-siblings believe Dr. Jones may have passed on a cystic fibrosis gene, but they can’t know for sure because he refused to share his medical history with them. .
“It would be nice,” she said, “if he showed any compassion.”
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