The Current - Toronto DNA lab repeatedly identified the wrong dads

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

For over a decade, countless people’s lives were turned upside down when a Canadian company knowingly issued incorrect paternity tests — despite promising “99.9 per cent accuracy.” Investigative journalists Jorge Barrera and Rachel Houlihan tell this story in Bad Results, the latest season of CBC’s true crime podcast, Uncover.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. When John Brennan learned the woman he'd been casually seeing was pregnant with his son, he went all in. He pivoted from a carefree college life in Atlanta, Georgia, to buying a house and moving in with the baby's mother. I had the little scissors and cut the umbilical cord and the whole thing. John built his life around this baby boy named Travis.

He was a father for eight months until all of a sudden, he wasn't. Just after his son's first Christmas, John received a text from Travis's mom. And it's, hey, sorry, plans have changed. You're not going to see Travis today because he's not your son. Call your lawyer. I'm like, what? What do you mean he's not my son? Travis's mother had decided to take a second paternity test after her relationship with John fell apart. And it revealed that John didn't share a shred of DNA with the baby he loved. How is it that a year ago, I'm 99.97% a match to this human, and now here we are a year later and I'm 0%?

And then all of a sudden the pieces of the puzzle started coming together. It's like, all right, well, I guess that first test wasn't right. That first test was done by a company called Prenatal Paternities, Inc., which promised clients 99.9% accuracy. John Brennan checked it up, chalked it up to incredibly bad luck. But years later, he stumbled on a Facebook group filled with others who'd received test results that named the wrong dads,

and they all came from the same lab in Toronto. Rachel Houlihan is a journalist with the CBC News investigative unit. She co-hosts the newest season of Uncover from CBC podcasts called Bad Results. Rachel, good morning. Good morning. What happened? Incredible story after John learned that he wasn't Travis's biological father. Well, John was completely blindsided. But before he could really process what it all meant or

how the mistake even happened in the first place, lawyers stepped in and they immediately gave him papers to sign away his rights to Travis. So it was really painful. And, you know, I think that we all recognize that being a father is more than just DNA. And for John, in his heart, he was Travis's father, even after he got that new paternity test. And he spiraled into an incredibly deep, dark depression. Also, because

it wasn't just him, it was his entire family that had grown to love this little boy, aunts, uncles, cousins, you know, everyone, especially his own mother. You know, Travis was her first grandchild. Her co-workers had given her a grandma shower. She had a nursery set up in her house and she babysat all the time. But because everything happened so suddenly and, you know, all ties, all contact with Travis, they were severed instantly. So truly it was like a death in the family. Yeah. A super tragic story the way you describe it. How many other people received wrong DNA results from this company? Well, the Facebook group that John

eventually joined, the one for people who'd say they've also gotten wrong prenatal test results, it has about 100 people in it right now. Then we've also gotten our hands on a separate email list that has another 100 people that say the same thing. So the scale has the potential to be quite huge. Also because the the company Acumetrix started selling the prenatal test back in 2010. So it was, you know, on the market for a while. And they also sold the test internationally. And I've spoken to people who worked at the company, and they say they were expected to send out five to 10 prenatal testing kits a shift. So if I'm really low balling it, that's roughly a thousand kits a year that just

one employee could be sending out. So the question is of that thousand, how many were wrong? And plus there are probably people who will listen to this or listen to the podcast and remember that they use this company and might be questioning their results. Indeed. Now, you and your co-host, Jorge Barrera, spoke with dozens of people. Why do people get DNA tests? I'd say, I mean, everybody's story is different, but there is a very common thread, which is you have someone often that's in a relationship and then, you know, things fall apart and then they go quickly and have a quick relationship with someone else. They realize they made a mistake and they go back to the other partner and then they find out they're pregnant. And so you want to know, is it who who is the father? Right.

So that's one common scenario. There are other more serious cases, like sexual assault cases. Also, you know, people that are younger, maybe having just multiple partners. And you spoke to one man, which his story really stuck with you. Tell us. Yeah, I got an email from a man saying he'd gotten a wrong result. And we lined up a call, and we had barely even said hello. And he was just sobbing. And he says to me, I'm sorry, I've just never talked to anyone about this. He was eventually able to get out his story where he told me about how his wife had had an affair.

They reconciled. And then she found out she was pregnant. And they did a prenatal paternity test with acometrics. And he came back as the father. You know, a huge relief to the couple. But years have now passed, and the child is now five years old, and he says it's very clear that he's not biologically related to this little boy because his wife is Caucasian, and she had an affair with a man who was black. So he says now it's just so obvious to him that they're not biologically related.

