Uncover - S30 E1: The “Fake Baby” | Bad Results

Episode Date: December 5, 2024

In 2015, a 20-something American named John learns he might be a father. A prenatal paternity test confirms it, and he quickly pivots from college student to family man. But eight months into the baby’s life, a second test reveals John is not the father, shattering his new reality. “How could I be that unlucky?”A legal note: Over the course of this podcast, a number of allegations are made against Viaguard Accu-Metrics and its employees. When asked, company owner Harvey Tenenbaum said he stands by the test, and that any errors were caused by customers during sample collection.Hear Episode 2 right now — early and ad-free — by subscribing to CBC True Crime Premium on Apple Podcasts.

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. You are the father! Remember this era? You are not the father. Yeah, the era of daytime trash TV. We're talking 1996 NBC Universal lineup. Those Maury Povich show episodes were some of the most brutal.

The wild emotion, the public shaming, the actual fistfights. And in the middle of all the chaos, the big moment, when an envelope is opened and we hear the results of a DNA test revealing the truth. Who is the dad? We're going to settle it right now. You are the father! This story we're about to tell you is also about paternity tests. But these tests, they're not done for TV ratings.

And the test result in the envelope, the one that's supposed to reveal the truth? Well, in this story, it doesn't. I'm Jorge Barrera. I'm Rachel Houlihan. We're both journalists with the CBC News Investigative Unit. And for many months, we've been investigating a story that's still unfolding today. This is a story about people who put their faith in a laboratory that promised the definitive answer to a very important question. People who would

later learn the answer was not definitive at all. It infuriates me. I was pissed. This is not a good thing going on here. It never crossed my mind that, oh, I'm going to get some false positives today. And at the center of it, a small Canadian lab with an explosive secret. Thank you for calling our award-winning laboratory testing and research center. A pattern of naming the wrong dads. A pattern that messed with people's fates, triggering court cases, destroying families, and rupturing lives. That's just some fucked up nightmare. It was like a death. What's going on here?

There's something wrong. She doesn't look like the baby you told me I was going to have. And it all went unchecked for more than a decade, from Canada to the U.S., from the United Kingdom to Australia. Those are the situations where like, oh no, you know it's really wrong. Can something actually be done now? Because this is huge. But before we get into all of that, I'm going to tell you the story of one man who trusted the lab, trusted the results and built his life around a baby boy,

only to have it fall apart. This is Bad Results, Chapter One, The Fake Baby. I've just arrived at John Brennan's condo in Atlanta, Georgia. I've flown in from Toronto to meet him and his very excited dog, Kona. Months ago, I'd reached out to John by email with my usual preamble. Hi, my name is Rachel Houlihan. I'm a journalist working on a story about a company that does paternity tests. Can we talk?

These stories are really personal, so I didn't know how much John would want to share. But on the phone, to my surprise, he was an open book. He actually told me, I'm an open book. It's a relief, because this story that I'm investigating with Jorge, most of it is not open. John's tall and lean, and he has these really bright blue eyes. His place is sparsely decorated, tidy, and it has the obligatory man cave leather couch, plus a few other signs that the 31-year-old lives alone. Yeah, I noticed you have no food in your fridge. Is that because that's bachelor lifestyle? Yeah, kind of. Honestly, there's like so many restaurants around here. I just walk.

Sorry. I'm very nervous. Now that we're meeting in person, he does seem nervous. Like, really nervous. He's even a bit pale, which I didn't expect given our initial conversations. But it does explain why his best friend Delano Rodriguez is here. Yeah, many times I'd stay on the phone with him for three, four hours a day, just keeping him out of a spiral. The two grew up together. They've been friends since the fifth grade. And Delano was there when a prenatal paternity test turned John's entire world

upside down. Well, it affects your relationships to this day. Like, I don't want, I don't want you just to, like, whatever happens from this interview, I just want you to make it clear that this thing affects you to this day. Like, it's this lie that you were told. thing affects you to this day. It's this lie that you were told. The story of that lie starts back in 2015. John is 21 years old and he's living with Delano and three other friends. It was disgusting. It was just a nasty, gnarly, you know, picture five dudes all living under one roof and everyone's got their friends over, you know, every night and just having fun.

I mean, we were all in college and there was no real responsibilities. And, you know, we split rent, you know, scraping by working jobs and going to school. Partying. And just partying and having fun, you know what I mean? All of life's big decisions still lie ahead. He's single, he's studying finance, and he has a vision for what his future will look like. Started saving for a house when I was like 13.