And now he says it doesn't change his love for his son, obviously, in any way. But he says he wonders, when is this little boy going to ask him? Why don't we look the same? Why don't we match? And then he wonders, you know, what's he going to tell his son? And what if his son, when he gets older, wants to meet this other man? This other man doesn't even know that this little boy exists. What if the biological father learns of this little boy's existence and wants to be part of the boy's life?

All of this is just going to reverberate for years to come. And that is just the case with so many people that we spoke to. So, Rachel, with Acumetrix Inc., how were the tests conducted? Like, how might this happen? So I think the first thing, it's really important to understand that this is a real test, just in case anyone's listening and thinking, you know, a prenatal paternity test, that sounds like science fiction. It's a real test. And when it's done properly, it's a very accurate test. And what it involves is matching up thousands of DNA kind of data points between the potential father and the unborn baby. And to do that, you need two things.

So you need a mouth swab normally, sort of like how you would do it for an ancestry test kind of thing. You need that from the potential father. And then you need a blood sample from the pregnant woman because the fetal DNA is floating in her blood. And you've got to extract the fetal DNA from the blood. And the way the company collected DNA samples was really inconsistent. Sometimes a person would come to an individual's home and collect the samples. Sometimes customers were sent a blood collection tube and they were told to go to a local lab, take that sample and then package it off into the mail back to the company. But the main method it seems that Acumetrix used was a finger prick

home kit. So the mother would squeeze a few drops of blood into a tube using a little lancet, kind of like a diabetes kit. And this test method is really problematic because experts tell us that it simply doesn't yield enough blood to even run the test. Now, the industry standard is to use two vials, so four teaspoons. So you can imagine just a few drops. I mean, there's such a huge difference. And, you know, some people might think, well, it's really obvious that that's not enough blood to run the test. But I'm telling you, we were months into looking into this story before we learned this. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs.

We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. So going back to that Facebook group that John had joined, where he learned he wasn't alone,

it has people in this group who used prenatal paternities, Inc, and Viagard Acumetrix, which has sold all sorts of tests going back to 2010, including the prenatal test, you know, was on their website. But they also did ancestry testing, dog DNA testing, drug and alcohol testing. I think I could trace 70 different websites all going back to Acumetrix. I mean, they offered a huge range of tests. Dog DNA? Dog DNA testing. And then Prenatal Paternities, Inc. was sort of like their, you know, their prenatal division, and it was used strictly to sell the prenatal test.

It was sort of like also their international version of the company because they had one website specifically targeting Americans, so a.com. They had one obviously for Canadians, a.ca. They had another focused on the United Kingdom, and they had one focused on Australians. But all of it is run by just one Canadian, which is Harvey Tenenbaum. Harvey Tenenbaum, who's he? Harvey Tenenbaum, who's he? So he is a 91-year-old entrepreneur. He owns a multimillion-dollar estate north of Toronto.

He's got an indoor pool and a tennis court. He also owns the large commercial building that Acumetrix operates out of. He's also, interestingly, a horse racing aficionado. He has owned around 150 horses over the past 20 years. One horse alone netted him about a million dollars. But probably the most relevant and most important thing to talk about is his scientific background or his credentials. You know, he signs some test results as having a PhD. And his LinkedIn page also says that he has a PhD in pharmacology from the University of Toronto. But we reached out to the university and asked them to confirm this. And they told us they have no record of a PhD under that name. They could

only find a Bachelor of Science from 1958. So this raises some questions about Harvey's qualifications. It does. And how does he explain all these allegations of wrong prenatal paternity results? I think it's good to first understand what the company sold, you know, what it advertised and why people even trusted this company. It advertised that it was a world leader in this type of test, that they ran each test twice to ensure accuracy. And in this promotional video from YouTube that we're going to listen to, you can hear Harvey Tenenbaum talk about the accuracy of his company's tests. You can have confidence in the results and in the protocols and procedures we use. It's just clinical laboratory work and you're receiving

the definitive answer on the question of the paternity of the fetus. Now that of course does not square with what our investigation reveals and we did send multiple interview requests to Harvey and to his lawyer to find out what he had to say about these inaccurate results. We also sent a detailed list of questions but we didn't get a reply. We also approached Harvey one afternoon in person as he was leaving the lab at the end of the workday. And in that brief conversation, he said the tests are accurate and that he blamed any errors on customers during sample collection.

Tell me a little bit about the people who worked at the company because you said you spoke with two former employees who began working at the company's call center, I think in 2018. And they were a little suspicious about the scripted questions they were required to ask. Let's have a listen to one of them, Sika Reshot. Part of the script was to say, oh, can you tell me the date of your last period? Because I think we even had to put it in the form. Harvey showed me the ovulation calendar on Google. It wasn't anything special. It's just like you put the date that you had sex, the date of your last period,

and then it gives you a calculation around about when you got pregnant. And then you'd say something like, it's likely, you tell them who it's likely to be before you've even sent the kid or anything. You're like, it's likely, you tell them who it's likely to be before you've even sent the kid or anything. You're like, it's likely to be that person. What else did Sika tell you about working at that call center? Sika says they were inundated with calls from customers who had questions about their results. And many, like John, often found themselves in custody battles. And when they had to do new court-ordered paternity tests, that's when they would learn that the Acumetrix test was wrong. Also, Sika and another employee made it really

clear that all those calls about disputed test results would go directly to Harvey. You also heard from another employee that you don't want to name or can't because he's scared of any association that Viaguard Acumetrix would affect his credibility in his current job. But what did he tell you? So this employee's job was to process the packages that came in containing DNA samples from customers. They had to enter customer information into the computer system and then put the samples into a special container

that was supposed to go to the lab downstairs. Well, the former employee says they saw one of Viagard Acumetrix's senior managers, a man named Kyle Suey, toss the samples into the garbage without being tested. And Kyle wasn't just any employee. He was the second in command at Viagard, and he's also now a convicted fraudster. He's currently serving a 44-month sentence in an American prison for running a food sensitivity side hustle completely unrelated to Accumetrix. People mailed in hair samples, hoping to have them tested for these sensitivities, but he was just throwing them in the garbage. And around

88,000 people sent in samples. And in eight months, he made about $6 million. And we did ask Kyle through his lawyer about the allegation that he might have also thrown out some paternity samples during his time at Acumetrix, but we didn't get a response. Incredible. So ultimately, during your investigation, you went undercover into Harvey Tenenbaum's Toronto office. What happened?

We knew what the company said publicly and what it advertised didn't square with what we knew. So CBC granted me permission to go in posing as a customer needing a paternity test. I knew going in, though, that Acumetrix had recently stopped selling the test, but we didn't know why. going in though the Accumetrix had recently stopped selling the test but we didn't know why so during my conversation with Harvey I had to kind of make that sort of little segue asking you know could I have done this test while I was pregnant and in his answer he made a surprising admission he told me that prenatal tests were quote never that accurate and he also specifically referenced a case where the shock of an accurate test was revealed right at the birth of a baby

because the skin colors didn't match. And I knew that he was referencing a real case because I've spoken to a woman that that actually happened to, and she sued the company. So all of this leads to questions about how the company has been able to operate. What are the regulations around this kind of business?

I think people will be surprised to learn that there are none. Acumetrix sits in a regulatory black hole. So commercial DNA companies are not regulated in Canada. And it doesn't matter if it's for something fun, like finding out whether or not you're part Irish, or if it's for something as serious and potentially life-altering like a prenatal paternity test. and potentially life-altering, like a prenatal paternity test. We reached out to every single provincial health ministry to see if they had any regulations in place, and they told us to talk to Health Canada.

And Health Canada told us to talk to the provinces. That seems hard to digest. You know, a health test like this doesn't fall under any regulation? Right. Well, it's because it's not considered a diagnostic test. So that's the first thing. So figuring out who the father of a child is is not a diagnostic test. And it's also a direct-to-consumer test. So it's not going through a hospital.

It's not going through a clinic. It's all being sold through the website direct-to-the-consumer. So Health Canada, they say it's a provincial matter. So what would justice look like for the former customers you spoke with and whose lives were really turned upside down by bad results? Well, many have expressed interest in suing the company, but that could prove to be very challenging because there's generally a two-year statute of limitations in personal injury cases. So from the moment they realized the test named the wrong father, they had, for the most part, two years to file a claim. But for so many people I spoke with, honestly, they just didn't have the emotional bandwidth to do that. Plus, many had already

spent a lot of money on lawyers, like John we talked to at the beginning. He spent $20,000 on lawyers fees just during the custody battle. So, you know, I don't know what the recourse would be for many of these people. Some people also think the police should be investigating Acumetrix. They call it a, quote, scam with horrible, personally devastating consequences. And a couple of them have actually called the Toronto Police in attempts to file complaints, but we reached out to the Toronto Police and they don't appear to have an open investigation.

So as far as we can tell, it's business as usual for AccuMetrics. Thank you, Rachel. You're welcome. Rachel Houlihan is co-host of CBC Podcast's new season of Uncover Bad Results. To hear the first episode, go to The Current's podcast feed or wherever you get your podcasts. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.