So my plan was always to, you know, buy a house and, you know, start a life and get a job and get married, have kids. You know, that's all, you know, the normal kind of like flow of things. But that was his future plan. Back then, at 21, John was all about having fun, including fun with girls. And there was one girl who was around a bit more than others. We were never exclusive.

It was nothing official like that. And she was fun. We went to high school together. She was cool. She was popular. She was really pretty and had a lot of friends. And, you know, everything was cool.

It was all very cool and all very casual until suddenly it wasn't. I actually remember the moment precisely. I'm driving to work and she calls me and says that she thinks she's pregnant. You know, your heart just dives down deep into your stomach and this can't be real.

But yeah, she was. She took the tests, went to the doctor, confirmed definitely pregnant. And it's all definitely confusing, too, because she doesn't know who the dad is. The baby could either be John's or another guy's. You know, she doesn't recall any kind of significant moment that would lead her to

believe it's either one of us in particular. So as far as I'm concerned, it's a coin toss. And she's very early stages pregnancy, not showing or anything like that. What do you do? Do you wait until the baby's born? They scramble for answers. I've never been in a situation like this. So we just look up, is it possible to do a DNA test before a baby's born? And we find this company that will do a prenatal DNA test. And I'm like, what? What does that even mean? What is that? What does that mean?

What does that even mean? What is that? What does that mean? When Jorge and I first started working on this story, we had the same question. What is a prenatal paternity test? Well, for one, it's a real test. And here's my best shot at explaining it. First, you need a blood sample from the pregnant woman because the baby's DNA is floating in it.

And then usually a mouth swab or another DNA sample from the potential father or fathers. The test works a bit like a jigsaw puzzle. Thousands of pieces of the unborn baby's DNA need to align perfectly with thousands of pieces of paternal DNA for it to be a positive match. If the puzzle pieces don't line up, the test will come back negative. You're not the dad. If the pieces sort of match up in a few places, but mostly don't, it will come back as inconclusive. But a false positive, a test saying you're the dad when you aren't,

the chances of that happening are basically zero. It's a very accurate test. In 2015, when John goes looking for the test, the technology is still pretty new. Lots of companies are popping up offering the test. The one John and the mom-to-be choose is like a DNA test broker. It farms out the actual testing to another company. This will end up being important, though the couple doesn't know it at the time. But they do know it's going to be convenient with an at-home sample collection service. Yeah, this guy shows up in this old car, comes to the door with a briefcase, and decides that he's going to do this DNA test at our kitchen table, which is a pigsty.

And I remember I just having to scoop beer cans to the side, and he throws down his briefcase and whips out needles. My gut's telling me this is probably not the best situation. It didn't seem super legit. We hear this over and over and over again while researching this story. Pivotal moments where people don't trust their gut. And I get it. They're feeling vulnerable, their entire future is in question. And they need answers.

So they set their misgivings aside. And they put their trust in the only thing that makes sense in that moment. The science. Besides, by this point, John's around a thousand bucks in. What are we going to do, back out? You know, we're kids. We don't know any better. We're like, I guess this is just normal.

This is what people do. And yeah, this guy takes my blood right there at my kitchen table with all my buddies there and stuffs my little vial of blood into his briefcase and walks out the door with it. And I guess I just kind of trusted that, you know, a proper test is going to be done and I can trust these results. And so they wait for two agonizing weeks. And I still remember where I was at when this phone call went down. I was on my way home from work and I pulled over in a random grocery store parking lot. John and the mom-to-be line up a three-way call. And I remember thinking it was a little bit odd that they were kind of like, oh, we have the results.

We got them here. Oh, yeah, it was positive. It's a match. A match. It's said so casually, John's in shock. I remember just wanting to get like something official. Show me some paperwork. Show me something. Let me see proof, not just some random guy on the phone telling me that I'm the father. I don't know who this guy is.

Who's telling me this? So the company emails the result. And at the top of the page, in bold letters, the name of the lab that did the test, Prenatal Paternities, Inc. And yeah, at the very bottom, it just says 99.97% match. And I'm like, all right, well, hey, that seems pretty official. At 21 years old, John is going to be a dad. As soon as I saw those test results, it was like a line in the sand immediately. Right then and there, things just changed.

My priorities changed. My perspective, my outlook on things changed. Everything I did was now geared towards building a life and building a future for this child. 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 three 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. The holidays can be stressful for a lot of different reasons. For one, there are usually some awkward conversations with relatives you don't see very often. Well, John, John decided to take that awkwardness up a notch. I'm like, all right, I guess Christmas is the time I'm going to introduce her to the whole family.

So bring her to my family Christmas with probably 30 family members that have never heard of her, never had any knowledge of her existence. My family's super Christian and just this isn't like the traditional way of doing things. So it was difficult for sure. And not just for John. I was a little hesitant. And, you know, at first, honestly, I even said, I think I said something about, have you had a DNA test? Are you sure? And he was like, mom, I'm sure this is my baby. John's mom, Jenny Brennan, has the demeanor of a much-loved elementary teacher. I can't imagine her getting mad at the grade ones she teaches. And seeing her and John sitting together, I now know where John gets his bright blue eyes from. And I just was

like, okay, you know, he was, this is the way it was and this is how it was going to be. And you're going to tell the family and everybody will accept her. That's kind of the message. Whatever concerns were looming over the sudden new trajectory of John's life or whether this fledgling couple could make it work were pushed aside to make room for Jenny's first grandchild. But it was so exciting. It was so exciting. And everybody was so happy for me. And we were all so happy. And we were gathering things so that I could have a place for the baby at my house and had a little nursery upstairs. Yeah, we were all in. Everyone was all in. Aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, right down to co-workers. The girls I work with threw me a shower, a grandma shower.

I didn't know that. Yeah, they did. What did you get at a grandma shower? They gave me a pack and play and then gift cards to Target to get whatever I needed to have for the baby. John sells his motorcycle and breaks his lease on the filthy frat house. He gets a job in pest control,

working overtime to make ends meet. The money he had been saving since he was 13 years old is finally spent on a house and the young couple moves in together. It's a starter home with a huge yard and a window over the kitchen sink, the kind where you can do dishes while keeping an eye on kids playing outside.

And one of the three bedrooms is already painted blue. A bit of good luck because they're expecting a boy. So I was actually really excited about the part where you get to get behind the wheel of the car and drive 100 miles an hour with your girl in labor. That part sounded like a lot of fun, but never got to do that. The birth, on May 2, 2016, doesn't play out like the cliched movie scene John had hoped, but it has its moments.

I had the little scissors and cut the umbilical cord and the whole thing. The labor was rough, though, and immediately after the baby is born, the mother is taken away for some extra medical attention. I'm alone with 10 doctors in a room with a screaming baby. attention. I'm alone with 10 doctors in a room with a screaming baby. John's overwhelmed, but his attention quickly turns to his newborn, Travis. I've probably held a baby one time in my entire life up until that point, so I don't even really know what I'm doing. One of the doctors picked up the baby and just kind of handed it to me, and they're instructing me on, all right, here's where the head goes. It's just, just us two. For 20 minutes, it's just John and Travis. He holds his baby and takes it all in. Then he remembers the very full waiting room. I had my whole entire family. I'm talking grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, my sister, everybody's there.

So everyone comes in, we're passing the baby around and everything. And a couple hours go by and eventually they're like, all right, she's out of surgery. The mother recovers and then slowly, with family support, the two begin the next stage of their life together. Parenthood. John settles in as a new dad, and his friend Delano watches him embrace his new role. I remember him calling me, telling me about, oh, we went to the park. He had gotten this front loader, front carrier. Do you remember that thing?

Yeah. Yeah, hands free. At the time, that was a cool thing to do because you were walking around, holding my kid, and you just felt strong. The two friends don't see each other much anymore, but Delano understands. I remember he was working overtime, double time, triple time, because he had just bought this house, trying to make this family take off. And that was cool to see someone step up and say, hey, I know I was a kid yesterday, but today I'm a family man. A family man with a lot of support from his own mother, who's now a doting grandmother.

He was so sweet, such a sweet baby. I just remember just holding him and just being like, I don't know. He was the cutest, sweetest little thing. Even with help from family, though, becoming a new parent is hard. And for John, in his casual situationship that became so unexpectedly serious, well, the cracks reveal themselves quickly, and the couple breaks. I did the best I could, John tells me, and without pause adds, she did the best she could too. When Travis is around five months old, the fighting becomes too

much. She moves in with her mother, John moves in with his. That starter home, once so full of hope and expectation, sits dark and empty. The two try, and for a while succeed in sorting out an informal co-parenting arrangement. But then come the negotiations over who gets the firsts. The first Halloween, the first Thanksgiving, and then the deal breaker, the first Christmas. That was kind of where things started getting a little bit difficult, more difficult. She wants him. I want him. It's an important day. They agree John will take Travis to his family's celebration on Christmas Eve. And in pictures from that night, it's clear the baby is the star, front and center in family photos in his festive red and white striped onesie.

But John lingers and stays way later than the two had agreed, leaving Travis's mother waiting and waiting. There's an explosive, ugly fight that night. The next day, Christmas Day, John calls in the hopes of seeing Travis, but she is still furious. On the phone, she outlines very clearly to me that we're not going to be able to figure this out together, that she's not going to allow me to see him under any circumstances. So John quickly hires a lawyer and files for custody. I'm just overwhelmingly depressed trying to navigate through this and not being able to see my kid. It was terrible. It was so hard.

John has one short visit on New Year's Day. The next one is scheduled for Wednesday, January 11th at 6.30 p.m. Five o'clock rolls around and I'm like, hey, listen, I'm about to head that way. I'm about to leave work and, you know, I'm really excited to see him. Thank you for letting me see him, that kind of thing. And then I get a text message from her, maybe like 30 minutes later, 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? So I call her ten times, no answer, of course. And so I do what she says, and I call my lawyer. John calls his lawyer over and over, but he can't get him on the phone.

His head is spinning. I leave work. I leave my job. I don't say a word to my boss. I walk out the door. I'm panicking. What is this? Why am I reading this on a text message? What's going on? I get in my car. I start driving home. I'm freaking out. I'm panicking.

In a text, John reminds her of the DNA test from Prenatal Paternities, Inc. that confirmed him as the boy's father. We did a DNA test and it came back 99.97. There's no backtracking from that. It is what it is. Like, the test is done. There is no other DNA test. What do you mean?

But there was. Travis's mother had just done another paternity test with the baby's other possible father. had just done another paternity test with the baby's other possible father. I call her, and we speak on background, but we're not naming her to protect her family's privacy. She tells me there was something about the way Travis looked that kept reminding her of the other man. It had been bothering her for a while, and when things blew up with John, she thought,

for better or worse, it was time to test again. John's lawyer steps in, tells him he needs to be retested too. They choose the lab, one that's not Prenatal Paternities, Inc. He's sent to an actual laboratory. There's extensive paperwork, signatures, witnesses, copies of photo ID are taken. John is fingerprinted, photographed. This is what's called a legal chain of custody paternity test. And it's the only kind that will stand up in court. And it confirms the unthinkable. It was 0%. The results came back to 0%.

And we put those test results side by side with this other guy's test results, who's 100%. 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. This baby he loves, this baby he's been raising for eight months,

doesn't share a shred of his DNA. 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%? John's biological link to Travis was either a mistake or a lie. But before he can wrap his head around how the first company, Prenatal Paternities Inc., got it so wrong, his lawyer starts calling him, urging him to sign away custody. And I had to ask myself, should I? Is this the right thing to do? Do I sign these papers and basically sign my son away to some other guy that I've never even met before? Is that the right thing to do? I don't know.

My gut is telling me, no, this is my kid. What do you mean? I don't care what the results are. The relationship with Travis's mother is now beyond repair. An entirely new family is entering the baby's life. The relationship with Travis' mother is now beyond repair. An entirely new family is entering the baby's life. John and his family are being replaced. He sees no other option but to give up his paternal rights. After a month of agonizing, he finally signs the papers. John never sees Travis again.

This is the first little outfit that John was brought home from the hospital in this outfit, and Travis was brought home in the hospital from this outfit. I mean, we kept it all, the decorations. These are the balloons that were hanging in the house. John's mother, Jenny, digs through a clear plastic bin she's put on his coffee table. It's full of mementos from when she was a first-time grandmother. Gosh, it's hard thinking and remembering all this. It's a little torturous. We're sitting side by side on the big leather couch in John's living room while she pulls out one item after the next.

This bin has sat untouched in her attic for eight years. I just told John that I just feel like someday Travis will come back looking for this. And maybe he will and maybe he won't, but we have it. There are lots of pictures of Travis. And oddly enough, he's got the same blue eyes as Jenny and John. There's also a handwritten note in the bin from the birth mother, written when Travis was a few months old. It says, Dear Miss Jenny,

Thank you so much for all you do. You guys have helped more than you will ever know. We love y'all and are super grateful. I'm so happy to have such an incredible family. I always wanted to have a big family. And I am super thankful to feel like I'm a part of y'all's now. We love you. And I really do feel like she did love the family.

John sits to the side, cross-legged, staring at his phone. He barely looks up at his mother or the bin. It's hard to grasp. It's bizarre. The whole thing is just, I don't know. It makes you think about what could have been. What would his life be like? I'm sure you think about that too. Yeah.

You know, there's still pictures of him up in the house. Like, do you take him down? What do you do? My sister had pictures of him in her house. And when his birthday came around, that was really hard. My daughter and I went out and got him a present. For Travis's first birthday, Jenny bought him a gift card to Toys R Us and a book, Happy Birthday to You by Dr. Seuss. She hadn't seen him for over five months. All ties had been instantly severed. She didn't know her place in his life anymore. Still, she got the biological grandmother's address and put together a package. She pulls up a photo on her phone of the card she sent.

This is what we wrote on the card. Dear Travis, happy first birthday, sweet boy. We miss you. And think about you every single day. Hope your birthday is as special as you are. We love you very much. It was so hard. It was like a death. That's how I can talk about it. That it's like a, it was like a death. And you just deal with it in your own way, you know, and it's grieving.

In the months after losing Travis, John lives with his mother. He can't stand to be in the house he bought, the one he thought he'd raise a family in. There were days he was just in the bedroom, in the bed, not getting up, in the dark. It was a lot. Yeah. A lot of time in the bed. And I would go up and, you know, try to rile him up and come on down, eat dinner with me, whatever. But it was just a lot of, it was not good. It was not good. And a lot of questioning, like, what do I do? He didn't know what to do with his life.

He didn't know what to do with life. And he didn't know what his next step was. And he didn't know, where do I go from here? Family and friends rallied around John and helped pull him out of the spiral. His darkest thoughts eventually receded. Almost nine years have now passed. And today, sitting around with his buddy Delano,

he can joke about all of it. Sort of. The fake baby, we call it. Yeah, we call it the fake baby now. Obviously, it's been close to 10 years, so we kind of joke about it now. Yeah, I would say we learned to make fun of it, but at the time, it was super serious.

And it was painful. Yeah. Yeah. But the questions, they never stopped. They eat at him. I guess I had thought that I was this one-off, you know, chance because, you know, it's not 100, it's 99.97. So I'm thinking, all right, well, I guess I was just at 0.03. How could I be that unlucky?

It's just so hard for me to wrap my brain around. Did she manipulate something? Is this her? Is it this company? Who's to blame here? How did this happen? Was it all just bad luck? Or was it something more?

To this day, it's been a mystery. To this day, it blows my mind that this happened to me. Neither John nor his ex ever reached out to Prenatal Paternities, Inc. about the wrong test result. In the chaos that engulfed their lives, neither had the emotional bandwidth. As part of our investigation, we reached out to the company about their tests.

They had no comment. But John's story doesn't end there. And for Jorge and me, it was the beginning of something bigger. A few years after realizing his paternity results were wrong, John stumbles across a Facebook group. And that's when he finds out he's not alone. This wasn't just some flawed test result. This is something fishy.

And that Facebook group leads us to a small lab on the eastern edge of Toronto. Thank you for calling our award-winning laboratory testing and research center. It's run by a 91-year-old racehorse aficionado. And scam just took the lead. Owned by Harvey Tenenbaum. My name is Harvey Tenenbaum, director of laboratory operations for a leading DNA firm. A self-described scientist who promised a DNA test with 99.9% accuracy. But instead of certainty, it created chaos. It's devastating. I couldn't breathe.

You're the company that's supposed to provide me with results. I's devastating. I couldn't breathe. You're the company that's supposed to provide new results. I was pissed. And to pin this story down, we did everything from rifling through corporate records to using hidden cameras for an undercover sting. Because what would you do if somebody came back to you and said, you got the answer wrong? Well, you don't want to get that answer wrong. There'd be confrontations. Jorge, are you listening? I am listening. We will call the police. Okay, but there's a lot of victims here. And conversations

with dozens of people, from former employees still disturbed by what they saw and heard, to families who told us about the moment when reality, as they knew it, was shattered. That's just some fucked up nightmare. What's going on here? There's something wrong.

All of this unfolding right under the noses of regulators and police at a lab that is still selling DNA services to this day. This is a huge injustice and we're just going to say it is what it is. It is not what it is. This is not okay. That's all coming up on Bad Results. A legal note here. Over the course of this podcast, you're going to hear a number of allegations made against Viagard Acumetrics and its employees. When asked, company owner Harvey Tenenbaum said he stands by the test

and that any errors were caused by customers during sample collection. Bad Results is written and reported by Jorge Barrera and me, Rachel Houlihan. Mixing and producing by AC Rowe. Jessica Lindsay is our showrunner and Carla Hilton is our executive producer. Special thanks to the folks at CBC Podcasts for their support. Karen Burgess is Managing Editor for CBC News Podcasts. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.